Lee Maguire graded snobberies, bawdiness, hypocrisy

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Recently, while waiting at a bus stop,  I noticed something on the poster for a particular brand of beer. Or rather the absence of something.  The lack, in 2010, of a promotional url; Just an icon. That Zuckerberg prosperity-sigil in the corner. A glyph, perhaps, invisible to eyes beyond a certain age?  Imagined cultural-presbyopia.

The implication being that some digital distillation of their drinking “experience” awaits you on the facebook.  That you can, perhaps, express your digital friendship with it?

Can one be friends with beverages on the facebook, or just a “fan”? (As if it wasn’t overloaded terminology already anyway.) God knows there have been times when vodka and cigarettes would have dominated my own “Top 4″. Widely, publically, flirting with self-destructive consumer choices?  Oh, yes. Muscling in on indie music’s traditional role in telegraphing abject miserableness.  A cultivated reputation without the need for that poorly iPod-karaoke’d rendition of “How Soon is Now”.

And if not a friend, then a “fan”?  I’ve never been comfortable with the term, since I’ve always mentally expanded it to “fanatic”.  Of low critical threshold (“Only the fans liked the weak sophomore album”). And, in recent years, of some pheromonal whiff of violence.  But now it seems almost interchangeable with “mostly likes”. Someone who’ll give a “thumbs up” to some million dollar advertising campaign.  To what end?  Is there some threshold that results in a bell ringing somewhere?  A couple of marketing execs high-five when the cost-per-head of their spend drops again.  Awesome job!

Of course, I’ve just assumed it’s a promotional reference rather than some break-through Portman Group campaign.  As if someone had gotten hip to the cavalier attitude to health implicit in youth, but that the truly horrifying consequences of binge drinking (in the age of ubiquitous cameraphones) is waking up to discover the evidence online, tagged with your name.

That logo merely a nudge. “Thinking of getting paralytically drunk tonight? Maybe try to avoid looking shitfaced in the photos again, eh?”

Because you made a phone call

There’s this fantastic bit in the movie Enemy of the State (1998) where armed NSA agents (on an unsanctioned operation) break into the office of a paranoid communications specialist, Brill (played by Gene Hackman), to retrieve a computer disk that has inadvertently come into the possession of a lawyer, Robert Clayton Dean (played by Will Smith). The agents reach Brill’s computers only to discover Brill, Dean, and the disk are already gone… and that the entire place is rigged with explosives about to blow.

As Brill and Dean speed away from the ensuing explosion, Dean asks what the hell is happening… “I blew up the building, because you made a phone call!”

I mention this not only because it is totally rad (as the old people say) but because it nicely illustrates five things I’m thinking about.

1. The Identity reset button

Brill isn’t an aspirational character, he’s the Hollywood archetype of the paranoid loner; In many aspects deliberately referencing Hackman’s character in The Conversation (1974).  Completely off-the-grid, he doesn’t even use his real name.  As with most movie information-outlaws he primarily goes by a self adopted handle.

Adopting new personas was one of the attractions of the Internet 15 years ago. Sadly this seemed to largely express itself as ordinarily meek boys adopting the personas of snide arseholes. In recent years net users have been shepherded toward tying online activity to an official physical identity and if there’s anything you don’t want easily tied back to you maybe you shouldn’t be doing it (say the targeted advertising companies dominating the “social media” industry).

And what of those “youthful indiscretions” cheaply stored online for the rest of your life?

Well, there’s a school of thought that says it’ll be OK, that society will adapt when too many people are in the same boat, it won’t be a problem.  It’s simple to imagine a wider trend toward acceptance and forgiveness, I can’t see it mutating quickly enough to prevent the public experimenters of the MySpace generation from being bitten in the next decade.

Google’s chairman was recently predicting that young people will be entitled to change their name to distance themselves from their online history.  Presumably he implies that you’ll also need to recuse yourself from your existing social groupings in order for this to work, like entering a witness protection programme.

I imagine any such scheme would likely be scuppered in the same way that Brill’s identity was uncovered: facial recognition software. Perhaps radical cosmetic surgery also an option?

I’ve also been thinking about Max Headroom. The spin-off series got released on R1 DVD recently, inspiring a few blog posts here and there.  One of the aspects of its 20-minutes-into-the future is the emergence of a social phenomenon of the “Blanks”, people who attempt to erase themselves from society’s databases.

Maybe the blanks already exist today in the form of those attempting to delete their Facebook profiles?

2. The social etiquette of privacy

Brill goes out of his way to keep his location unknown, but this falls apart when Dean makes a call from a pay phone at a convenience store en route.

In theory you can be as open as exposed as you like.  The real issue is with being entrusted with the privacy and security of others.  Expose your location to the world and you expose the location of those known to share it, without their consent.  Write about a relationship, and the other party (even if not named) can often be inferred.  It’s why people, who might be happily geo-tagging their Flickr photos and checking in on Foursquare, are still freaking out over the default settings on Facebook Places.  Potentially ceding control of their information to those less careful.

A friend of mine was outed as a lesbian to her parents as a result of Facebook photo tagging.  She was quite open about everything when in London but, in Internet terms, was very careful about what her family (in another country) could see.  She was inadvertently photographed in an embrace with her girlfriend and tagged by a friend on Facebook… causing it to pop-up on her mother’s page.  The first my friend knew of the photo was as a result of a phone call from her mother seeking reassurance.

3. Technomadic freedom

First sign of trouble, and – boom – Brill’s out of there, no sentiment.  Nicely contrasted with Dean’s wife’s refusal to move out of her house for safety:  “I picked out those drapes!”

I tend to feel a little trapped by my stuff. I’ve got the hoarding instinct and I’ve been fighting it for the last decade.  I’m not at the “crazy person filling their home with piles of garbage” level, but given enough time…

It basically manifests itself as an inability to decide if the future potential value of something exceeds the implied cost of storing it.  When you’ve got cupboards and a big enough shed the cost of hanging on to stuff seems negligible, so you can let yourself hang on to anything. Kipple drives out nonkipple, as PKD put it.

Relocation to smaller dwellings brings the problem into focus.  Years ago I moved in to an expensive elegant minimal apartment in the city.  Which I then filled with huge piles of magazines and comics, books, CDs, crates of VHS cassettes, obscure computer parts, cables, DVDs, video games, and all manner of paperwork.  And I would look at this mess and realise that it’s just information, right?  That, outside of certain documents, nothing actually required a physical expression.  It could all be shrunk down to the size of a hard disk.

Of course actually making it so seemed like too much work. I used to fantasise about returning home from work to find the problem solved by fire or explosion (a la Fight Club).  That I could start afresh, but this time rejecting the physical.

Which is why I’ve been tracking the emergence of those who seem to have adopted this first-world minimal possession lifestyle. Apprearing as if some Matrix-style existential house-fire had destroyed their physical things, yet rendering their digital world oh-so-stylishly.

It’s minimalism in the sense of physical weight, rather than some stoic tub-dwelling philosophy.  Laughable descriptions of it being “anti-consumerist” aside, it does carry the acknowledgement that most of what we own isn’t really precious.  (You may have taken a train journey down to “that London” back in the 90s and scoured since-disappeared shops for that obscure item, but it’s 2010 now and that thing’s going cheap on eBay.)

And once you’ve removed the sentiment from your physical world, everything else starts to seem disposable.  Lendable. Rentable. (Not to mention it totally feeds into that classically-nerdy pursuit of recreational cataloguing.)

It almost carries a sort of geek-macho air to it.  Keep your important documents in your “Go Bag“, data backed up at remote locations.  You’re ready. You’re resilient. “Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat” as De Niro’s character puts it in Heat (1995). I remember, five years ago, reading a list email during Hurricane Katrina from someone living in New Orleans.  They’d opted to stuff what they could into bags, get the hell out and never go back.

Myself?  Still selling, ripping, scanning, recycling, and shredding.  Nowhere near yet, but I’m tryin’, Ringo.

Should some controversial data fall into my hands precipitating a short-notice extreme lifestyle modification I’d still be dithering over my signed hardbacks as armed men ascend the stairs.

4. The Information Underground

The whole “computer file that the bad guys don’t want made public” MacGuffin was such a mainstay of the 90s computery/cyberpunky movies (Johnny Mnemonic, Strange Days, The Net, Hackers etc) that it’s now surreal to see the same plot playing out in the nonfictional news.

When the Hammersley disk falls into the possession of Dean one of the strategies the NSA operatives use is to attempt to discredit him by attempting to link him to criminal gangs, leaking information about his personal life, eventually framing him for a crime.

As I sat down to rewatch the Enemy of the State DVD the last bit of news I saw was that the globe-trotting public face of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, had an arrest warrant out on him in Sweden on accusation of rape.  By the time I’d finished the movie the warrant had been mysteriously cancelled.

The cyberpunkification of reality continues apace. Another Wikileaks volunteer was recently detained on reentering the US, his laptop and cellphones are confiscated for analysis. Of course, since “border guards imaging laptop disks” was already a hacker-paranoia meme for more than a decade, strategies are already effected (in this case the seized laptop contained no permanent storage device, so nothing to image).

But still, specific scrutiny as implied threat of punishment.  An electronic lifestyle equivalent to the threat of “IRS audit” US government agents use to encourage cooperation. Chilling, no? I wonder how those minimal technomads would react to the threat of a seized laptop?

I do have some ambivalence toward the Wikileaks operation, but I was intrigued enough to download their mysterious “Insurance file” on to a small removable memory card, thus transforming it into a sciencefictional object. So much mystery surrounding it, so much potential power.

Maybe worth dumping a regrettable youth (a la Johnny Mnemonic) to move this data across borders…

5. Jason Bourne movies

Because I’m always thinking about the Jason Bourne movies.

Diegetic Winks

Every work of fiction exists in its own fictive world, its own diegesis. Not just the science fiction worlds with their technological advances, or the comic book worlds in which New York’s skyline includes the Baxter Building, flying cars, flying men. Even the everyday, ordinary, real-world stuff.

Even if the movie never shows you a US President that doesn’t match the one you saw on the news, there are still two things that usually separate that world from reality:

• The fiction and characters you’re witnessing don’t exist as fiction within the reality . No character on EastEnders watches EastEnders.
• The actors portraying the characters also don’t exist in the fictive reality. Jason Bourne would find it hard to keep a low profile if people kept mistaking him for the actor Matt Damon.

It’s what  TV Tropes calls the “Celebrity Paradox“.

Sometimes it’s amusing to break these rules: The Last Action Hero contains a diegesis-within-a-diegesis in which a character attempts to convince another character  that he’s fictional character being portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. He takes Arnie to a video store in order to convince him, and sees an advertisement for Terminator 2 starring… Sylvester Stallone.

Sometimes it’s cheap and stupid, such as the plotline of Ocean’s 12, which involves a character played by Julia Roberts actually posing as Juila Roberts due to her uncanny resemblance.

But most of the time they’re not plot points, but little jokes dropped in for the benefit of anyone paying attention. I call these diegetic winks.

A lovely example was in the first episode of Sherlock, “A Study in Pink” (about 50 minutes in).  This is a 21st Century update of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but set in a modern London in which, obviously, the Victorian-era Holmes tales never existed.

In order to observe an address on Northumberland Street, Holmes and Watson take up a position at the window of a restaurant at the corner.  The street seems an odd choice for the scene;  it’s clearly not filmed there and the geography of the later scenes would call for something closer to Soho.

But in the real world that Northumberland Street restaurant doesn’t exist. I’ll save you from looking it up: there’s just a pub. The Sherlock Holmes.

Legally Bound

You know when you go to buy a track on the iTunes store and, without warning, iTunes demands that you again read through many pages of legalise before it’ll deign to serve you. Is that something you’d class as an elegant user experience?

For all the times I’ve confirmed that I’ve “read and understood” these various terms and conditions at best I’ve read it, I don’t think I’ve been confident enough to say I’ve really understood it.

I recently took the Eurostar from London to Paris during which I watched a movie rented from the iTunes store. The journey is usually about 2 hours and 15 minutes – a length so suited to movie watching it would be tragic if they ever spent millions trying to shave another 20 minutes off the trip.

Incidentally the film was Jeunet’s “A Very Long Engagement”, which I’d somehow never seen despite, or perhaps because of, it being pitched as “Amelie… with polio”. I would, however, commend to fans of the First World War Fighting Moustache. Slightly more sex in the movie than I’d like to be seen viewing on a train (those scenes judiciously hidden behind a calendaring application…  but really, the train was full of French and this stuff was, I imagine, no more explicit than a typical continental yogurt advert.)

Just over an hour into the movie, as I passed out of the tunnel and into the French countryside it occurred to me that, by watching a UK rental outside of the UK I might possibly have violated one of those Terms and Conditions I may have skimmed though…

10. Territory. The Service is currently available only in the United Kingdom and is not available in any other location. You agree not to use or attempt to use the Service from outside of the available territory, and that iTunes may use technologies to verify your compliance.

Purchases and rentals (as applicable) from the iTunes Store are available to you only in the UK. If you are not in the UK you may not use or attempt to use the service. iTunes may use technologies to verify such compliance.

Given the definition of “Service” seems to covers the purchasing of licences rather than their activation I appear to be in the clear.  The point of consumption, rather than of purchase, seems to be something unmediated in this case.

Although, if that action was forbidden by the terms, there’d be no technical way of checking to enforce it.  My laptop doesn’t always know where it is, so it wouldn’t be in a position to give me up. I can’t expect to always have a network available, and I’ve no built-in GPS.

But really, we’re not too far away from being able to assume that every computing device we use has some way of determining its location on the surface of the earth.  And when that becomes the norm, will disclosure of physical location end up becoming a pre-requisite for any use of licenced content? If my device thinks I’m not in the UK, will it one day refuse to play my UK-purchased media? Will it refuse to play things licensed for home use if it thinks I’m not at home?

Not that that seems reasonable, of course.  At least at this point in time. But we already live in a world where content providers dictate the types of physical connectors you may use to watch HD content on external screens.  There are already videogames that, despite having no online element, require that players be constantly online while playing the game.  Stories of people horribly inconvenienced by the Microsoft media licensing servers. Etc.

Coming up with plausible scenarios in which DRM would a major pain-in-the-ass never stood in the way of its adoption. Perhaps real-time location verification seems inevitable, we’re just waiting for the devices to catch up. (Want to watch Avatar 4? You’ll need to upgrade to a location-sensing player.)

After all, the markets and territories of the content business are defined by physical territories.  Unlicensed (“grey”) imports are regarded as losses by territorial licensors, equivalent to piracy.  (And no doubt these losses feed into the industry’s total worldwide losses.) Why wouldn’t they demand that widespread availability of a tomorrow’s technology be leveraged to enforce yesterday’s business models?  (And, as a bonus, provide additional valuable marketing data.) There are plenty of reasons the region-based licensing of media content works like it does, and not one of those reasons is anything actual consumers give a damn about.

For the determined, I’m sure there’ll be was around it. VPNs can be used, as they are now, to present a different location.  Cell phone signal isn’t always available, so offline verification might just rely on GPS. GPS is a weak signal, not impossible to fake. But if you’re planning to perform an act of geofraud everytime you want to watch a movie remember you’re still constrained by the laws of physics – there’s still only so much travel time you can allow between an account registered in LA and one in London.

As it turned out, the reason I was asked to read-and-understand revised iTunes conditions was concerned with this issue. Apple have reserved the right to share your real-time location data with whoever they chose and for whatever purpose (i.e. advertisers, advertising).  They then seem to implausibly claim that this isn’t personal data since it’s only the location of the device. Phones aren’t human, right?

I’d blithely agreed to it already, but it seems that it’s caused concern beyond the Jason Bourne-types attempting to stay “off the grid” (hey, what are they going to do? Refuse to agree and forgo the rest of their Chuck season-pass?) Apparently they’ve got the German government concerned.

If I was Apple I’d want to soften the Terms and Conditions anxiety fast becoming associated with their products. I’m sure that most companies will throw up their hands and say they hate this stuff as much as consumers do, that it’s just the cost of doing business in a litigious society, and that they’d never try to hoodwink people into agreeing to things they wouldn’t want to.  But surely there’s some way to finesse the experience?  I’d suggest

• disclose the new Terms and Conditions a week in advance, instead of ambushing people into reading and accepting them on the spot.
• make the T&Cs available in a structured (e.g. xml) plain text format in which the changes can be clearly determined.  i.e. via a “diff”
• and, if you really think your terms are reasonable, maybe pay an independent public/consumer advocacy group with legal knowledge to provide an interpretation of the proposed changes. Then provide links from the form. I’d be less intimidated by n pages of legalese if I knew they’d already been checked over by some EFF-type organisation.
• god, I don’t know…  Present it in the form of a Scott McCloud comic or something?

On Tablets

Hello, I’m excited by the introduction of large touchscreen tablet devices aimed at consumer markets. Are you, or anyone you know on the internet, also excited by this? Anyone?

After all, if you’re reading this, it’s probably on a laptop or desktop with a decent enough screen. Not as light as an iPad, I’d imagine. Not as convenient. Apple seems to have finally cracked the technologist dream of a computing device it won’t seem contextually alien to be using whilst on the toilet. Truly, the successor to the magazine.

Cory Doctorow is pouring scorn on the iPad already. Ostensibly for the closed and controlled ecosystem of the iTunes store, but I do recall him telling me (years before the iPhone, in the context of London Underground ticket machines) “I don’t understand your British obsession with touchscreens”.

And yeah, as Cory points out, the iPad does seem designed for a stereotype of a technophobic mother. Certainly that was my first thought: This seems ideal for my technophobic mother. She refuses, point blank, to touch keyboards. When, as a kid, I got my first computer she asked me if I knew what all the buttons did. “That’s not an answerable question,” I told her, “the function of the keys is contextually dependant. Any key can potentially do anything.” Whoops, turns out that sort of revelation is not an effective way to cure the older generation’s fear of computers. Every home visit involves lugging along a laptop purely for photo display purposes.

(Amusingly, my own long-term fear of touchscreens is based on the LCARS displays on Star Trek: TNG. Rather than have the actors learn where all the functions were located they just had them perform contextual actions and fill in the interface in post-production. Dangerously complex machinery with dynamically inconsistent control interfaces. Whenever the ship got torpedoed and the bridge crew fell against their control panels I used to worry they’d end up accidentally ejecting the warp core or something…)

Myself, I’m still a little wait-and-see iPad-wise. Certainly I’m not overly excited by the prospect of enhanced paperless versions of all the magazines I don’t already buy. (Although comic book downloads may be another story, but that’s for another post.) Of course, my instinct is to think “buy”, but magazine circulation in the UK is dominated by TV listings (already an app) and what appear to be tax dodges of some kind – i.e. not something you’d ever pay for directly. The only other magazine close to a million circulation in the UK is the sort that might be bought by those technophobic mothers.

Many on the net seem confident that the magazine format obsolete anyway, a byproduct of physical distribution constraints that mean nothing in the context of online distribution. I remember buying the Sunday paper and dropping entire sections of it, unread, directly into the recycling bin. The resentment at paying for something you don’t want is likely to be greater for anyone already used to the internet’s a-la-carte.

I’ve only managed to read one magazine cover-to-cover this year. The only reason that happened was that all the seats in the train with power sockets had been booked-up. Paper media is great for when you’re more than ‘n’ hours away from a charge point. (And I imagine charting that ‘n’ against magazine sales might reveal some rough symmetry.) It may turn out that people just want a convenient way to burn through their Instapaper queue, rather than a bundle of editorial consistency.

Certainly, whenever I see Jack Schultz showing off a Mag+ product, I’m more excited his magical CGI desk (he’s like David Warner in Tron!) than the actual real magazine he’s demonstrating. A lot of existing magazine layouts seem a little too gimmicky to me and, as Danny points out, it’s possible that the expensive presentation of text is how these paperless magazines intend to justify themselves.

I could be wrong though. While I recognise that the publishing is attempting to retrofit their pre-existing paradigm, I’m just as guilty of assuming the last decade of web-based media consumption is going to prove healthier as an ongoing model. God knows I wouldn’t wish my own online consumption on others. I learned all my bad habits back when all I had was Email and Usenet. The feed reader always fills, and every night I engage in the same goddamned truffle-hunt.

What am I thinking about? Curation? Quality vs Choice? Curating personal values in choosing quality. Like price comparisons for laptops before understanding the value of not having to use Windows. Liking chocolate fine, before tasting really good chocolate. I’ve been happy to eat the stone soup the web has provided thus far, but I’m not wholly resistant to a finer gastronomy.

I just don’t know what that looks like yet. Or, more importantly, what it feels like.

The Digital Economy Bill vs. flatshares

I’ve avoided getting worked up about the Digital Economy Bill. My income currently depends on people buying music online – I kinda feel I’m obliged to be utterly humourless about how people act with regard to music piracy in the real world.

But.

The most troubling thing about the “disconnection” section of the bill is that it seems to imply that every household has a single point of legal authority. Perhaps those in favour of the bill have only lived in houses with someone like that, a parental figure, a single leaseholder? It’s certainly not a universal experience.

To date, I’ve never been the single point of legal responsibility in a household. Even after graduating I’ve still ended up in a variety of shared flats and houses. Attempting to work in London is like that. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, you end up sharing a house with people you don’t particularly get on with. (And sometimes these people lose their jobs and spend all day in their room smoking and surfing the web. And how do they manage to go through so much toilet paper? It’s mind-boggling.) Anyway, it’s all rich life experience.

Like other utilities it’s usually the case that there’s only one phone line going to a shared house. Which means one DSL connection. Which means one router. Which means a wi-fi router with a shared password. (Unless the different items needing access can’t support a common authentication scheme for whatever reason. Ugh, in a dense enough area it’s hard enough finding a clear channel.)

But, while the DSL connection has a single bill payer, there’s no reasonable way (with today’s domestic networking equipment) for that person to even know what traffic is going over that connection, let alone have grounds to call a house-meeting or whatever it is they’d be expected to do as part of “policing” the house network.

And who even wants that job? “Network nazi”? Who wants to be nominated as the chump in line punished for the risk-taking of others? You can’t even take legal action against your flatmates since actual real evidence implicating them doesn’t even need to exist.

A possible arrangement might be for the bill-payer to require a bond from the network users before allowing them access (on top of the deposit or something). A chunk of money that’s at risk regardless of their personal action. But how much would that bond need to be? What price do you put on being banned from the internet? (Personally? A lot.) If I were the network bill-payer, how reasonable would it be to ask for my flatmates to deposit, say, the equivalent of a year’s rent up-front in order to use the wi-fi? That’s clearly not going to fly.

Just the possibility of this punishment existing punishes everyone in shared living arrangements regardless of any intent to engage in unlicensed file distribution. And it’s likely to increase the costs of accessing the internet for those in tighter financial situations.

Micropatronage and the virtuous paywall

I remember, back in 2008, stepping out of Oxford Circus station and seeing that the Evening Standard news-stand had been updated. A sort of proto-Blade Runner makeover, sandwich boards replaced by updating monitor screens, electronic card payment. It struck me as a moment of overlap, newsprint and ubiquitous infotech, like that point in time that Orville Wright and Neil Armstrong could have met. Within a month the paper been sold on to a Russian oligarch.

I’ve gone from someone who used to buy at least one newspaper a day (often two) as a teenager, to someone who has only bought a single physical newspaper so far this year. So I’m following the stories about the impending newspocalyse with interest and some little sense of guilt.

It’s been a long drawn-out separation. Last couple of years I’d buy The Guardian on a Saturday purely because I liked the physical form factor of the weekly listings guide – these days ‘there’s an app for that’. (Not that I really watch TV anymore – around four hours so far this year, all on my laptop.) The only physical paper I’ve paid for was a copy of the Guardian International edition I picked up at Gare du Nord before hopping on a Eurostar. Because I’m Jason Bourne, obviously.

I don’t even have enough loyalty to visit news site home pages, like most of the news beach-combers I just read that which washes up in my friend’s feeds and searches. Naturally the “paywall” concept, the last desperate gasp of “old” news, seems antithetical to how I and my friends are exposed to news articles. Single source; no sharing? Do remember to label your former customers as thieves when that plan backfires…

And yet, if only because that’s the prevailing net-head axiom, indeed
echoed by the Guardian’s editor, that my contrarian mind awakes. What if there was a paywall scheme for news that was compatible with the customs and values of the current network-news consumer? A “digg this up” for the news?

Let us imagine some fictional Fleet Street ox, say The Daily Brute, sells their online access for cash. Credit-cards, paypal, anonymous code scratchcards bought for spare change at whatever remains of newsagents, whatever. Load up your credits and you can read whatever you like.

But the twist is, it’s not a walled garden, you’re participating in a variation of a threshold pledge system based around granting free access to others.

The very first person to access an article has to pay. But once they’ve done so the article is free to access for the next few people to attempt to read it. Once those “free riders” (although one assumes third-party advertising will still feature) read the article, and assuming they’ve got credit, they have the option of “passing it on”, gifting access, to the next few people attempting to access it. Then once a pre-advertised threshold of payments has been made on an article it becomes permanently “unlocked” (and perhaps ad supported), safe to cite and link to, and (to ensure some semblance of permanence) accessible by the archive spiders and the like under an irrevocable (but not exclusive) license.

In those circumstances the cultural instincts of the web generation, the link sharing and micro-blogging, take on additional meaning. To those behind the news curve, only viewing the highly trafficked links, it might seem like web business-as-usual. And the infofreakos, sitting at the intersection between hard-core news consumers and respected linkers become the king makers. If enough people pay for this thing of value now, that value can be freely shared in perpetuity.

And since there’s potentially a financial transaction involved (for the reader or their friends, or those trusting a linker’s reputation) it might, I’d hope, help correct one of the plagues of the current web newsphere – and financially vote-down the link-bait trolls.

Sometimes it just works

As I’ve pointed out previously: a good benchmark of a technology’s ease-of-use is whether you can use it while holding a conversation.

My normal mode is to complain about all software/hardware, but I thought I’d share a couple of examples where tasks could actually be completed mid-VOIP conversation.

“I need a good photo of myself – can you send me all the photos you have of me?”

Initially this sounded like a “sure, when I get an hour or two, I’ll get back to you”-type request, but then I remembered: I ended up importing the last few years of photos into iPhoto so that I could play with the facial recognition feature. For once, geeky software fiddling pays off in real life. Select her face, export all images to a new directory, compress the directory, drag resulting zip on to the chat window and let it upload in the background. No problemo.

It was one of the few times I’ve felt like an actual use case instead of an edge case.

“I need to be at St Pancras for 8pm on Sunday, what time do I need to leave to make the connection?”

This one I know. Fire up traintimes.org.uk and plug in the details. So far, big deal right?

The trick here is that traintimes.org.uk gives you the result on a page with a terse but readable, hackable, stateless URL. Which means I don’t have to read out the results, I can just copy-n-paste the address into a text chat window. This ability to easily share and bookmark searches, while it seems bleedin’ obvious to me, is curiously absent from so many big sites.