loose wire blog

Generating Meaning or Fluff?

I love this: a mashup that generates great-looking ads from Flickr pictures and a computer. The conclusion: We realise how easily affected we are by words and pictures together, but how the mix often doesn't mean very much, especially when they're ads.

By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

Of course, it also raises the question: At what point would it be cheaper and more effective to generate ad copy by computer?

THE AD GENERATOR

Technorati Tags: ad generator,ads,automatiion,ai,buzzwords,copy,advertising,PR

Burma's Firewall Fighters

Another good report on Burma's failed efforts to stop information getting out, from the Commitee to Protect Journalists:

Those fears are driving Burma’s undercover reporters to become more innovative. DVB’s Moe Aye said his in-country reporters now check in with editors by pay phone at predetermined times to mitigate the risk of communicating on lines that may be tapped by authorities.

In-country journalists have their own clandestine procedures. One undercover DVB reporter secretly reported on the trial of a popular political prisoner by using his mobile telephone to record the detainee entering the courthouse. Later that day, he used the Internet to transmit the footage in time to meet DVB’s production deadline.

“They say, ‘Don’t ask me how, just wait and it will be there.’” Moe Aye said. “I don’t ask, so I can’t tell you how they do it. They have their own ways.”  

Although I still believe it's important not to overstate the influence of the Internet in opening up a country and placing a brake on the brutality of regimes (Burma has shown no lack of appetite for repression, and can pull the plug on the Internet at will, firstly, and secondly information and images still found their way out even in the pre-Web uprising of 1988), it's great to read of how young Burmese are finding ways to report on what's going on there.

Burma's Firewall Fighters

Technorati Tags: burma,myanmar,censorship,repression,journalism,media

Sleazy Practices Cont.

Fired up by Google's move into the crapware domain by foisting an "updater" on customers who want to install (otherwise great) programs like Google Earth, I took another look at what was happening in the updater sphere.

Apple drew some heat for its own bit of underhandedness recently, when its own Apple Software Updater automatically included downloading the company's Safari browser. After a backlash, it dropped the Safari from the "Updates" section to a "New Software" section, but still prechecked it:

In other words, run the updater and not concentrate, and you'll find yourself downloading 22 MB of browser you didn't ask for, and didn't have before.

So no, I don't think Apple did the right thing here. Apple fans can protest as much as they like, but there's a clear move here to get new software to users to install software they didn't ask for and, if they don't actively intervene, will have it installed by default. Browsers, like media players, are particularly significant because they will try to make themselves the default browser, and users once again need to act against the default process to avoid this.

Needless to say, Apple's bid has been modestly successful, apparently at least doubling its modest market share for Safari. Still miniscule, but a start.

Of course, software is one thing, but it has to be used. For that it has to be visible to the user. No point in hiding the program launch icons somewhere they can't be found. On Windows, there are three places you want to be: the desktop, the system tray, or the start menu. Apple is particularly smart about this, ensuring that all its products sit, not in some side-alley subfolder, but in the 'root' menu:

and

as well as on the desktop:

(though not, interestingly, the Updater.)

Of course, Apple isn't alone. Microsoft has long been doing this, as has Adobe.

Folk argue this is all besides the point, that users retain control over their computer and can remove all this stuff if they want. But to me it's worrying that Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sun, Adobe et al think that this is OK, and, like their defenders, fail to understand that for the vast majority of users, installing software is not an everyday experience, and that these sleights of hand merely cause extra stress, confusion and uncertainty. That can't be good.

Technorati Tags: crapware,updaters,google earth,apple,microsoft,google,java,sun,desktop,start menu

Google's Sleazy (and Broken) Updater

Sorry to see that Google is going the sleazy route that Microsoft and Apple have ploughed before, namely trying to hoodwink and browbeat users into installing and automatically updating software they don't want via an installer.

Try to download Google Earth now, for example, and you'll be directed to the Google Updater, which will try to persuade you to install software you didn't ask for. (A great write-up of all this is at the Google Operating System blog.)

On top of the inconvenience and sleaze of all this, I was irritated to find that the Updater doesn't actually work: Not only that, but the help pages don't help, and there's no direct link to the original files so you can download them separately. (Fortunately the blog above does.)

All in all, a sure sign that Google is entering the software business, since it's adopting the same bait-and-switch, install-by-stealth tactics of its Apple and Microsoft competitors. Shame on you, Google.

Technorati Tags: google earth,google,sleaze,microsoft,apple,updaters

The History of an Article

The Guardian is adding some great features to its website. I'm not crazy about the betting stuff, coming from puritanical stock, and I'm not quite sure how the paper is making money from all this, but I do like the "article history" feature. It's below the byline and before the text. Click on the link and a window appears explaining where the article originally appeared offline and when it was last updated: 

There's a similar link at the bottom of each story although for now the link doesn't seem to work:

This stuff is good for several reasons:

• It helps to create a relationship between the offline and the online, especially where the paper has two distinct offline products (Observer and Guardian).
• Giving a 'last updated' time/date gives the reader a sense of how recently journalists/editors added to the story. I'm not quite sure whether this means the Guardian is going to update the story in the journalistic sense of adding a lead if the situation requires it. But it's helpful to the reader to know when the piece was last touched.
• This would also work well for corrections. Correcting a story and explaining what it was corrected from is an important part of journalistic transparency (this Wired story, for example, corrected Clueless Manifesto to Cluetrain Manifesto after BuzzMachine pointed out the error, but didn't indicate what the original error was; ironic, given the subject matter.)

Of course, this could go further. Perhaps the Guardian could share with readers when work started on the story, who edited it and for how long, as well as a history of comments on the piece (I never quite understand why comments are allowed on blog-type articles on the Guardian website, but not on stories.)

And a minor quibble: I'd like to see the time tagged as GMT, or British Summer Time, or whatever, given the Guardian's huge foreign readership. We're a big global family now, but we're not all in the same timezone.

Anyway, kudos to the Guardian/Observer for an impressive site.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, guardian, editing

The Way Chat Should Be

Great to see that Google Talk is adding improvements. I just noticed this one, for example: Drag a photo into a chat window and it appears in the chat itself. Click on the picture and a little progress bar lights up on the right as the recipient accepts the picture.

Resize the window and the picture resizes:

This is good stuff, especially when you compare it with Skype, which for some reason no longer allows dragging of files or links into a chat.

Chat, in short, needs to fit the conversation. And conversation involves sharing things, looking at things together, and generally connecting to each other.

Switch to Google Talk. Skype, get your act together.

Technorati Tags: chat, google talk, skype, instant messaging, IM

The Book Will Outlive Us All

A wonderful post by an old friend and former colleague, Martin Latham, on why the book will outlast the e-reader:

Printed books are palimpsests of our lives. They bear our imprint: we press in them the mountain-holiday flower, we spill wine, bath water, suntan lotion and even tears on them. As babies, we chew them; as adults, we curl up with them. We crack their spines for pleasure: they are unbreakable. Tibetans wind them, mummy-style, in cloth (the unwrapping itself is a prefatory meditation).

Conversely, the great travel writer Wilfred Thesiger hated book jackets and had a post-purchase ritual of removing the garish cover to expose the tactile buckram. Others cannot resist writing in books, and there are now several works on "marginalia" through the ages. To a historian or anthropologist, the book, at 500 years old, is a new-born baby. It has a long life ahead of it.

The whole piece is worth a read. E-books will be good for "providing a channel for all those low-margin reference texts, siphoning off some of our overpublishing glut in an eco-friendly way." But books are much, much more: "an all-round psycho-sensory experience. Every reader has a few books which they love because they represent a transformation time in their lives."

Amen to all this. My friend is a bookseller, running a store in Canterbury, UK. We used to work in a bookshop together in the King's Road, a very happy episode of my life, despite the fact that the store itself was going bust. Being around books, and people who loved books, was a very nice way to earn a living.

It's unnerving to think I spend more time among bits and bytes than musty papyrus these days. I can't help thinking that the end of books as learning (as opposed to enjoyment) is on the way out. Watching today's students with their ubiquitous laptops and ready access to massive silos of information, where libraries are just places to plug in their MacBooks and Questia is the database of choice, one wonders where the serendipidity of wandering the aisles, thumbing through books that aren't on the reading list and spotting an interesting tome in the returned books stack, has gone.

Anyway, read Martin's piece.

Technorati Tags: books, waterstones, ebooks, paper, print

What Price Tranquility?

It struck me, as I lay on a chaise longue at the Conrad Bali trying to filter out the drone of the jetskis, that hotels are selling a complicated product. My wife, for example, loves the clean, crisp white sheets and thick feather pillows of a king-size bed. Others go for the food, some for the ambience, some for the adventure, others for the sun, some for the service.

But in this stressful age, money increasingly buys and hotels sell tranquility: a chance to relax, zone out, be pampered, wander around in a bubble of soft footfalls, bubbling little fountains, soft tinkling music and the absence of intrusion. Of course, there are different grades of tranquility: If you want total silence, you go to an Aman resort; if you want tranquility plus active night life you go to Seminyak or Kuta. Tranquility is actually quite a sophisticated product. You don't actually sell it directly, but it's implicit in every photo and description of your hotel: But it's also, it struck me, more or less the one thing that hotels can't guarantee.

Tranquility is the result of effort and a complex management of logistics behind the scenes: You can train staff to keep voices low, to not intrude upon guests, to keep the sound of crockery being piled high to a minimum. But there are events you can't really control. Like, in the case of the Conrad Bali, jetskis swarming the beach in front of the hotel like Sioux around a wagon train.

"It's beyond our control," I Wayan Sumadi, the assistant manager, told me. Although the Conrad has a cooperation agreement with some of the jetskis operators--you can rent one from one of the poolside booths or from a guy on the beach sporting a Conrad-logoed ID card--the hotel, Wayan says, can't prevent them from dominating the seafront. The result is that no guests venture into the water and a drone that can be heard from the hotel lobby.

I've seen this problem before in Bali, but usually the hotel is smart enough to find out a peaceful coexistence that doesn't annoy the guests (Wayan says I'm by no means the first to complain.) Of course, public spaces are public spaces, but clearly the jetski owners rely on guests from the hotel, otherwise they wouldn't parade in front of them all day.

I feel for the guests who have come thousands of miles to buy some peace and quiet, and have to retreat to their hotel rooms to find it. I feel, in a way, for the hotel management who don't seem to have figured out that--despite an otherwise beautiful hotel and good service--the jetskis undermine the very product they've tried so hard to create: tranquility.

If I was the Conrad I would put this to the top of my agenda on Monday morning, and not rest until the situation is resolved. For more than a few guests, I suspect, tranquility is non-negotiable.

Technorati Tags: bali,hotels,pr,conrad,noise,ambience,customers

Whaling in Singapore?

Singapore appears to be the source of a virus cleverly designed to hoodwink U.S. executives by appearing to be an emailed subpoena which mentions them by name, as well as their title.

The SANS Storm Center said three days ago that

We've gotten a few reports that some CEOs have received what purports to be a federal subpoena via e-mail ordering their testimony in a case. It then asks them to click a link and download the case history and associated information.

One problem, it's total bogus. It's a "click-the-link-for-malware" typical spammer stunt. So, first and foremost, don't click on such links. An interesting component of this scam was that it did properly identify the CEO and send it to his e-mail directly. It's very highly targeted that way.

The report says that the server that the trojan reports back to is "hard-coded to an ISP in Singapore at this time," from where, according to Ars Technica, it "steals copies of any security certificates installed on the system."

(This, by the way, is calling whaling, since it is like phishing but is more targeted, and going for bigger phish, so to speak.)

The Inquirer says that the web servers delivering the emails are based in China, and, in language too loose to take seriously, "the cyber ruffians who later nefariously take control of the victims’ computers, based in Singapore."

There's no evidence the "cyber ruffians" are based in Singapore, as far as I can work out. The only possible connection could be the English and errors in the emails, which, John Markoff of the NYT reports, "led several researchers to believe that the attackers were not familiar with the United States court system and that the group might be based in a place that used a British variant of English, such as Hong Kong."

That said, just because an ISP may have been compromised doesn't mean that those involved are physically located in Singapore. Indeed, it would seem very unlikely they are; if they're smart enough to launch an attack like this, you'd have to bet against them being anywhere near the 'command and control' center itself.

Still, it's unsettling that an ISP may have been compromised. So far we don't know much more, though I've put in requests for more information. (The source of the information about Singapore appears to have come from someone at Verisign, whose Asian PR address bounces. So don't expect something anytime soon.)

Technorati Tags: phishing, whaling, singapore, scams, security, NYT, china, trojan

Facebook is Dead. I'm Not Being Facetious

Either there's a glitch in Facebook, or else it's dead. Well, not dead, exactly, but I noticed that, at nearly 10 pm, none of my friends have done anything today to merit appearing on the News Feed of stuff (see above).

(The News Feed, for those of you with real lives, lists recent activity by your friends in adding little widgets, updating their photos, tagging other photos, and all that sort of thing that merits an evening at home.)

(And no, I'm not filtering my News Feed at all:)

(And yes, I do have some friends. Well, Facebook friends. They're like fairweather friends except they don't even hang around when the weather's good:)

Now, this could be a glitch. A glance at one of my most active Facebook chums indicated she's accepted flowers, a caveman and a fire in the past hour.)

And we should distinguish between activities and updates. Status updates are still going fine: 22 of my chums have updated their status in the last six hours. But none, as far as I can work out, have added an application, tagged photos or done anything that merits being put into the News Feed (indeed a lot of the activity in the News Feed seems to be a couple of days old.)

To me that's kind of significant. If my friends have tired of Facebook as a place to hang out and do stuff, then how long has it got left?

Technorati Tags: facebook, networks, status, presence, lifestreams