virtualeconomics

The panic of the new falconers

A few weeks after closing the purposeless petition-rejecting facility that used to adorn the Number10 website, the coalition proposes a new petition-rejecting facility via which anyone who can gather enough signatories (rumours say 100k might be "enough") can have it rejected not just by a cabinet functionary but after an Actual Debate in the Commons. It is of course faintly possible that unlike last time one of the petition will coincide with something the government was planning to do anyway and when they leap to enact it we can all bask in the glow of having such enlightened and responsive leaders. In such leaps and bounds does participatory digital democracy progress.

We know that it's a crocodile

Outrage (and disappointment) is just breaking out over the Facebook "like" button, which allows FB to track not just the browsing habits of its users (which, let's face it, is now most of the online population) but also non-users. According to Arnold Roosendaal's paper (pdf), "the tool is also used to place cookies on the user’s computer, regardless whether a user actually uses the button when visiting a website."

A world lit only by cathode rays

It's that time of year when metropolitan media/tech commentators wend our way back from a few days in the provincial towns where we grew up, and on getting back home sit down to write with the incredulous tone of anthropologists about the technology that's still used there and the childlike wonder our parents and our friends from school expressed at our iPads, Kindles and 3G-enabled phones. (Did you know they still have video recorders out there? Some of them still even have landlines! And, bless, you should have seen their faces when I cheated in the pub quiz by changing the entry on Wikipedia using my phone...)

Like any tradition it has its pros and cons. It lets us end the year with a happy bit of technophile self-congratulation at time when there's no substantial news, but it leaves us starting the new year under a vague misapprehension about the level of consumer technology that's being used once you get outside London, New York and San Francisco. Having seen our parents' faltering attempts to use the Internet on clunky desktop PCs and having watched them recording soap operas on antique VCRs to watch on tiny pre-HD TVs we return home from xmas with the impression that the digital divide is alive and well (it isn't) and that out in the sticks technology has stood still for another year (it hasn't - it just moves a little bit slower than we're used to).

Merry #failwhale

Is it worse that I was trying to Twitter at Xmas or that so many other people were trying to do the same that I got the #failwhale?

Merry #failwhale everyone!

Reading age of Journalism.co.uk's top five journalism blogs

John Thompson at Journalism.co.uk was kind enough to include virtualeconomics.co.uk amongst his picks for top five journalism blogs of 2010 (thanks John!), so I've run another Google reading age filter over all thirteen of the blogs listed (three people got a pick, two of the blogs were picked twice) with the results you see to the left. I'm afraid both Wannabe Hacks and After Deadline return data anomalies. 

Bank of America sucks at being a cargo cult

The next release from Wikileaks is going to be about a US bank. Bank of America seems thinks it's going to be them (bit of a giveaway they've done something so bad it's worth leaking). The regulators think it's going to do the regulators more harm (bit of a giveaway...). 

Bank of America's panic-buying of domain names is a fascinating response to the fear their secrets are about to be spilled. Says ReadWriteWeb, they're "buying up domains for (the) senior executives and board members, including their names along with "sucks" or "blows.""

This is pure cargo-cult thinking.

Tried to pay, can't pay

Let me just add an English echo to the chorus of voices over at Techdirt pointing out that if we were simply allowed to pay for a copy of the media we download many of us would. The particular problem we have here in England is that our social media is global and connected (about half the people I talk to on Twitter are in the US) but our broadcast media are constrained by obsolete release windows, so by the time the latest shows hit our TV and cinema screens we've already heard all the spoilers. 

Daily Mash tells the news how it is

From today's Daily Mash article, "BRITISH MEDIA URGED TO DO DECENT THING WITH REVOLVER":

"The Daily Telegraph is showered with awards because it offered to buy a CD-ROM with MPs expenses on it.

"The Guardian is currently even more pleased with itself than usual because it's publishing classified information that not a single one of its journalists helped to gather.

"The News of the World proclaims itself as the greatest newspaper in the world because of its rare journalistic ability to record mobile phone conversations."

Should the greatest threat to press freedom in the world really be hosting Press Freedom Day?

Another day, another assault on press freedom by a clueless US government department. Just for the sake of variety though, this isn't an attack on Wikileaks, Wikileaks supporters or the allegedly free US press for reporting on what Wikileaks is doing. This is Homeland Security's seizure of four blog and forum sites that discussed and reported news about BitTorrent. 

The full debacle is at TechDirt, and Mike calls it "downright scary" and "wrong". But Homeland Security summarily seizing domains on grounds that they were infringing the bogus copyright laws made up by the MPAA is one thing; seizing those sites when in fact all they were doing was linking to news stories and opinions about use of the BitTorrent technology is a(nother) direct assault on the freedom of the press. Homeland Security needs to issue a statement, now, admitting that it made a mistake, promising to hand back those websites immediately and most importantly stating for the record that writing journalism about BitTorrent does not constitute a criminal infringement and that journalists remain free to comment on the use of technology, even on the use of technology that may itself be legally dubious in some jurisdictions.

Interest on New Year's Eve

People who don't understand compound interest (or markets) are having a bit of a whinge about short-term loans provider Wonga sponsoring free New Year's Eve travel on the tube. Admittedly, asking people to express an opinion about money is about as useful as asking fish to express an opinion about water, but...perhaps we can do better here than simply assuming short-term lenders are exactly the same as loan sharks. The same free tube service was sponsored in recent years by alcopop Smirnoff Ice, pseudo-Australian lager Fosters and sub-prime mortgage casino Natwest (RBS), so the outrage over this year's contributor strikes me as bizarre.