Eloise's thoughts and fancies

In various different places, most of them too tenuous to really mention unless I'm writing an academic review for publication which I'm not, there have been various comments about the knowledge or idea economy. They're not quite the same I know but there is overlap and whilst some of that is sloppy thinking, some of it is useful concepts too.

The trouble with the Idea Economy (IE from hereon) is that you see a lot of truisms trotted out and they are mostly contradictory AND they're mostly right despite this. Consider, for example, Ideas are Cheap and Ideas are Golden. Both true and yet contradictory.

Ideas are cheap. We all have ideas, all the time. You don't, despite what you may believe, need to be a creative genius to have ideas - you probably have an idea how the book you are reading will end, how the current storyline(s) in that show you watch will develop, how the next match with your favourite club will turn out, how you will vote in the next election, where you might like to go on holiday in 2010 and so on. You, if you work in a similar field to me, probably have a few dozen ideas about the next steps in the current project you are working on, or the project you are planning to start next. Most of these ideas, mundane as them seem, are cheap and largely worthless. Where to go on holiday might save a marriage which is not worthless but the idea is still cheap even if the holiday turns out to be really expensive.

Ideas are golden too though. Just not all of them. The ideas behind Amazon, eBay, the iPhone, blogging software and the like are golden. In the case of the first three, more than your bodyweight in gold valuable too. Harsh though it might seem, most of these ideas are not the work of a creative genius. The ideas that make the iPhone the icon and groundbreaker that is being the possible exception - like or loathe Apple, they have a lot of very creative ideas that have changed the way we work and the ways we interact with technology - a windows-based GUI, the iPod AND the iPhone all come pretty identifiably in their modern incarnations from the Apple stable (the original idea for a GUI wasn't Apple's but they were the first to deliver a usable, consumer level GUI so they deserve some of the credit). Creative genius is, in my opinion, the ability to repeatedly have those ground-breaking ideas. You see this at Apple, you see it in advertising agencies and the like. You don't see it from the boss of eBay nor the boss of Amazon - they've had their golden moment and they are milking the gold and good luck to them. Having that idea at the right time can make it golden - no one has duplicated the success of Amazon, not even in web-based sales; no one has really even tried to compete with the idea that was eBay.

Then we get into the fun of protecting ideas. Copyright laws exist, pretty much globally, to protect ideas and let someone make money from it. That is their main function. Creative commons licensing and other copyleft ideas are emerging to change this but the default position is that your idea is YOURS and copyrighted to you. Nothing wrong with that - there are people who definitely make a living from this sort of thing and not least Mr. eBay and the rest of them.

Against this we have two slightly different things: one is that Information wants to be free and the other that knowing something can be done makes it easier to do for yourself. Again both are true although they contradict the copyright concept.

A lot of electronic art, for example, is very hard to protect even though the law says it's yours. That's not information per se, that's ideas, your creativity, being copied by others because of the tools available to them. Let's be clear here - unless you know the provenance of the electronic information you are almost certainly breaking the copyright laws and stealing someone else's idea. The fact you found it in a place that requires it to be made available under a creative commons license might mean that you didn't actively break the law and steal their idea, but you are still essentially an accessory after the fact - someone else did the theft and you're living off that whilst the person that you should be paying is not getting even a penny or two richer thanks to you. Does that make it right and ethical? Seems unlikely doesn't it.

The other thing to consider is that balance that knowing it can be done makes it easier to do. This is much harder to legislate about and to control. Amazon's idea has been copied and altered slightly so you can buy groceries, DVDs, music etc. online easily. In fact, except for groceries you can buy all of those things through Amazon too. That first idea made it easier to develop elsewhere. The windowed-GUI from Apple, and various improvements to it along the way, have been more or less efficiently copied by the Microsoft people. Multi-touch large screen bright phones are now pretty common - the iPhone was the first and is probably still the best but there are a few different technologies to do it now. Innovation and adaptation might not be quite the same as creativity, but they are part of the whole area. This is why, sometimes, you get very similar stories and films coming out at the same time - someone floats a not-quite there concept, different people pick it up and adapt it and you get Deep Impact and Armageddon - similar stories although one film far outgrossed the other and almost against each other. Nine and 9, very different films, but very confusing title similarity might be another example.

Where do we go?

It's not clear. The IE changes fast, by its very nature. Who remembers Betamax? VCRs even? Why is the singles chart called the singles chart? I remember going to the shop and seeing a load of 7" single-track per side vinyl records. I never really bought any, but I could have done. Nowadays the music industry is bemoaning the loss of album sales and even the concept of the album (although not the concept album) because the singles chart is the chart of single track downloads - information streamed over the internet rather than a physical item. Who remembers DOS and CLIs? The UNIX fans out there probably do, but a lot of UNIX/Linux installs come with a GUI these days. Ironically the Apple OS, home of the GUI, adds Terminal to let you in to the UNIX kernel directly too and quite a lot of people use it, if only occasionally.

Often the law moves too slowly. Apple recording (home of The Beatles) and Apple Computers have been in legal on-and-off again brangles for decades. If you try to sue someone about the possible copyright infringement of your idea it might take 5-10 years to be settled. Five years ago VHS and DVD were fighting for dominance, although DVD was starting to win the battle. Now DVDs are on the way out. The mobile phone of 10 years ago would phone and text but was still rare. Now even my mum has a mobile (although she rarely turns it on) that she bought for about 50p more than the value of the call minutes she had and includes a camera and some other stuff. Five years ago mobile internet sort of existed, but like AOL of the 1980s and 1990s it was a walled garden approach. Now mobile internet doesn't look that different to internet at home except the screen is smaller. The new Apple Magic Mouse and the Bamboo, have let multi-touch gestures (first seen on the iPhone) available to desktop computers, they've been on MacBooks for a while.

Where will we be in 5-10 years time? Your complaint is upheld and the company you were suing is gone, or the technology is quite possibly gone or both. Oops. The law is too slow it might change and adapt, or it might just become irrelevant.

The revolution will, doubtless, come. The music industry will die, or change. EMI will curl up and iTunes take over the world - make that completely take over the world. Copyleft might win as good ideas are no longer protected but they are paid for, for that competitive edge until someone else can adapt to their precise needs, but paid in non-obvious ways. Speed up Starbucks ordering processes and get free coffee for life... not sure it's a payment I'd accept but the principle is good. Sort something for a mobile phone company and get free roving internet for the next 25 years... thanks! Complete this task and we'll give you a new, top of the range laptop. It's not inevitable but it is a way that the world might go.

Giant entertainment and probably news conglomerates will go the same way: all it will take is a few smaller groups making a success of it and the cracks we're already seeing will shatter everything. Maybe not everything: part of me believes that the BBC will survive because it provides a service that most of the 60M people over here, and more worldwide, value. It will doubtless change, but it will probably survive. On the day my new TV license arrived I'm even more clear that I do pay for the BBC but I'm still willing to pay a bit for a quality service - but I'd like a less monolithic approach too, where i can pay for the bits I want, much like I can now download that single track rather than the whole album.

Will it spread everywhere? That's harder to predict. You can't stream me the veg I'm going to eat for dinner. Someone has to physically get them to my door. That might be me from the shop, in which case someone has to get them to the shop and so on. Internet shopping for books is one thing, but most people still go to the supermarket rather than having them deliver - but that could change. Books, real books, still outsell eBooks heavily but eReaders are getting close to becoming common and reliable enough to use routinely. Farewell all bookshops... And on it marches - if we lose the bookshop, the electronics good shop, the music shop, etc. (most of which we're losing or have lost examples of recently) what will the highstreet look like?

It might be a fun ride to find out and the Idea and Knowledge economies will drive it and it will spill out everywhere in time - mobile phones are pretty much global already for example.

Metaplace (which I tried once without great success in March) is about to shuffle off this mortal coil. It will soon be singing in the celestial choir.

Naturally this is big news across a lot of the blogs to which I subscribe and here's my tuppence worth too.

Way back at the start of the year I posted a piece about OpenSim and the magic that makes SL work, and in May another post about adult content being important in driving innovation in Second Life.

I think it's time to come clean and admit a mistake or two in the list and possibly rock the boat of a few at Linden Lab who are hell-bent on improving that first hour experience.

First up, as Gwyn points out in her much longer post, Second Life continues to work because it has a sound business model. Second Life may or may not require more premium members to flourish, although it's an obvious place for Linden Lab to make some more money and free homes for premium members (however much those of us with homes turn our noses up at it) might just be part of the way forward on that. Confidence that the place will be here next year and in five years time is important to a lot of people.

And the other thing is a first minute reaction I think. I was entranced with Second Life as soon as I arrived. I don't remember precisely what caught me at this remove (2,000 days in early 2010) but I was viscerally, instantly hooked. That's part of what kept me coming back to work out how to build, part of what made me learn to script, part of what made me engage in the social interactions that I did back then, and all of those things paved the way for keeping me in Second Life right now.

I rather suspect making that first hour easier, better, might help those who are less willing or able to invest time into new skills but still like what they see will help convert some of that newbie churn into new users. But, and herein lies the rub, looking for my Metaplace post and the pictures there reminded me of the disappointment I'd felt. That, in turn, reminded me today in a way it didn't then, of the wonder i'd felt in Second Life in those first seconds. Working on the first hour might be good, but working on the first second might be even better.

There are really three things to talk about with this movie.

1. The Plot. There is a plot but it's not challenging. You've seen the trailers, you can almost certainly write the scenes in order for yourself and there's no surprises. If you get the scenes in a different order it's really tempting to say that's because you're more creative than they are. That's not to say the plot is actually bad - it's so time worn that it doesn't surprise but it can't go wrong either. If the other elements of the film had been worse, this could have been a disappointment, but they weren't and so it sufficed.
   
   
2. The CGI. The CGI is brilliant. Awesome. Amazing. When we saw Beowulf just over two years ago faces, eyes, hair and horses didn't quite work. In this the CGI was good enough that there were times the faces of the human actors looked wrong and we were all fairly sure they weren't CGId faces. The alien flora and fauna was amazing and looked natural whilst alien. The geeky biologist in me wants to know more about the ecosystem and the evolutionary advantage of their communication device but that's from a position of totally buying the world and its ecology. And also very, very pretty.
   
   
3. Third the 3D. This is the first 3D film I've seen. I'm sure it's good in 2D too but 3D really adds to the impact. There are places where it distracts a little - mostly I think because the film-maker can and does use it to try and force your attention where they want it and if you try to take in the rest of the scene it's subtly out of focus in a way that works in 2D but my brain didn't expect in 3D. Those moments were rare enough that they didn't bother me overly, but did bother me enough to mention. However, all the rest of the time the 3D looks and works amazingly well. Lawns leap out of the screen at you, falling pollen or ash falls between you and the person in shot and so on. I'm kind of pleased that they didn't really have things leaping out of the screen for cheap shock value but the shots worked like you were there in a way that immerses you even more. When will Second Life stream like that?!

Great film. VERY pretty, and at nearly 3 hours it didn't feel long - the plot is predictable but fast-paced enough to keep you following along to watch more of the prettiness.

This is a section of a larger book with a summary available on the web. I'm currently debating buying or inter-library loaning a copy of the book - if I do a full review will come.

The summary makes for interesting reading though. Some of it, almost inevitably, is pretty obvious: Cyberspace is different to normal space because of reduced sensory input; cyberspace allows you to present your identity differently, possibly radically differently. Parts of it, though, have some interesting comments and thoughts: we live in a world where the vast bulk of meaningful communication is by the written word, email and IM/text chat may allow for a more sophisticated mode of interaction thanks to that, even in their relatively synchronous forms they allow for thought and reflection. (Well usually, flaming might be an exception.)

Net democracy, on the other hand, I'm not sure about. The theory is attractive at first sight, but it relies on everyone having access and that's just not globally true - not even 100% true in the UK and most other highly connected countries. It also relies on quality of writing so if you have problems (dyslexia, poor literacy skills for two obvious examples) you are clearly at a disadvantage.

However, net democracy crossed my consciousness in another form recently. An academic expert was bemoaning the rise of wikipedia and the loss of the expert voice. His comment: wikipedia is a net democracy and assumes everyone's opinion is of equal worth. In fact, there are experts and people who don't have a clue on any given topic and the opinion of an expert is worth more.

This is fair enough. Compared to the readers of this blog I may or may not be regarded as an expert builder and scripter in Second Life - compared to the wider online audience I think I can probably claim to be Nobel Laureate material, if they ever awarded a Nobel prize for such a thing. Similarly, although I'm a bit out of touch, I'm probably more of an expert in GIT immunology than just about everyone reading this blog. My opinion on both matters is worth more than the opinion of my dad, who to the best of my knowledge has never heard of Second Life and although he is a biologist by training, he is a toxicologist/biochemist rather than an immunologist. There is merit to the expert opinion is worth more point of view.

BUT there is an inherent fallacy too. Academic experts do not represent a unified single voice. There is a broad consensus: climate change is real and we need to do something for example, but even before the politicians get involved there are arguments and eddies: should we aim to limit temperature rises to 1º, 1.5º or 2º (that's Celsius, for the metrically challenged: 2, 3 or 4ºF more or less). Is it already too late and we've tipped into catastrophic change already?

Whilst I'm sure every academic would love you to cite them in their field of excellence and most of them are human enough to hope you ignore their annoying rivals or cite and dismiss them, every academic involved in teaching would also fail a student who cited a single source for a major piece of written work. There is a kind of tug-of-war expert democracy to give the consensus opinion on just about any significant topic, in any significant discipline. (Relatively trivial things like the date of Thermopylae are, I think, universally agreed, but causes, tactics and the like... I'm sure there's a lot of debate among classicists, some 2,000 years later.)

Net outcome: Experts may be wrong. They are rarely wrong thanks to trying to wilfully deceive others but they may be wrong.
Solution: Read more than one source and read critically.

Just how is this contrary to checking wikipedia I ask? Wikipedia is a good, but fallible, source of information and links to more information. For a quick look up for something it is often right and usually a fairly easy read. Reading it critically, not assuming it is absolute fact, and reading around the subject elsewhere is something to encourage but it is something to encourage in all reading for all disciplines at all levels.

I'm sure there are topics - religion and politics I suspect being high on the list - where the reliability of wikipedia falls as people try to overwhelm the pages with their "self evident and obvious" truths. Self-evident and obvious? Yeah, right. But you would hope a good educator might use that to advantage about reading from a range of sources rather than say "Oh, we shouldn't have a freely accessible repository of information like wikipedia." It's wrong sometimes. So is every reference book, every branch of science has had its missteps too.

It's certainly cynical and might be rude to suggest that the academic who was moaning is one who is seeing sales of his textbook decline mightn't it?

I'm fighting the urge to resist repeating a review for a very different type of film. The film in question was Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and the review went: Pretty. Bad.

And this film was pretty, the scenery was stunning and the costumes were pretty and interesting. The story itself is basically a shamanic journey (or psychodrama if you prefer) told from the perspective of a lonely and angry (roughly) ten year old boy. His big sister is hanging out with the cool kids her own age and they play harder than he does. His parents are divorced and mum is dating a new guy.

There are a lot of reasons for him to be angry and a psychodrama could be quite interesting I think but since I don't really recognise any of those elements in myself (I was the older child, my parents are still married after 50 years or so) it's hard to relate to this particular one. Thinking of it in the metaphor of a shamanic journey helps me accept that there doesn't have to be a logic or a structure beyond the nature of the story itself but as a film if you don't identify with the elements it's a bit of a disaster because there's no plot and no structure to get your teeth into.

I suspect this will be a movie that will polarise opinions but if I tell you one of my companions wasn't quite snoring but was definitely asleep you've got some idea which side of the fence we were on.

First off, what is news? This isn't an idle question in these days of Google doing deals with the pay-for news websites and groups like News International talking loudly about charging for all their news.

Although it might seem like an odd place to start, let me start by saying I think that sports news, some level of sports news anyway, does constitute news. We could have cultures where that isn't the case but if you look at the history of broadcast news and print news, it has basically always included sports news too. And that helps me establish a fairly important principle too. News doesn't have to be of interest to you to count as news. I could care less about the football news (for all values of football), horse racing, boxing and lots of other sports but they deserve their place in the news, at least sometimes.

Thinking of different types of football also brings us to the idea of what I'm going to call a news constituency. Aussie Rules Football (yes there is such a thing) is more or less only of interest to Australians. I remember a group of Australians I was traveling with New Zealand moaning because the local paper in Canterbury didn't carry news of yesterday's AFL results. In fact, despite the "Whinging Poms" accolade they could and did whinge about everything under the sun, including the fact that in South Island New Zealand in winter it was cold and wet. It was certainly very wet, cold only if you're a soft Aussie. I don't know what the natural news constituency is for sure but for the sake of argument lets consider that 33% of those within the target audience should be interested for the news to be part of the constituency.

The idea of a news constituency is important too. There can be special interest groups. There is a huge SLogosphere for example because there are a lot of Second Life residents that blog about Second Life. If I were aiming a news service at Second Life residents (scary thought, there's a ton of competition out there) stories that I would report for that, I wouldn't report if my day job was BBC National News editor. The few hundred thousand Second Life residents who are also part of the BBC's target audience is rarely going to be spilling over into my 33% of target audience figures. That doesn't mean I won't talk about Second Life in the bigger job, just not often.

Besides sport, what is almost automatically included? Well, the "Four Horsemen" topics of course: death, war, famine and pestilence. Disasters in general in fact. My death, hopefully some decades off, probably isn't major news. If I die in the next 'flu pandemic or in a terrorist attack or run over by road safety campaigner who is drunk-driving then it might be. Politics gets included too. Quite possibly too much politics gets included; we can live without all the bickering and silliness that gets reported too but politics is often a significant factor in our lives, setting the agenda and changing our culture. Law-breaking is news, some level of financial reporting is news. Probably not a coincidence that the two came together in my mind in this day and age! Hypocrisy by public figures is news too. Someone who uses their status to promote a certain message "Heterosexual marriage with absolute fidelity" say, who is exposed as having a string of lovers, ideally a string of lovers of both sexes to really make the whole thing hypocritical, does count as news to my mind. Someone who promotes free love and bisexual relationships having such a string of lovers is not news, at least it shouldn't be in this day and age where they are not actually breaking the law.

What isn't news? Pictures of the latest starlet in a short skirt and no knickers getting out of a car and flashing it all about. Starlet A and starlet B are dating, no longer dating, had a big row, are expecting a baby and the like isn't news. These, and of so much else, counts as gossip. Let me be clear, I don't have a problem with gossip sites and magazines. They have established a constituency which is essentially the same as a news constituency, it's just not for news.

There are, certainly, some grey areas here. Is "news" about a tv show or a popstar really news? I'm not saying there isn't a constituency for information about both groups by the way - NME, TV Guides and the like are certainly well within their remit to talk about their respective things but that doesn't make it to general news still. However, some of these things are news: the death of Elvis, Take That splitting up (and Take That reforming), the "Who Shot JR?" craze around Dallas are all pieces of news that I remember hearing and thinking, more or less "Yeah, so?" but which I still think were correctly reported as news. More recently the "news" about the sacking of the "Strictly Come Dancing" judge for being too old counts as news. It might have been manipulated in terms of a story, or I might be being cynical, but in a cultural climate of increasing opposition to discrimination on the grounds of age, even if completely legal and ethical such a move is newsworthy. Given there is a much older man still on the show it might also be illegal - you could probably make a case of sexual discrimination too although that hasn't happened with makes me suspect manipulation of the story.

What are the current news channels? In the UK we have still BBC TV and Radio News on a nationwide and regional level, and radio news on a local level. There is a mixed Independent Television News that covers the various commercial TV stations more or less mostly on a national level but some regional news. Our satellite TV company runs its own national news service to subscribers, also available to cable TV subscribers. There is not much national commercial radio news although there are some headlines, no regional commercial radio news that I know of, but there is local commercial radio news. We have daily national newspapers split into broadsheets (more news heavy) and red tops (sometimes news, sometimes gossip). We do have odd regional newspapers in some regions, but we still (in most areas) have local newspapers. The BBC does international, national, regional and local news on the internet too. Many of the newspapers have a website too, some with free content, some with pay-for content, some with a mix. We have pretty much unrestricted access to the internet. ALL of our newspapers are taking a hit: people are not paying for them any more, or many less people are. There is a free-to-take morning paper called The Metro which is fairly new (it's about 5 years old now) which is supported purely on advertising fees. Recently the London Evening Standard decided to go the same way: they expect to increase their circulation six-fold when they are free and they have a natural readership NOT reading them any longer on the tube of an evening. Your country will have some slightly different names and distributions but it's mostly likely to be broadly similar.

What does all this mean for "pay-for" news? Well, unless you can convince us that it is really to our benefit to NOT pay an annual fee to have the BBC provide us with news you're kind of stuffed. It is hard to be completely sure (the figures aren't totally clear) but it looks like the BBC News channel gets more viewers per week than all the newspapers added together. Since moving head-to-head BBC's evening news has steadily stolen viewers from ITV's evening news. Both of these are essentially free at the point of uptake. It appears that the consumers of news are voting with their feet and remote controls to say "we want the BBC news please." Unless a pay-for news service adds something to the mix we'll choose not to pay. Ironically, according to the research I was doing, this has coincided with most of the big papers STOPPING their free bulk-delivery services such as newspapers to hotels, stations etc.

So, what could that "adds something" to persuade me to pay be? In-depth reviews and analysis might be part of the solution, particularly if it well targeted. Something that gives me a split screen, with headlines (less well targeted to me but still somewhat targeted), enough to give me a decent overview of the global, national and local news of import (even if I'm not really interested in it) would be good, but well targeted additional analysis of the stuff I want would be great. Clearly and well automatically aggregating the news from multiple sources with links back to the original materials would be good too. I like reading well written views I don't agree with. I might be unusual in this but surely that's part of the requirements of the targeting system - it has to recognise I want contrary views whilst my neighbour doesn't. It should integrate my RSS feeds too and it should integrate them more smartly than the current system. I read I think 2 blogs where only the title is RSSed and one where the RSS feed is all the article as unformatted text. They are the only ones that haven't (yet) been culled that do this. I would happily extend RSS with a "load whole page" option so the ones where I currently have to click because there's little or no useful information from the RSS feed so I can see the whole lot. Would every blog suddenly require this? Maybe - but I can move quickly through RSS feeds currently, I would like to think this smart system would still rapidly load the new pages. Convergence would suggest I should be able to drop in my choices of Facebook, Twitter etc. to get the news from there - maybe it should really aggregate all the stuff that comes through and give me the news I actually want to read amongst all the noise. Feeds similar to Amazon's recommended book emails for things I want to buy - mostly books in my case but whatever rings your bell - would be good to. This is my personal news after all.

I'm looking, therefore, at paying more for a service than specific content. Your content on such a service will have some overlap - you read my blog so presumably we have some interests in common - but some differences: my local news is different to yours for almost all readers, my national news is different for many, my (very small) subset of sports news is different again and so on. Web 3.0 please!

What I almost certainly won't be paying for is a subscription to your currently proposed model of a news service. This won't disappoint the Murdoch dynasty too much - I don't pay them directly for any news anyway - and I don't know how typical I am but I rather suspect I'm more typical than the Murdoch pere et fils would like. The world is changing, the way we access information is changing. The person or group that does this, at a suitably low price (pence per day at the most), unless it is Google (and covered by click-through advertising), might just join Google and wikipedia as the two great information providers of the next decade or more. Stubbornly clinging to a model that is not thriving might see you through the next year but unless we change back to a pre-internet age and method of accessing information (seems unlikely unless there's a huge disaster that stops us wanting to read the news at all) I'll bet that in five years time, you'll be history.