Category Archives: IT and Internet

Mac Book Air mini-review and power useage bleg

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Having promised myself that I’d buy a Mac when they brought out a netbook sized MacBook Air, I did just that about nine months ago. I got forced out of Macdom many yearsafter I began on a Mac in 1986 I’ve been meaning to write a review of my experience FWIW but haven’t got round to it.

In summary

  • I was quite surprised at how much I had to figure out in making the transition from Windows.  There are a surprisingly large number of small differences and when you’re used to one way of doing things it’s surprising how often one way of doing things needs to be unbaked into memory and something else baked in.
  • Steve Jobs’ famous arrogance is on display with far more things that can’t be changed and customised to your own preferences.
  • I expected to find the Apple software better designed, but it’s not. If anything – and this is now after nine odd months, I think it’s slightly worse. The Task Bar in Windows was always a snappy device, but I didn’t realise how good it was till I discovered the dock is definitely worse. If you’ve got lots of windows open the task bar lets you navigate to different windows quickly. On the Apple it’s usually two rather than one click away. Sounds like a small thing but it’s irritating.  Still perhaps there’s a way of doing it I don’t know of. So generally I’d rate the operating system somewhat inferior to Windows in terms of convenience and intuitiveness.
  • The trackpad in the Apple is seriously better than Windows. However this isn’t a big deal for me because I use external keyboard, screen and mouse most of the time.
  • The Apple hardware is lovely.
  • Ultimately my experience hasn’t made me, like many a baked on Apple fan. But I’ll probably keep with Apple for a funny reason. I can’t stand the Microsoft Office ‘ribbon’ which is compulsory in Office from Office 2007 on. Of course the best thing to do is to simply transition out of Office but unfortunately it’s impracticable given how much I have to interface with people using Office and Open Office won’t read Microsoft Office documents without formatting glitches. However Apple has managed to get Microsoft to do for its Apple variant what it should have done all along which is to provide menus at the same time as indulging it’s obsession with the ribbon. Anyway, that means that until Microsoft changes its policy in the Windows world, I’ll probably stick with Apple computers.
  • Which brings me to the main subject of this post.  Until a week ago, my battery lasted around 3 1/2 hours. Now it lasts around 1 1/2 hours.  I don’t know of any setting  I’ve changed. The fan seems to come on more though even when it’s not on the meter seems to show much less time is left in the battery than before.  Anyway, this all suggests that, like old copies of Windows, the OS degrades in efficiency over time and needs reinstallation from time to time – if so that’s another reason I’m not happy but there you are. 1 1/2 hours is enough for most plane rides. Any clues O Troppolishous ones as to how I can fix this? (And yes, I’ve checked the power settings and there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unusual in there.)

The Independent Media Inquiry: Six impossible things by February 28th

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Right now Ray Finkelstein and Matthew Ricketson, the two members of the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry, are trying to finish off their report to the government. It’s due by 28 February.

Writing these reports is frequently difficult, but Finkelstein and Ricketson have a particularly intriguing task. It’s more difficult because they clearly want to rein in a few of traditional media’s worst excesses – and they want to do it just at a time when that traditional media is shrinking in importance in the face of an Internet-driven explosion of information availability:

  1. Finkelstein and Ricketson have to examine what the terms of reference call “the effectiveness of the current media codes of practice in Australia”. That’s tough enough on its own, because it’s hard to think of a more effective system which isn’t also more restrictive of freedom of speech. The head of Curtin University’s journalism department, Dr Joseph Fernandez, has made this point well – see the transcript of his evidence here. Fernandez perhaps understands these issues clearly because he spent 14 years editing newspapers in Malaysia, a country where editors face real experience of freedom-of-expression issues.
  2. They must examine the codes of practice “in light of technological change that is leading to the migration of print media to digital and online platforms”. Their problem here is that technological change is leading to an explosion of content that undermines the case for even existing restrictions on publishers. This is a point that Ian Rogers and I have tried to make at length in WorkDay Media’s submission to the inquiry. Traditional media had a level of oligopoly power over information distribution. These days anyone can publish. There is no longer any such thing as “the media” – rather, there is a huge and messy range of information forms, sources and channels with different levels of reach, frequency, engagement, audience trust and motivation. This is great for citizens: the “marketplace of ideas” has never been closer to being fully realised. But it’s bad for traditional publishers – and for aspiring regulators.
  3. They must assess “the impact of this technological change on the business model that has supported the investment by traditional media organisations in quality journalism and the production of news”.  For anyone who pulls the economics of media apart, the answer is pretty obvious: printed newspapers mostly won’t survive. They are losing advertisers and readers to a fundamentally more attractive and efficient Internet. The media analyst Roger Colman calculates that “all metropolitan newspapers in print editions will be unprofitable, definitely, by 2020″. But a surprising number of people don’t want to say this. And if Finkelstein and Ricketson do say it, they will instantly raise the question: “so why are we bothering about extra regulation of print media now?”.
  4. They must figure out how investment in quality journalism ”can be supported, and diversity enhanced, in the changed media environment”. This is an interesting question. But as Ian Rogers and I have argued, the answer is less obvious than many people think. The media and those who analyse it are constantly in danger of over-estimating traditional print media journalism’s contribution to the world, and underestimating the benefits of the information availability explosion which the Internet is bringing us.
  5. They must look at “ways of substantially strengthening the independence and effectiveness of the Australian Press Council, including in relation to online publications”. The ABC’s Jonathan Holmes has predicted that the inquiry will push from a stronger Press Council with more powers and a much broader remit. And that will bring us back to the inquiry’s fundamental problem: it seems to want a more activist government media body just at the time when technology is making traditional media of all sorts less dominant and undermining the case for media regulation.
  6. They will feel pressure to come up with a solution that fits in with the interim report of the Convergence Review, which has decided the inconsistency of Australia media regulations should be addressed by a system of regulating equally all members of a vaguely-defined group called “content services enterprises”. These firms’ content would be subjected to a public-interest test. The firms covered would include television, radio, newspapers and online outlets – which means print and online journalism would face new restrictions. Finkelstein and Ricketson are at least awake to the freedom-of-expression minefield that such a law would sow. As Jonathan Holmes again points out,  the convergence review’s authors seem largely, weirdly, oblivious to the whole issue.

The Independent Media Inquiry could sensibly suggest that a voluntary body provide reputation indicators for online and offline media. That’s the solution recommended by Monash University’s Dr Johan Lidberg. (The Council could also make it easier for small online media organisations to join.)

But if the inquiry recommends the Press Council or a new media super-regulator starts regulating a much wider group of reporters and commenters, and government follows that recommendation, three things will happen. The council  will be quickly overwhelmed, it will be forced to make impossible judgments, and it will eventually become a joke.

[Update: An hour after first posting, I gave in to the impulse to properly honour Lewis Carroll by adding a sixth point, on the Convergence Review.]

Bicycle cam

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One thing I think about whenever I sit in a tram waiting for cars that shouldn’t be holding up the tram to stop holding up the tram is that trams should have a video cam on them and drivers could have a button that either activates the cam or marks the spot at which it is running and if the car was breaking the road rules it gets a ticket. Improves efficiency and brings in a bit of revenue. What’s there not to like. Anyway, the same idea has been proposed various times in the past but has never managed to be implemented. I don’t know why. But as is so often the case, technology’s capacity to decentralise these decisions is leading the way – with bicycle cams as illustrated above. Handy in court cases.

The GLAM Sector bytes a hand that tried to feed it: Or how really terrific organisations can do really silly things

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Tim O’Reilly proposed the slogan “Government as a platform” for his Government 2.0 activities which he’s heavily scaled back in favour of more lucrative opportunities. But there was always a problem. That problem was that it wasn’t so much that no-one had ever had the idea that government might be an enabling resource – a platform in the lingo of Web 2.0. The real problem is that government has no culture of this. Departments are proprietorial and secretive and that’s a tenacious culture which is prevented from evaporating by lots of expectations and structures.

But there is one part of government that has cultivated the culture of ‘Government as a platform’ since its inception around a century and a half or so ago:  The GLAM sector – that’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums. I couldn’t help noticing when doing the Government 2.0 Taskforce that the GLAM sector were up and at it long before anyone else. The National Library had its newspaper digitisation program and Seb Chan from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum was on our Taskforce and instrumental in getting us to run a mashup competition – and likely instrumental in getting the Powerhouse to become the first museum anywhere in the world to post its historic photos on Flikr and licence them Creative Commons. Seb’s unit built the mashup of baby names in NSW which is fascinating to play with.

I also learned about all the problems the national and state libraries were having getting rights to archive web content that were analogous to their rights as libraries of record to receive a copy of all publications in their jurisdiction from publishers. If they had such rights all they would need would be a robot to go and collect the material and Bob’s your uncle. In fact without this, much of their efforts involve sending people letters to ask their permission to archive their sites. I discussed with various people in libraries of record having such rights which certainly made sense to me.

Anyway, they still don’t have such rights.

Meanwhile . . . they are certainly keen on their rights to printed material as you will observe from this letter I received from the Victorian State Library this week (I might add that The Victorian State Library is a terrific organisation, which I am very fond of, but even terrific organisations do really silly things):

The State Library of Victoria tries to collect a copy of all books, videos, CD’s, CD-ROMs, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers and any other items published in Victoria for permanent preservation in the Library.

To help us in this endeavour, legislation was passed in 1869 requiring publishers to deposit free of charge with the library a copy of every item published in Victoria. Current legislation is contained in section 49 of the Libraries Act 1988 (see enclosed leaflet).

Recently the following publication came to our notice.

The economic value of Australia’s investment in health and medical research: reinforcing the evidence for exceptional returns. 

We look forward to receiving a copy of this publications (sic), as well as any other publications you might not have previously sent us for legal deposit. Please follow the enclosed legal deposit instructions when forwarding publications. Continue reading →

Archiving Government websites: Should it really be this hard?

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When I did the Government 2.0 Taskforce, one of the subjects that was earnestly discussed was archiving of government sites.  It’s a big problem in government. I could never see why it should be a big problem. After all you can look at anything written on ClubTroppo since it started.  We haven’t spent any huge amount of money to deliver that kind of functionality, haven’t burned any midnight oil. But IT people in government told that it’s very expensive to keep web pages live. I have no idea why but they swore black and blue that it was.

Anyway I recently sought to track down the results of Obama’s less than spectacularly successful community brainstorming on open government when he came into office. (The top two suggestions for promoting open government were legalising marijuana. The other big thing was releasing Obama’s birth certificate.) Anyway I emailed an American friend who’d been in the White House at the relevant time – now back in academia – asking for any write up of the program and she told me there was one in a 2009 annual review of operations.  But it’s gone from the website and no-one has been able to find it in a couple of weeks. This is 2009!

For another project I was also looking up the old Power of Information Taskforce in the UK.  Here’s Tom Steinberg’s blog entry announcing its release.

I’m delighted to announce that the review I’ve been working on with Ed Mayo and the Cabinet Office has launched today. You can get the official PDF version here or my friend Sam Smith’s annotatable version that he just threw together.

I clicked on the first link and it went through to here.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/publications/reports/power_information/power_information.pdf

Which was promising. It said this.

This snapshot taken on 25/11/2010, shows web content selected for preservation by The National Archives. External links, forms and search boxes may not work in archived websites. Find out more about web archiving at The National Archives. See all dates available for this archived website 

Object moved to here.

Alas, it wasn’t there either and I was diverted to a Cabinet Office Page Not found signal – as you can see for yourself if you want to click on the link.

Meanwhile one of the things that the Power of Information Taskforce and Review did was to publish using commercial blogging platforms. And everything using that remains safe and sound. “Sam Smith’s annotatable version” that Steinberg says Sam “threw together” refers to on his blog is still there, safe and sound. Likewise the Government 2.0 Taskforce published to its own url using Wordpress software, and it’s still there too, it’s cost to government would be the same as the cost of Troppo to those of us who run it – the cost of the domain name registration, which is about $30 a year or something, though the cost to government of maintaining the UK’s Power of Information review, which is a sub-domain of wordpress.com is exactly zero.

So it still eludes me why, with all the resources to hand, governments make it quite so difficult for themselves.

Government 2.0: my first column of the Gittins Summer break

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Ross Gittins asked me if I’d fill in for him during his summer break, which gives me a chance to get a few things off my chest. So here’s the first of four weekly columns.

In 2009, I chaired the federal government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce. We sketched out how government might be transformed by the open zeitgeist and tools of Web 2.0 – like Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Web 2.0 massively scales up our capacity to communicate – with possibilities both trivial and earth-shaking. And it scales up simple improvisation. Whether you’re organising a party or a working bee, just hop on to Facebook or Twitter and Bob’s your uncle.

Two hours after the Christchurch earthquake, work commenced on a map on the net on which could be plotted emerging developments on the ground. The information, such as the address of pharmacies that still had insulin, was parsed from 300,000 tweets bearing hashtags like #eqnz.

If you think this was a job for official emergency services on the ground, think again. Tim McNamara wasn’t with the government, but spearheaded the initiative from the North Island capital Wellington. The people who parsed the tweets were further away still, a band of humanitarian ”Crisis Commons” volunteers spanning every continent. Continue reading →