Category: Random

Manifestos, Disclaimers, Bills of Rights, Constitutions, Codes of Practice (voluntary or otherwise). A lot of these things are filtering through my mind at the moment. Here are some examples:

• A Blogger’s Disclaimer
• The Internet Manifesto
• The Hackers’ Manifesto
• An Internet Manifesto
• A Blogging Code of Ethics

So three times in recent memory, plasticbag.org has experienced fairly substantial increases in traffic. The first time was when a conflagration of warbloggers decided to take me to task about something I’d written about the power of the inbound link. This post was widely misinterpreted – even to the extent of being mentioned at the Revenge of the Blog Panel in the States by Glenn Reynolds as an example of “people not clear on the concept” (although the context of the transcript is a little unclear as to what concept in particular he’s referring to). But even though it was misinterpreted, it still sent a good few people to my virtual door – even if they were mostly brandishing fiery torches and threatening to burn down my castle.

Shortly after this came the incident at Blogger when (thanks to Phil (and indirectly to the current Pyra crew) I found myself in the unenviable position of being able to alarm and terrify two-thirds of blogdom with my scare stories about random hax0rs with world-destroying uber-weapons.

And in the last couple of days, my piece on Apple and the Pirate Everyman (which was widely given rousing yeah and so whats by friends of mine before I put it online) has been picked up by Macintouch.com, Doc Searls and CafÈ au Lait (among others). And again, as a result – a short-term surge in traffic.

It’s always nice to get more traffic to your site – it’s nice to be read. Makes you feel like you’re not completely talking into the ether. But at the same time it’s also weirdly paralysing. When something on my site gets picked up by a large new audience that haven’t had any experience of me before, I tend to feel a bit overwhelmed and confused by it all. I can’t think of anything to say when there are (new) people watching. I get stage-fright – glued to the spot by expectant eyes. Or maybe it’s more complex than that. Maybe I feel embarrassed when the politically active come to read a political post and find instead a poem about iBooks. Maybe I feel still more embarrassed when the Mac Gods and Open Source Pioneers end up wandering through my site on the days when I want to write about the huge amount of crisps I have in my kitchen cupboards.

Sometimes I think it would be much easier to write a site – you know – about something…

Today on Barbelith: The Autopsy: Spectacle or Science?:

The first public autopsy in Britain for 170 years was greeted with reactions almost as predictable as the process of the postmortem itself. But why have the medical establishment and the media been so squeamish? Brooke Magnanti investigates.

If I thought for one minute that I would be able to get any credit from anyone (knowing as I do how inexplicably dodgy my credit rating appears to be, I would sign up for this in a moment. Particularly as I could get my darling little iBook (hear how it calls my name) for just £183.17 a month… Drool…

3.30am Finally go to bed. Have been working for fourteen hours with only an hour break for Celebrity Big Brother. Autopsies have gone on in the background. 6.45am Alarm goes off. Get up, shower, shove loads of files online, check e-mail. 7.30am Leave flat. 8.10am Fight through rain and buses – arrive at work, print out loads of things. Twitch. 8.50am Leave for Holborn tube, run to get onto train. Fall over, hurt leg. 9.00am Bakerloo line not working. Get out and catch bus. 9.30am Arrive at Paddington for ten o’clock train. 10.10am Train still not boarding… 12.00pm Train supposed to arrive in Cardiff. 12.45pm Train arrives in Cardiff. 1.10pm Arrive at BBC Cardiff. 2.00pm Start presentation. 3.30pm Finish presentation. 4.00pm Leave BBC Cardiff. 4.50pm Train leaves for Paddington. 7.00pm Train arrives at Paddington. 7.30pm Arrive home. Sit in dumb, slack-jawed silence watching Home Front in the Garden in my overcoat. 9.00pm Write blog-entry.

Further to my post earlier today, I’ve decided to release an only mostly-finished article I’ve been writing about the ways in which Apple computers seem to me to be almost facilitating piracy – and in my opinion rightly so… Please forgive me if it seems slightly hackneyed and if you find any blatant inaccurracies or spelling mistakes mail me and I’ll correct them immediately…

Apple and the Pirate Everyman
“Don’t Steal Music” says the sticker on every new iPod. But is Apple being disingenuous? Because no other platform in recent history has done as much to help information (and entertainment media) to be easy to create, copy or disseminate…

I’ve read two articles today about the ways in which the entertainment industry is interacting with computing and the internet – and unsurprisingly both touch on issues of piracy. The first article (Fox Exec wants help ending piracy) is about Peter Chernin’s upcoming speech at Comdex. He’s expected to argue that restricting the reproduction of copyrighted materials to end piracy would also reinvigorate the tech economy. The other article (Online casting calls snub Apple) is from c|net and is about the way in which media and entertainment companies are passing the Mac platform by in favour of the wider distribution of Windows-based technology. And here’s a quote from Apple themselves:

Apple’s Schiller said the company is not concerned about losing out on the next generation of digital media services, noting that current industry-approved offerings are barely out of the gate while others are on thin ice legally. “We don’t want to evangelize products that encourage illegal behavior,” he said.

If you don’t mind me saying so (and I hope you’ll forgive me for being so harsh) both of these people – Schiller and Chernin alike – are talking absolute and total bollocks. In fact it’s never been clearer that in terms of conventional models, the entertainment industry and the computing industry are working directly at loggerheads here. Piracy in its current form is both the result of, and increases to be promoted by, rapid technological take-up and change. The desire to download a movie or a selection of MP3s is one of the things that lies directly behind the popularisation and take-up of broadband technologies, and everyone knows it. Similarly burning music, storing music, playing good quality entertainment products – all require decent hardware, and moreover encourage the purchasing of more or higher quality hardware by bringing the computer in to an ever more central entertainment role in the home. Who do they think they’re kidding?

Meanwhile Apple claim to be avoiding encouraging illegal behaviour? Then why have they made an entire operating system and way of interacting with media products that has made illegal behaviour – or to put it another way, behaviour that is not copyright-centred – easier than ever before? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever…

Never let it be said that Bill Gates has lost his touch. I mean certainly the man responsible for Windows and Office can’t really be blamed for the fact that everyone hates his company. Nor is he directly responsible for the X-box not selling at all. Nor indeed can he be held to account for completely not noticing the potential of the internet. No, I think it’s clear that Gates is a man with a mission – a true visionary genius. Which is why I’m prepared to forgive his obsession with the tablet PC and celebrate instead the concept that will take the Western World firmly into the 21st – maybe even the 22nd – century: Smart Fridge-Magnets!

I knew it had a name – and I’ve been trying to remember what that name was for years. I’ve asked friends, family, professionals, experts – but evidently my friends and family weren’t studying rhetoric and the experts and professionals were experts and professionals in completely the wrong fields. But I now know the name for the rhetorical trope where you mention by omission (“I won’t mention the prime minister’s predeliction for brandy – or bring up (yet again) the chancellor’s fetish for ladies underwear”), and that name is… paralepsis. [Find out more about rhetoric]