Ged Carroll

Category: media | 媒體 | 미디어 | メディア

It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.

But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.

“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.

I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.

  • 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.

  • Dish network + more things

    I, Cringely Final Prediction #10: Apple will buy Dish Network – I, Cringely – bit of a reach. Dish Network has a customer base that is full of the wrong demographic for Apple. Dish Network has a legacy infrastructure that will be a cost, not an asset

    Hurt by China economic slowdown, luxury sector can recover if… | South China Morning Post – Chinese customers still have wealth from their equity market holdings and are still travelling (paywall)

    Jack on Twitter: “Was really hoping to talk to Twitter employees about this later this week, but want to set the record straight now: https://t.co/PcpRyTzOlW” – staff changes

    Apple cut iAd ‘to starve Google’s core business’: column – Business Insider – an interesting theory that the iAd downgrade was part of a much bigger, bolder Apple strategy to crush Google

    Yale psychologists have built a mathematical model for selfishness – Ever wonder why some people have a tendency to be nice—even in situations where it costs them—while others are constantly out for themselves?

    Streaming-music listeners really don’t care about missing out on CD-like sound quality – Streaming-music listeners really don’t care about sound quality. A recent survey by MusicWatch found that few music fans would pay more to listen to music with better audio quality. Which is interesting when one thinks about how CDs were marketed. Instead streaming media is more like the convenience sales pitch previously made for cassette tapes

    Amazon’s strategy for Europe expansion includes armchair grocery shopping – Amazon is gearing up to expand its European footprint, taking several services deeper into the continent, including one that’s already seen success in the UK: online grocery shopping and delivery. More Amazon related posts here.

    ★ Daring Fireball | Anywhere but Medium Dave Winer If Medium were more humble, or if they had competition, I would relax about it. But I remember how much RSS suffered for being dominated by Google.

  • Yahoo! – how did we get here?

    Understanding who Yahoo! is today means understanding changes in the technology and media sectors. These changes occurred over the past 20 years.
    Jerry, Liam & David celebrate the new Yahoo! Mail

    The Fear

    Yahoo! started off as a hack. The directory grew from a list of sites catalogued by Jerry Yang and David Filo. They did this as students in Stanford. This was back in the early 1990s, Microsoft was the dominant technology company. It is hard to understand the power that Microsoft had at the time. Apple was on a fast track to oblivion. This power was later clipped in the Judge Jackson trial of 2000.

    The Media Company

    At the time, investors and founders were reluctant to go into business against Microsoft. Even the idea that Microsoft may enter a sector was enough for others to stay clear.

    The technology sector was full of casualties: Digital Research, Borland, Go and Stac Technologies. Microsoft’s approach to competition of embrace, extend and extinguish was already well known.

    Yang and Filo would have had this in mind when they positioned Yahoo! as a media company that happened to be online. Yahoo!’s early business deals such as Yahoo! Internet Life magazine and display advertising are symptomatic of this media thinking.

    The advertising display model that Yahoo! operated was reminiscent of print magazine and newspaper businesses. It even went ahead and hired a traditional media sector CEO in 2001. Terry Semel was a former chairman of Warner Brothers. He was brought in following a 30% collapse in online advertising sales. Semel’s efforts to build a media business at Yahoo! didn’t succeed.

    The Technology Company

    Yahoo! has a history of contributing to key open source technologies including:

    • Debian Project
    • PHP
    • Hadoop
    • Oozie

    The work done on Hadoop lead to a spinout technology company called Hortonworks. Hortonworks customers include eBay, Spotify and Expedia. Not bad for ‘media company’.

    Panama, was to drive quality and profit in advertising by increasing click through rates. Yet it took too long to develop, many other projects ended up being canceled.

    Despite of the technical expertise at Yahoo!. The company bought in many key technologies rather than building themselves. Yahoo! Mail came from acquiring the 411.com directory service which owned Rocketmail in 1997. The modern mail web application has its roots in Oddpost, acquired in 2004.

    Failure To Make Big Bets

    Yahoo! bought video and audio streaming company broadcast.com in 1999 for $5.7 billion. This was the most expensive thing Yahoo! every bought. By comparison Tumblr cost $1.1 billion dollars in 2013. Yahoo! ended up with little to show for it’s $5.7 billion. This meant that Yahoo! developed a culture which made it hard to make big bet the farm kind of changes.  Terry Semel rejected the opportunity to buy Google in 2002 for $5 billion. It also failed to buy DoubleClick. Google bought it instead, and used DoubleClick to speed up growth beyond search advertising.

    A secondary effect of not being able to make big bets was a constantly changing set of priorities. Insiders have gone on record talking about the missed changes with aborted projects. This also made it harder to develop and pursue a vision.

    The Google comparison

    Google started some five years later. Google came into a world where Microsoft looked weaker. The US government filed charges against the company and Linux started to gain momentum. Google’s original business model was to be a search engine provider for web portals. There were other competitors in this space like Inktomi. It wasn’t until 1999 that the company started selling its own advertising. Google waited six years to go public. The size and profitability of its business masked from competitors and customers until 2004.

    Google hasn’t been afraid to make big bets or have a big vision:

    • Search
    • Enterprise search
    • Personal productivity
    • Enterprise productivity
    • Mobile operating system

    It has thought carefully about focus and vision – which is part of the reason why the Alphabet conglomerate was formed.

    More information

    New Panama Ranking System For Yahoo Ads Launches Today | Search Engine Land
    A Cyber-Arsenal for Road Warriors | BusinessWeek
    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation
    The Yahoo! Post-Bartz post and the perils of Microsoft Excel
    Inflection Point | renaissance chambara

  • Focus on the user + more

    Focus On The User – interesting lobby and direct consumer action that is very EU focused. The idea of Focus On The User brings to mind past antitrust remedies against Google and Microsoft. It will be interesting to see where Focus On The User goes. More posts related to antitrust in the EU specifically here

    Why WhatsApp scrapped its $1 annual subscription fee | VentureBeat – no more shadowy gateways you buy online for marketing messaging but proper corporate accounts that you pay for – only years behind LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat…

    People trust Google for their news more than the actual news | Quartz – its a reputation engine rather than just a search engine

    Recovering Teletext data from VHS recordings / Boing Boing – it takes such “phenomenal processing power” to accurately and reliably scan VHS recordings of text that we’re only now on the cusp of being able to do so. That hundreds, even thousands of frames of each teletext page are required to OCR each one is also a powerful tribute to just how astoundingly awful VHS is.

    GM says you don’t own your car, you just license it / Boing Boing – which will affect the right to repair or modify your car and possibly even resell it

    MI5 agent on how surveillance of Islamic State terrorists works – Business Insider – Because they’ve had this golden opportunity with technology and the internet, because they could and did hoover up as much info as they can, that’s actually hampering their work and damaging national security.

    Burson·Marsteller | World leaders on Facebook – nice collection of government usage examples on Facebook

    Microsoft decrees that new PCs will ONLY be able to run Windows 10 | SiliconAngle – Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to push the world onto Windows 10 by revising its support policy in a way that means newly purchased PCs will no longer support older editions of its OS. Given how much of China is on cracked versions of XP; expect legal trouble ahead

    Nobel Prize-Winning Economist: We’re Headed for Oligarchy – The Atlantic – this is so like William Gibson’s latest novel The Peripheral

    Chinese factory replaces 90% of humans with robots, production soars – TechRepublic – but does have some limitations

    How Tumblr Can Save Yahoo — Thoughts on Media — Medium – there is delicious irony to this post being hosted on Medium. The problem is that a lot of the magazine content which has failed is also hosted on tumblr, how could Yahoo! be trusted to monetise third party content any better

  • Cellular network surveillance + more

    The Dragnet | The Verge – or how cellular network surveillance was unmasked. A US criminal case into online returns fraud provides the reader with information about law enforcement usage of cellular network surveillance.  More wireless related content here.

    New Technologies and Mixed Use Convergence by Applin & Fischer (University of Kent) – interesting paper on how technology forces an alteration of consumer behaviours called ‘covert agencies’ in this paper (PDF)

    Worldwide smart home device shipments to nearly double in 2016, says ABI Research | Digitises – (paywall)

    Chinese citizens are boycotting search engine Baidu—and praying for Google to come back – Quartz – Baidu quickly announced Tuesday (Jan. 12) (link in Chinese) it had replaced the owner of the “hemophilia” post bar with a representative from an NGO working on the disease, but also seemed to confirm it has been selling these positions for profit, saying it would “stop commercialized operation” of all illness-related post bars, and invite non-profit organizations to run them. A Baidu spokesman told Quartz he couldn’t say what percentage of Baidu’s 19 million post bar groups were run by a commercial partner. – Native social advertising risks have been particularly challenging in healthcare. Baidu’s service is more than search the way we understand it and includes ‘expert’ Q&A as well. Imagine Quora if its was trusted and reliable in nature.

    Detect and Disable an Airbnb’s Hidden Wi-Fi Cameras With This Script – Lifehacker – waiting until someone builds this into a gadget; I think that there is a market for privacy related gadgetry.

    How Could The Winds of Winter Be Published In Only Three Months? | Tor.com – interesting breakdown of book publishing work flow

    Shell of a mystery new Huawei leaked, rumoured to run SD616 – Gizchina.com – interesting focus on product design to try and achieve a premium position versus similar hardware. There needs to be a corresponding focus on software and experience to make it work