Gotta love it, people are angry at auntie. I love the arguments;

Why should public money be used to create competition to a successful commercial venture such as MySpace?

….and what for it…..

Few will want to dispute the emphasis on building multi-media websites to cover areas ranging from sport to health. But the popularity of the BBC — it is already the most popular British website other than the search engines such as Google — makes it virtually impossible for commercial rivals to charge for similar online services in Britain.

This from such balanced and fair individuals such as James MacManus (executive director of News International) and Dan Sabbagh (media editor of The Times, a wholy owned subsidary of News International).

Damn the beeb to hell…..how dare they use public money to offer an free (monetarily and advertising) portal supporting society and stopping good honest, hard-working billionaires earning some more billions!

Also when did MySpace become just a successful commercial venture? I thought it was a ‘Place for Friends’, not a ‘Place for Friends to fill the pockets of multi-national conglomerates’. Seems to me that the BBC wants to set up a social networking site, not a cash cow. So in that sense James MacManus has nothing to worry about.

Really should have posted about this when I thought about it yesterday. But I was being lazy, and now the point seems a little mute after today’s happenings. But I do feel I need to speak my mind about Charles Clarke getting all puffy and red-faced about media-representation of the government.

“I believe that a pernicious and even dangerous poison is now slipping into at least some parts of this media view of the world.”

Woh there dude….poison, dangerous, are these words that should be used when speaking about what is in essence free speach. I don’t agree with a lot of what the right-wing press prints daily in this country, but I do accept that it is the right of a free country to allow people to speak their minds. It is also the right of any citizen of this country to disagree with those statements. But to declare it poison, especially from a government official, is somewhat dishartening. Especially when the matter in hand is about how the government is apparently getting more totalitarian.

So lets some up, state officials declare that free media are becoming poisonous as well as lazy and deceitful, in what one assumes to be a bid to stop said free media on continuing with this angle. Isn’t this in effect attempting to control the media? Now I don’t think the government are really that totalitarian (but as Simon Jenkins states today – there does appear to be a creeping authoritarianism) but when they attack the press about printing points of view (however inaccurate), a dangerous line is being walked.

Overall, however, I do feel Clarkey boy had a point. Sometimes the press do go too far and print widely exagerated claims based on flimsy evidence and can tend towards absolutism.

“So some commentators routinely use language like ‘police state’, ‘fascist’, ‘hijacking our democracy’, ‘creeping authoritarianism’, ‘destruction of the rule of law’, whilst words like ‘holocaust’, ‘gulag’ and ‘apartheid’ are regularly used descriptively of our society in ways which must be truly offensive to those who experienced those realities.”

But then that’s always been the way the press deals with stuff. Why say something is kinda bad when you can scream “THIS THING THAT HAPPENED HERE IS ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLY TERRIBLE AND THE WORST THING TO HAPPEN, EVER….EVAARRRRR…ARGHHHHH…WE’RE ALL DOOMED….ARGHHHHH!!!!!” in 20pt red lettering.

For me the entire argument gets a bit paradoxical. Consider the situation, goverment is accused by press that they are being totalitarian, goverment gets angry and declares that press are essentially being totalitarian by suggesting that government is being totalitarian.
Now look, I have confused myself and am all ism’d out.

Went for a vey nice walk with my girlfriend today, here are the pics.

Dave the Chameleon, absolutely brilliant stuff from the people that brought us such classics as the war in Iraq and Third World debt cancellation. A very cute mini-film ala Pixar about David Cameron and the very much hyped belief that he changes his opinion depending on whom he is addressing (isn’t that the very definition of a politician?). I really like this, among the style of recent ads where political parties realised that no one likes nasty, this ad manages to be appealing and negative (and seems to be and idea the Tories had themselves).

I see the point made by Mark Lawson that people may think this a little too cute and think higher of Dave than is intended:

In short, Dave is the kind of character that viewers may well love. An office straw poll suggests that the message – you can’t trust the Tories – is undermined by the essential charm of mini-Dave, and the reliance on an overly complex idea. Yes, his namesake is transforming the party, but it’s only superficial. The danger is that the first part of that proposition is more striking than the second. The advert even highlights one of Cameron’s assets – his green credentials, reinforced by his willingness to cycle to work.

Source

However, a point made later in the article, and a viewpoint I share, is that political advertising rarely makes much of a difference anyway.

“There is a myth about political advertising,” warned Philip Gould, New Labour’s polling and marketing guru, in his book The Unfinished Revolution. “Advertising has an effect but it is small and rarely decisive. It is certain that in four of the last five elections, advertising did not materially influence the result.

So if advertising doesn’t really matter then one might as well make it fun eh? In much the same way that large corporates don’t really advertise to increase sales, more remind people of their status and power. I for one think this trend should continue. Gordon Brown and John Prescott anyone?

As much as I am excited about new developments in the world of the interweb; flickr, youtube, digg, delicious…etc. I can’t but help think that the rush towards web 2.0 gold might have a touch of the March 2000s about it. Sure these services are really good and there is definately a tidal shift occurring in how we interact with the internet, but myspace worth gazillions? del.icio.us worth $15-20 million? I know markets just lurv growth rates and tend to dislike guaranteed sales within a narrow profit margin, but everyone made this mistake 6 years ago.

Yes, 25 people can run a company that has millions of users, and yes they can be loved and regarded as brilliant. But when you have 35,000 videos being uploaded a day with very little money incoming (apart from VC cash) then surely there is only so long this can last? Ah yes, advertising, that’ll save us. But why is this always seen as the golden child? If in doubt, google ads, but when do most net savvy users actually click on them? I am all for hyper targeted advertising, but probably will trust a blogger’s recommendation, than the ads placed on their site.

As you can see, it’s not that easy to get on a growth path and keep going. As for those spikes? Well, that’s just us (the technophiles) screwing around and playing with this stuff.

From: Reality Check 2.0

Maybe I am being a bit ‘bah humbug’ about this all, but I just can’t see how these companies are supposed to make any profit beyond covering the costs of hosting.

Don’t get me wrong, I think we are really in a web renaissance at the moment and are on the verge of seeing the web operating at its much hyped potential. Many of the new services have made my web experience much richer, but would I pay for them? Would I accept massively intrusive banner ads? Generally I see the system working on a socially beneficial level and on a much more micro level, not a monetary behemoth one. The moment people feel a service has been compromised by over-advertising, overly harsh controls or simply overuse, then a clone will pop up somewhere else (facebook, magnolia, google video) and the process will start all over again. I suppose my main beef with the way web 2.0 is going, is the hijacking by greedy corporates looking to make a quick buck.

I suppose that’s the nature of the beast, where there is genuine excitment and inovation, there will be dollar signs flashing in people’s eyes.

Really like this concept, imagining a world where objects, all objects (or at least a lot of them) produce data.

In everyware, the garment, the room and the street become sites of processing and mediation. Household objects from shower stalls to coffee pots are reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered, and acted upon. And all the familiar rituals of daily life, things as fundamental as the way we wake up in the morning, get to work, or shop for our groceries, are remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves, the state of the external world, and the options available to us at any given moment.

In all of these scenarios, there are powerful informatics underlying the apparent simplicity of the experience, but they never breach the surface of awareness: things Just Work. Rather than being filtered through the clumsy arcana of applications and files and sites, interactions with everyware feel natural, spontaneous, human. Ordinary people finally get to benefit from the full power of information technology, without having to absorb the esoteric bodies of knowledge on which it depends. And the sensation of use—even while managing an unceasing and torrential flow of data—is one of calm, of relaxed mastery.

The appeal of all this is easy to understand. Who wouldn’t desire a technology that promised to smooth the edges of modern life, subtly intervening on our behalf to guide us when we’re lost, and remind us of the things we’ve forgotten? Who could object to one that dispensed with the clutter of computers and other digital devices we live with, even while doing all the things they do better?

Similar to this pdf titled ‘A Manifesto for Networked Objects- Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ by Bruce Sterling. by Julian Bleecker, a professor at USC.

Could you imagine the shear amount of data that is going to be available and accessible? At first I found it difficult to understand how we could possibly manage this torrent of data and I still have concerns about how we could process such a volume.

How do you avoid being flickr’d? How do you insure that you get flickr’d? Will flickr’ng cameras self-aggregate their photographic coverage, automatically discovering the flickr feeds of all the other cameras that were nearby them — at the fireworks show, or during the firehouse picnic — using NFC or Bluetooth
proximity-based networking?

All of these possibilities seem great, but I still see the need for an extremely powerful and knowledgeable layer that sits between this ‘Internet of Things’ and ourselves. In the same way that many people currently experience the Internet from a core base of about 5 websites (or so I have heard), a kind of self-imposed filter allowing access to the wider web. This relationship between user and website is extremely trustful and a similar relationship would need to exist between the user and this filtering layer (whatever form that takes). Due to the amount of data, this layer would need some form of programming about the users preferences and needs. Such needs would naturally change throughout the day, depending on mood, anxiety, personal and professional needs as well as other criteria.

Such needs seem to suggest that this layer would need to learn and grow with us, its teacher, constantly adjusting it’s knowledge about ourselves.

That level of interaction is somewhat interesting and many questions raise themselves. It questions the notion of our perception of ourselves, for example if such a layer exists and must learn from us, it is in essence part of us (or at least a microcosm of our identity), what if we don’t like what we see in said layer. What if it is fundamentally different to what our own perception is of ourselves? Also, what level of emotional training is necessary. Should the layer need to know when we are angry, happy, sad etc, should it make suggestions based on these moods, does it need to?

Maybe I am taking this issue a little far, but for such an interaction to be useful there would need to be a level of automation. It’s how far that level is taken that decides the complexity.