Glowrich on New Media

Where are the long and thought provoking articles?

Sorry for my irregular posting, my masters thesis has top priority. That doesn’t take away my interest in good, long and thought provoking articles. Every once in a while there’s an article that seem to nail certain aspects of a technology, media or culture in a very broad sense and takes centre stage for a few weeks in the blogosphere. Sometimes it sets a standard and gets out of the blogosphere and gets referenced even years after.
Everyone who takes his job or interest in social media, new media, technology or (digital) culture seriously knows some of these articles. I’d like to list these articles for some deeper reading and see you come up with more articles. I know I don’t have much of a readerbase yet, but hey, I believe in the long tail

• To kick things of, here’s one of the most discussed articles in recent times: Tim O’Reilly about his ‘Web 2.0′ James Fallows explores not what Web 2.0 is but what it means. Tim O’Reilly responds and has a nice discussion on his blog about it

• A recent eye-opener was from Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School about how IT is a real game changer in business.

• Another recent article that set the blogosphere on fire for a while is ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ by Nicholas Carr which draws attention on the way we read. This is actually the article that triggered my thinking about long articles.

• Interesting insights on design by Kevin Fox who helped to design Gmail and is currently working on FriendFeed.

• Lawrence Lessig who already stirred things up with his book ‘Free Culture’ now tries to ‘Wikify’ Congress. Although I am not a US citizen (I’m Dutch), this still is interesting because it seems inevitable that something like this will take off.

• Jeff Jarvis writes mainly about how journalism and the printed press is (in need of) changing in order to stay alive in this digital world. When AP tried to bully and charge bloggers for quoting AP news snippets Jarvis nailed on what level Journalism 2.0 needs to be different, especially when it is about quoting and linking to other news outlets. Not really a long article, but several short ones about the same issue. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch wrote about the same issue.

• Last but not least, Scoble. He sure knows how to engage with his audience and still deliver interesting articles. In this bit he talks about why Technology Blogs have failed us recently and how he’s going to the root of his desire: blogging about technology, no more no less.

I plan to update or link to and from this post whenever an article comes to mind, so it might be a good idea to reply and keep posted about updates or replies. So, what do you think should be added to this list?

Ok, so I got some nice input from Yuri van Geest who pointed me to both Kevin Kelly and Bruce Sterling:

• Instead of singling out 1 article, I’ll recommend this long list of Kevin Kelly’s writings

• For a relaxing summersday at the swimmingpool, it might be a good idea to print ‘The Hacker Crackdown’ by Bruce Sterling. I like the way Amazon describes it: “It’s a lively tour of three cyberspace subcultures–the hacker underworld, the realm of the cybercops, and the idealistic culture of the cybercivil libertarians.”

• An article I just got off Friendfeed by David Cohn who has an interesting point on how a crowd of people can sort of hire a blogger to report on a certain topic for a certain time. This allows for an article to get beneath the surface of a subject, just like good reporting in news papers.

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Legal download when artist agrees with downloading?

A few days ago a Dutch judge ruled that downloading a copy from an illegal source (ie. most downloading) is illegal as well. This seems fair enough, although most (all?) lawyers are not convinced that the ruling is  justly banning illegal downloads. I think none of us would really care if it’s illegal or not, it would matter only if we’re likely to get caught. Enter NVPI, the Dutch RIAA, who are claiming a big victory but say that they are probably not going to go on a sueing-spree.

Nothing seemed to have changed much, everybody agrees that downloading music you haven’t paid for is not very nice….unless artists like Joss Stone encourage it. So now Joss Stone says downloading her music is fine by her, is it legal? I think it’s less of a burden on our morality. If the artist says it’s okay, who am I to disagree? If artists like Nine Inch Nails are even uploading their music to bittorrent sites is downloading their songs legal or illegal? When authors like Paulo Coelho actively help you find free downloads of their books is downloading them something you can get fined or jailtime for?

What other artists are sharing their work or promote to share it freely like these artists? Maybe a list of those artists, with right next to the download button a button to buy a concerttickets is a good businessplan Or will the future only bring streaming music?

Posted in music | 1 Comment »

Why Rabobanks paying via mobile phone will fail at first

Rabobank just introduced transferring money via mobile phones, something which hasn’t been possible in The Netherlands, at least to my knowledge. This seems in line with Rabobank making alliances with mobile phone providers, content providers and service providers. I think it’s good that Rabobank starts to roll out new ways of paying but it seems that they haven’t really gone through a lot usability tests. Maybe the ‘perpetual beta’  has entered the impenetrable citadel of banking, who knows, but it’s more likely they think this is a proper 1.0 version.

Steps you have to take to pay

1. Open a mobile wallet
2. Transfer money from your regular account to this wallet

After this you can either buy something in a (online) shop or pay friends for that last round of beers with “just one sms” (text message). This is not true in most cases, the only way to pay via just one sms already existed and you first needed to type in your account number and password ON A WEBSITE. So that’s not mobile at all unless you use your mobile phone for surfing the web. If you’re not using your mobile phone for that, it takes 2 text messages.

1. Send a text message to 6689 and add the phonenumber of your friend, the amount of money and a personal message
2. Receive a confirmation message with a codeword
3. Reply to this message the codeword within 10 minutes

A similar procedure need to be gone through if you want to pay in a shop, although the explanation on the website is a little ambiguous about the productcode.

1. Send a text message to 6689 and add the phonenumber of the shop, the productcode of the product you want to buy.
2. You receive a confirmation message with a productdescription, the price and a codeword
3. Reply to this message the codeword (within 10 minutes?)

Although it seems quite easy, how do you type in the phonenumber of your friend? I don’t know those 10 numbers. Some (read: all) phone companies recognized this problem and implemented a contactlist about 15 years ago on all of their phones. But how do I make use of that contactlist? Most phones don’t have a cut&paste functionality.

Hassles

Ok, so you’ve found out how to pay and you’re okay to pay your mobile phone provider for the text messages on top of this. You seem to enjoy paying in this new, cool way and show it off to your friends. But what’s that, you’re maxed out? Yes indeed, you have to fill up your wallet again and again, it only able to hold 150 euro’s. Seems fine for paying friends and drinks but who actually starts using it will find out this is a ridiculous limit. You don’t want to charge every couple of days, you don’t need to do that with your normal electronic payments, so why now?
This is only a minor hassle compared to the hassle somebody on the receiving side has to go through. Imagine that you receive a text message saying that you received 10 euro’s from a phone number on your ‘mobile wallet’ of which you have never heard. Hopefully the sender put in their name in the personal message, otherwise you have to work your way down your contactlist looking for that number to know who sent you money. But who puts in their name in text messages to friends? They recognize who’s message it is because their phone tells them, so lots of people will forget to say who they are.
Now you finally know who you got the text message from you need to sign up to Rabobanks SMS mobile paying site to actually collect the money. Can I show my phone to somebody at a Rabobank and will they give me my money? I don’t think so. What happens to the money when nobody collects it isn’t clear: does Rabobank keep it, is it put back in the payers ‘mobile wallet’, is Rabobank going to look for me to give me the money somebody actually gave to me?
Rabobank has to sort out these usability issues before I start to use it, and I like to think of myself as an early adopter.

Posted in mobile | 5 Comments »

What will really be the Official News 2.0?

Blogging was celebrated as the democratization of reporting or publishing but this hasn’t really gone off yet. Instead of opening up traditional news-sites with original stories from local, on the site, reporters with a vast knowledge of the area, the Associated Press (AP) or national equivalents like the dutch ANP hold a firm grip on standardized reporting. As original and less professional sites are becoming more and more popular these traditional organizations are desperately trying to hold that grip on so called official news. AP has noticed take-downs of articles on blogs that quoted bits and pieces of AP’s stories. As this practice clearly falls within the reach of DMCA (part of US copyright law) which allows ‘fair use’ of copyrighted works which includes commenting, reporting or criticizing it. This of course angered the usual suspects: Techdirt and Jeff Jarvis.

What’s happening here has it roots in the marginal costs of reporting since the www came around. Blogging took web-publishing to another level and allowed even the most computer-illiterate people publish their stories. The levee of ´closed source´ news reporting is going to break since crowdsourcing or wikinomics principles acknowledge that in the haystack of a few million bloggers are a few needles that are just as good or even better than official news-sites. These bloggers have all the infrastructure to reach a huge public for a few euros a month.

What I´m wondering is what the first non-official news-site will be that is not a sterilized AP aggregator but rather the result of those needles that emerge from a crowd. Sites like boing boing or Digg just don’t cut it. What will really be the News 2.0?

Sidenote: It came to me that I haven’t even considered newspapers or television to be the media where this will happen, I think that says something.

Update 10th of July 2008: Jeff Jarvis has another thought provoking post on newspapers. His point is that they should make their mind up about what they are: journalist and not a distribution network. Google will take care of the distribution and advertising he thinks. This is quite like what Princeton researches argued about the government publishing their information in XML and RSS format: The government should not be a publisher of information on fancy websites but a generator of information, let someone else take care of the publishing.

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