Ged Carroll

Category: online | 線上 | 온라인으로 | オンライン

The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.

Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.

Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.

Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.

Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.

  • Patent cliff + more things

    Pharma to lose $69 billion in five years as patents expire | Pharma File – patent cliff kicks in. Pharma has been buoyed historically by a run of blockbuster drugs. These drugs are coming off patent and there is a lack of obvious replacements. Secondly, investment in research is getting more and more expensive for pharma companies to stave off this patent cliff. Expect the pharma industry to try and go for intellectual property right extensions to try and stave off the patent cliff

    Laurence Fink Says Activist Investing Can ‘Destroy Jobs’ | New York Times – not terribly surprising but interesting that Black Rock has come out and said it

    Britain’s autumn statement: Two lost decades? | The Economist – at least since there is no compelling reason for things to improve (like with North Sea oil in the 1980s)

    Intelligence: Nike’s CIO Had to Get the Hell Out of Portland | Racked – surprised that Nike hadn’t managed to build a more urbane environment in Portland. I could see this as being a great case study for Who Is Your City author Richard Florida

    Intelligence: Gucci Cleans House: CEO, Creative Director Are OUT | Racked – not surprising given poor sales performance

    WhatsApp might be working on a web client | VentureBeat – me too feature to catch up with WeChat, expect QRCode hand-off

    Yahoo shuts offices in Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia | Campaign Asia – Malaysia I understand: closeness to Singapore, less of an economic power machine and a marketing sector that needs to work hard to keep up with legislation and local sensibilities. Indonesia and Vietnam are surprises given the high growth and populous markets that they represent

    Sony Lawyers Warn Press to Destroy Documents from Hack | Variety – this is tough one legally Sony as journalists are largely protected by the the US constitution

    Top 10 websites in the US according to Quantcast: A few observations | Chris Dixon – some interesting data points, you can still see the power of the IE installed user base and email looking at this data

    The Cheapest Generation – Atlantic Mobile – it assumes that will have the same amount to invest

    Silk Road subsidies undermine rail link | South China Morning Post – really interesting article about the nitty gritty of rail freight including lack of international common legal standards and requirements for paper work, insurance etc

    The Customer Journey to Online Purchase – Think with Google – really handy for media planning

    Sony hack: Studio Tries to Disrupt Downloads of its Stolen Files | Re/code – ethically dubious at best

    Xiaomi’s Indian expansion could be derailed by a patent tussle with Ericsson | Quartz – this is interesting as IP could put a speed bump on the new smartphone players for the time being, though this may decline in 5G as Huawei and ZTE get a bigger proportion of the IP in comparison to Alcatel-Lucent, Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom, Nokia, and Ericsson

    Russia tries again, in vain, to steady its collapsing currency | Quartz – it’s a buffet that the west hasn’t been invited and will end with a stronger China – having got hold of military and strategic industry IP, industrial assets and natural resources to drive further Chinese growth and strength

    Wal-Mart is the latest company to badly overestimate China | Quartz – there is a whole blog post in this story about growth, the nature of growth, management by Excel spreadsheets and a bit about China. Maybe I will have the time to write it one day

    EDMTCC 2014 – The EDM Guide: Technology, Culture, Curation – white paper trying to defend the bastard child of the dance music scene now that the Americans discovered it including Swedish House Mafia alumni (PDF)

  • Sharing economy & more

    Leo Burnett on sharing economy

    Leo Burnett put together this great presentation on the state of the sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc.) The presentation on the sharing economy is well thought out and handy to keep one side as a reference. More related content here.

    The Sharing Economy: Where We Go From Here from Leo Burnett

    Code Rush

    Code Rush – an amazing documentary on Netscape and its Communicator product: a mix of email client and web browser. Netscape Communicator was the first desktop email client that I used. I remember that we had it at work and then were put through the trauma of moving to Lotus Notes at work. Communicator had been the first email client to support HTML, so going to text only on Lotus Notes as a culture shock.

    At home I switched to Eudora until I eventually moved to mail.app when I set up an Apple services based email account.

    The Hundreds x Reebok

    The Hundreds X Reebok collaboration movie is a great trip back to the early 1990s and some serious sneaker love. The Hundreds may not be the hippest brand, or the one with the most hype. But they don’t just do clothing, instead the publish content that captures the culture of streetwear. Observers as well as originators and creators in the streetwear scene.

    Alan Watts

    The creators of South Park put together some great animation to accompany recordings by the philosopher and buddhist Alan Watts. Don’t worry it isn’t done a South Park style and Alan Watts voice is very soothing. Watts’ work was very influential from the 1950s and again in the 1990s as the interest was rekindled in Zen buddhist philosophy and practice.

    Video game music origins

    Finally, Red Bull put this great documentary together on the origins of video game music. The process that they used to compose the music is amazing. It shows how limitations can enhance creativity.

  • Qualcomm China problems + more

    How Qualcomm China Problems Could Hit Xiaomi – WSJ – likely to start Chinese device maker patent war. Qualcomm China problems are an example of China’s technology ambitions and China’s strategy of war by other means. Qualcomm China problems are likely to be the start of a gradual attempt at eroding Qualcomm’s innovation base. More on Qualcomm here.

    Bristlr is a Dating Site for Beardy Blokes and the People What Love ‘Em | Lifehacker – interesting specialist social networks offer highly targeted marketing opportunities. Not sure having a beard is a passion that people can form around, if nothing else it will appeal to hipsters

    A $30,000 smartphone with four wheels and a motor | Luxury Daily – interesting take on the modern car as a connected device that happens to be transportation

    Google is funding “an artificial intelligence for data science” | GigaOM – there goes SkyNet. Which fits close to their own needs for search engine needs

    Huawei and Inspur Electronics challenge Q3 server status quo • The Register – not terribly surprising post-Snowden. Inspur is winning a lot of high-end business from Chinese banks which will roll down their range as well

    Google Drive now lets you edit Microsoft Office attachments right from Gmail | VentureBeat – works back to feature parity with iCloud and Office 365. But its nothing like editing a document in a proper desktop client

    Bits Blog: China, a Fish Barrel for Cybercriminals | New York Times – using social engineering and the law of large numbers to commit fraud. WeChat also lends itself to fraud since its an app that can both message and send payments

    RIP Clip Art: Microsoft axes yet another foundational piece of computing history | ExtremeTech – the move away from clip art reflects consumer behaviour but does it have IP implications beyond the saving made in not licensing bad drawings?

  • Oddpost webmail

    Before Oddpost

    When you think about Oddpost, you have to cast your mind back almost two decades in 2002, the web was a very different place. In order for applications to do anything they would have to refresh the whole page. You couldn’t dynamically edit a document with other colleagues like you can with Google Docs for instance.  Which made applications like time tracking, or updating the basket on an e-commerce site a bit of a pain.

    The catalyst for change for app like performance in the browser was a webmail client called Oddpost.
    Oddpost RSS aggregator

    Oddpost.com

    Oddpost was different in a number of ways to anything else at the time. At first glance, it looked like a three pane desktop mail client, there was less navigation controls than your webmail interfaces at the time. Which heralded a very different design approach in subsequent web 2.0 companies. It is hard to articulate now, Gmail wouldn’t arrive for another two years and when it did it was invite only which meant that for the average Joe it took a while to come around. There was no download or application required to make it work (like a Java applet for instance). Oddpost, instead used technologies which are now humdrum, but a decade ago were the web equivalent of a revolution. Dynamic HTML, XML, and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) allowed individual elements of a page to be updated that provided a desktop app-like experience.

    Design

    Oddpost’s design approach didn’t lend itself to advertising that would slow down it’s dynamic interface and its method of updating components of a page rather than the full page adversely affected the page view metric advertisers cared about at the time. Storage was more expensive than it is now, so it made sense that Oddpost was a paid-for product.  In return for your subscription of $30/year got you a whopping 30MB of storage in your email box and an integrated RSS reader (rather like mail.app with OSX or Outlook with Windows).  In addition to the unique interface Oddpost offered support for both POP3 and IMAP standards which allowed access over an email client. IMAP allowed you to keep the files on the system providing you with a standard view using the web interface, your own computer, PDA (using Bluetooth and your cell phone as a wireless modem) or early smartphones like the Nokia 7650 and Nokia 6600 which came out in 2003. I was unusual at the time in having an IMAP email account, the entry cost for this service was purchasing an Apple computer.

    Oddpost was rough around the edges. It would be another few years before the metal lid of an Apple laptop would be as common as it is now, so it wasn’t as much of an issue that Oddpost only worked on Internet Explorer (version 5 or better) for Windows. The search functionality only did the headlines of messages not the body text. The company was eventually acquired in April 2004 by Yahoo! as it looked to bolster its position as an email provider against the then new Gmail service.

  • Canada on Twitter

    Canada on twitter will be an event that will have delighted my friend and former colleague Matthias Lüfkens. Matthias founded the    Burson-Marsteller Twiplomacy project. Time spent at the World Economic Forum on social media meant that Twiplomacy has been a long time personal passion of his. The Twiplomacy looked at which countries have accounts and whom they follow and are followed by. The study isn’t exhaustive, for instance it doesn’t cover China’s wolf warrior accounts.

    Canada rolled out an official global account
    Canada on Twitter

    The first post that announced Canada on Twitter showed Canadian self depreciating humour with its ‘eh!’ ending imitating Canadian speech patterns. This account was as much aimed at Canadians as it was at generating digital soft power.

    In reality Canada has had a number of digital diplomacy accounts before aimed at specific interest groups like the European Union or Iran. But don’t let those wrinkles get in the way of a good story.

    And the internet (actually just over half of them Canadian netizens) responded back. As with most political discussions online this was a male-dominated discussion.
    1

    The conversation areas touched upon seemed to mirror the kind of issues that are currently rippling through Canadian politics: the environment, Quebec independence and care for veterans. There was a wonkish strand that talked about this accounts role in digital diplomacy for the Canadian government. Conversationalists also name-dropped well-loved Canadian brands like the Tim Hortons coffee and doughnut chain and the country’s love of ice hockey as the national sport.

    Canadian based brands took time out to welcome their country’s government on to Twitter.
    Canada

    The biggest shock for me was that the account showed blatant favouritism towards Hootsuite compared to other Canadian social monitoring companies like Sysomos. Hootsuite was the only commercial entity that the account followed in what looks like a case of casual nepotism or a default setting in Hootsuite’s management tools. If its Hootsuite’s default setting that’s a scummy way of building followers and engagement. More online related posts here.