Preoccupations

Music like running water

John Naughton, writing in today's Observer, recalls a 2002 NYT article about David Bowie in which the musician speculated on the future of music:

'The absolute transformation of everything we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years,' he wrote, 'and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music, itself, is going to become like running water or electricity...'

If you want to read the NYT piece, you can go here and pay $3.95 for the pleasure. And it's worth reading. Alternatively, you can go here and read it for free. Or here. I find it … amusing that the NYT carries an article prophesying the end of copyright as we know it, then tries to charge you for the same article — only to find itself defeated by the power of the net.

And that's the point. As Naughton's Observer article explains, what has happened so far (mp3/compression technology, Napster/etc, iPods/etc) to change the music-as-packaged-product model for the broadcasting and entertainment industries is but

… half a revolution, because it's still [my emphasis] based on the music-as-product model. For the record industry, it has been an unqualified disaster, because millions of people aren't paying for their packages. Legal download services like Apple iTunes are beginning to mitigate the disaster, but it's not clear that even iTunes can compete with illicit file-sharing.

So what's to be done? Here's where the water analogy comes in. It's as if we lived in a world where water was only made available in Perrier bottles, so that if you want the stuff you have to buy (or steal) bottles. But in fact water is also available as a public service, piped through mains and available by turning a tap. We pay for this either via a flat tax or a charge based on how much we use, and everyone is (reasonably) happy. We have access to water whenever we need it; and the companies that provide the stuff earn reasonable revenues from providing it.

As broadband internet access becomes ubiquitous - and wireless - this model suddenly becomes feasible for music. At the moment, the only way we can have the stuff we crave is to buy or steal the product. But if we could access whatever we wanted, at any time, on payment of a levy, our need to own the packages would diminish. We could just turn on the tap, as it were, and get Beethoven or So Solid Crew on demand. Not to mention the collected works of David Bowie. And then we could give him a Brit Award for being so far ahead of the game.

Bowie's vision of the future (2012!) is wilder/more radical than Naughton's, of course.

Harold Pinter

Tributes in abundance to Pinter on his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature (see here for articles in the Guardian and Times). On his website, he has a brief statement about being awarded the Prize … and then this:

In 1958 I wrote the following:

"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Pinter's speech, 'Torture and Misery in Name of Freedom', can be read here. Excerpt:

The great poet Wilfred Owen articulated the tragedy, the horror - and indeed the pity - of war in a way no other poet has. Yet we have learnt nothing. Nearly 100 years after his death the world has become more savage, more brutal, more pitiless.

Culture catch-up

The last few days:

• To the Oxford Playhouse to see the ETT in Hamlet. It left me unmoved — a decent, clean and clear production with Ed Stoppard in the lead. A BBC page says of the ETT and this production: 'ETT is renowned for the clarity and style of its work … This new production of Hamlet will stay true to the company’s ethos of producing raw, direct and passionate theatre'. I agree with the clarity bit, but no, there was little that was 'raw' or 'passionate'. I couldn't find any review of the production last week (when I went), but Michael Billington panned it on Friday in The Guardian:

… the English Touring Theatre offer us a middle-of-the-road, Jacobean-costumed version that has nothing fresh to say about the play. I have no problem with the period setting; it is the failure to investigate either the human relationships or the political context that troubles me. … this is set-text Shakespeare shrouded in decent dullness. When you recall that ETT began 12 years ago with Alan Cumming's capriciously eccentric Hamlet you feel that the company has dwindled into respectability.

There was an interview with Ed Stoppard in The Independent (conducted prior to the production).

• I finally got around to watching the film of The Madness of George III, The Madness of King George. I always feel with Bennett that there are much greater dramatic depths to be plumbed than he permits himself to look into. I saw the original stage production and prefer that greatly for its tightness, focus and energy — the central performance of Nigel Hawthorne being allowed to occupy its proper place.
• Robert Crawford came to read at school on Wednesday evening and stayed the night. It was a good reading to which some of those present responded warmly. Robert opened with 'Chaps', of which the Literary Encyclopedia says:

In the militaristic-toned poem “Chaps”, Crawford uses repetition and language reminiscent of the stiff-upper-lip Englishman to convey a sense of how maleness has historically been perceived as both macho and a necessary element in the constitution of the British imperialistic project:

With his Bible, his Burns, his brose and his baps,
Colonel John Buchan is one of the chaps,
With his mother, his mowser, his mauser, his maps,
Winston S. Churchill is one of the chaps.

Even the rhyme scheme and parallelism in this poem seems to play into the requirements of an essentialized British Empire. The regimentation of language is one of the dangerous consequences of imperialism and one that denies voices from breaking through and interacting with others. The refrain that Crawford employs has a similar effect: “Chaps chaps chaps chaps/ Chaps chaps chaps chaps”.

The marching regularity is emphasized but so too is the gender. A “chap” is not just any old male, it is a male who has been shaped by a past that requires that he behave in a particular way and communicate his gender in a fashion that must reflect the superiority and power of the state.

A concern with language, communication and identity marks much of Robert's work.

Later that evening, we joined up with Jamie McKendrick for supper. Conversation naturally focused on poets and poetry, but Jamie and Robert are both interested in the visual arts. Jamie spoke of his admiration for Plath's drawing of Ted Hughes, recently sold by Bonhams.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Bonhams 1793 Ltd

• Friday saw some of us go to catch Seth Lakeman on tour (St Mary's Church, Marlborough). I'm not in to English folk music much, but Seth Lakeman came to prominence earlier this year when he was nominated for the Mercury Prize and we felt we should go and hear him. (He also hit the headlines last year when he launched his new album at Dartmoor Prison.) He is a fine musician, the solo pieces he played being exceptionally powerful. As a trio they worked very well together, with marked mutual understanding, and his drummer proved a great hit with our party — photos. If he's to gain more fame and following, his music will inevitably have to shift somewhat. Acoustic now, he is already being described on the web as 'folk-rock' and on his own website as 'indie-folk'. One to watch.

Conversation is different from talk

Theodore Zeldin (shamelessly lifted from The Obvious — it's just too good and I want to remember it):

Conversation is different from talk

Talk in the past was about rising up the social scale. Etiquette - not what you thought. You had your place in society and that was it.

Conversation is a new thing. Conversation means who you keep company with. Not just the exchange of words - a social activity. When society was hierarchical we had one kind of conversation - now we need to invent a new kind of conversation. An exploration and self revelation. You each reveal things about what are important to you in your lives. You have admitted each other into private worlds and created links - you create shared experiences.

Women in the public sphere represent the biggest revolution since agriculture. They have introduced the complete human being into conversation and not just the trappings of power. Things can never be the same again.

I am trying to put together some thoughts about teaching and how it has changed over the last 20 years (the length of time I've been teaching). Zeldin's words (the above being Euan Semple's rough notes of what he heard Zeldin say) resonate very much with what I've been thinking about, particularly that last paragraph: the complete human being, in conversation.

Zeldin's website is The Oxford Muse, A foundation to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life. There's a biography of Zeldin on the website.

Ha?

Was this "it"?

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Google Inc. today announced an agreement to promote and distribute their software technologies to millions of users around the world. The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun's Java Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, helping millions of users worldwide to participate in the next wave of Internet growth.

Under the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on http://java.com. In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite available at http://www.openoffice.org.

Wait and see.

Update (5.10.2005): a general sense of disappointment is prevalent (see, eg, Inside Google), but John Battelle's take is, as ever, illuminating:

The Toolbar, in the end, is how Google pushes out Microsoft. Seems the push is on to get more Toolbars downloaded. And now, I see why Google is doing this Sun deal. It's the Toolbar, of course! From the Cnet coverage:

Details about what exactly that will entail were vague at best, with the only nugget offered being that Sun, in the immediate future, will make Google's toolbar a standard part of the package when users download Sun's Java Runtime Environment from the server seller's Web site.

In other words, Google really, really wants more Toolbar distribution. Watch this space.

Update (6.10.2005): Shel Israel writes,

My good friend Richard Brandt has started a blog on Google.  It is altogether fitting that he should because: (1) he's more knowledgeable on that company than anyone I know, and (2) he's writing a book about it.

Richard Brandt's take on Google/Sun?

It’s surprising to me that some people who profess to follow and analyze Google’s actions and strategies still don’t realize how secretive this company is. … Sun, however, is a company with a bigger mouth. Sun President Jonathan Schwartz described just what people wanted to hear in his blog. All of a sudden, just as the deal with Google is being announced, he decides to write an enthusiastic essay on the promise of software as a service and its potential to unseat Microsoft. Even though that’s an idea that Sun has been working on for years. Jonathan also titled his blog The Value in Volume, the most boring headline Sun PR could come up with. But they forgot to tell him to change the url for his blog, which seems to give his original title for the column: entry=the_world_changes_this_week

There’s no question about it. Google is going to, within a year at most (and probably less considering the speed at which Google travels) start offering PC applications like word processing and spreadsheets as a service on its site. … They will announce it when they release it in beta on the Google site.

Google Office

No sooner do I blog (yesterday) about the rumours than Robert writes:

Internet News: Next Up: Google Office.

Google and Sun are set to announce that tomorrow. Ahh, I expected to see this someday. Google's Chris Uhlik (who ran the Gmail and Toolbar teams) told me at Foocamp 2004 that Google was working on Calendaring (expected soon too).

The internetnews.com article Robert points to runs thus (well worth quoting at some length):

Google and Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) will hold a press conference on Tuesday at which they're expected to announce a collaboration to bring StarOffice productivity applications to Google users. … Google's dip into OpenOffice began with its hiring of Joerg Heilig, former director of software engineering at Sun, according to Gary Edwards, a consultant and designated representative of the OpenOffice.org open source community. "He was the project manager for StarOffice, a longtime employee of the Star division, and a very important person to StarOffice," Edwards said. "When he left, there were some real tears. Also a great deal of apprehension." Community scuttlebutt was that Google was on a hunt for OpenOffice and StarOffice developers, and everyone in the company's Hamburg division was a target, according to Edwards. "No one knows what Google was going to do with Joerg, but they had the keys to the kingdom when they got him," Edwards said.

It has long been rumored that Google is developing its own operating system or desktop, with an online calendaring application scheduled to be released in October. The partnership with Sun seems to indicate that Google's direction is to build out what is, in essence, an alternative to Microsoft Office. Google already offers e-mail, photo managing and instant messaging applications. …

But the ramifications go far beyond free, online apps for consumers, Edwards said, because StarOffice is far more than just an alternative to Microsoft Office. StarOffice -- or OpenOffice -- is based on standard XML, so it can act as the transformation layer between any application that can read the XML file format and legacy applications. "If Google comes along and … provides some basic AJAX-based editing, and allows people to do this editing in XHTML and OpenDocument, you have a clear line of capability that goes from simple HTML to a little bit more complicated but data-centric XHTML to a truly bridging XML technology, OpenDocument," Edwards said. OpenDocument is an OASIS standard for a single XML-based file format for text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents. It was ratified in May. Google already offers Gmail users plenty of storage for their e-mail archives. If it extended that storage to other kinds of documents that were generated in conformance with the OpenDocument standard, and then combined that with a Web-based productivity suite to connect users to their stored information via any browser, the result would be a platform that could transform business collaboration as well as consumer communications.

"Imagine StarOffice running on the desktop, and Google perfecting the [file synchronization]," said Edwards. "Then you have your collaboration space carved out immediately for you, and Google is hosting it."

And, surprise, surprise, there's this fresh in from CNET News:

Tim Bray, the director of Web technologies at Sun, said at the OpenOffice.org conference in Slovenia late last week that the file format developed by standards body OASIS has the potential to transform the world as much as the World Wide Web did. "Now we have the potential to explode the world again, to turn everything inside out again, if we get the widespread use across the office desktops of the world, of a common, open, unencumbered, reusable data format, namely OpenDocument," Bray said at the conference. "So we could see an explosion over the next decade that is like the Web happening again. And that would be fun--I'd love to see that happening."

Office on the web

How long will it be before a full suite of platform-independent ajax-enabled office applications becomes available? If all you need is a browser to open and edit these documents, the huge network effect enjoyed by Microsoft Office could simply vanish. techcrunch

Can’t wait to see Google’s (rumored) full Ajax suite that is (rumored to be) coming out this year. techcrunch

I'm watching: Writely, JotSpot Live, Writeboard, Chalk, Zoho Writer … Richard MacManus is watching many more sites than me and looks into the future:

I do think that long-term, the writing is on the wall for desktop office applications. Once the current crop of alpha and beta web-based office products reach a level of maturity, they will be ready to challenge Microsoft for the minds and pockets of consumers. One of the keys is achieving the level of functionality that Microsoft Office undeniably has. But there are also issues of online security and reliability that web-based apps will need to address, in time. Office apps are just too important to corporate productivity for CIOs and IT managers to entrust their businesses with web-based apps, without complete confidence in their functionality (ability to do the job efficiently) and performance (security and uptime).

The time for the web-based office will come, mark my words. When broadband is ubiquitous, web functionality is richer, issues of security and reliability have been put to rest, and most importantly of all - when Corporates are ready to make the jump. It may be 5-10 years down the track, it may be longer.

techcrunch profiles Chalk here, JotSpot Live here and Writely here. Solution Watch takes a thorough look at Writeboard and techcrunch has a brief piece about it. 37Signals has this, amongst other things, to say about their product:

Where are all those fancy “WOW! WOAH!” features?
Where’s the MS Word export? Or the real-time live editing with other people? Or the WYSIWYG editing mode? Or the ability to drag and drop text around to reorder paragraphs? They’re in JotSpot Live and Writely. If you need that stuff check them out. If you just want to write, share, revise, and compare quickly, easily, and with minimal fuss, check Writeboard out. …

What about that Backpack integration you talked about above?
Starting today, if you have a Backpack account, you’ll see a “Writeboards” tab in Backpack. This allows you to create writeboards inside Backpack. Plus, when you create writeboards inside Backpack, all those writeboards will be listed inside Backpack for easy retrieval. Further, you can import any writeboard into Backpack and even attach writeboards to any Backpack page via the new “writeboards” button at the top of every Backpack page. It’s pretty slick.

Institutions of this new century

via Pasta and Vinegar:

« My ideal XXIst century institution would appear less like an “institution” as such, than as a constantly evolving and flexible organism, or a network connecting people on a “global” mode, people who have ideas and people who act. It should be able to respond to the most varied forms of thought and media, and more precisely, to face the challenge represented by the new complexity arising from the merging of new forms of social emergency and new technologies. And while it develops it should also take in account the emergence of this other fact : the collapse of the centre of the world. »

Hou Hanru : curator indépendant in "Qu’attendez vous d’une institution artistique du XXI° siècle ?" (What do you expect from a XXIst century art institution ?). Ed palais de Tokyo. Conteners

I've always had the greatest problems with institutions and institutional life. ('Regimentation and education are incompatible' — Gerald Vann, OP.) Hou Hanru's vision is something I can understand and respond to. Nicolas Nova (Pasta and Vinegar) comments (I'm selecting and, in this instance, changing his emphases):

… it seems that this kind of definition is more applied recently to private companies in our supercapitalist days … Will private companies be organized like art groups? interactive labs?

(My son, Tom, who's studying in Paris, showed us round the palais de Tokyo earlier this year.)

Nifty Web 2.0 definition

I enjoyed Tim O'Reilly's long piece about Web 2.0, but his summary has focused my mind:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.