Das ist Ja Doof!

Many years ago the last major British computer manufacturer ICL launched One Per Desk, one of the craziest early computers ever. It was based on the famous Sinclair QL - as used by one Linus Torvalds - and had small tapes instead of disc drives (no, they never worked). But what was most striking about this misbegotten device, was the name of one of the rebadged versions, which came from BT. It was called Tonto - Italian and Spanish for "stupid."

Well, the meme lives on:

Doof, a new London-based startup went into public beta at the beginning of October offering casual gaming wrapped-up with social networking in a good-looking package.

"Doof" is German for "stupid"....

Full of Fail

Lovely piece here on the underwhelming launch of somebody's phone thingy in the UK. Makes yer proud to be British....

The Art of the Remix

One of Larry Lessig's favourite concepts is that of the remix: taking pre-existing stuff and doing something new with it. Recently I came across one of the purest expressions of that remix idea in the shape of the Georg Baselitz exhibition at the Royal Academy.

After a series of rooms packed with often deeply disturbing images, the show culminated in one devoted entirely to the remix. More precisely, the pictures were remixes by Baselitz of his earlier works, which created a powerful double resonance. The ultimate remix, perhaps.

Time to Face the Music

I've been rabbiting on about this for some time; now The Economist is saying it too, so it must be true:

Seven years ago musicians derived two-thirds of their income, via record labels, from pre-recorded music, with the other one-third coming from concert tours, merchandise and endorsements, according to the Music Managers Forum, a trade group in London. But today those proportions have been reversed—cutting the labels off from the industry's biggest and fastest-growing sources of revenue. Concert-ticket sales in North America alone increased from $1.7 billion in 2000 to over $3.1 billion last year, according to Pollstar, a trade magazine.

...

The logical conclusion is for artists to give away their music as a promotional tool. Some are doing just that. This week Prince announced that his new album, “Planet Earth”, will be given away in Britain for free with the Mail on Sunday, a national newspaper, on July 15th. (For years Prince has made far more money from live performances than from album sales; he was the industry's top earner in 2004.) Outraged British music retailers were quick to condemn the idea. As far as the record industry is concerned, it is madness. But for the music industry, it could well be the shape of things to come.

An Opening for OpenAds

Business open source just keeps on getting stronger:

Openads, a supplier of free software used by Web sites to manage online ad campaigns, has received $5 million in initial funding, bolstering it to prepare for increasing competition globally with Google Inc.

...

London-based Openads was founded as a grassroots, open-source software development project in 1999. It has signed up 25,000 Web site publishers in more than 100 countries and 20 languages.

Maybe It's Because I'm a Dot-Ldn-er

Yes: as the world's most exciting city - think Swinging Sixties goes digital (Networked Naughties?) - London absolutely has to have its own top-level domain, and to hell with the logic:

Supporters of the campaign for London to be the first ever city to have its own internet domain name are invited to voice their support to Nominet, the UK’s internet registry.

...

Lesley Cowley, Nominet’s chief executive, says the correct extension could be either a second level domain in the .uk space, such as ldn.uk, or a top level domain such as .ldn.

(Via Vecosys.)

There is no War on Terror

Blimey, there's hope yet:

London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.

The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.

Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner...

...and a geek to boot, that I love these kind of things:

We've taken a selection of maps featured in the London: A Life in Maps exhibition and converted them into a Google Earth layer.

(Via Ogle Earth.)

There is a There There

I had occasion to use Second Life in anger the other night, by which I mean I made a serious, business-related use of it. Taking up the kind invitation of the splendidly-named Gizzy Electricteeth (SL name, of course), I went to visit IBM's recreation of the Australian Open, which I had written about earlier (and which Gizzy had spotted).

As I had surmised when reading about it, this is an impressive virtual construction, not just for what it is, but mostly for what it portends. The ability to capture a ball's path in real time, and then recreate it in Second Life - and a rapidly-moving ball at that - means that other, more sedate sports like football and cricket will be even easier to reproduce in this way.

As a result, fans of those sports (I'm told there are one or two) will not only be able to watch matches as they happen, but also replay them, watching from different angles. They could even join in - for example, taking the viewpoint of the umpire/referee, or one of the players (even I found myself "playing" tennis, with balls careering towards me at high velocity - and magically being returned).

I think this alone makes IBM's work important, because it may well be enough of a hook to get couch potatoes off their sofas and staggering towards their PCs (until, of course, somebody produces set-top boxes for TVs specifically designed for Second Life.)

But impressive as all this work was - knocked up in less than a month by a small and clearly dedicated team including said Gizzy - what really struck me most was something quite different. This was the fact that I was engaged in this immersive experience while I sat at my computer, late at night in a wintry London, as Gizzy sat at her computer, mid-morning in Australia, in the summer, and while both of us "met" in that somewhere land we call Second Life.

Whereas my previous experiences of SL have been purely of an exploratory kind - and hence retained an element of being "there" only in a shallow, unengaged sense - my visit to the IBM site, which involved me being myself, a journalist asking questions, as I do in ordinary life, was far truer, far more real. Not because of where I was, or what I saw, but because of what I was doing, which was a seamless extension of my life in another place that was neither here nor there, but simply was.

Electric London

Well, London is electric, so it makes sense for local delivery lorries to go electric too. The only questions are (a) what took so long given that milk floats have been doing it for years (as the article above points out)? and (b) why isn't everyone doing this?

The Sergeant's (Digital) Song

Well, here's a right rollicum-rorum:

Yesterday, UK telecom regulator Ofcom issued a Consultation paper on future uses of the "Digital Dividend" - the frequencies to be released when TV broadcasters migrate from analog to digital transmission.

At the same time, they released a related set of "preparatory reports" by several teams of consultants.

There is a significant difference of opinion between Ofcom and the consultants on the question of whether to reserve "Digital Dividend" frequencies for license exempt applications.

This difference leads Ofcom to encourage the public to use the just-launched consultation to provide better arguments and new proposals for worthwhile license exempt applications in the UHF band.

Ignoring highly-paid consultants? Whatever next:?

Then Little Boney he’ll pounce down,
And march his men on London town!

(Via openspectrum.info.)

A Future Danger

Criminal profilers are drawing up a list of the 100 most dangerous murderers and rapists of the future even before they commit such crimes, The Times has learnt.

The highly controversial database will be used by police and other agencies to target suspects before they can carry out a serious offence. Pilot projects to identify the highest-risk future offenders have been operating in five London boroughs for the past two months.

At the moment:

Experts from the Metropolitan Police’s Homicide Prevention Unit are creating psychological profiles of likely offenders to predict patterns of criminal behaviour.

But, as everyone knows, psychology is something of a hit-and-miss business, and not really reliable enough or scalable enough for rolling out across a nation. What we really need is something more precise, something more scientific - like a genetic pre-disposition encoded in the genome.

Some people claim to have found certain genomic characteristics of those who commit major crimes; the obvious step would be to screen people's genomes automatically for those genetic elements before they committed the crime they were hardwired to perpetrate, sparing society many problems and expenses.

Since the proof would be scientific, and not merely based on the fallible judgment of a psychologist, the guilty would have no basis to appeal against the sentences imposed upon them. Indeed, even more money could be saved by simply refusing to allow what would be unnecessary appeals in such cases, where the proof of future guilt could be found in nearly every cell of their body.

How fortunate, then, that the UK has the largest DNA database in the world....

Open University Meets Open Courseware

Great news (via Open Access News and the Guardian): the Open University is turning a selection of its learning materials into open courseware. To appreciate the importance of this announcement, a little background may be in order.

As its fascinating history shows, the Open University was born out of Britain's optimistic "swinging London" culture of the late 1960s. The idea was to create a university open to all - one on a totally new scale of hundreds of thousands of students (currently there are 210,000 enrolled). It was evident quite early on that this meant using technology as much as possible (indeed, as the history explains, many of the ideas behind the Open University grew out of an earlier "University of the Air" idea, based around radio transmissions.)

One example of this is a close working relationship with the BBC, which broadcasts hundreds of Open University programmes each week. Naturally, these are open to all, and designed to be recorded for later use - an early kind of multimedia open access. The rise of the Web as a mass medium offered further opportunities to make materials available. By contrast, the holdings of the Open University Library require a username and password (although there are some useful resources available to all if you are prepared to dig around).

Against this background of a slight ambivalence to open access, the announcement that the Open University is embracing open content for at least some of its courseware is an extremely important move, especially in terms of setting a precedent within the UK.

In the US, there is already the trail-blazing MIT OpenCourseWare project. Currently, there are materials from around 1250 MIT courses, expected to rise to 1800 by 2007. Another well-known example of open courseware is the Connexions project, which has some 2900 modules. This was instituted by Rice University, but now seems to be spreading ever wider. In this it is helped by an extremely liberal Creative Commons licence, that allows anyone to use Connexions material to create new courseware. MIT uses a Creative Commons licence that is similar, except it forbids commercial use.

At the moment, there's not much to see at the Open University's Open Content Initiative site. There is an interesting link is to information from the project's main sponsor, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, about its pioneering support for open content. This has some useful links at the foot of the page to related projects and resources.

One thing the Open University announcement shows is that open courseware is starting to pick up steam - maybe a little behind the related area of open access, but coming through fast. As with all open endeavours, the more there are, the more evident the advantages of making materials freely available becomes, and the more others follow suit. This virtuous circle of openness begetting openness is perhaps one of the biggest advantages that it has over the closed, proprietary alternatives, which by their very nature take an adversarial rather than co-operative approach to those sharing their philosophy.