Nothing to Declare

There was a very interesting chap on this morning’s “Start the Week” on Radio 4. He pointed out that, according to the US Patriot Act, government agencies can access information on third part servers (e.g. Google, in his pitch) without either requiring the consent of the information source, or even having to disclose that such access is taking place. This is fascinating and curious (to say the least) given the amount of previously private traffic that therefore become agency-accessible. For example - standard voice calls need a warrant; from this definition, voice over IP (Skype, etc) does not.

OK, Skype is peer to peer, and I don’t know whether the definition of “third party server” covers caches and other hardware mechanisms for getting information around the Web, so there should (and no doubt will) be a debate on this; meanwhile, I was wondering when people would start to consider duping the system. For example, if some agency is curious about my particular search requests (unlikely, admittedly) and it I was in the slightest worried about this (even less likely), I would start seaching for random items just to confuse the system. Given the availability of API’s to Google etc, I might even write a script to search for random sequences of dictionary entries, and run it as a screensaver - my own search entries would be lost in the noise.

Of course, if everyone started doing this, it would be a disaster for Google and other search providers, who are far more interested in the commercial potential of their search data. There are a billion searches a day apparently, offering huge opportunities for the companies collecting it - and no doubt, for the agencies that plug into them. In protecting against the latter, great damage would be done to the former.

At the end of the day however, would the end users care? Would they care enough to protect themselves, and would they care about any damage caused by such protection? Probably not - to either. This example of what might happen is just one of many potential future end user behaviours, the majority of which won’t happen. The point instead is that all the highest aspirations of either Google or the US government are ultimately hostage to the vagaries of the technology consumer.

In which the writer castigates the anti-bloggers, then the bloggers, and then everybody else, just to be evenhanded

My wife said to me the other day, “aren’t blogs just the online diaries of self-important, exhibitionist geeks?” Interesting perspective, I thought as I was tucking into my breakfast. That day I chose scrambled eggs, and I was wearing… not really. What I really thought was, “better write a blog about that.” Besides, I don’t eat breakfast.

There’s plenty of debate going on about the strengths and weaknesses of blogs, and I frankly don’t get it. On one side there is a camp that says “blogs are going to change the world” - a view which to me is both flawed and dangerous. On the other side there is a camp which says “blogs are an irrelevance”, or worse, speaking with palpable indignation that blogging should broker any attention whatsoever. As one who clearly has a blog, I may be biased, but equally I find myself in neither camp, which is confusing.

So, what it all the fuss about, and why is it causing such a polarisation of views? At its heart, a blog is no more nor less than a very simple Web publishing mechanism. Were I writing this in FrontPage and then running Web Publishing Wizard, would I write anything different? I don’t believe so - having uploaded plenty of text-based content to the Web over the years, the only difference to yours truly is that I don’t have to muck around with other editors. I type, I hit “publish”, and I’m done.

Ultimately however, the end result is online information, in the same way as magazines, books and newspapers hold hard copy information. There are plenty of publications that are shoddily written, poorly edited or in bad taste, but nobody would ever say “all magazines are bad”, for example. So, why should we say the same about blogs? Similarly, there are Web sites a-plenty that give us chapter and verse of the goings on of some obscure family in Maine; there are plenty of shabbily produced, poorly formatted and otherwise dubious Web sites. These are publicly accessible, and often unavoidable as they somehow get presented by search engines as “most relevant” despite all attempts to the contrary.

Somehow, however, we ignore such Web sites quite easily, but it is abhorrent that similarly low levels of quality might exist in blogs. To the anti-bloggers, this is proof if any is necessary that blogging is a crime against humanity and should be stopped. Now.

Meanwhile, the lowering of the bar to more simple Web publishing has also opened a number of opportunities, which leads to the other side of the coin. The IT industry has a tendency to hype the latest trend: this is possibly due to the fact that much technology is disappointingly dull and deserves a bit of a lift, but more likely for commercially minded types it is a way of maximising chances of commercial success. Finally, and whether we like it or not, this is a trait among tech types, we really do get genuinely excited about things technological and their potential to change the world. And so we have the overhyping of blogs - how many thousands of bloggers are really going to turn their waxings into hard currency, for example? On this, the Greek chorus may have a point - there is a lot less to blogging than meets the eyes of some zealots. Meanwhile, perfectly good columnists are calling themselves bloggers for fear of becoming irrelevant, a bit like parents trying to join in the conversations of teeenagers.

Perhaps both sides as presented above are missing the point - I can already hear little voices questioning my definition of “blogging”. So far in this piece, the interactive nature of blogs has been missed, a clear discrepancy. It could (and no doubt it has) been argued that a blog is no more than a single user newsgroup, a bulletin board channel in which the moderator creates the content and other contributors are reduced to mere commentators on the main story. This would be true were blogging in some way hierearchical, but instead blogs form a meritocratic network of networks. The blog itself is of limited value; a network of blogs, where participants exchange views and develop ideas, is really where the action is. Blogs obey Metcalfe’s law - the value increases exponentially based on the number of links between them.

Let me repeat that, then: a single blog is of limited value, and this is where I fully concur with the anti-bloggers. In the signal-to-noise ratio of the blogosphere, this is the noise - feel free to ignore it. While there may be plenty of such blogs, they make no sound if you just close the window. I don’t want to downgrade the value of using blogging tools for more conventional web sites - I’ve seen charity sites and other news feeds operate with a blog mechanism, and why not, its just a tool. Even if this were useful just to the people writing their own blogs and commenting on the blogs of others, it would already be of enormous benefit to themselves; as it happens, many blogs are generating quite a substantial readership, which suggests others can benefit from the debate whether or not they choose to contribute.

Finally then, there is the strength of syndication. Blogs feed information and content, and it would be very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff without some filtering mechanism. So, we have tools like Bloglines and Pluck, which aggregate blogs into a single window, suggest blogs based on current settings, enable the easy addition and deletion of blogs. To look at single blogs in isolation would be a bit sad, it is the power of the many that matters - and the better blogs will undoubtedly filter to the top.

So, there we have it. Should we expect today’s bloggers to be the media moguls, business leaders and presidential candidates of tomorrow? Don’t be silly. There may be one or two characters who ride the wave better than others, and come out on top - and good luck to them. Blogs are already used in a multitude of ways - from major companies market testing ideas, to hobbyists sharing information, and indeed no doubt to self-indulgent diarists. For myself, I really do not see the relevance of what someone had for breakfast, nor am I interested in the golfing progress of an executive who has clearly been prompted to add more of himself into a corporate communication. In the meantime, as a mechanism to share information, test ideas and build relationships, blogs deserve at least a place at the table. What we are witnessing is the democratisation of technology, a lowering of the bar, and that is always to be applauded.

For me, a blog serves as a channel for ideas, and a placeholder for news: the blogging mechanism has enabled me to create a three-column, dynamically changing Web site with minimal trouble. Also, as I am supposed to be a commentator on all things technological, I believe I should at least try these things out, just as I play (and sometimes struggle) with the latest gadgets. No more, no less, and if just one person has read this far, then its been worthwhile.

Next time I’ll try to answer my 12-year old son’s question, asked out of the blue the other day: “What exactly is the point of Linux?”

There’s been a recent spate of releases from Qualcomm about anticompetitive behaviour - not least this one, which is a responds-to-allegations kind of release. Today we saw the release “QUALCOMM Files GSM Patent Infringement Suit against Nokia” (not yet available on the Web). While this patent litigation in mobile device companies is not news, the release has to take credit for having one of the best lines seen in a recent release - “Patents that are essential to a standard are those that must necessarily be infringed to comply with the requirements of the standard.” Took me three goes before I could even understand what it meant…

But anyway, none of the device companies are having a particularly good time of it at the moment, but do they really have to descend to quite so much bickering? While there may be valid short term commercial reasons to do so, its surely not in anyone’s long term interests, least of all the end users of technology.

It reminded me to go check out the current SCO situation. While SCO made quite a hullabaloo about patents a year or so ago, it was rather more quiet about its near de-listing from the NASDAQ due to accounting errors. While any litigation may be rumbling on beneath the surface, SCO is now getting on with its core business - promoting its products - which has to be a more healthy way to spend its time. Not saying any of these things were connected, just that the majority of people don’t really want to know, to them its all so much dirty laundry.

Meanwhile, in the operating system world, we are starting to hear of companies using Linux more as a lever than as a strategy. More than once I’ve heard companies saying Linux was the best thing to happen to Solaris, and no doubt it has impacted SCO in the same way - meanwhile of course, Microsoft is having to modify its own strategies to ensure it is competitive with Linux. End result: everyone is better off, no vendor is complacent, companies are forced to innovate ever harder to keep their customers sweet.

Which is just as it should be.

The recent, utter faux pas by Sony BMG to hide copy protection software the computers of unsuspecting individuals raises a number of interesting questions about what kind of service music companies are trying to provide to their customers. This debate is raging on, and yet another opinion on the subject won’t particulalry help at this stage, so I thought I’d take another tack and consider exactly what the so-called “music industry” is for in the first place. Through my various roles I have met a number of people inside the biz, whose opinions are directly opposed to the general perception of what the industry stands for - so are they wrong, or not being heard, or is it that the industry itself is far more complex than we allow?

Following various discussions I’ve been led to believe the music industry occupies a number of roles. Firstly, it is a loan agency. Musicians and artists are considered in terms of market potential and business risk, and are loaned money to make recordings and pay for their management, marketing and distribution. This latter point is important - there are plenty of artists that didn’t realise it was their own money being used to these ends, when they signed the initial contract. The “advance” is exactly that - an advance payment against expected royalties, a.k.a. a proportion of the money made from each sale. Some bands - Marillion is an obvious example, but there are now plenty of others - have twigged the fact that they can get this money from elsewhere, on more reasonable terms. It is surprising that other financial institutions do not get wise to the potential of funding the arts, but in all probablility they just do not understand how to underwrite the risk.

Second, the music industry offers a recording and packaging service. Many music companies own their own studios, as I understand it, and there are independent studios (each with their own specialist skills and reputations) that can be booked. At the end of the day however (as illustrated by David Gray’s White Ladder), you don’t always need an expensive studio to produce a good album. Once the music has been mixed (final arrangements selected) and mastered (made to sound on the DVD like it sounded in the studio), there is a manufacturing process involved - again, each stage can use in-house facilities or can be outsourced, the same as with any business.

Then there is a global distribution network. There’s no magic here - the creation of a global organisation is a painstaking task, requiring the creation of local offices, relationships with suppliers, channel partners and the media in each geography, an understanding of legislation and market dynamics, and so on. This is probably the real battleground for music companies, as it is the only area where they can really differentiate themselves (apart from the artists, but they are subordinate to this in importance - the best artists in the world will not make as much difference to profits as having the better ditribution network).

There is a sales, marketing and promotion service. Again this is global - once a major label has decided to put its marketing muscle behind an artist, they will appear on every street corner and in every magazine, whether they are any good or not. This is a hugely valuable service, but it is not essential that it is carried out by the label itself - indeed and again this role is often outsourced.

Finally, there are other areas to the biz, for example the publishing business, which protects the rights of artists in its stable. Anyone can own the rights to an artist’s music - Michale jackson owns much of the Beatles catalogue, for example, and David Bowie has sold the rights to his own back catalogue as a going concern.

While this may be an oversimplification, these five areas give some indication of how complicated things can get. While the recording elements may just want to get the music heard, the distribution elements seemingly work in cahoots with the publishing elements to protect their existing models. Enough for now - the sad thing is, that while certain parts of the biz may be demonstrating their intransigence, it is the industry as a whole that suffers. There is a huge market for music, and it may be even bigger than the existing market suggests; however the proportion of the market that depends on traditional models will inevitably shrink.

The bottom line is this: give value to the people - make the benefits outweigh the costs, and they will pay. There are too many examples to state here, from Simon Cowell to Steve Jobs, from Marillion to George Michael. There is every indication that people want to spend a good proportion of their money on music in all its forms; ill-conceived attempts to implement rights management technologies are only doing damage to what is already an industry in trouble.

My publisher has just told me that copies of the book have now been received from the printers, which is a few days in advance. Hurrah! I shall be sending pre-order copies out as soon as I receive them.

For further information or pre-order see the Chemistry page. Also, here’s a banner ad produced by my son, they do grow up fast

Also, it was great to see the book as “perfect partner” to the R30 DVD on Amazon.com. Not sure how these things are worked out, but I’m not complaining!