World Wide Web

Boris Johnson has a wonderful way with words as he discusses the wonders of capitalism and why the British will never invent a Facebook. His explanation has many echoes for modern New Zealand too, where Labour and others constantly seek to destroy wealth.

As we gaze in stupefaction across the Atlantic at these spooling zeroes, we are forced to ask ourselves an embarrassing question: why isn’t Mark Zuckerberg British? There seems no reason in principle why we should not be equally blessed with the entrepreneurial drive that has produced Facebook, Google, Twitter and other such zillionaire-spawning companies. We have the right timezone for an international media giant; we speak the world’s language; our capital is one of the safest and most liveable big cities in the world. We have all sorts of geniuses installing themselves in the vicinity of Shoreditch’s Silicon Roundabout, and no less an authority than Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales says that London is now the world’s best place for an internet start-up.

It is not as though we lack potential Zuckerbergs. Our universities are pullulating with brilliant young men in T-shirts who like playing Call of Duty and have slight difficulties with girls. We are fantastically fecund at coming up with new games and new apps. The very concept of the World Wide Web was devised by London-born Sir Tim Berners-Lee. So why isn’t there a British Facebook? Why aren’t these billions about to explode into the pockets of people in this country?

Well, to see the answer, you have to go back to The Social Network, the wonderful film about the birth of the company. It was about the war between Zuckerberg and the preppy Winklevoss brothers over the paternity of Facebook. It was a feud that began at Harvard, and in many ways the environment resembled Oxbridge – gowns, rowing, fusty old traditions, oak-panelled dining halls. And yet what struck me as deeply un-British, and unlike Oxbridge, was the maniacal determination of these undergraduates to get rich, the single-mindedness with which they set about it – and their unalloyed joy in success. Making money seemed to them a good thing, even a great thing, and these days it is not clear how widely shared that assumption is in this country.

Let us imagine a British Zuckerberg. He and his fellow billionaires would be the object not just of envy, but of resentment. There would be debates in Parliament, instigated by Ed Miliband, about the scale of his prospective wealth, and whether it was tolerable in a fair society. Wherever he lived, the British Zuckerberg would be tracked down by anti-capitalist protesters, and even now, in all likelihood, the pop-up tents would be appearing on his lawn. His new-found wealth, in short, would not be the subject of simple amazement. It would provoke amazement and a fair degree of rage; and that – to put it mildly – is not a climate that is conducive to wealth creation.

It is one thing to object to bonuses that are explicitly funded by the taxpayer. It is another thing to start attacking “Mammon” of any kind – because as my old schoolmate Ed Miliband has found, it is very hard to make a distinction between “good” enterprises and “bad” enterprises, between good money and bad money, between profit that is socially useful and profit that is not socially useful. In the general confusion, there is a danger that banker-bashing will metastasise into an all-round scorn for all varieties of money-making instinct – and I can’t believe that is in the economic interests of the country.

We need to stop wasting our energy in hating the disgusting affluence of the top 1 per cent, and we need to start doing more for the bottom 20 per cent. The poor and needy will always deserve help, in taxation and in philanthropy – but we can’t expect to generate either, on the scale of the Americans, if we continue to denigrate wealth-creators. In the US, unemployment is now falling sharply, in contrast to Europe and indeed to this country. Jobs are being created, not least because America is full of people who are not only scrabbling to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, but who know that if they make it they will receive admiration from their fellow Americans, rather than chippiness and disgust.

I have no idea whether the myriad Facebook investors are correct in their potential valuation of this company. I don’t pretend to grasp the economics of the web, which seems to me to be a colossal destroyer of value, reducing the price of text, music, images and voice telephony to virtually nil. But one thing is for sure. If the Facebook bubble bursts, the investors won’t blame Zuckerberg. They will shrug their shoulders and gamble on something else.

It’s called capitalism. It’s about ideas, energy, innovation and reward, and we need to remember that for all its defects, humanity has yet to come up with a better way to run an economy.

via Boing Boing

Only the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys could stuff up so badly.

 A French commercial court has found Google guilty of abusing the dominant position of its Google Maps application and ordered it to pay a fine and damages to a French mapping company.

In a ruling Tuesday, the Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.

The court ordered Google to pay 500,000 euros ($660,000) in damages and interest to the plaintiff and a 15,000 euro fine.

The French company provides the same services for a fee and claimed the Google strategy was aimed at undercutting competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gains control of the market.

“This is the end of a two-year battle, a decision without precedent,” said the lawyer for Bottin Cartographes, Jean-David Scemmama.

“We proved the illegality of (Google’s) strategy to remove its competitors… the court recognised the unfair and abusive character of the methods used and allocated Bottin Cartographes all it claimed. This is the first time Google has been convicted for its Google Maps application,” he said.

A Google France spokesman said the company would appeal.

Of course Google could tell the Frnech to nick off, refuse to supply services to their piss-ant failed country and watch as they get left behind.

There is a fair bit of commentary around at the moment about the state of blogging. to be fair most of it is in the tech world where there is a sort of consensus that the golden age of blogging, at least from a tech perspective, is over:

The reasons, in brief: many top blogs have sold out; staff turnover saw “star” voices slip off the radar; younger audiences like social networking more; and advertising revenue is increasingly hard to get at.

All the reasons given are true, but they’re not reasons to believe that a golden age has passed. They’re phenomena in their own right, each with its own story, and only the last presenting a barrier to entry for newcomers. Epochal change makes for an epic narrative, but all this adds up to a simpler truth: media is a tough game and you won’t get far by copying what other people did years ago.

I have always said that New Zealand lags about 5 years behind the rest of the world and blogging here is no different. We are just now catching up with the advent of bloggers commentators that has been prevalent int he US and UK for at least 6 years.

Some don’t agree that the golden age is over. I’m with them:

“There are still plenty of people who love to write– not just share, Tweet and comment– for a living, and blogs are still the best platform for that. In many ways, professional blogging is just getting started. It’s a time when new entrants are jumping into the field with bold, fresh ideas, standing on the shoulders of the blogging giants that came before, taking a second stab at reinventing the new media landscape.”

In the 6 years I have been blogging there have been many blogs and bloggers not many of us stick around. There is a reason for that, it is bloody hard work. Your critics are instantaneous and not many can take the constant criticism and especially the nasty hate mail. I keep every email and one day I will publish them all. It will make a book of hate all by itself. This comment at Boing Boing though sums up blogging for me:

There was never a golden age of blogging, just a golden age of mainstream interest in what it all meant. Don’t worry about it; opportunity does not knock but once. You need obsession, a work ethic, and an uncommon voice. That’s tough, but that’s all. The rest is counting the hours, and we’ve all got plenty of those.

So readers what do you think…Has blogging done it’s dash?

I love the way politicians have embraced Twitter. We get to share their every thought. More importantly we get to engage with politicians in different ways.

Kind of like this exchange between Jacinda Ardern and Regan Cunliffe.

Last week I blogged about Len Brown’s Christmas card and three days later the Herald on Sunday has a story about the very same thing. Google Len Brown Christmas Card and see what Google thinks. The Whale on top and The Herald several links down the page.

Yesterday I blogged about Japhet Simiona being hailed as a success story in a school bullying project. I broke that story, I published it first and loe and behold a NZ Herald repeater goes and does a story about the exact same thing. Now this is news and all good that it is exposed, but a little credit where credit is due is in order I think. (Note all the links…that’s how modern media does things)

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have broken stories and the repeaters ahve follwoed along one, two or even a week later. It would be nice of them to insert a line acknowledging where they heard about it from.

The thing is I know they heard about it from me first, because they all follow my Twitter account and read my Facebook wall. I’m sure as hell not following them on Twitter.

When bloggers use news stories to highlight their opinion they politely provide a link to the source story, it would nice if churnalists and repeaters did the same.

I might have to start billing I think. Either that or the various schools of churnalism start teaching these chumps about ethics, how to google, how to link to sources and other useful topics instead of them sitting on Facebook and Twitter hoping a story will land in their lap.

UPDATE: Just had an email from Jared Savage…he has said that he got the story from other sources…and that he was going to email me last night because he knew I would do a post like this lol… Good on Jared for emailing me.

Bruce Simpson at Aardvark has stumbled on the ultimate solution for stopping Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

The US government has a problem, a big problem.

Some little Aussie upstart by the name of Julian is telling all their secrets to an eager world.

He’s dumped hundreds of thousands of supposedly confidential communiques onto the internet and the US administration seem powerless to stop him.

Sure, they’ve exerted pressure on the likes of PayPal and MasterCard in an attempt to choke off the supply of money. They’ve recruited the patriotic support of Amazon to throw him out of their cloud, and they’ve even managed to coerce the English and Swedish authorities into arresting him on some allegations of sexual offending.

But so far, all this has proven is that the US government is completely incapable of reigning in the actions of Mr Assange and the Wikileaks organisation.

I think it’s time they called in the big guns.

And, when you consider how many people have been hung, drawn and quartered by the US justice system for allegedly downloading the occasional $1 music track, I think we know exactly who to call.

Heh…I can see where this is going.

The RIAA/MPAA consortium has been able to achieve things that nobody else in the world has.

They’ve been able to accuse people of crimes and then, with little more than anecdotal evidence, have those people hit with astoundingly high fines and penalties which far exceed the seriousness of their alleged crimes.

Surely, if they put the RIAA/MPAA in charge of handling the thorny issue of Assange, he’d already be rendered powerless and enjoying a little waterboarding in an off-shore US prison somewhere.

I mean, just look at this case and you’ll see what I mean.

The recording and movie industry has managed to extract such incredible protection from the US government that it is surely now the most powerful “anti-evil” force in the land and thus, the perfect group to scuttle Assange’s attempts to release material that must surely be *copyrighted*, by dint of having already been published to a select few within government.

Ironic isn’t it. For exactly the same reasons as the recording industry can’t stop file sharing Wikileaks is destined to continue. Simon Power should take note in his bizarre attempts to control the internet.

Mashable has an article about the Spartacus effect as I like to call it.

The South Yorkshire man who was recently convicted for joking about bombing an airport on Twitter is now just one of many who have done the exact same thing.

Paul Chambers’s original tweet, “Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” was meant as a joke, but Judge Jacqueline Davis saw things differently. She thought the tweet was “menacing in its content,” dismissing Chambers’s appeal to the original sentence, a £1,000 fine.

Furthermore, Chambers has been ordered to pay an additional £2,000 to cover the legal bills, and lost his job as a financial manager as a consequence of his arrest.

Now, thousands of Twitter users are expressing support for Chambers, repeating his tweet together with a hashtag #IAmSpartacus, a reference to the film Spartacus, in which fellow gladiators express solidarity with Spartacus by uttering the phrase, “I am Spartacus.”

The hashtag is now a global trending topic on Twitter, and Chambers’s tweet has been repeated by thousands of users.

FIGJAM should take careful note of this as he seeks to try to control the internet. The Spartacus effect and mobilised, serious users of technology make almost any attempt to control the internet meaningless and ultimately pointless, other than for trying to raise the profile of the fool proposing it.

The law never has kept up with technology and never will. the internet was designed for freedom and routing around blockages, the justice system is just a network blockage and users are routing around.

FIGJAM runs the same risk of becoming a network blockage, one that will be flushed out of the system electorally if he keeps meddling where he knows nothing. He would be best to go back to being a third rate conveyancing lawyer in a small provincial town.

Citizen A – 7pm tonight Triangle TV, replayed 8pm Sunday Sky 89 & Freeview 21

Tune in to join Bomber and his revolving panel of bloggers as they offer an up-to-date half hour review of the political media issues of the current week from a very Auckland perspective.

THIS WEEK: Who will win the SuperCity, What would a Laws and Peters NZ First look like and wikileaks – what are we doing in Afghanistan again?

And me of course with Tim Selwyn….so I guess you could call it the beardy weirdy show.

I was reading an article last night from a blogger telling the GOP the 7 things they could do to help the right side of the blogosphere. I could have written this myself and replaced Republican with National/Act. It is a very good post though and has some very good ideas, if National or Act could even implement a couple of them they might find life a little easier.

On a semi-regular basis, I get asked by Republican “new media” staffers how the GOP can better work with the Rightroots. As a general rule, I find that these new media staffers are well meaning, get the blogosphere, and have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done. Unfortunately, these very same new media staffers almost universally have almost no real power whatsoever.

That’s because, in my experience, a lot of the Republican establishment in D.C. are scared of the bloggers on their own side (yes, really), have a top down messaging style, and they’re very hidebound. In other words, they have trouble understanding the new media; so at best, they treat it just like the old media or at worst, they ignore it entirely.

The second paragraph above is certainly very true of National.

Now, a few caveats — First off, I don’t want to give you the idea that nothing ever changes. At one point, you couldn’t even get a teleconference with a Republican member of Congress and now we’re deluged with them (more on that later). Also, they have gotten more sophisticated in handling bloggers. For example, the first time I remember the Bush White House reaching out to the blogosphere was when their comprehensive immigration push blew up in their faces. As I remember, they responded by inviting a handful of bloggers who agreed with them to a teleconference while leaving everyone else out. That worked out about as well as you’d expect. It’s also worth noting that there are some individual members of Congress who are very good at handling bloggers. Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn deserve special mentions although, to be fair, the House generally does a better job than the Senate.

So, all that being said, here are some suggestions for how the GOP can better work with bloggers.

Here in New Zealand communication officially with bloggers is non-existent. There are some MPs and Ministers though that are very good at understanding how bloggers can aid the cause. They are able to be counted on one hand though.

Now onto the 7 suggestions.

1) Funding help: There’s a weird dichotomy between the way the Left and Right view the new media. The Right views it as a capitalistic enterprise where individuals succeed and fail on their own merits. The Left views it more as a collaborative effort where they’re working as a group to advance their goals. This plays into everything from the way both sides approach stories, to fundraising, to raising capital for new media ventures.

That last item is one in particular that deserves some more attention. Most of the people on the Right side of the blogosphere are starved for funding. They can’t afford to improve their websites, advertise, expand, etc. because they simply don’t have the money to do it with. People ask why there’s not more journalism on the right side of the blogosphere. The biggest answer is that they simply can’t afford to do it. Even a lot of the more successful bloggers still need to have day jobs and the ones that don’t can’t even afford to rent a car, drive a few states over, and stay in a fleabag hotel for a couple of nights. The money needed to do those things is out there, but it’s being spent to fund losing campaigns, to help defray the cost of print copies of magazines, and to help think tanks fund blogs nobody reads and give fellowships to people without audiences.

Granted, the Republican Party can’t get away with directly funding blogs, but, they could put us in touch with big donors. They could also buy some ads, not only to reach out to their base, but to help fund the people on their side.

2) Some sort of centralized teleconference scheduling: There was a time when the GOP didn’t do any teleconferences. That was bad. Now, there are so many potential teleconferences that they sometimes overlap and it’s nearly impossible to go to them all. While it’s a positive that there’s a lot more access, it would be nice if it were more organized. If bloggers could actually look in one place and see what is coming up in the coming week, it would make it a lot easier to plan ahead to be there.

3) Feeding stories to bloggers: One of the worst kept secrets in the media is that many of their stories originate from their political contacts. The staffers do the opposition research, hand all of it to a journalist, the reporter writes it up, adds a little garnish, and then the story runs. The GOP needs to be doing much, much more of this instead of doing so many press releases.

Let me explain: On an average, I get 150+ emails per day. At least 75 are press releases from campaigns. The overwhelming majority of them are deleted without being read. That’s because you can tell from the title that they’re not interesting. A small percentage of these releases are read. Maybe 1 in 2500 actually leads to a blog post.

Here’s an alternative way of doing things: Do the research, shop it around to blogs, give it to one that’s interested, and let that blog release it as a news story. That way, it definitely gets out on at least one blog and let’s face it: blogger journalism has a lot better chance of drawing eyeballs and links than a GOP press release.

4) Promote Bloggers: Does the GOP do anything to promote bloggers? Do they send out an email to their mailing lists suggesting some blogs people might want to take a look at? Do they hand out flyers with a list of prominent blogs on them at the Republican national convention? Do they do anything to try to get more Republicans to read blogs? The answer to all those questions is “no” and that’s a mistake. The more people the GOP has hooked into blogs like Right Wing News, Redstate, and Hot Air, etc, the better off the party is going to be in the long run.

5) Access to aides: It’s surprisingly difficult to get access to congressional aides — and I say that as someone who has access to quite a few of them. Congressional aides can be immeasurably useful in providing behind-the-scenes info, the answers to unusual questions, and in giving insight into the thinking of their bosses. They’re also useful at building bridges with bloggers. Every member of Congress should have staffers with blogger contacts.

6) Listen to bloggers: Those teleconferences? Know what would be a good idea? If some of the members of Congress actually brought in bloggers just to get their advice. Granted, members of Congress know their own constituents better than right-of-center bloggers do. But, conservative bloggers have a much, much better understanding of the conservative base than members of Congress do. That doesn’t mean bloggers are always right. In my experience, bloggers tend to be overly wonkish and overestimate the impact of obscure issues on the public-at-large. However, I’d also note that bloggers regularly identify political trends that end up blindsiding Republicans in Congress. This happens over and over. I’d even suggest bringing in bloggers to work on fleshing out message points and brainstorming new websites. If you’ve got people who know the base, who’re willing to help, why not?

So, yes, members of Congress could learn something from actually working off-the-record with bloggers. It also would help with the next item.

7) Build a relationship with the bloggers: Currently, the Republican Party does very little to help bloggers, has no way to hurt them, and hasn’t bothered to build relationships with them. When you have bloggers who are generally well disposed towards you, buy ads on their sites, listen to them, give them access, and try to work with them. It creates the impression that you’re on their side, gives them a reason to give you the benefit of the doubt, and it means they’re much more likely to readily listen to your point of view.

You know, there isn’t a thing I would change in those suggestions. They apply as much for ACT as for National. Someone should sit Kevin Taylor down in front of this article and make him study for test on it as some remedial education and by way of an apology to me. It certainly won’t do him any harm and may well do him some good, at least before he gets the arse.