Random recent images from camera and pen...

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Funding Rupert's retirement package vs finding a new way to share information

I read Richard Glover's Saturday column in the Sydney Morning Herald, headed 'Rupert's on the money', on actual newsprint. Yes, real paper! Well I started to, anyway. I didn't finish it (or the whole paper - I rarely do these days) as I had better things to get on with, like breathing, eating, sleeping and whatever. But I looked it up again online, because I spend more time online than with my head in a newspaper (yes, it was different way back when, pre-Web...) and the subject - pay-for-view - does interest me.

I can understand Richard's thinking, suggesting as he does that we are willing to pay through the nose for convenience food yet baulk at paying relatively small sums for information online. He asks 'why is it so?' and goes further to suggest that it shouldn't be like that at all, that information has a value and that by rights it should be distributed for a fee, not freely. After all, no-one stands around on street corners handing out free coffee and sandwiches, do they? Now on the surface that sounds plausible in our consumer society, where very little is absolutely "free" and where goods and services are traded in markets and in theory find fair prices. Note that, "fair" prices, where supply and demand meet and share out resources. Nice theory.

In that way Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is certainly free to offer its journalistic services for a price, and good luck to them with that. It may work, they may find the sweet spot in their pricing that covers costs, and more. But unless the vast majority of old media close ranks on this - as well they may - "free" content just a click or two away will draw the punters and their dollars. But if they do close ranks they will be running a risk - the risk of being labelled a cartel. Not that name-calling - or even legal action - has ever scared these guys off. So they may get away with it, and lock their "information" behind a wall. Of course the wall will leak like a sieve, but it will provide some revenue relief for the old guard of the media -at least for a while. Fair use and foul will mean that good (or perhaps 'desired'?) content gets quoted and blogged outside of the walled garden, so nothing short of a totalitarian lock-down would save old media from slowly leaching to death. So why fight so hard, belittling the upstarts? Why not put the effort instead into finding a new business model, one that works sustainably?

Philosophically I have to say that information - be it the daily news, data or reference material - should be free. Freedom of information is something that we cherish as a right, something enlightened and empowering. So stashing it away behind a paywall is fraught with danger, in that it's inequitable in its distribution, it limits the sum growth of our human knowledge and technology and is a simple power play. It could be seen as a blatant misuse of the "information" in the first place. When we invented the wheel, did we share it or sell it? When we copied the wheel from nature, did we pay nature back for the intellectual property? I would guess not.

Nice though that philosophy is, it's not going to work. Most of us live in a society where our lives - our means - depend upon income derived from achieving a fair price for our goods or services. So we are left with Rupert, Richard and their cohorts hoping to create something, anything, in a digital age that they can swap for cash. The problem is that they keep coming up with poor analogies for their plight - like Richard's example of exorbitant sandwich and coffee shop prices - to illustrate that what they do - to gather, filter, qualify, refashion and regurgitate (in varying degrees of "quality") information - is just as worthy of payment as that coffee that may cost $5 but gives you a break from your work, gets you out of your chair and lifts you for an hour or two. But Richard himself answers that when he eschews the $5 coffee, makes and takes to work his own sandwiches and avoids most of what he sees as underwhelming and overpriced. So to use Richard's own analogy, how should we avoid these old guard media barons and their underwhelming, over-priced content, if not by blogging or fashioning our own?

Let's face it - we have stepped into a virtual, digital world and the old model of printing on paper, trucking it around and burning up finite resources just doesn't work like it used to... and it will only get worse. Subsidising "quality content" with the classifieds cash cow is all but over. And walling up your online content - be it your news, your images, or your music - may stem the tide, but by clinging to old ways - the "physical model" of distribution and ownership - you are just delaying the inevitable. The internet has created a new paradigm, where we are able to freely disintermediate, removing any middle layers that may distribute but don't effectively value-add, putting information ownership and publishing back where it started - with the people. If old media don't adapt quickly enough to that online opportunity, by truly adding value and leveraging their strengths, then they will be overwhelmed by change. They may retreat into their walled cities but they will waste away.

In fairness, you can check Richard's piece out too, just here: http://sn.im/rhjtg

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Post your vital signs to twitter with this pulse-checker. HRM is a good starting point but if you broadened the scope to other biological - or performance - measurements and added a wireless transmission system you'd have an interesting and useful public/private data feed http://sn.im/rg3n7

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Post your vital signs to twitter with this pulse-checker. HRM is a good starting point but if you broadened the scope to other biological - or performance - measurements and added a wireless transmission system you'd have an interesting and useful public/private data feed http://sn.im/rg3n7

Telstra planning an IP TV service with own-branded PVR? I'll stick with iView thanks http://sn.im/rg20h

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Telstra planning an IP TV service with own-branded PVR? I'll stick with iView thanks http://sn.im/rg20h

Try TPI for neuro-scanning. Sick of ppl telling you fMRIs actually show brain activity? Want something better next time you get a brain scan? http://sn.im/r8e7x

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Try TPI for neuro-scanning. Sick of ppl telling you fMRIs actually show brain activity? Want something better next time you get a brain scan? http://sn.im/r8e7x

If you really must travel why not travel with no baggage? Here's a service that brings together storage, rental and borrowing for travellers http://sn.im/r87u4

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If you really must travel why not travel with no baggage? Here's a service that brings together storage, rental and borrowing for travellers http://sn.im/r87u4

How Nokia differentiates itself in the netbook market will be interesting... where do I put the SIM? http://sn.im/r4ec4

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How Nokia differentiates itself in the netbook market will be interesting... where do I put the SIM? http://sn.im/r4ec4

Tele reports NSW hwy police accused of threat to 'sort it out over a coffee at Maccas'. Race accusation made by driver of 'rotary-charged' car. A what? http://sn.im/quxwk

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Tele reports NSW hwy police accused of threat to 'sort it out over a coffee at Maccas'. Race accusation made by driver of 'rotary-charged' car. A what? http://sn.im/quxwk

Chapter 11 for Reader's Digest, eh? You'd think a business model based on long-winded pleas to "say yes to win even more" coupled with a big slice of the dentists and doctors waiting room market would survive a downturn, but apparently not when they have a debt problem http://sn.im/quwel

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Chapter 11 for Reader's Digest, eh? You'd think a business model based on long-winded pleas to "say yes to win even more" coupled with a big slice of the dentists and doctors waiting room market would survive a downturn, but apparently not when they have a debt problem http://sn.im/quwel

Lesson of the week: don't take a week off work or the Tele will dob on you http://sn.im/qsrcl

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Lesson of the week: don't take a week off work or the Tele will dob on you http://sn.im/qsrcl

Sydney Morning Herald has all the answers - this time on transport - as always. Why do we even bother having governments?

I just love it when newspapers, crammed with journalistic talent as they are, start up a so-called independent 'study', an 'investigation' or a 'report' of their own creation and call it news. It fills a space, I guess. They usually make it sound so very official, only disclosing their self-interested "ownership" late in the piece, or in small print easily missed. Not so much this time with the Sydney Morning Herald's 'transport public inquiry'.Yes, we see the editorial, we see the front page blah, we see the lengthy opinion pieces dressed up as some sort of historical record of inaction. It's a bit disguised, but the clues are there. The content is scattered around the paper and yes, the alert readers will see the errors of fact, they will see the journalistic bias and the pre-judgement. They will realise it's not independent at all, rather it's part of the very sham that the newspaper seeks to critique. Why should it be any different? After all, the old media just want to sell newspapers and advertisements, not fix public transport. Indeed, selling newspapers and shuttling people around on trains and buses is a nice fit. People don't tend to read papers and drive, leastways not at the same time.

 Mind you, the old media also want you to buy cars via their classifieds. Now that's a conflict if ever there was one. Buy your car and your paper, then park the car and read your news on the train. But hang on, what if we worked from home or at nearby shared digital hubs, and read the news online? What are the odds of the SMH's "independent investigation" coming up with a game-changer like that?

 But enough of that. It's an interesting read for a whole range of reasons. But first, let me bore you a bit with my opinion. And yes - before you hate me too much - I *do* agree that public transport in particular has been mishandled for decades. I just think that blaming successive Labor governments for this mess ignores a lot of political, social and economic realities. And yes, the SMH articles make some good points, too.

 But let's be honest. people vote with their cash as well as their ballot papers. Many people buy cars, and they want to drive them to work. They want the amenity, the freedom to escape schedules; and they want more roads, better roads, and easier parking. Sure, the tide may be turning as costs rise and carbon awareness increases, and we *are* clearly seeing the downsides of widespread car ownership and daily use, but the car lobby is so massive and so entwined into our lives that spending capital on major rail projects has become /nearly/ impossible. It's easy to say we should have done more, but who wants to (a) pay for it and (b) give up their social amenity and land as a rail line is pushed through /after the fact/ to service people who *chose* to live away from public transport?

 Saturday's SMH article only touches on the political realities of raising capital, equitably distributing funds and effectively 'governing' the state of NSW. Whilst blaming Labor for every transport-planning inaction imaginable. But at the end of the day people elect governments, and boot them out, too. If people wanted 'more' or 'better' public transport to a greater degree than (say) health care, law and order or education they would have booted the longstanding Labor state members out long ago. Maybe they will next time around, but let's face it - the conservatives are for small government, private equity and individual freedom of choice. They may promise the world in Opposition but faced with the economic realities of the very next day they'll resort to first principles; which is not in any way shape or form to build costly public infrastructure. Forget the metro, or new heavy rail; forget seeing trams again. If it happens at all it will be a private/public partnership with high ticket prices.

 Sadly too there's little mention of opportunity cost. But plenty of mentions of the economic drag placed on the economy by 'Labor's inaction'. Traffic snarls cost billions, apparently, and it's implied that this cost would be better avoided. But to what degree? Completely? At what cost? Or perhaps incompletely removed? Just where do we draw the line on reducing this "snarl-linked economic drag"? What if traffic snarls actually serve a purpose, to discourage further car use?

 The impression is left that we should build roads as well as rails to meet the demand to ease these "snarls". But there's no mention of any checks and balances here that perhaps should apply, as it does for most of the products and services available to us. There's no mention of what we could do with this proposed stream of infinite capital that woudl subsidise road and rail construction. What if we chose to balance things a bit and encouraged better health with more usable bicycle paths, or actually discouraged energy-expensive mass transit and replaced it with shorter journeys to digital shared workplace hubs? Or encouraged more working from home? What if - heavens above - the ghastly traffic snarls that cost "billions" are actually serving the purpose of discouraging driving to work, or choosing to live 30 kilometres or more from the workplace? What if we remove that disincentive? What mess will we arrive at then? Presumably - if the SMH's "experts" are right, removing traffic snarls would release the billions previously lost in those snarls as productivity savings. But will it? Or will it just spread the malaise as planning errors are laid one upon another, allowing Sydney to sprawl and con-urbate to infinity?

 Maybe there's more to this than the Herald appears to suggest. It'll be interesting to see where the "investigation" heads. As an aside, check out the overwhelming public engagement with this SMH-provided this link to twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23fd-etww
Yep, nothing. Yawn. Move on, nothing happening here.

 Or check out Andrew West's interesting yet somewhat error laden 'history of inaction' (better re-check some of your 'facts' in Wikipedia, Andrew) http://www.smh.com.au/national/blowing-the-whistle-20090821-ets7.html
Oh dear. Nice to see it's not opinionated either, eh? There's more of the same here: http://www.smh.com.au/national/another-transport-scheme-another-dream-20090821-etww.html

 Pick your reality. I've said enough.

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Shake up on Geelong GC sees coastie Scarfey and pseudo-coastie Lang lose 2mins. That's bike racing folks http://sn.im/pu2et

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Shake up on Geelong GC sees coastie Scarfey and pseudo-coastie Lang lose 2mins. That's bike racing folks http://sn.im/pu2et

Progress! Mixed media take 2 - one old canvas, oil, texta, spray, ash etc... now bake in moderate oven

I'm kidding about baking it.. or am I? Anyway, something's appearing, whether it's art or not I can't be sure...

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Warning! Mixed media in progress - take one old canvas, add oil, texta, spray, ash, dirt, glue and leaves...

No, I don't know what it means either. On the spur of the moment I just took an old canvas (replete with an equally old oil painting that I'd grown tired of) and started slapping on layers of "stuff". It's an abstratct exploration I guess, we'll find out where we are when we get there.... and no, we may not get there at all!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Another for the coasties - Dale backed up to take 4th in stage 2. And we'll claim stage winner Richard Lang as a coastie, too, since he has rels up here ;-) http://sn.im/prl6s

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Another for the coasties - Dale backed up to take 4th in stage 2. And we'll claim stage winner Richard Lang as a coastie, too, since he has rels up here ;-) http://sn.im/prl6s

One for the central coasties.. Dale Scarfe took 3rd place in the stage 1 crit, Tour of Geelong http://sn.im/prkx3

Theft of copyright, music and even the news... or sweet disintermediation?

The change, it had to come. I see and hear the almost daily blustering,
blistering complaints from various vested interests (read old guard
proprietors and those who prosper under them) and whilst I may have some
sympathy for people suffering through the pain of change there's a point
where we all have to just wake up, get up and move on. The internet is
here, the web is here, convergence is upon us. More than that, we live in a
world where data of any sort can be circulated, replicated and re-used
faster and with greater ease than ever before. That sort of restructuring
matters a lot. It changes the economics of entire industries by reducing
(or even removing) the cost of transport and production and makes the entry
of new competition frictionless, or at least far easier. We may argue about
the timing, but as sure as sunrise we will eventually not recognise much of
what today we call newspapers and magazines; we shall see television and
radio "transmission" fragment and diversify, if not disappear completely
into an IP-universe; and we shall see - perhaps slightly more contentiously
- the collapse of what I would call 'corporate' music publishing (in favour
of a more or less democratic model, of the people, by the people if you
like).

 I'm sure none of this will shock you - it's been suggested, even promoted,
for decades. But many people still doubt it. These are the people who look
at us, seemingly awash with paper at home and at work, and say "I told you
so, there will never be a paperless world". And they'd be right, up to a
point. Paper has its good uses, like for wrapping presents, but storing
data is not one of them. For those of us who worked in 'the old days' when
computers were huge things hidden under buildings and tended by a strange
technological priesthood, paper was what we opened all manner of accounts
with, what we stored our account records on, how we kept track of payments,
how we communicated, diarised, journalised, photographed and managed our
lives. Even the simplest transaction was recorded on paper before being
finally input - overnight, it must be said - into the big iron we thought
of as 'computers'. Imagine what our world would be like if we still ran our
lives on a paper-based recording and transaction system? Imagine the
forests we would need to cut down, or the wait-states added to every single
move we made. There would be no 'instant' in our lives, we'd be back to
waiting patiently - read days or weeks - until one vital piece of paper
found its way through the maze and back again. (Actually a slower life with
a mass carbon sequestration program based on storing more paper could
actually stack up, if you wanted to turn it into a business case. But don't
ask me to think it through, please. It'll probably fall over when we factor
in the cost of moving all of that paper from here to there, and the
producutive hours lost when a piece of paper gets filed in the wrong spot,
as it inevitably does.) Point is, in just a scant few decades we have
completely removed time, materials and much human error from our
transaction systems - by largely replacing paper with a new world of
connected computers.

 By and large, the mass computing and interactive communication revolution
has been a productivity booster, with the economic gains made providing for
much of the new wealth and prosperity we see around us (global economic
collapses aside). You can simply do more with less, quicker, in a digitised
world - and have access to greater choice. It makes everything faster, more
repeatable, more accurate. It releases labour from drudgery and puts them
to work in more educated and potentially more satisfying ways (at least in
theory - I don't know how rewarding it was to be in a typing pool but I'm
guessing we are better off doing our own typing). It also has tended to
reduce the layers of distribution and wholesaling, to "disintermediate" and
put buyers and sellers more closely together.

 So why do laggards like the old media still exist? Of course
disintermediation hasn't yet freed every industry up, or released value
from every step in every possible process. For example many people still
see paper as a tangible "thing" to "prove" something to themselves; they
like to keep it close, touch it, and cling to their old, comfortable ways.
It's the same with music - vinyl or a CD is holdable, collectable in a very
physical way. And that's understandable - we still live in a physical
world. But many others (of all ages, I hasten to add) now live what we
could call 'parallel' digital lives to their 'real' ones and not only are
happy to ditch paper or plastic, they positively choose to do so. For them
their life's data is now online, along with their digital transactions,
their photographs and their music. Whilst we still have the "clingers" - a
whole baby-booming generation of them, at least - who have lived through
the 'immediate pre-digital era' and remain arguably more comfortable with a
newspaper, say, than with an RSS reader, a favourite set of bloggers or
something like Twitter or FriendFeed - we will still have newspapers, CDs
and the like. The market is still there. But with every passing day that
number dwindles and the cliff approaches.

 And then there's government and industry action taken to "protect" existing
investments, AKA simply prolonging the agony. It may be disguised as
'regulation' of TV or radio markets and their attached radio spectrum, or
it may be bold-as-brass "licensing" protectionism. Or it could be law, such
as copyright. None of these things are by universal right, they are simply
ideas that have had their time and are now under pressure to justify or
reinvent themselves, or disappear.

 So you can see the threats, plain as day. Why buy a newspaper when you can
tap into a diversity of news feeds online? Why buy CDs or even DVDs when
you can store them on a media server, or even "in the cloud'? Why indeed
pay for the printed word - or even an online one - when a barrage of
bloggers will happily aggregate, share, decode and analyse the news for
you, free of charge? Why get the views or news of a few, filtered through a
corporate prism, when you can tap into the unfiltered and diverse views of
many? Why not cut out the middle-man and make virtual contact with the
participants, rather than the reporters? Why pay for hard-copy music and
support a monolithic corporate culture, when the tools of audio recording,
musicianship and (legal) music sales and exchange have been virtualised and
made available just a mouse-click or two away? Simply put, these are all
ideas that bring sellers (if you like) closer to buyers (or whatever word
you choose to use). It makes sense socially and economically to do so. It's
a model that questions whether we need the big, expensive corporate layers
and filters of the past. Indeed it asks, can we afford not to change?

 There may be a good reason to prolong the lives of the dinosaurs, but right
now I can't see it. All of the arguments about preserving 'existing capital
investment' and 'quality and standards of journalism' or 'fostering new
musical talent' are built on the past with all of the waste and excess that
goes with it, locked in. Economically - and socially - it's
anti-competitive with a big fat negative ROI to boot. The old guard are
saying, effectively, that we are not smart, educated and discerning enough,
we need an elite of some sort - preferably "us" - to run the show. Well
maybe we don't.

 What started me thinking about productivity as a driver for the creation of
new media constructs? This article (a good example of disintermediation if
ever I saw one) on 'make your own online video ads':
http://snipurl.com/pn24h

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It's not just connectedness that changes us, it's our photographic memory

I read a post recently that suggested we are well on our way to 2/3rds of
Earth's human population being connected via a mobile phone, the point
being that for the first time in humanity's history - except perhaps at the
very, very beginning when there were really very, very few of us - . we are
empowered by a global 'connectedness' that approaches ubiquity. Whatever we
do, wherever we are, we can connect globally and 'spread the word', be it
good or bad. I think the proportion involved is probably an overstatement
that doesn't fully account for churn, disused and trashed phones and people
with multiple cell phones; nevertheless it's clear that we are becoming
more and more 'connected'. It's also clear that much of that connectedness
has to do with affluence, and the numbers quoted are clearly heavily
weighted towards developed countries. The point is made however that the
developing countries are picking up steam (not that there are any
steam-powered cell phones - yet).

 However it's not enough to just have access to a phone, is it? It's also
the internet that's underlying practical, useful connectedness globally,
providing a literal and figurative web of information to every connected
person, right now. And I do mean now - there's minimal waiting around for
answers these days. It's empowerment both by connectedness and instant
access to databases.

 But it's even more than that as well. We used to wait around for film to be
developed - even 'instant' cameras had a latency period where nothing much
happened. Now we can buy cheap digital cameras that will take that shot
right here, right now. And we can embed those cameras into our mobile
devices... so we have connectedness, access to knowledge and photographic
records of events - evidence, if you like - all rolled up into one mass
human movement. I can be here, ask questions over there and send proof - a
photo or a video - to everyone I know in the blink of an eye. Now that
really is something. What comes out of that empowered digital connectedness
I can only guess at - it could be that humanity begins to bind itself
closer together and works better to report - and then solve - big problems.
Perhaps it will lead to a global popular government of sorts, something
that helps to level the playing field across nations. Or it may turn out
more like Lithium for the masses - where we all just achieve a safer but
duller 'average' life. I don't know. But we will inevitably find out, and
probably soon.

 The article on cell phone uptake was re-tweeted via @neerav. You may also
like to read the article that prompted my further thoughts on mobile
photography: http://snipurl.com/pmozu

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OK, it's silly, stoopid, crazy but at least it's small - Daewoo Matiz with a 7litre V8 - http://ping.fm/6J5bI

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OK, it's silly, stoopid, crazy but at least it's small - Daewoo Matiz with a 7litre V8 - http://ping.fm/6J5bI

Do we want, or need, or can we support 40+ million ppl in Oz? We will soon crack 22m with 1 in 3 Australians residing in NSW, and more ppl live in Sydney than in all of Queensland. If Sydney was in the USA it would be their 10th largest city. What are we thinking?? http://ping.fm/jB2We

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Do we want, or need, or can we support 40+ million ppl in Oz? We will soon crack 22m with 1 in 3 Australians residing in NSW, and more ppl live in Sydney than in all of Queensland. If Sydney was in the USA it would be their 10th largest city. What are we thinking?? http://ping.fm/jB2We

Uncritically promoting Telstra's 100Gbps broadband is all very well, but they will charge like wounded bulls, won't they? http://ping.fm/4uvVp

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Uncritically promoting Telstra's 100Gbps broadband is all very well, but they will charge like wounded bulls, won't they? http://ping.fm/4uvVp

Whoopee. Michael Idato tells us what we already know - 3 more digital TV channels in Oz by Christmas. I'll be glued to ABC3, for sure ;-) http://ping.fm/kCzqf

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I just love this misspelling, deliberate or not: "Heigl another pre-madonna". A what? Oh, yeah, got it. Link to trashy Tele gossip beatup here (but don't bother, really!) http://ping.fm/CyGvf

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Whoopee. Michael Idato tells us what we already know - 3 more digital TV channels in Oz by Christmas. I'll be glued to ABC3, for sure ;-) http://ping.fm/kCzqf

I just love this misspelling, deliberate or not: "Heigl another pre-madonna". A what? Oh, yeah, got it. Link to trashy Tele gossip beatup here (but don't bother, really!) http://ping.fm/CyGvf

Love this disclaimer: "Everything else on this page, including the numbers 16, 48 and 100 is or may become a trademark of Microsoft, Corp., except for trademarks of their respective owners that are used for product identification purposes only." Well, 16, 48 and 100, eh? Slaves to the evil empire. Who'd have thought it?

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