Stilgherrian » mark pesce

Book cover marketing FAIL?

Stilgherrian — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:58:24 +0000

I saw these books sitting in a shop window the other day and the first thing I did was laugh. Why? Well, seeing the four lined up like this seemed like a list of clichés.

Germaine Greer On Rage? Well, yes, she does get more than a little grumpy, wink wink, eh? (Although as someone asked me, “Greer on Rage? What would she guest program?”) David Malouf On Experience? Yeah, he’s getting a bit long in the tooth, sure… and need I mention the probable subject of Blanche d’Alpuget’s longing in On Longing?

Yeah, time for another nudge-nudge wink-wink there too.

Now Mark Pesce tells me that Greer’s book is written in the context of the NT Intervention — something worth getting angry about. “A cogent book about rage,” he says. “Perhaps an important one. Time will tell.”

Sure, he’s a fan. Greer is an important public intellectual, though, and today’s First Dog on the Moon cartoon explains very well why everyone hates Germaine Greer. But for me the line-up of little pastel covers and the gift-set option tells me this is for people who want to look like they’re intellectuals.

If Greer’s book is indeed important, then it needs to be more than a fetish for someone’s mantlepiece, along with that unread (and unreadable) hardback of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. And maybe that means more descriptive covers?

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Exhausted by the Future of Media

Stilgherrian — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:57:03 +0000

Whew! The Future of Media Summit 2008 was exhausting yesterday! I’ll be writing something this morning, but I’m not sure what yet. Stand by. Meanwhile you can get a taste of the action by reading Mark Pesce’s thoughts on the Future of Live Television (Part 1, Part 2), and Erin Moss’ notes on the Sydney Future of Journalism session and plenty more linked from the Future of Media Blog. Plus of course there’s the Summize feed of everyone’s Twitter traffic.

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Future of Media Summit 2008: live blogging etc

Stilgherrian — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 11:58:43 +0000

OK, I haven’t even regurgitated all the information I devoured at PubCamp Sydney and the Politics & Technology Forum, and now I’ll be spending all day tomorrow at the Future of Media Summit 2008. Get ready for the overload!

I’m not quite sure exactly where I fit into this. However I do know that I’ll be one of several people providing a Twitter feed tagged #fom08, and Mark Pesce wanted to make sure I had a live videophone feed via Qik, which I do now.

The attendee list is a veritable Who’s Who of New Media Cleverness, plus me. So something interesting is bound to happen… stay tuned!

Oh, and for some bedtime reading, try the Future of Media Report 2008 [PDF].

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Actually, what DO Vodafone’s plans mean?

Stilgherrian — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:24:47 +0000

There was plenty of discussion on Twitter last night about Vodafone’s iPhone plans. Yesterday we thought that data outside the “included” amount was still billed within the cap. But then people started reading Vodafone’s confusing and legalistic Terms & Conditions and got confused. I contend that failing to clearly state the price of your services is in breach of the Trade Practices Act — and if a dozen smart people can’t answer the simple question, “What will I be charged for 5GB of data?” then the T&Cs are misleading, I say. Stay tuned.

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Vodafone’s iPhone plans better?

Stilgherrian — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 04:39:12 +0000

Is Vodafone Australia so stupid that they didn’t promote the most attractive part of their iPhone plans? Mark Pesce went a-hunting today and found that on the business plans, yes, the “included data” is a small 250MB or 500MB or whatever — but data usage after that point is billed at 12c/megabyte inside the monthly cap. He Twittered this news [1, 2, 3, 4] earlier today, but you should check the Terms & Conditions yourself before signing up. [Update: You should definitely read the follow-up post before proceeding.]

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So let’s just start our own telco, eh?

Stilgherrian — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:55:21 +0000

While my piece about iPhone data plans brings you the disturbing imagery of Telstra’s Sol Trijillo bending over for Steve Jobs, Mark Pesce’s iPhail is blunt about telcos’ data plans and offers another possibility — creating our own data-friendly telco.

Mark reckons all three carriers offering iPhone have completely failed to recognise the pent-up demand for the device, and the way it will change network usage.

A typical example is Optus’ plan (general consensus holds that Optus has the most generous plans of the three carriers), which provides a maximum of 1GB of internet usage per month — for a hefty $179.

Let’s run some numbers here. The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald clocks in at just about a half a megabyte. That’s fat, but also fairly typical. The widespread deployment of broadband has lead to a proliferation of media-rich pages. Now, if I hit the SMH page (or a similar site) sixty times a day, I’d reach my 1GB cap. Add in any Google Maps activity, or push email, or what have you, and the figure could easily double. Now, instead of $179/month, I’d have that bill plus potentially hundreds of dollars in data charges.

On the other hand, if I wanted to buy 3G mobile data service for my MacBook Pro from Optus, they’d give me a cute little USB dongle with the Hauwei 3G/HSDPA modem and SIM card, plus 5GB of data — and it would cost me only $39.99 a month.

Have I missed something here? After all, data is data. The network usage for the dongle is completely indistinguishable, as far as the network is concerned, from the iPhone 3G.

Mark’s conclusion is that there’s an “iPhone tax”.

Not only are we asked to pay a premium to purchase iPhone 3G, we will also be paying a premium to receive every bit of data on iPhone 3G.

The solution, he says, is to start our own MVNO, or Mobile Virtual Network Operator.

It’s not as hard as you might think,…

If we put the word out through our various social networks (both human and electronic), I’m sure that in practically no time at all we’d have 10,000 or more subscribers ready to sign up for an MVNO. I don’t know how many subscribers we’d need to get to a break-even point, but I doubt it can be many more than that. Given the amazing facility of many members of the community for setting up and running online services that scale to handle many users, I suspect that much of the infrastructure for this MVNO can be created by the community, for the community, at very low cost. The power of social networks — as has been endlessly pointed out by Clay Shirky — is that it allows large numbers of individuals to self-organize quickly and effectively.

I’ve heard people complain about the mobile carriers since before I moved to Australia. I suggest that it’s time to put up or shut up. Passive resistance is no longer enough. It is time to show the carriers that we can do this ourselves. We can service ourselves and our needs. We will do this because doing anything else is abhorrent.

We could name our MVNO the Future AUstralian Carrier, or FAUC.

Don’t like your plan from Telstra, or Vodafone, or Optus? Well, get FAUC.

As I write this, the Facebook group FAUC (Future AUstrailian Carrier) Interest Group [sic] already has 127 members…

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Links for 02 July 2008

del.icio.us — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:13:18 +0000

Stilgherrian’s web links I’ve found for 02 July 2008, created automatically from internets.

China As An Island | Strange Maps: China has land borders with 14 other countries. And yet you should not think of China as particularly well-integrated with its neighbours. In fact, as shown in this dramatic map, you should rather consider China to be an island.
NASA's Moon Truck Goes for a Test Drive | Telstar Logistics: A prototype of a NASA lunar rover undergoing testing at the Moses Lake Sand Dunes in eastern Washington state.
Hyperpolitics (American Style) | viddler.com: The video of Mark Pesce's presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum 2008.
Asthma Weed | Sydney Weeds Committees: This is the nasty weed which keeps emerging in our garden and resists all efforts at eradication. Chemical warfare appears to be the only resort.

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Links for 26 May 2008 through 01 June 2008

del.icio.us — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:01:28 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 26 May 2008 through 01 June 2008, gathered semi-automatically and covering a disturbing range of topics:

NSLU2-Linux: Technical information for hacking the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device, along with the Synology DS101, the Iomega NAS100d, the D-Link DSMG600 and other ixp4xx-based devices with large attached storage.
Hacking WD MyBook World Ed: Western Digital's My Book World Edition network storage device is actually a little Linux RAID server. This Wiki has technical information on how to hack them.
Sarah Jessica Parker Looks Like A Horse: Well, she does. And here's the website. Proof that people have too much time on their hands.
A twittering experiment | eicolab: An interesting use Twitter, with a comment added by yours truly.
Friends, Enemies and My Army | Viddler.com: Another recent presentation by Mark Pesce, this one at the 2008 Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, on 25 May 2008. A nice trip through the power of Twitter, the "nuclear option", and the surprising influence of Josh Marshall's army.
Phoenix Lander “Talks” to Twitterers | NYTimes.com: Includes an interview with the NASA employee who's been playing the part of the Mars Phoenix spacecraft on Twitter (@MarsPhoenix).
Australian Strategic Policy Institute: "One for the feed reader", I've been told. I haven't explored this site yet.
A discussion paper on the singular use of “they”: This link looks like it solves this question forever. If only people read it…
Twitter Co-Opted by Users as Better SMS, Social Media Platform | URBEINGRECORDED: Yet another superb essay on the impact of Twitter.
The Gruen Transfer | ABC TV: A new TV series looking at the art and science of persuasion as used by the advertising industry. Much good stuff here.
Ern Malley | Wikipedia: Not exactly a new story, but I was recently reminded of this wonderful literary hoax from the 1940s.
Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I | Hueniverse: A comprehensive but fairly technical explanation of the problems Twitter faces.
The Digital Media Revolution | YouTube: Mark Pesce, Technology Futurist speaks about the Digital Media Revolution at the SAGEM conference, April 2008, in Adelaide. Will the government heed his advice? In 5 parts, this links to part 1.
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address | YouTube: An inspirational 15 mins about the importance of following your dream, even if the end result isn't clear. "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking back."

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Yeah, this is hyperconnectivity!

Stilgherrian — Mon, 26 May 2008 01:16:39 +0000

Did someone say we’re hyperconnected? Oh yeah, Mark Pesce did last week. And you know what? He did a keynote presentation at a conference this morning and someone’s blogged about it before he’d even left the room. And now I’ve blogged about the blog. And he still hasn’t left the room.

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Twitter’s having a whale of a time

Stilgherrian — Sun, 25 May 2008 03:45:03 +0000

As I write this, Twitter is down for a “database replication catchup”. Sounds technical. As I hinted before, and as Kate Carruthers agrees, it’s make or break time for this most cool of messaging services.

It’s ironic that Twitter’s ability to connect us humans into an almost-instantaneous global network was a core theme of Mark Pesce’s keynote presentation at Microsoft’s ReMIX 08 last week. The very week he extols Twitter’s strengths, it collapses. And they don’t know why.

At least Twitter has responded to community calls for more transparency.

In Twittering About Architecture, Alex Payne admits they built it wrong from the beginning.

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that’s introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability.

I don’t need to repeat my call for less haste in web development — and in the world generally — do I?

Twitter has just received another $15M investment. Take the time to get it right, guys. But quickly.

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Links for 23 May 2008 through 24 May 2008

del.icio.us — Sat, 24 May 2008 23:03:06 +0000

Stilgherrian’s links for 23 May 2008 through 24 May 2008, collected almost-automatically…

Only Connect | the human network: The text of Mark's keynote at Microsoft's ReMIX 08.
Mark Pesce - Only Connect | Viddler.com: This 23-minute keynote presentation from Microsoft's ReMIX 08 is a wonderful distillation of Mark's thoughts over recent months. If you want to get your head around the future, watch this.
TimesMachine | New York Times: All issues of the New York Times from 18 September 1851 to 30 December 1922 available to browse as images and PDFs. Free to NYT delivery subscribers, but even the sample issues offered to everyone are a fascinating read.
We Travel in Tribes | Rands In Repose: Excellent explanation of the appeal of Twitter.
Royalty-free music | Aussie Bloggers: Links to some sources of royalty-free music, i.e. music for which you pay a one-off fee and can then continue to use in your production.
Twittiquette and Acceptable Online Social Network Behaviour | DEDLOG: Dedlam offers 5 excellent tips for being a "good participant" on Twitter and other social media.
All The Cool People Are Still Going… | hyperpeople: Adolf Hitler gets ready for the Burning Man party. Wrong. Funny.
PR and the Management of a Real Crisis | DEDLOG: Shanghai-based Dedlam's commentary on how China handled the media during this month's earthquake.
Power-Tweeting: 101 Everyday Uses for Twitter | Inside CRM: Examples of how the Twitter community uses this simple tool. When it works.

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Social networks: the Nuclear Option

Stilgherrian — Mon, 05 May 2008 06:18:22 +0000

I’d planned to write something else today, but if I don’t mention this article now then I’ll appear way out of touch. Mark Pesce has just posted another magnificent essay: The Nuclear Option.

It’s a commentary on how Twitter and similar tools which help us create instantaneously-connected global social networks are changing the world. Entertainingly written too, as always — and not just because he mentions me.

I won’t quote it. Just read it. Then make a cup of tea, read it again, and stare out of the window for a while.

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Oh you poor, dear record companies…

Stilgherrian — Fri, 02 May 2008 09:32:34 +0000

You’ve got to hand it to “the music industry”. This week they released a propaganda film Australian Music In Tune which asks us to sympathise with musicians because they’re all poor struggling artists. Diddums.

The only reason musicians trying to “make it” are poor is that as soon as they do get that sought-after recording contract they still pay for everything from there on. Before they see a single cent from their music, they have to pay off the studio hire, recording engineer, video director, stylists, set designers, editor and dozens of other parasites — including music company executives with their nice lunches and their BMW leases.

An entire industry — “the music industry” and their retail outlets — sits between the musicians and their audience, sucking out something like 90% of the money in the process.

And they have the gall to rope musicians into their propaganda film under false pretences, telling people like Frenzal Rhomb’s Lindsay McDougall that it was a movie about life as an artist.

He said he was told the 10-minute film, which is being distributed for free to all high schools in Australia, was about trying to survive as an Australian musician and no one mentioned the video would be used as part of an anti-piracy campaign.

OK, so who are the guys in the photo? Jared Madden (left) and Adam Purcell (right) have created tune-out.com in response to the industry crying poor.

They know that thanks to teh intenetz, we can distribute that music from musician to audience for a fraction of a cent. They know that the audience is deciding for themselves what’s hot or not through this social media thing, and that the entire music industry is becoming irrelevant.

You the Music Industry have failed to move with us in our discovery of new and exciting ways to interact, collaborate, and communicate. We have embraced the digital space and the opportunities it affords us, and we have changed because of this. We are developing new forms of entertainment which have transformed the way we interact with each other, with you, and with music. This is an ongoing process, and we are excited about what we will discover tomorrow.

For some reason you assume that we are the same as yesterday, and you are kidding yourself.

You wrongly place the blame of declining CD sales on others. Our source of entertainment has diversified, and we are no longer as interested in the concept of the ‘album’.

There is no digital music battle or piracy war. That is a figment of your imagination, and, every time you preach our digital crimes to us, we ‘tune out’ of your deranged ranting. Your declining profits are the symptom of a business model that is fast becoming irrelevant.

You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention.

Hear hear. I have signed their letter. I look forward to the video they’re producing this weekend.

Meanwhile, read Mark Pesce’s essay, Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century. I’ve linked to it before, but it’s especially apt today. Or read about 1000 True Fans.

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Vale Scott Young

Stilgherrian — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:16:53 +0000

I’ve just had the most amazing conversation about the man in the photograph. C Scott Young was, according to Mark Pesce, “the very, very first VRML designer. What he did — with no tools and for (literally) no money — changed the world.” And Mark should know, because he invented VRML.

Alas, Scott died a few days ago after a long, long battle with diabetes-related illnesses. He doesn’t have his own Wikipedia entry yet, but you can get hints of his life in Mark’s personal blog post and the memorial site.

Tonight’s conversation was remarkable because it led me to re-read a somewhat influential Wired article from 1995, Technopagans: May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace. When that article hit the streets I’d just moved to Sydney in the first dot.com boom. Mark Pesce was a minor superstar in the Internet firmament for inventing leading-edge virtual reality technology — he was, almost literally, creating the world of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

That article combined what I knew of Mark’s technical work with religious and spiritual ideas which were at least somewhat related to my own. I remember thinking, “I’d very much like to meet this man one day.” That’s why I was so well pleased when I finally did meet him last December.

Mark, I am truly sad that you’ve lost a good friend — especially since there was so much complex news for you this week. As you say, “Remembering is the only gift we living can give those gone before us.”

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Australia 2020: The Disillusionment

Stilgherrian — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:15:37 +0000

When Chairman Rudd announced the Australia 2020 Summit the euphoria kicked in like a clean hit of a fresh new political drug. After 11 drab years of John Winston Howard, Change! Big, bright colourful change with sparkly bits and the sound of a thousand sitars! But now the euphoria’s wearing off. We’re coming down — and the Main Event is still a month away.

Kevin still looks pretty cheerful, though, doesn’t he. Why is that?

Look back through everything I’ve written so far and you can see the moodswing. “Chairman Rudd’s got a clever strategy going,” my first post began. Another post was headlined Australia, let the Enlightenment begin!, quoting Maxine “Toadslayer” McKew and agreeing that the nation was ready to start a new conversation about its destiny. At the end of February I even nominated myself.

Given Rudd’s claim that his government would be open and transparent, and develop policies based on evidence, it all sounded pretty good.

As days go by, however, it’s become increasingly clear that the potential of the event will be stifled by the political “need” to placate the same old whinging lobby groups, the same old middle-class middle-aged white men in dark suits (just flick through the Steering Committee) and, it seems, the “need” to pre-load the agenda with specific topics to… well, let’s explore that.

There’s two brilliant critiques of the process so far. Please, read them in full before continuing — though I’ll give you a summary here if you’re in a hurry.

The ABC’s Media Watch ran a story this week, I’m having a Summit and you’re invited, which highlighted Rudd’s technique of openly inviting specific high-profile journalists and getting key media outlets to nominate “ordinary Australians” — ensuring they’d be supportive.

In the past couple of weeks, the Prime Minister’s Office has invited twenty media organisations — they’ve sent us a list — to select a reader, listener or viewer and to pay for them to go to Canberra.

That’s not including News Ltd’s big kahuna, John Hartigan, who of course is chairing one of the summit sessions.

It’s not surprising that News Ltd papers have eagerly joined the search for summiteers.

Like Sydney’s Daily Telegraph…

“You can help shape our future”
— Daily Telegraph, You can help shape our future, 3rd March, 2008

Australia’s 1000 “best and brightest” is gradually diluted.

Meanwhile, the Centre for Policy Development’s article Beyond the 2020 Summit asks us to imagine what we actually do after this magic weekend.

You would think that the Government’s stated objectives for the Summit would be a good place to start. Here we scrutinise just two: harnessing the best ideas across the nation and producing options for consideration by Government.

Objective: To harness the best ideas across the nation.

This might be difficult to measure and doing so will be a very long-term exercise. For those who missed out on their opportunity to present their ideas at all, it is probably a sore point. Candidates had to write 100 words to justify their inclusion and many with wonderful ideas would not have considered themselves worthy of consideration. From amongst those bold enough to apply, can we be certain that the Steering Committee did not filter out potentially radical ideas in their participant selection process? No matter how open-minded the selectors, it is certain that the Summit was a select group rather than a genuine opportunity to generate the best ideas Australians could offer.

Objective: To produce options for consideration by the Government.

This is hardly a firm commitment to do anything in particular with the ideas. As well, there was a promise that a public response would be produced by the end of 2008. The decision-making process is hardly transparent; it is not clear who will decide which ideas are capable of being shaped into concrete policy responses. This objective, unfortunately, will most likely lead to contributors at the Summit passively awaiting the Government’s response. Moreover they will be unaware of how the output of the Summit will be processed. Of course they are the ‘lucky’ ones. Those who never made it, especially those who will potentially be affected by policy responses emanating from the Summit, will feel even more obsolete.

The authors rather wish that the Summit’s objectives had instead been modelled on some principles on best practice in community engagement that are expressed in The Brisbane Declaration 2005, endorsed by over 2000 attendees from 44 countries of the International Conference for Engaging Communities, a conference hosted by the Queensland Government and the United Nations.

The CPD proposes what some people may think a radical solution for the follow-up. Instead of bureaucrats analysing the options behind closed doors, you choose 100 random citizens for each policy area and have them evaluate the ideas.

The randomly-selected citizens are presented with ideas from the Summit and able to obtain clarification from the authors. Rather than just private submissions lodged through the Summit website, all Australians are encouraged to participate in e-panels (electronic issues-based forums) that simultaneously discuss the ideas. The randomly-selected citizens have access to all these views as well, including new ideas or concerns that emerge.

This is remarkably similar to an idea first floated by futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1970s book The Third Wave: if you truly want parliament to represent the people, you could just choose a representative sample of the people. Randomly. It’s one of many fascinating ideas he runs through.

It’s also remarkably similar to Mark Pesce’s proposal, How to listen to 21 million voices.

Hey, I think they might be onto something here. Open, transparent policy development!

Gosh.

Now I’ve already written how I don’t think “representation” should be the model for selecting participants, but this seems a great way of involving everybody.

So, Dear Chairman Rudd and well-suited Steering Committee members (and Cate Blanchett), you have a choice.

Treat the Australia 2020 Summit as a political exercise to create the perception of a new long-term vision for Australia and pat yourselves and a smiling PM on the back.
Actually harness the potential of new ideas. Use some of the best resources of our nation — our minds, our wonderful, varied multicultural and multi-experienced minds, all of them! — to process and filter and come up with something really new. You could even use the Summit to showcase the kind of open, transparent, evidence-based government you’ve been talking about.

So far, alas, it looks like you’re choosing the same old cynical, corrupt Option 1.

Binge drinking is guaranteed a spot on the agenda, apparently. Important perhaps, yes, but I’d have thought the topic panels would decide their own agenda — you know, fresh ideas from the panellists to think “outside the box”.

How many other topics have already been loaded this way?

Well, we don’t know, because there’s been no news from the summit secretariat in a fortnight! You think there’d be something to say, even if it was just to confirm officially how many nominations you’d received, how far you are through the selection process, when we’ll know who’s selected, whether you’ve chosen the tenderer to run the event yet, when the timetable for the summit will be announced — that sort of thing.

We can accept that this is all being made up as we go along. After all the world is made up as we go along. In the 21st Century, though, some of us are used to seeing that “background chatter” as things get done. It helps reassure us that things actually are getting done — and done honestly — even though it might not be fully polished and glistening in the sun yet.

Wow, there’s transparency for you.