Charles on… anything that comes along

James Doohan, who played Scotty in the original Star Trek, is dead.

“The engines canna take it!” (Pleading voice) “The dilithium crystals..” (Stern voice) “Well, if 10 minutes is all we’ve got..”

He was splendid. The one most important thing he did through his role was to make people think that engineers were people who were smart and made stuff work - rather than the people who linger under your car (they’re mechanics).

And he was Canadian, not Scottish. Actors, y’see, they do accents…

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Silly season? Yes, I may have heard of it (30 July 2008; score: 20.4%)
• Thoughts on podcasting: harder than it sounds (11 April 2006; score: 16.03%)
• "If we're so inventive, why aren't we richer?" (14 October 2005; score: 15.54%)

I was keynote speaker last night at Musictank’s event in London called “I Came, I saw, iPod: What’s Next?”. Also on the panel were Dr Michael Bull (Sussex University) - who’s done a study of more than 1,000 iPod users - Steve Mayall of MusicAlly, and Barney Wragg of eLabs, aka Universal Music’s online/new media bit.

One of the interesting ttidbits Barney mentioned, though not in the talk, was that the process of getting the Live 8 performance by Paul McCartney and U2 of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” onto the digital shops was a world record.

Here’s how it went: song performed. Taken straight off desk, mixed in 9 minutes. Given UPC number (without which it can’t be sold online), tweaked and twizzled and distributed to the online stores, ready for sale 46 minutes after the last chords had faded away.

The Long Tail©™® also got mentioned a fair bit, though Barney pointed out that it can take one person up to 3 weeks to work out the licensing and payments needed for a piece of “catalog” - and Universal has stuff going back to 1912. So setting priorities is important.

And since you’re wondering what’s next after the iPod, my answer was - more iPods, and perhaps the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP). Mobile phones might be able to store lots of things but they face all sorts of problems with price, reliability (of download speed) and usability (which I’ve talked about here before).

Another problem that got mentioned this morning, at another event I spoke at, is security - specifically, what if you’ve downloaded 200 songs from the network operator to your phone, and the phone gets nicked or eaten by the dog? Where are your 200 songs? Think before you reply. Are you sure of the response?

Ah - Jonny Evans (hi Jonny!) wrote up the evening for Wired. That’s a nice precis of two hours’ talking - nice one. The music biz’s CMU Daily also had a writeup.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The tin ears of vox pops (10 March 2005; score: 62.26%)
• An iPod quirk: you haven't played a song until you've played it all (7 December 2005; score: 49.8%)
• Another prediction comes right: iTunes Music Store now selling videos (10 May 2005; score: 47.94%)

In this week’s column in The Independent, noting that more than half of the home/small business population has got broadband rather than dialup (and that the economics of broadband are now compelling: if you spend an hour a day on dialup, you’re spending as much you would on broadband), I’ve got tips on how to secure your broadband connection.

Partly it’s because the ISPs do so little education of customers about the risks they’re running. Partly it’s because people don’t realise they are running any risks. Partly that people don’t know Windows XP SP2 is free, if you’ve got XP. Partly that according to Spamhaus, Britain is one of the worst offenders for compromised broadband PCs. (I had one the other day being used to try to post link spam to this blog from BTOpenworld.com.)

And partly because if your PC isn’t being used to spew spam and link junk to the world, then it’ll run faster for you, and you won’t waste money replacing it because “it’s too slow”. This is a temporary and expensive solution.

Though of course that won’t help people who’ve junked their PCs because they’re sick of spyware and can’t reload Windows because their PC didn’t come with installation disks. (Link 1 and Link 2, both from John Gruber’s excellent Linked List. Subscribe, and you get the RSS feed, which both saves time hitting “reload” and encourages him to do more of it.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The mystery of the wandering broadband: is it the router? Is it the tree? (Tree?) (3 September 2007; score: 58.59%)
• Do bigger broadband companies give better or worse service? (16 February 2005; score: 56.69%)
• The online money is in distribution, not content (10 January 2008; score: 54.55%)

Robert Scoble ponders a little about John Naughton’s article in last Sunday’s Observer on “Why I have serious doubts about the ‘citizen reporters’”.

Naughton’s point, very encapsulated: why were people taking photos and videos of the horrific things that had happened to some of the victims of the London bombings of July 7th? To quote him, I find it astonishing - not to say macabre - that virtually the first thing a lay person would do after escaping injury in an explosion in which dozens of other human beings are killed or maimed is to film or photograph the scene and then relay it to a broadcasting organisation.

Scoble remarks that as a journalism student, he recalls meeting several professional journalists who brought their images that were never published. They had horrific images from war. From traffic accidents. From murder scenes. They shot the images because that was their job: to capture the scene and do reporting. They were never used because editors were sensitive to their readers and because they could find images that told the story without needing to rely on the blood and guts.

What’s changed? Well, the photographer can publish his/her images now without checking with an editor. Just go to Flickr and drag the images up. Interestingly enough, I didn’t see many of the horrific images get published. And, the ones I saw most bloggers link to were pretty benign images. But, of course, a headline of “citizen journalists were pretty responsible” isn’t nearly as interesting as the one John had on his story today.

Sorry, Robert, but you’re not close enough to the ground on this. Read up about the phenomenon of ‘happy slapping’ in the UK. Or how about the kids who go to some of the more vicious websites which have videos made by the insurgents in Iraq, showing beheadings - real beheadings of real, live hostages - which they download to their mobile phone and show to each other, or Bluetooth around? When I gave my talk to the NUJ about new technologies, one of the audience had been really disturbed by the group of Somali kids in his street who’d shown him one of those videos, and suggested it was the reason why there was a bunch of police surrounding a house down the street. (It wasn’t.) As for the images on Flickr (say) not being horrific, perhaps people complained about them? Some of the offensively-captioned ones I got on my Flickr feed disappeared quite fast. Just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

There’s a really cruel, gore-wallowing streak in some people that technology and situation sometimes colludes to enable. It’s not journalism; it’s not bearing witness, except in the most anti-empathic way. That’s the contrast with, say, the journalism coming out of Niger, where millions face starvation. It’s not wallowing to report what’s happening there; the aim is to change it. That, perhaps, is what marks out “true” journalism from voyeurism and gossip. Though I’ll accept that a lot of what passes for journalism in whatever medium doesn’t rise much above the latter category.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Are journalists really a major source of 'stop energy' (as Rob Scoble seems to imply)? (26 October 2004; score: 68.87%)
• My Newsnight appearance - yeah, well, watch it now (4 February 2008; score: 63.95%)
• MPs baffled by new technology: "jamming will stop happy slapping". No it won't (26 June 2005; score: 58.91%)