Archive for September, 2008
Ubuntu Mobile Edition September 30th, 2008
Whenever I think about the iPhone or the iPod Touch I also think about what Canonical might have lined up for us. This video review of Ubuntu’s Mobile Edition (listen out for the url for the download in the video) looks great on a touchscreen device and I have to wonder whether the iPhone or iPod Touch is going to be regarded as such wonderful devices in the coming months and years as we begin to see more Linux based devices running software like Ubuntu’s Mobile Edition software.
Of course the iPhone/iPod Touch has the added benefit of great integration with a Mac but if you are not a Mac user, how big a deal is that? What I don’t know is how a Mobile Edition device integrates with a desktop/laptop running a full version of Ubuntu? Would we see the mobile device synchronise with the desktop/laptop when it is plugged in? If not, I imagine that would appear soon enough.
As awesome as the Mac OS is, I don’t think it will be too long before Linux based devices become pretty darn appealing, if not compelling for people like me. The one thing I am concerned about with my Mac is that the deeper I go down Uncle Steve’s rabbit hole, the more I am locked into this ecosystem. Ubuntu and Linux generally represents a more open ecosystem (potentially) and the key issues to address are probably usability and flexibility.
Technorati Tags:
ubuntu, uncle steve, ubuntu mobile edition, mac os
Posted in Mobile Tech | Comments (Comments)
One man, one goat September 30th, 2008
Support great local talent!
Technorati Tags:
nik rabinowitz, comedy, one man one goat, humor, humour
Posted in Events, Fun, Fun stuff, Humour, People | Comments (Comments)
Nokia E71 on the horizon September 29th, 2008
I am pretty much set on the E71 as my next phone which I hope to buy in the next month or so. I have had a terrible experience with my Nokia N73 Music Edition (to the point where I have had happy dreams about smashing it - literally).
I have read a couple reviews about the phone and they have all been really positive. The one reservation some people have had is that the keys on the keyboard are a little on the small side. Otherwise people have been raving. One such person is Jonathan Greene who also posted a great video on Viddler which is worth watching if you are interested in this phone.
My one big gripe with my N73 is that it is so slow! It takes ages to do anything and after a while that becomes really annoying. Another pain in the butt is that a recent firmware update on the phone effectively killed the Bluetooth connection between my phone and my MacBook. I really hope I don’t have a similar experience with the E71. I haven’t seen any suggestion that I would have the same issue though.
Technorati Tags:
e71, n73 music edition, nokia, review, jonathan greene
Posted in Mobile Tech, People | Comments (Comments)
No moral and ethical absolutism September 15th, 2008
My comments at the recent panel discussion in Sandton about moral and ethical relativism received more attention than I anticipated. For the most part I thought my slightly pessimistic view of the moral and ethical framework we find ourselves living and working in would be seen as an off colour, somewhat quirky perspective on South Africa. Instead I keep encountering people who heard me speak about it and who have pretty serious thoughts about this moral and ethical relativism that seems to me to dominate our society at the moment.
In a sense it is ironic that this could be South Africa’s dominant doctrine in a society that seems to have firm absolutes that guide it along the path to whichever higher state we, as a society, may be aspiring to. I just had a profound discussion with Branko Brkic and one of the things we spoke about was American politics and how the American electorate managed to vote for George W Bush twice and is now considering his spiritual successor, Sarah Palin (and McCain to a lesser degree, perhaps) for higher office. The political campaigns in the USA are frequently dominated by opposing ideologies which are expressed in absolute terms, as if they are derived from a stack of stone tables carved by the hand of the Divine. When you dig a little deeper you find that rather than these absolutes, politicians are guided by a series of factors, most of which amount to self-interest and the hope is that there is enough of a knock-on benefit for the population that their self-interest is less important.
When the ANC speaks to its voter base it uses communist/socialist terminology because that is the ideology that most appeals to the millions of impoverished citizens who were not uplifted by their party after 1994. Instead they continue to live in conditions that are inferior to what they could be living in had the government honestly committed itself to fulfilling its election promises rather than focussing on reaping rich financial rewards for its members and establishing a powerbase going forward.
We may be surrounded by absolutist talk but what lies beneath is very different. There is a strong tendency to support the dominant player in politics and anyone who doesn’t align him/herself with that player is attacked or marginalised. This is not what we would have liked to see in a truly democratic nation based on values like dignity, tolerance, equality and freedom but this is the society we live in. There is a level at which our government speaks of its commitment to these values and to niceties like the independence of the judiciary and institutions that are Constitutionally protected but when it comes down to it, those values and institutions either serve the requisite purpose or they will be undermined and quite possibly removed from the picture altogether. Morals and ethics are relative in practice even though what we need are absolutes that we can believe in.
Technorati Tags:
politicians, moral relativism, ethical relativism, absolutism, politics, society
Posted in Don't be evil, Mindsets, Policy issues, Politics and government | Comments (Comments)
Bloggers vs Big Media is not the real debate September 9th, 2008
The idea that bloggers or citizen journalists are going to be the end of Big Media has been floating around since blogging started to to gain a little popularity. Bloggers have been predicting Big Media’s End of Days and Big Media people have been pointing to less than exemplary writing and laughing at the thought of these upstart bloggers taking over. Good times.
It seems though that this debate is still raging and Matt Buckland’s post about editors as gatekeepers moderating content published by those upstarts is the most recent expression of the debate I have read, albeit in a more developed form. While the model Matt talks about has worked (his points to Thought Leader which is a good example of how the model can work well), I don’t see this is a major issue worthy of such focus. Bloggers are not going to replace the professional journalist. Readers will (and do) read articles written by journalists as well as bloggers. This really shouldn’t be an “us versus them” scenario or even a serious debate about how Big Media can reign in those crazy bloggers. I find the notion that editors are necessary if there is going to be quality content published on blogs or elsewhere on the social Web to be mildly offensive. There are some excellent bloggers out there who put many journalists and editors to shame. Even then, the distinction between bloggers and journalists is often a false distinction. A number of professional journalists blog prolifically and while they may not fall into the category of “citizen journalist” (I’m not even sure I like that category as a description of a legitimate blogger sub-set), they manage to blur the distinction pretty successfully.
As I have pointed about before, the real issue is more about Big Media’s changing model and specifically its adaptation to new distribution models. The old slogan that “Newspapers Are Dead” may be closer to the truth than the contention that Big Media is dying. Newspapers, as in the physical paper publication, are wasteful and should be put to rest. This is more about the medium than the content presented in that medium. It is also a bit about the model itself.
Image: printing press in SL Illumination Island by Jambina published under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license
What we should be seeing from our newspaper publishers is a concerted effort to adopt technologies like RSS more extensively and incorporating them into their business models. I’d like to see this from any publisher actually. I receive a magazine called De Rebus from the Law Society which is free to practising attorneys and available at a nominal subscription fee to other practitioners. The publication is also available, to a degree, online for free. I would like to receive De Rebus each month as a stream of feed items via RSS instead. Heck, a PDF of the magazine would be great too, it must be in a format capable of being converted to PDF already. I don’t mind receiving the download link for each month’s issue via RSS too. Instead the site is available through LexisNexis’ convoluted interface which might be comforting to those few lawyers who actually use LexisNexis’ online offerings but it keeps the content locked up on the site.
Another example is my monthly Fortune magazine subscription. What about an RSS feed for those articles so each month I pick up another 20 or 30 feed items in NetNewsWire when the physical magazine goes out? This applies to Brainstorm too (which I also subscribe to). Heck what about being able to buy access to a given month’s issue of a magazine ad hoc? Subscription feeds are not new and provide a perfect mechanism to control access to subscriber content. I can sign up with my publisher of choice, buy my subscription and use a username/password combination to subscribe to my paid subscription feed that includes the full articles. People who don’t pay could perhaps receive a truncated article that forces them to visit the web site for the full article (ad supported).
This last weekend I wanted to read an article in the Sunday Independent. I visited the site and discovered that the article was “premium” content and I couldn’t read it unless I subscribed to the physical newspaper first. Why? Why can’t I choose to subscribe to a digital version only? What about signing up and buying the odd article here and there? Think iTunes for newspapers except I use my existing feedreader to read the (full) articles that I download when I buy access to the article on the site either ad hoc or by subscribing to the digital version at a reduced cost (no paper).
Of course Big Media may be concerned about piracy and may want to exercise more control over what can be done with the digital articles. After all, my feedreader downloads text or html and that can be copied and redistributed (consider first that people pass around the newspapers they buy or magazines they subscribe to anyway). Why not develop or make use of either a suitable device that can accommodate news content conveniently or make use of something like Adobe’s Digital Edition software or something similar to enable people to read their subscriptions on their own devices that support the software? There are many feasible options and yet here we are still debating whether bloggers are going to overthrow Big Media!
Perhaps we should be spending more energy talking about better, more environment friendly means of getting all that good content out there rather than getting caught up in false or less important distinctions. Another perspective: with declining newspaper sales it must make economic sense to start reducing the amount of paper that is printed and distributed and instead persuade the market to shift to a paperless option. This won’t happen overnight but it has to begin at some point.
Technorati Tags:
digital media, feed reader, newspapers, rss
Posted in Making money, Media, Mindsets, Web/Tech | Comments (Comments)
