I am doing some beta testing on the new Typepad Blogging tools. (Maybe they heard that if it ain't broke you send for Earl)

So for the interim anyway, you can find my stuff here

Just sat through an excellent presentation by John Wroclawski of MIT looking at some of the high level thinking about negotiating the future of the net with the people who are participating while trying to retain its ability to adapt and change in the face of powerful vested interests.

As a research issue it is fascinating, as a real-world problem it is even more important. I'll get a copy of the PPT and post more later.

Good conference with some fine people, some reviews to come when I get a mo

A couple of years ago I saw a chart that showed the demand for revenue from 3G systems rising steadily over the next five years as the networks were rolled out and put into operation. What it also showed was the cost of a voice call on a 3G network falling steeply, and the expected revenue from voice forming an ever smaller component of the revenue total over the same period.

The clear implication was that data and other services would have to be found to make up the difference. It pretty soon became obvious that the demand for those data services and the price we are prepared to pay for them are both pretty small. Now the other shoe drops.

The first 3G sales experiences - from "3"
03/06/2003
After all the hype around 3G and "3" and all the services that will be available at high speed over the network - what is the main selling point for a new "3" mobile phone?

Unbelievably it is the price of the voice traffic!

Just a few weeks after "3" launched their mobile phones to the public, the first indications of what the consumers first buying experience are have been collected and analysed by Strand Consult. We have visited a number of "3" outlets - both some of their own and some independent retailers. Everywhere the sales pitch from the salespersons has been the same almost word for word: "3" offers the lowest price on voice minutes.

The three main factors with this strategy that could be unfortunate are the following:

"3" are not focusing on the mobile services that should be generating 20 - 40% of 3G revenues
"3" are buying customers by offering the lowest minute prices in the UK

The two above factors can influence the customers perception of "3" - to the effect that "3" is just a new discount brand - rather than the first 3G mobile operator in Europe.

Shirky is one of the more subtle and thoughtful people publishing anywhere, and especially with his thinking about the application of IT to things in the world. His latest musing on the new US FCC ruling on media ownership is worth the read, and tells us a great deal more about the reality that the Internet is NOT a media environment.

Weblogs are the freest media the world has ever known. Within the universe of Internet users, the costs of setting up a weblog are minor, and perhaps more importantly, require no financial investment, only time, thus greatly weakening the "freedom of the press for those who can afford one" effect. Furthermore, there is no Weblog Central -- you do not need to incorporate your weblog, you do not need to register your weblog, you do not need to clear your posts with anyone. Weblogs are the best attempt we've seen to date of making freedom of speech and freedom of the press the same freedom, in Mike Godwin's famous phrase.

And in this free, decentralized, diverse, and popular medium we find astonishing inequality, inequality so extreme it makes the distribution of television ratings look positively egalitarian. In fact, a review of any of the weblog tracking initiatives such as Technorati or the Blogging ecosystem project shows thousand-fold imbalances between the most popular and average Weblogs. These inequalities often fall into what's known as a power law distribution, a curve where a tiny number of sites account for a majority of the in-bound links, while the vast majority of sites have a very small number of such links. (Although the correlation with links and traffic is not perfect, it is a strong proxy for audience size.)

The reasons for this are complex (I addressed some of them in Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality), but from the point of view of analyzing the FCC ruling, the lesson of weblog popularity is clear: inequality can arise in systems where users are free to make choices among a large set of options, even in the absence of central control or manipulation. Inequality is not a priori evidence of manipulation, in other words; it can also be a side effect of large systems governed by popular choice.

There's a great discussion going on at "Information Society: Voices from the South" is@dgroups.org, covering education, access and application of Internet tools in developing communities. One of the questions that most interests me is the one about how much the local language and the place matters.

If we consider the net as a communication tool and accept that the vast majority of our communication is both in our local language and within a fairly small geographical horizon within which our most important social, economic and political activity occurs.

The technology is able to facilitate, accelerate and archive that communication for many purposes, most of them benign. But it will only do that effectively if it is available to people when and where they need it (walking 5KM to a telecentre is not the answer), through an interface that they can use (if it doesn't support non-literate users it will fail), in a language that makes sense to them (must be local).

While it is a great thing that we can also use it to communicate with like minded, and alternatively minded people all round the world, and there are significant benefits in that, its greatest value, and sternest test comes in figuring out how to be relevant and worthwhile in our daily lives.

This applies both in poor and rich communities and there is increasing evidence, and discussion around the ways that Internet tools and services are being used to enrich and empower local, real-world communities.

I have some material that deals with these issues here

• Telecentres: How Did We Lose the Plot?
• How Can ICT Help Alleviate Poverty?
• Jhai Foundation Remote Villages Network
• ICT and Poverty: The San Bushmen (Waiting to go online)
• Communications Networks Access in Developing Countries (Waiting to go online)

This piece by John Naughton in the Guardian has some interesting and cogent points about the way the Internet works and why Big media still doesn't seem to get it and, like Big Music and Big Movies and Big Software, can only seem to whine and moan when it doesn't work the way they want it to. Samples

Assiduous students of the print media will have noticed its practitioners becoming increasingly exercised about 'Blogging' - the practice of publishing

On 18 May, for example, one Geoffrey Nunberg fulminated in the New York Times about the fact that whenever one does a Google search on any topical issue, the top page rankings often go to Blogs rather than established media sources (such as the New York Times ).

This was, according to Nunberg, A Bad Thing. After all, most Bloggers are not professional journalists, but rank amateurs! He was not the first hack to articulate this whinge. In fact, he seems to have picked up the idea from an earlier piece in the Register, an online publication. But the mindset he represents is widespread in Big Media, so it is worth devoting a few moments to unpacking the prejudices behind it.

Because I care about the Guardian getting their traffic, check it yourself, but there are a couple of other paras I want to put up front.

I would sooner pay attention to particular Blogs than to anything published in Big Media - including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it's just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them - which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many Blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison.
[...]
there is the problem - not often touched upon in the New York Times, by the way - that many controversial public issues are ignored by Big Media for the simple reason that the ideological and commercial interests of their proprietors preclude it.

This is why the US mainstream media has wound up misleading its audience about Iraq and the 'war' on terrorism.
[...]
Then there is economics. One reason Blogs show up so prominently in Google searches is because Weblogs are available on the web while Big Media sources increasingly are not. Instead they are locked behind pay-for firewalls. (As with Nunberg's little rant, which I have just tried to re-read - and been invited to pay $2.95 for the privilege.)

Since the whole point of the web is full and comprehensive linking, and Google ranks pages by the numbers of other pages that link to them, it is hardly surprising that Blogs are winning over established media. Nobody in his right mind would link to a mere abstract.

5th

Korean and How Language Conditions What We CAN Think

Emergence With Even More Vengeance?

ROTFL This is Too Funny For Words

Latest on My favourite Newsreader

Jared Diamond Looks At How Societies Blow It

20th

This is Excellent

21st

What Happens When EVERYONE Has a Wireless Web Cam?

Thinking About Vague Stuff

To Start with the End - The Blogosphere is NOT a Media Story

22nd

It Is Never Right to Shoot the Messenger

Trust the Porn Merchants to Get It First

A Question of Scale

23rd

Have the Telcos Woken Up To the New Century?

Too Many False dawns

25th

Broadband: Its the Price and the Speed

26th

3G Continues to Knock 'em Down

29th

So Much for Convergence

Catching Up

10th

Open Source Claims a Microsoft OS

Westerners are the King Kongs of the breeding race

4th

When Emergence Turns to Catastrophe

5th

Power Companies Go End To End

No No No, EVERYONE Is Supposed to Have One

The John Perry Barlow Paradox

The Internet Changes Everything - Europeans' Life Online

Europe Hacker Laws Could Make Protest a Crime

6th

A Reality Check for Electronic Media

Oh Yess, Here Comes the Next Shift

7th

The Ripping Cosmos

10th

First the Next Big Dumb Idea

Now Something More Positive

12th

Interactive TV - A Bogey Man in the Living Room?

Did I mention Awasu?

RSS WILL Rule, OK?

A Payoff For Distributed

Chewing the sealskin

A Gig, and Thoughts On ICT and Education

13th

I Think David Weinberger is Being VERY Rude

Blogging Off the Web Page

Altruism and Revenge - Only One Makes sense

Wireless Everywhere

16th

The depth of the telecom Hole

17th

How Does It All Turn Out?

19th

Stupid Network Outsmarts Copyright Police

20th

Reverse Engineering Google?

21st

Getting the Cart Before the Horse

I'll stick these in forward date order one day.

3rd

David reed On the IP Meme

5th

Emerging from the Insurance Haze

Space Shuttles and group Behaviour

The Music Industry Not Only Doesn't Get IT, Its trying to Commit Suicide

10th

What if Economic Integration Was the Problem?

12th

My Wife Will Love This

15th

Power Laws in the Blogosphere

16th

If You Want a Great Newsfeed Reader

17th

From My Friend Lee Thorn in Laos

18th

Google Buy Blogger - Of Course

19th

More on Google Blog

The Internet HAS Changed Everything - And the Old Controllers of Information REALLY Don't Get

Bob Frankston is NOT HAPPY

Networks Hard at Work

One of Those days On The Net

21st

Plug For My Friends at Katipo

Everything Being Changed

AOL Bales At Last from TV - Cessation Of Stupidity

Beauty Emerging from Functionality

Selling Our Time

22nd

Dumb Science

When Something Finally "Gets It" - A Purple Cow - 6 replies

Story Telling and Its place in Running a Project

23rd

What We Really Want in IM/KM

24th

Emergence - Even the NY Times is Getting the Bug

Another Step on the Road to Genuinely New Media

25th

Complexity Theory and Co-opetition at 190 MPH - Finally a Use for NASCAR

Coming Down Out of the Trees

27th

Telco Sector Still Shrinking

28th

David Reed's Group Forming Networks - In Action - 1 reply

Online Knowledge Management Tool for the Voices of Dissent

Here are the Postings for January, 2003.

Network drivers in Bankruptcies and Deflation Talk

Elliot Wave Theory - A Measure of Emergence

Anything Works Unless Everyone Does it

Lying; The New Competitive Advantage

Hollywood Should Be More Careful of the Emergence It is Driving

Golden Rice Better Than Expected and Open Source

Managerial Aggression Breaks the Contract

Emergent Processes and Enormous Leverage

OK, How Did the Ants Figure THIS Out?

Copyright War: Another Round to Consumer Control

Copyright War: IP Control Freaks Lose Another 2 Rounds

Music Industry sees Small Glimmer of Light

No Need for a Conspiracy When You Own the System

How do New Norms Supersede the Old? Its the Internet Stupid

You WILL Watch The Adverts

When 25% is Still "Under the Radar"

We Media - Interactive Internet Journalism Is Already Here

Predictions - Getting Emergence Before it Shows ..

Not Your Father's Economy

Maybe Birds Started Out Trying to Stick to the Earth

How Many Homes Have to Burn ...

Innovation, You CAN'T Stop It

The Higher the profile, the Worse the Business

Eldred v Ashcroft - Corporate America Pulls Its Memes Out of the Pool

Music Industry Has no Shame

Lord Mayor Of London Tries to Find a Tipping Point

Integrated Text-Based Communications Tool

The Network is Too damned Smart

Emergent Geometry

Dana Blankenhorn Says Its A Boycott - Emergent of Course

The Proliferation of Great Ideas

THIS is what I mean by a Knowledge Economy

Language, Not Only Emergent, But Sudden and Subject to Power laws

Cloning is an Emergent Process, not a Photocopier

Ming Quotes Bucky on an Emergent Universe

a Wonder of Reconciliation

MS SQL Worm

Doing the Numbers on Copyright Violations

Merging Microbes Precede Gene Therapy by Millions of Years

Remember in the heady days of the Dotcom bubble when "new media" and "old media" were supposed to converge, creating and explosion of, well something, mostly profits?

Seems like the biggest attempt to converge the two is not working out anywhere near what was planned, or at least expected. AOL Spinoff May Be Back on Table

"There is still a wait-and-see attitude about the merger paying off the way it was supposed to do," UBS Warburg analyst Christopher Dixon told the E-Commerce Times. "They've done more in terms of cross-platform work lately, but the question is still out there, and it's a matter of time before AOL has to show progress or admit it might need to rethink where it's headed."

This story in the Guardian looks at the process, and the ethics, of the British (and other European) allocation of 3G licenses. 3G fiasco - only the porn barons win

How are the mighty fallen. MMO2's announcement of the second biggest loss in British corporate history brings back some memories.

Of the early months of 2000, in fact, when an astonished British public was treated to the spectacle of highly paid (and hitherto apparently rational) telecom executives going bonkers. The occasion was the auction of licences to operate 3G cellular telephone networks in the UK.

The auction opened on 6 March and closed on 27 April. [...] The unfortunate 'winners' were TIW, Vodafone, BT3G (which later became MMO2), OnetoOne (later T-Mobile) and Orange.

In a further certifiable decision all five opted to pay for their licences up front, and by September 2000 all had a licence to lose money in their hot little corporate hands.

MMO2 paid about £4 billion for its licence (together with a further £5bn for licences in Germany). In total, the auction raised about £23bn for the Treasury.

It also added greatly to the nation's entertainment, for it was clear even to the meanest intelligence that the sums paid for these tickets to corporate oblivion were manifestly absurd.

There was something deeply comic about seeing the private sector - which in the shape of buffoons such as CBI chairmen regularly lectures the public sector about the need for efficiency, cost control and fiscal prudence - squandering shareholders' money on such a staggering scale.

We now learn (from an interesting Radio Four programme by Simon Singh) that the 3G auction was designed by a game theorist named Ken Binmore from University College, London. If so, Professor Binmore is a genius.

[...]
In fact, some of his mathematical colleagues were astonished by the bidding strategies adopted by the mobile networks during the auction, and have written several learned papers trying to infer what the companies thought they were doing.

This is no doubt a fruitful subject for academic research, but it raises in my mind a different question - namely whether maximising the Government's 'take' from the auction was actually in the public interest.

This snippet from Forrester is interesting.

No-Frills Broadband Beats Full-Service Offer At BT

BT's access-only BT Broadband product is trailing behind goals, but it's beating sales of the full-service option by more than two to one. Expect even the most committed ISP/portals like Terra to scale back their content activities in the next 18 months.

This looks to me like some realisations in BT that the net is not a media business, broadband, as well as dialup, is a communications commodity business. When will companies finally accept the reality that the net is an End to End process, its what happens at the ends that matters and in ways that undermine business models based on "owning" an "audience" or "controlling" the connection, we, the users, really don't care who or how we are connected, what matters is who we can reach and how we can interact with them.

I've been saying it for 5 years and I haven't been wrong yet, "content" is expensive, ephemeral and a mugs game, the connection is not between people and information, it is between people and people and information is the currency between them. And that model will win in the end.

So we buy enough speed to enable our transactions at the lowest possible price. We grudgingly accept the net as a toll road, but we'd really rather have it as a footpath, included in our property taxes.

Have lit up the eyes of those who think they "get" the Internet, but there have been a lot of close calls too. The email campaign that shut down the UN mail servers when East Timor exploded into violence was an early sign of a global smart mob getting up a head of steam. With access to America's mainstream media becoming increasingly difficult for Liberal candidates, maybe the net is the charm THIS time. Check this.

When it comes to the Internet, no detail is too small for [Joe] Trippi. Some campaign managers devote their energies to working the elite press or courting union leaders or wooing donors. But Trippi seems to spend an inordinate amount of his time checking Meetup numbers, posting to liberal Blogs, sending text messages to supporters who have signed up for the Dean wireless network, and otherwise devising ways to use the Internet to build what Trippi envisions as "the largest grassroots organization in the history of this party." And his efforts might actually be paying off: While many predicted that Dean would fade away once the war was no longer a salient issue, there is little evidence that the former Vermont governor's supporters—originally drawn to Dean when he was forcefully speaking out against war in Iraq—are deserting him. In fact, the Internet might account for Dean's staying power.

For the Dean campaign, it all started with the Meetup phenomenon. Back in January, the campaign stumbled upon the Meetup website and noticed that 432 people were signed up for a Howard Dean Meetup group. "We didn't really know what it was," says Trippi. He watched from afar as Dean's Meetup numbers grew to more than 2,600 in February. In March, Dean showed up at a Meetup event in New York City. It was so crowded that hundreds of young supporters were pouring out onto the sidewalk waiting to get in. Soon the campaign began receiving mysterious donations with an extra cent added. They learned that the Meetup community intended to raise $1 million for Dean, and the extra cent was being used to identify the donations. It became known as the Meetup Million Dollar Challenge and has raised at least $300,000 for Dean so far (close to 10 percent of what Dean had raised overall, as of April). Almost overnight, Meetup had become the Dean campaign's most important organizing tool.

Other innovations—wireless communications, HowardDean.tv (a website that runs streaming video of Dean speeches and events), a network of rapid- response Bloggers—have followed, and Trippi is now doing more with the Internet than any other presidential campaign. Aides to some of the other 2004 Democratic candidates regard Trippi, who was born in Silicon Valley and has spent the last few years working for high-tech companies, as a bit of an eccentric who wastes precious campaign time e-mailing obscure Bloggers and hanging out with political oddballs at the monthly Dean Meetups. "Some of these Meetup events look like the bar scene from Star Wars," says an adviser to one Dean rival.

But Trippi believes others will one day understand the brilliance of his plan. Consider the Meetups: Once a month, thousands of self-organized Dean supporters across the country get together at coffee shops and bars to discuss their candidate and ways they can help his campaign. This ability to get people to meetings, Trippi says, bodes well for Dean in the Iowa caucuses. "What do you do in a caucus?" he asks. "You go to a meeting." And Trippi has plans beyond the caucuses and primaries. He speaks of using Meetup and other Web tools to build a million-person-strong network of small donors who could raise the cash needed to take on President Bush. "There's only one way you could ever get to a million people in this country," he says before pausing dramatically. "That's the Internet."

From the NY Times

Phone Companies See Their Future in Flat-Rate Plans

Fifteen years ago, Arthur C. Clarke in the science-fiction novel "2061: Odyssey Three" predicted a future as follows: "With the historic abolition of long-distance charges on 31 December 2000, every telephone call became a local one, and the human race greeted the new millennium by transforming itself into one huge, gossiping family."

That future may be at hand, only a few years behind schedule, as a result of the telephone industry's declining economic fortunes, increasing competition and recent technological advances. Starting with MCI, which introduced its Neighborhood plan in April 2002, most leading phone companies — AT&T;, BellSouth, Qwest Communications, SBC Communications and Verizon — have rolled out programs that allow customers in some states to make unlimited local and national calls for one flat monthly price.

These unlimited-use plans offer callers the advantage of predictability and less time spent checking monthly bills. They commonly cost $50 to $60 a month with services like voice mail and caller ID bundled in, making the price only slightly higher than the $48 that American households typically spend on local and long-distance calling, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

The introduction of the flat-rate plan at MCI, formerly WorldCom, a company currently going through bankruptcy proceedings, is "exceeding expectations," according to a spokeswoman, Claire Hassett.

A spokesman for Verizon, Jim Smith, calls his company's program a "ripping success."

I'm in the midst of reading Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee : The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal which is, in itself an interesting book and raises the valid questions about how different we are from other animals on the planet, and where those differences might be taking us.

The latest research on the genetic differences goes even further, suggesting that chimps and people should be classified as homo, the same genus, indistinguishable on 99.4% of the DNA that matters and 98.4, even in other areas of the genome.

What interests me even more than that is this: if so little difference can make such an enormous difference once the process is fully expressed, why on earth do we assume that the significant differences that we are making to the ecosystem should not be important? The question is not how much we can do without "harming" the system and rather how little we might need to do to change it irrevocably, and to our detriment.

The answer is, we don't know, OUR answer is, "we'll risk it anyway"

Throughout the recent history of information technologies, the porn merchants have always been the first to "get" the idea. Video uptake and business development was largely driven by porn, the Internet proved another godsend as they adapted their models and adopted the technologies.

Now, according to a CBS Marketwatch that hit my desktop this morning, they are cracking Peer to Peer as well.

PORN COMPANIES EMBRACE PEER-TO-PEER

LOS ANGELES (CBS.MW) -- Adult filmmakers are making love to online file sharing, not rejecting it, according to a published report. "The porn guys are smart; they've figured out how to use the technology," said Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster, a developer of software designed for use in file sharing.

Independent researchers estimate as much as 38 percent of online file sharing involves adult material. Producers freely make available small segments of programming, to promote visits to subscription sites. Porn producers have also married digital rights management technology with their programming to create pay-per-view downloads. The adult film industry is "leveraging the power of peer-to-peer," said Aram Sinnreich, an entertainment industry analyst in comments to the San Francisco Chronicle. There's a lesson in this for the recording industry, he said. Namely, "how do you use free to promote paid?"

Meanwhile the one business that seems to have understood the music game online is Apple. Although SFGate's Mark Morford has a valid point in Highway To $0.99 Hell
Apple's iTunes music store: A rockin' revolution, or same ol' corporate song and dance?

Once again the Australian Government, in league this time with a website filtering company, has revealed a lack of understanding about information and how it works.

This story appears in today's Sydney Morning Herald and dots all the i's and crosses all the t's

Print this article | Close this window
Filter's prudish paranoia clogs research
By Mike Seccombe
May 22 2003

Pornography, drugs, gambling, racism, how to make bombs or conduct computer crime - it's all out there on the Internet, and 105 bureaucrats in Parliament House want to make sure they can get it whenever they need it.

They are the information and research staff of the Parliamentary Library and they are fuming at the prospect of having access to net nasties cut off by a new filtering system.

The filtering system, provided by the American company, Websense, covers more than four million restricted sites, and

for the staff of what is called "program one" of the library fighting the filter has become a campaign. For they are the ones under pressure to provide timely responses to their impatient political masters on all manner of subjects.

The Websense database, they found, blocked the site of an group funding vaccinations for children in India as "sex".

The Autism Behaviour Intervention Queensland site was blocked as "gambling".

A German site which examines historians who deny the Holocaust was blocked as "racism/hate".

They found data which showed filters designed to block pornography could also cut out 55 per
cent of references to condoms, 50 per cent of safe sex sites, 60 per cent of gay health sites and even 32 per cent of pregnancy sites.

How could they research sex slavery in Australia without access to ads for Asian sex workers? How could they research a harm-minimisation approach to drugs when the system reflected America's zero- tolerance approach?

Yesterday the man behind the introduction of the filter, library official John Templeton, said its application to the research staff was on hold.

Microdocs has a summary of some research they have done on the way waves of attention flood through the Blogosphere, exchanging vital fluids with the mainstream media, bouncing off it, feeding back into it and often being put to bed at last within it.

It shows also that spontaneous emergences of ideas and memes are the rule and that Bloggers, even the A List, cannot use the tool to make things happen; interest, enthusiasm, attention, are generated by participating only. I like it, there is something new about the way we are negotiating our ideas about the world taking shape here.

Perhaps the last conclusions we came to in this study is that Blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared.

In total, Microdoc News believes Blogging to be a radically different world than that of mainstream media