Posts Tagged ‘Times Hit Silicon’
Apple Vs. The Internet
Long before Appleeven announced its new iPad, media companies were going nuts about the device, for two reasons. First, they believed they would be able to create apps that would be gorgeous and stunning and way better than anything theyve been able to do on a Web browser. Second, money. As in, media companies figured that with apps, customers would be willing to pay subscription fees, something they have been reluctant if not outright unwilling to do when their news delivered via a browser.
The idea of getting people to pay for news again was especially appealing to old-media companies. Those guys have been online for a decade or so, and most still cant figure out how to make money over the Internet. In the original version of the magical thinking that surrounded the Web, media companies were led to believe that the Internet was a pot of gold, and that the money they would make via the Web would offset the declines in their print businesses. Instead, their Internet divisions have turned out to be money losers; instead of solving the problem, they are often making it worse.
Ah, but here comes the iPad, and with it a fresh round of magical thinking, with a three-step process that goes like this:
1. Create an app
2. Um
3. Profits!
And who knows? That may work out. But it’s worth noting that some of the savvier denizens of Internet media have not leaped on the Apple iPad app bandwagon. Case in pointNick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, who says he wont rule out the idea of creating apps for Apples environment, but for now he will happily stick to delivering news via the plain old browser, thank you very much.
Every single time something new comes out and people wonder whats the killer app, the answer is the same. Its the Web every time.The boring old Web, Denton says, or rather writes, since we were doing the interview via IM, Dentons preferred mode of communication.
Denton has looked at some of the news-media apps and says hes unimpressed. Wasnt it obvious when one played with the WSJ and Time apps that the apps were a massive step back? he says. I loved the look of the Time app, but then I tried to select and copy a paragraph to send to a friend. I did the action automatically, without even thinking.
And guess what? You cant do that. You cant e-mail. You cant bookmark. It made me realize how much the experience of reading has changed. Nobody really just reads anymore. They copy text, send links, tweet, Denton says.
Theres another issue for media companies to consider,which is, do you really dare to get into bed with Apple, and put yourself at the mercy of Steve Jobs?
Over and over, Apple has run roughshod over its partners. This is Apples one great weaknessthey simply do not know how to play well with others.
Recently Apple has been bullying developers, issuing new rules telling them what tools they can and cannot use when they make apps. Apple also hopes to give itself a leg up in the advertising space by prohibiting apps from sharing usage data with third-party ad networks. Apples new policies reportedly now have drawn the attention of federal antitrust regulators.
More relevant to media companies is the way Apple has been policing content, blocking apps that ridicule public figures or contain material that Apple considers objectionable. Why would a media organization align itself with a distributor that insists on having a say about the material that is being published?
The reason is that Apple has rounded up a huge audience, having sold close to 80 million devices that run the iPhone OS. Weve all heard about the little companies that are making lots of money selling iPhone apps.
The hope among media companies seems to be that its worth putting up with Apples control-freakery for a chance to get in on the gold rush. Plus, dont forget, the media companies are struggling, and they cant figure out the Internet, and desperate times call for desperate measures, and so forth.
In other words, from Apples perspective, theyre perfect.
Just rememberthe music industry at one time made a similar Faustian bargain with Jobs & Co., betting that the pros would outweigh the cons. They didnt come away too thrilled.
As Goliath, Fb Targets The Fallacious David
Facebook won an important skirmish in the privacy wars this week. That
is one way, at least, to read the
news that the social-networking startup successfully forced Pete
Warden, a tech entrepreneur and former Apple engineer, to delete a
data set culled from Facebook’s public profile pages. Warden had spent
several months and tens of thousands of dollars crawling the public
pages and collecting data on individualstheir location, fan pages, and a
sampling of their friendships. Warden planned to release the data to a
select group of academics, who wanted to use it to
study how social networks affect disease transmission or unemployment.
When Facebook threatened to sue, Warden agreed to delete the whole
thing. And thus Facebook beat back one of the hacker-barbarians at the
gate.
Of course, there is another way to read this: that this is
more about PR than privacy. Facebook was once the dorm-room project of
Mark Zuckerberg, who hacked into university IT systems to expand his
popular project; now it’s a major corporation, valued by some at $14
billion and eyeing an IPO. Warden and his data set threatened to
embarrass the company, which is no stranger to privacy-related PR
nightmares. (See: Beacon.)
Facebook’s lawyers acted accordingly. David has grown into Goliath and
is sending cease-and-desist letter to anyone with a slingshot.
The second storyline seems more plausible. Of course, it’s true that there are
massive privacy implications whenever someone collects a dataset including lots
of personal information. During an interview in New York City in February,
Warden admitted that one of the first things he did after compiling the data was
delete the information from Iran. Why? He didn’t want to give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s
security snoops a ready-made tool for discovering which Iranians had,
say, joined the fan page of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.
The snoops could have found the same information on their own quite
easilyall it takes is a Google searchbut there is power in
aggregation, and Warden didn’t want to unintentionally aid a cruel and
indiscriminate regime. Moreover, before releasing the rest of the
data set to a carefully vetted group of academics, Warden planned to
delete identifying information like namesto “anonymize” it, as
programmers say. But a well-publicized 2008
research paper by computer scientists at the University of Texas at
Austin showed that it’s next to impossible to scrub data totally clean.
They successfully “de-anonymized” parts of a huge data set of customers’
movie ratings released by Netflix.
Scary stuff, right? But as
Warden points out, “the data I was planning to release is already
in the hands of lots of commercial marketing firms.” Companies like
Rapleaf and InfoUSA hoard our information, collecting everything from
individual e-mail addresses to Facebook fan-page membership to household
income. A huge network (including banks, credit-card companies, and, yes,
magazines) constantly trades this data. And Warden’s censure will do
nothing to stop that. Indeed, the public profile pages he crawled remain
public. Marketers, spammers, and hackers are free to re-create Warden’s
effort. And presumably they won’t be brash enough to blog about it, so
Facebook may never know. Nor will they be philanthropic enough to give
away their information hoard to public-health researchers.
So
let’s take a tally. Facebook has succeeded in stopping one responsible,
cautious entrepreneur from delivering public information to
public-interest-minded researchers. Meanwhile, countless companies are
using the same information for more mercenary reasons; some may even be
using it for illegal pursuits like phishing passwords or hacking bank
accounts. Sounds like Goliath is targeting slingshots when there are
IEDs all over the place.
When A Family Tragedy Turns Into A Youtube Sensation
It seems an ever-more common scenario: a death is captured in a photograph or video. The images are uploaded onto the Web. Within days, thousands, if not millions, of strangers have pierced their way into a familys griefgawking at the final moments of a life that were never meant to be public. Its a scenario thats ongoing for the family of Nikki Catsouras, the 18-year-old Orange County girl killed in a 2006 car crashher mangled remains leaked onto the Web by two police dispatchers. Now its the latest battle for the family of Dawn Brancheau, the 40-year-old SeaWorld Orca trainer who drowned last month after she was yanked by her ponytail and held underwater by the six-ton whale she trained. The attack happened in front of a number of horrified tourists whod attended a show just moments before.
Brancheaus family announced this week that they would seek an injunction to protect the release of the death imagery, captured by SeaWorlds surveillance cameras on Feb. 24. And though the video has not yet been publicly released, its presently in the hands of the Florida Orange County Sheriffs Office, which is investigating the womans death. (Please note this Orange County Sheriffs Office has no connection to the California Orange County Sheriffs Office responsible for the Catsouras leak.) Under Florida law, however, the tape would be made public once the investigation is completewhich could mean that any number of media outlets, bloggers, or unaffiliated interested parties could release the footage on the Web and elsewhere. We see this a lot, says legal scholar Dan Solove, an expert on privacy and the Internet, because there are a lot of states that havent fully thought through what they do with their public records.
Like the family of Nikki Catsouras, the Brancheaus have said that the public airing of their daughters death would only worsen their grief. And while the images do indeed appear to be fair game under Florida law, there is some precedent to prevent their release. The Brancheau family is working with the lawyer who represented Teresa Earnhardt, the widow of NASCAR racer Dale Earnhardt, who was killed in a crash during the last lap of the Daytona 500 in February 2001. In that case, Earnhardts widow petitioned a judge to seal her husbands autopsy records, and Floridas state legislature ultimately passed a law exempting the future release of such photosalong with audio and videowithout the express permission from the victims next of kin.
The Brancheau video isnt autopsy imagery, but it is an issue of free speech and privacyand in many ways, say legal experts, the precedent set by Earnhardt could still apply. Certain speech is not as valuable as other speech, and I think we need to say that, says Solove, the author of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. And while [the release of such imagery] may satisfy a morbid curiosity, I dont think it really serves a great purpose otherwise. Thats certainly what the Brancheaus hope the Florida legal system will see.
Source: blog.newsweek.com