Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Articles about race + more things

    The Guardian website will no longer allow comments under articles about race, immigration and Islam | JOE.ie – interesting that The Guardian stopped at just articles about race, immigration and Islam. Also controversial given its stance on censorship

    Chips on their shoulders | The Economist – THE Chinese government has been trying, on and off, since the 1970s to build an indigenous semiconductor industry. But its ambitions have never been as high, nor its budgets so big, as they are now. More on semiconductors here and on China here.

    How Facebook tracks and profits from voters in a $10bn US election | US news | The Guardian – there goes the West Wing approach to campaigns

    Attackers Use Word Docs to Deliver BlackEnergy Malware | SecurityWeek.Com – The advanced persistent threat (APT) actor behind the recent attacks targeting Ukraine has started delivering BlackEnergy malware using specially crafted Word documents with embedded macros.

    Twitter Execs Are Annoyed At Facebook For Referring To Them As “Social Media” – BuzzFeed News – At any moment Facebook trending posts always include 2 stories about things happening “on social media” … — Whitewashing Twitter out of news agenda

    Completely Ignoring the DMCA an Option for Torrent Sites? – Rutracker gets blocked in Russia so strips anti piracy bodies of special ‘takedown’ accounts

    TransferWise’s revenues grew by 5x in 2015 — but so did losses – For many companies unicorn status seem to share dot bomb characteristics

    Does Better Internet Access Wind Up Disenfranchising Lower Income Groups? – As counterintuitive as it seems, reducing the digital divide isn’t necessarily beneficial: Our results show that participation in local elections has dramatically declined in recent years, in part as the internet has displaced other media with greater local news content

    Vampire Weekend Played This Classic Song in Honor of Bernie Sanders in Iowa – use of music industry supporters to gather votes is interesting, particularly in the mid-west

  • Chinas Coming War With Asia

    Chinas coming war with Asia – provocative title

    Chinas Coming War With Asia: where do I start with a book title this inflammatory? I went to the trouble of reading the book twice before starting this review. In the end, the only conclusion I can come to is ‘Policy Faultlines in East Asia’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.

    Chinas coming war with Asia is one of those books that you shouldn’t judge too harshly by its cover, but by Jonathan Holsag’s writings.
    Untitled

    About the book

    Holsag marshals a huge range of facts and opinions within the book. If you want to have a basic understanding of the modern Chinese state, then this book is a good primer.

    He provides insight into the Chinese Communist’s Party’s policy cornerstone of territory maximisation. They were happy to put off their agenda for tactical advantage, but never gave up on their goals. China’s neighbours have similar inflexible policy goals. There is is no win-win solution. This is very interesting given the treaty

    Time has brought increased pressures. A fight for resources to fuel further growth and water rights conflicts. Relative declines in economic growth also fuels nationalistic politics. In China, nationalistic sentiments in citizens grew with prosperity. It has become convenient for politicians to tap into nationalistic sentiments.

    Holsag doesn’t attempt to provide a solution for de-escalation of these edges. His book only provides a macro-level understanding of the countries involved. For the reader who wants to understand Asia, Holsag’s book is an excellent primer.  More on Chinas Coming War With Asia by Jonathan Holsag. More book reviews here.

  • VGA + more things

    VGA In Memoriam | Hackaday – interesting overview of the VGA display technology. Although as with many technology standards, declaration of its death is likely to be premature. Instead it will gradually decline, but still be supported by a variety of connecting dongles. We still see component video and audio feeds available on the latest television sets alongside HDMI connectors. More technology related posts here.

    Why the iPad Is Going Extinct | New Republic – Interesting assessment of the tablet form factor. One point that the article misses is that tablets also have long replacement cycles. Hand-me-down and secondhand sales for iPads then become important. Relatively speaking the iPad offers a good ratio of computing power to price. But it isn’t a replacement for a laptop. It is no paradigm change on the scale of the PC or the smartphone and that is why it looks doomed to the author. Instead the iPad is a replacement for the portable DVD player, a coffee table magazine or a portable TV for consuming content. It does have roles in replacing paperwork and processes for people like airline pilots who previously would have had a pilots case with a thick binder. In it would be maps, way points, check lists, worksheets computer printouts and reference materials.

    What Influences the Influencers? ComRes/Burson-Marsteller 2016 EU Media Poll findings unveiled – Burson-Marsteller – interesting to see Politico rank highly. It has enjoyed a relatively fast ascendancy to influence, particularly outside the US.

    5 new luxury retail formats to look out for this year – Luxury Daily – Columns – peer to peer fashion lending (AirBnB for bags). It is the  sort of the role that the pawn broker and secondhand stores played to date. It represents a further democratisation of luxury, which in turn causes a bigger question to me. What does this democratisation mean for luxury in the future?

  • Twitter troubles

    You can read elsewhere about Twitter troubles, I have linked to some of the best analyses I found out there at the bottom of this article.
    Twitter
    If you don’t have time to go through the the analyses around Twitter troubles, here’s the ‘CliffsNotes’ version:

    • Management turnover. Three different heads of engineering in 18 months, five different product leads in the past two years, three CFOs in 18 months and 2 COOs (mainly because the role was left vacant for over 12 months)
    • Growth in user numbers has been stagnant in the U.S.. The three published quarters of 2015 showed U.S. active users at 66 million. The last two quarters of 2014 were steady at 64 million
    • Growth in user numbers globally has been a modest 11 percent. Growth outside the U.S. was just 13% year on year in quarter three of 2015

    James Whatley and Marshall Manson called the user number plateau ‘Twitter Zero’.

    There have been product-related Twitter troubles:

    • The ‘Promoted Moments’ advertising option is confusing to look at
    • Will it, won’t move beyond 140 characters
    • Algorithmic filtering of the timeline
    • Utility of the news feed is becoming diminished for the digerati
    • Likely reduction in user engagement
    • Likely uptake in bot content publication
    • Inability to deal with community issues like #Gamergate
    • Twitter’s auto-playing videos are barely more than a rounding error in the battle between YouTube and Facebook for video supremacy

    What less people are talking about is what Twitter troubles means beyond Twitter.

    Advertising purchases are a near-zero sum game. Facebook and other high growth native advertising platforms gain from Twitter troubles. But for marketers this is not all good news. Facebook is poor at giving marketers actionable insights and intelligence. There is no Facebook firehouse of data. Facebook only provides aggregated data.

    The OTT (Over The Top) messaging platforms (WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, Kik) are data black holes. Commercial dashboards on some accounts allow you to see how your account is doing. There is no insight of what is happening across accounts. There is no measure of influence beyond follower numbers and click-throughs.

    Twitter troubles with declining relevance, has a direct effect on social media monitoring and analytics platforms.

    Social media analysis of Twitter data is widespread. From consumer insights / passive market research to brand measurement and financial trading models.

    I had seen data which showed a direct correlation between brand related market research conducted by respected market research firms and social media analysis using Twitter data. The implication of this was that Twitter data could provide a more cost effective alternative.

    All of these research benefits are moot if Twitter is in decline or becoming irrelevant.

    Twitter data has its use beyond market research. It is the source of breaking news for the western media. Twitter’s firehouse also goes into making smarter phones. Apple’s Siri sources Twitter content to answer news-related requests.
    Siri using Twitter as news
    A poor performing Twitter has implications across the tech sector beyond online advertising. There are no obvious substitute solutions for its data waiting in the wings.

    Perhaps Twitter’s earning’s call on February 10 will give a hint of improvements at the company. But I wouldn’t bet on it. More related content here.

    More information

    Twitter Inc. quarterly results
    How Facebook Squashed Twitter – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
    Can Twitter turn stagnation into progress, or has it hit the wall? | Technology | The Guardian
    Twitter’s Fiscal 2015: Up, Flat, And Down | TechCrunch
    Twitter is teetering because it has turned into one big pyramid scheme | Andrew Smith
    Twitter Might Ditch The 140-Character Limit: What This Means For Marketers | SocialTimes
    Daily Report: The Tough Realities of a Twitter Turnaround – NYTimes.com
    Next Twitter boss faces complex challenges, says departing Dick Costolo | The Guardian
    Twitter data show that a few powerful users can control the conversation – Quartz
    Twitter’s Jakarta office is now open. Here are 6 reasons why Costolo is focusing on Indonesia | Techinasia
    Inside Twitter’s plan to fix itself
    How efficient is Twitter’s Business Model?
    Black Widow | Dustin Curtis – interesting analysis of Twitter and a warning about APIs

  • Susan Kare + more things

    Susan Kare

    Things that made my day this week included mac pioneer Susan Kare, Luxxury, Greg Wilson and JG Ballard:

    Great interview with Susan Kare. Susan Kare is famous for her icon designs that appeared in the first nine versions of the MacOS. Even now veteran Mac users will have a reaction to the ‘Dogcow’ that Susan Kare used to illustrate orientation of paper in a printer. More Mac related topics here.

    Luxxury

    Luxxury have cut a new slice of post-disco, pre-house 1980s dance music that Maze or Hall & Oates would have been happy with. Take it Slow is out on iTunes

    JG Ballard

    JG Ballard’s High Rise makes it to the big screen alongside some great late 1960s / 1970s set dressing and a great Kraut Rock soundtrack that Daft Punk would love.

    Apple Watch

    Finally, an Acceptable Use of the Apple Watch | Hackaday and 3D printing for that matter. A lovely Mac Classic homage as watch stand. You can now find this in silicone on Amazon, if you don’t want to 3D print your own version.

    Greg Wilson & Francois K

    Great interview with Greg Wilson and Francois K talking about the early days of modern dance music. From DJing to production and everything in between. What becomes apparent is something that Robert X Cringely, pointed out in his book Accidental Empires. That the same set of (48) names keep cropping up again and again in the development of something. In Cringely’s case, this was the personal computing revolution. Watching this video; you ge the same sense in the development of dance music.

    Greg Wilson helped develop the culture at the Hacienda and  brought beat and scratch mixing to UK television in the early 1980s. Francois K’s impact was as a DJ and producer since the early 1980s. The career longevity of these pioneers is fascinating.