By the way, just in case you’re surprised by how cheerful and non-violent I appear to be about the current political / BBC situation, rest assured that it’s all a big act but that I don’t really think I can write about it while I work for them. That is all. Move along.
Brief one this: So I’m watching Contact on television and there’s an advert for Pantene shampoo. And the voice comes on – the deep pounding “buy me” voice of the professional voice-over artist – and he says ,”Pantene makes your hair not just once – but twice as shiny!” Can you imagine that? Can you imagine how awesome that must be? I mean something that makes your hair once as shiny is clearly pretty good (given how important the advert made it sound), but this is way way beyond once! This is like twice! That’s like once as shiny two times over!
Can someone explain to me how an advert can present “once as shiny” as somehow something pretty awesome that only Pantene can beat? I mean, wouldn’t hair naturally be once as shiny? If it wasn’t – that would be a problem, wouldn’ t it? I mean if your shampoo made your hair 90% as shiny, then wouldn’t it gradually and eventually decrease in shininess every time you washed it? Wouldn’t it eventually come to absorb all light? Maybe that does happen in very poor places where they can’t afford proper almost-once-as-shiny-making shampoo. God how confusing that must be for people at night. It would hurt your eyes eventually, wouldn’t it? And wouldn’t it make people’s heads really really hot after a while? Frankly the thought’s so scary that I’m now scrabbling around for a shampoo that guarantees me precisely 100% normal shininess and not a single millionth of a percentage either way. If it’s not precisely once as shiny, I don’t think I want to go near it…
Font for post-its remains Coates.ttf as made with Fontifier.
This will only mean anything to readers in the UK, and only cinema-going readers at that. Just before the trailers are shown at Odeon cinemas there is often an ident designed to get you into the filmgoing spirit. This advert resembles an explosion of what appear to be out of focus sparks or fireworks. It’s pretty cool. I can now tell the world that the music that accompanies it – music which always gets Cal and I wiggling along approvingly – is by Pete Rodriguez and is called “I Like It (I Like it Like That)”. The song can be found on this album and no doubt is circulating on various peer-to-peer networks. I thank you.
Just a reminder – first things first today is the last day that you can vote for this year’s Bloggies. And secondly, I want to put in a bit of a plug for daily dose of imagery in the Best Photography category, because (despite the fact that the site suffers from one of those appallingly truncated taster-only RSS feeds* that drive me absolutely barking) the images are simply and regularly beautiful. Particularly recommended is today’s snowy car-lot in Toronto. Extraordinary.
* Other plasticbag.org regulars / favourites that don’t get read as much as they should because of this fetish for miserable little RSS-dribblings: Zeldman, Oskarn.org, Worlds of Waldman, Wish Jar Journal and Paranoid Fish. I know that you all have your reasons, but really…! Lots more people would hear what you had to say if you’d just be amenable to how we’d like to read your sites…
In the Daily Telegraph today is an advert/petition paid for and signed by many thousands of BBC staff asserting the fierce independence of the BBC and talking about Greg Dyke’s leadership as Director General (see Guardian article). I don’t have a lot to say about it except to say that unfortunately my name and those of many other people I know couldn’t fit onto the page, but that shouldn’t in any way be read as a lack of support. It was signed and supported financially by many more people than could fit onto that page – myself included – and its impressive scale should be viewed as just a slice of the even larger genuine ground-swell of sentiment throughout the organisation.
What follows is a letter that I’m sending through to my MP via FaxYourMP.com. If you feel strongly about this issue too, then I would ask you to consider expressing your sentiments accordingly. The views expressed – of course – are exclusively my own and have nothing to do with my employer.
Dear Ms Karen Buck,
I wanted to write to you to express my horror at the way the government that I voted for in the last two elections is handling the current debacle with the BBC.
I’ve been awaiting the Hutton report with considerable interest, and while I was surprised by the results of the enquiry I was much more surprised – appalled even – by the effect it has had upon the BBC. I didn’t realise how strongly I felt until I watched Greg Dyke resign and saw statements by Tessa Jowell and Tony Blair on the news.
It seems to me that the two major issues in this country at the moment are (1) whether or not the BBC’s accusation that the government’s dossier was ‘sexed up’ was true or not and (2) whether we were dragged into a war that many felt strongly was not justified given the evidence available. Of the two, the first is an extremely serious issue, but surely it can’t compare in size to the scale of the latter.
When the Hutton report came out, it stated that the BBC needed to accept culpability and that there was a clear need for change. The changes started immediately and have just kept coming – Gavin Davies, Greg Dyke, Andrew Gilligan – all of them have now left the organisation. Alongside these resignations, the editorial processes that led to this mistake being made are now being thoroughly investigated and reviewed.
With regards to Greg Dyke’s departure, I personally believe that this was a step too far. His resignation was a profoundly honourable gesture, but it was unnecessary and I believe a direct result of the extraordinary pressure that the government placed upon the organisation. I don’t know to what extent people understand the extraordinary damage his departure will cause to the organisation as it prepares for Charter-renewal, but I think much of the country will come to consider the government responsible for much of this damage.
Which is ironic really, considering the other major issue in the country at this time. After all, the government took our country to war, and the rationale it gave for that war turned out not to be true. And don’t take my word for that – listen to the ex-head of the investigatory body! The war itself might have had positive consequences and it may have had negative consequences. It might or might not have been an honourable venture. But even if we accept that there was no untoward pressure from the United States and that the government was not in any way duplicitous, surely to go to war on the basis of such astonishingly incorrect information must still constitute the very largest of screw-ups!
So let’s examine this again for a moment. A mistake was made somewhere down the line, a mistake that was not picked up by the various chains of command and resulted in some bad decisions all the way up to the top of the organisation. Does this sound in any way familiar? Gavin Davies and Greg Dyke found themselves in a similar situation and they resigned. And what has the government done? Nothing. More to the point, the BBC has nearly been broken by the attempts of government to force them to make an abject apology for their mistake. But is there any sign that the Prime Minister feels the slightest responsibility to apologise to the nation for making the decision to go to war on such faulty information? No! He has not!
Given this situation – and having watched Tony Blair and Tessa Jowell on television over the last 48 hours – isn’t it a thoroughly dishonourable act to praise another for having the strength of character to fall upon their own sword? Doesn’t it smack of the most hideous hypocrisy and moral weakness? The idea that they can even say those words without burning up at the shame of their own dishonour and double standards staggers me.
Ms Buck, I can’t even tell you how much and how quickly my opinion of Tony Blair and the current Labour administration has changed. Two days ago – and for the ten years before that – I was a strong supporter (advocate, even) of the Labour party and Tony Blair. Today I find myself questioning if I could even bear to vote for your party again. The way the government has handled this has been hideous, self-serving and vile and has damaged one of our most-loved and well-respected institutions far beyond the extent that was actually necessary. I can only hope that you are ashamed of yourselves. When I voted for you I never thought I’d be forced to question whether or not the good you had done would be outweighed by the damage. I find myself now looking for a new party to support.
Yours,
Tom Coates
What a strange, frustrating day. Loads of reporters lurking around Broadcasting House all day, TVs blaring out from all over the building as they report live the responses to the Hutton Inquiry, e-mails all over the place, anxious preparations for meetings that were doomed (before they began) to end badly, lots of snow (plus a couple of snowball fights), the sensation of slowly sinking beneath an ocean of political intrigue and my repeated uttering of at least two sayings which seemed almost impossiby iconic and important to me today: Never get involved in a land war in Asia and An atheist is a man with no invisible means of support. General crapulence eased slightly by long conversations with good friends over AIM and the viewing of insane low-key televisual masterpiece Director’s Commentary on (weirdly) ITV1. Sleep soon to come. Reassuringly, this too will pass.
There’s a fascinating clump of posts going around the place at the moment about the various DRM-based digital audio solutions that you can buy at the moment. The one that kicked stuff off initially was a post on The Sobleizer (A challenge for webloggers: handling organizational difficulties) which included a chunk of stuff about why it’s best for people who are going to buy music files with DRM to buy them in Windows Media format. Here’s the main chunk of the argument:
When you hear DRM think “lockin.” So, when you buy music off of Napster or Apple’s iTunes, you’re locked into the DRM systems that those applications decided on. Really you are choosing between two competing lockin schemes.
But, not all lockin schemes are alike, I learned on Friday. First, there are two major systems. The first is Apple’s AAC/Fairtunes based DRM. The second is Microsoft’s WMA
Let’s say it’s 2006. You have 500 songs you’ve bought on iTunes for your iPod. But, you are about to buy a car with a digital music player built into it. Oh, but wait, Apple doesn’t make a system that plays its AAC format in a car stereo. So, now you can’t buy a real digital music player in your car.
(I should mention at this point that Scoble works for Microsoft, but I’ll say straightaway that I don’t think that’s particularly relevant to the argument at hand. Nonetheless, cards on the table.)
So the argument at this point is if you choose lock-in with Microsoft, then your music files will work on a wider variety of media than if you choose lock-in with Apple. Therefore you should choose lock-in with Microsoft. At which point BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow weighs in:
In this world where we have consumer choices to make, Scoble argues that our best buy is to pick the lock-in company that will have the largest number of licensees.
That’s just about the worst choice you can make.
If I’m going to protect my investment in digital music, my best choice is clearly to invest in buying music in a format that anyone can make a player for. I should buy films, not kinetoscopes. I should buy VHS, not Betamax. I should buy analog tape, not DAT.
Because Scoble’s right. If you buy Apple Music or if you buy Microsoft Music, you’re screwed if you want to do something with that music that Apple or Microsoft doesn’t like.
Cory’s argument then is the fairly commercially radical proposition that we should buy only open music files, that companies should sell open music files (there is a precedent here – Bleep sells DRM-free songs from Warp Records), and even that companies like Microsoft should be using their substantial legal power to fight the record companies to be able to sell DRM-free songs online.
Now I’m not going to argue with that, although – to be fair – I think the current climate makes it pretty unlikely to happen. The various companies concerned are too neurotic about it, and frankly Microsoft has too much to lose from the proposition that intellectual property should be distributed without arcane DRM attached to it. Instead I’m going to argue that even if we’re only given the choice between two DRM schemes, we should still not just automatically go for the one that plays on the most devices. Because what does this mean in the end? No more or less than yet another monopoly at the operating system level – the musical infrastructure ends up belonging to Microsoft.
The fact is we shouldn’t think in those terms at this stage. We should be trying to create miscegenated musical libraries that we expect digital music manufacturers to support all of, not just some as it suits them or as it suits whichever company ends up dominating the market. We’ve been down this parth before – the company that owns the monopoly has the least to gain from a rapid pace of innovation, the least to gain from being standards compliant. We’ve seen it at the level of operating systems, internet browsers and now we’re seeing attempts to own and define the one successful format in which music files could sit for the next few decades. These things are too important to be left in the hands of one company. We need to have consumer choice at the level of which DRM (or lack of DRM) we’re comfortable with buying, we need variety so that different types of audio file can be released via a variety of business models, we need variety – fundamentally – because otherwise we all lose.
The examples that people cite about competing formats no longer hold true for music. It’s not like VHS and Betamax – we’re not talking about hardware with different sized slots that you can only fit one kind of music delivery system into. No – with music we mostly have applications on our desktop that can play dozens of different formats – whether we notice it or not. Just the other day, RealOne announced that it could now play Apple-encoded AAC files, and the rumour is that HP’s deal with Apple required that the iPod should have its ability to play WMP files restored. These things can play more than one type of file and we should be doing our damnedest to make sure that continues to be the case. It should be obvious to car audio manufacturers that they should be able to play AAC tracks – that there are hundreds of thousands of people across America (and soon Europe) who are going to want to be able to do more things with their bought songs. And it should be obvious to all of us that we want a world in which new formats can be integrated into our listening without any particular effort, or at least without us having to rebuy all our old tracks to work on non-mutually functioning players.
So in the meantime, buy, steal or rip whichever tracks suit you best in whatever format you want and make it your mission to put pressure on all the players (both business players and audio players) concerned to support as many of them as possible as soon as possible. And don’t listen to anyone who says that having one organisation controlling the musical infrastructure will result in greater choice. That’s never been the case in the past, and I very much doubt it will be so in the future either.
Dan Hill’s idea for a profoundly useful iPod accessory – as explained in greater detail in his post iPods and the wireless – is rather cheekily presented below. I want one.
