Dadblog

I read this my mouth wide open. Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal - Blog Maverick. I can’t quite believe it. In fact, only Mark Cuban and maybe a dozen other bloggers could get away with posting it. Cuban’s basically posted something from a discussion group which claims that $500m of the $1.6bn purchase price of YouTube was put into escrow as a way of compensating media companies who were lining up major suits against YouTube, and that the money would be paid in the form of equity positions in YouTube which Google would buy back as a means of withholding royalties from the talent who created the copyrighted material.

It gets even more amazing when the post goes into the quid pro quo claimed by GooTube in return for these payments:

The first request was a simple one and that was an agreement to look the other way for the next 6 months or so while copyright infringement continues to flourish. This standstill is cloaked in language about building tools to help manage the content and track royalties, some of which is true but also G knows that every day they can operate in the shadows of copyright law is another day that Youtube can grow. It should be noted that Google video is a capable Youtube competitor with the ONE big difference being a much more sincere effort to not post unauthorized works - and Google fully appreciates what a difference that makes. So you can continue to find movie clips, tv show segments and just about every music video on Youtube today.

The second request was to pile some lawsuits on competitors to slow them down and lock in Youtube’s position. As Google looked at it they bought a 6 month exclusive on widespread video copyright infringement. Universal obliged and sued two capable Youtube clones Bolt and Grouper. This has several effects. First, it puts enormous pressure on all the other video sites to clamp down on the laissez-faire content posting that is prevalent. If Google is agreeing to remove unauthorized content they want the rest of the industry doing the same thing. Secondly it shuts off the flow of venture capital investments into video firms. Without capital these firms can’t build the data centers and pay for the bandwidth required for these upside down businesses.

I say again: I don’t quite believe any of this. I only posted it because it’s so jaw-droppingly fascinating in its paranoia. But clearly there were deals done. Clearly these deals are very interesting. Clearly Google’s next SEC filing will be pored over. And clearly Mark Cuban is in for an interesting 24 hours.

• Reinventing HTML | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs
  “The plan is to charter a completely new HTML group. Unlike the previous one, this one will be chartered to do incremental improvements to HTML, as also in parallel xHTML. It will have a different chair and staff contact. It will work on HTML and xHTML to
  (tags: standards w3c html)

Thanks to Norman Geras for this from a US sergeant in Iraq:

In Germany after World War II, we controlled our sector with approximately 500,000 troops, directly administering the area for 10 years while we rebuilt the country and rebuilt the social and political infrastructure needed to run it. In Iraq, we’ve got one-third that number of troops dealing with three times the population on a much faster timetable, and we’re attempting to unify three distinct ethnic groups with no national interest and at least three outside influences (Saudi Arabian Wahhabists, Iranian mullahs and Syrian Baathists) each eagerly funding various groups in an attempt to see us fail. And we are.

If we continue on as is in Iraq, we will leave here (sooner or later) with a fractured state, a Rwanda-waiting-to-happen. “Stay the course” and refusing to admit that we’re screwing things up is already killing a lot of people needlessly. Following through with such inane nonstrategy is going to be the death knell for hundreds of thousands of Sunnis.

We need to backtrack. We need to publicly admit we’re backtracking. This is the opening battle of the ideological struggle of the 21st century. We cannot afford to lose it because of political inconveniences. Reassert direct administration, put 400,000 to 500,000 American troops on the ground, disband most of the current Iraqi police and retrain and reindoctrinate the Iraqi army until it becomes a military that’s fighting for a nation, not simply some sect or faction. Reassure the Iraqi people that we’re going to provide them security and then follow through. Disarm the nation: Sunnis, Shias, militia groups, everyone. Issue national ID cards to everyone and control the movement of the population.

The whole Iraq thing is reminding me a dysfunctional business that doesn’t have the stamina or willpower or passion to get something done properly so decides to withdraw from doing it and find something else a lot easier (like, say, Iran or North Korea - dead easy, that). Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of going into Iraq, you have to admit in your heart of hearts that an immediate withdrawal would be a disaster for the Iraqi people and that a withdrawal would be a festering black mark on the conscience of the industrial West. In any dilemma, the easy solution is more likely to be wrong in the long term. Don’t withdraw. Do it right.

• Peuplade
  French version of outside.in
  (tags: messymedia localnews)
• London Borough of Lambeth
  Fabulous old images of where I live (and other London boroughs, in what seems to be a combined initiative).
  (tags: london hernehill photos)

• News and jobs for journalists :: What's on TV to launch online
  Whatsontv.co.uk will have its own editorial staff compiling a multi-channel film and TV listings guide, TV news, gossip and previews. The magazine previously launched a mobile service and formed a partnership with Electra Entertainment taking the brand on
  (tags: tvlistings whatsontv ipcmedia)
• outside.in
  Steven Johnson’s new venture, a local mash-up based on US neighbourhoods.
  (tags: local messymedia)
• The New York Times > Science > Slide Show > A Descent Into Alzheimer’s
  William Utermohlen’s self-portraits reveal his descent into dememtia over the span of nearly four decades. Compelling and brutal.
  (tags: painting art alzheimers)

An interesting idea, is News Sniffer. Someone’s built a little site that tracks revisions to articles on the BBC, Guardian and Independent web sites, and also tracks posts that were deleted from certain BBC threads. I have no idea how they’re doing the latter; it seems very cool and also, if you’re the BBC, very dangerous.

But like Richard Sambrook I do have a problem with the site itself, in that it seems unsigned. Who is this person? Don’t they think they should declare themselves? What is their interest in “sniffing the news”? Because without this information, I’m afraid that I’m going to draw conclusions, such as this: does the fact that they’re only monitoring the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent suggest some kind of political bias of their own?

And yes, I know I can find out who NewsSniffer is by sniffing around - the point is, I shouldn’t have to (and anyway he doesn’t update his blog very often). Declare yourself, sir.

I am acutely grateful to my good friend Andy Levy for introducing me to David Foster Wallace. I’d never read any of his stuff, and on Andy’s recommendation went out and got Consider the Lobster, a collection of Wallace’s (Foster Wallace’s?) essays from around the place, which I commend to you as adult, passionate, funny, literate and moving. Life-changing, even.

One of the essays, Authority and American Usage, makes a vivid case for the preservation of an “authoritative” form of American English, while acknowledging the danger of pedantry and alienation for those not comfortable with Standard Written English. So what would he have made of the current Ford campaign featuring James Bond? Because this features the presumably heavily-discussed tagline “Licenced and Loaded.”

Now, consider how wrong this is. It isn’t even normal American usage (which would presumably be Licensed and Loaded). British usage suggests Licensed and Loaded also, as the verbal form is “license” not “licence.”

So this campaign went through the entire Ford infrastructure of marketing, strategy, purchasing, creative, and whatever, and not one person said “er, that’s wrong.” Not one. And now it’s on posters and in cinemas. Rumours that Ford’s new car is to be called the Random Apostrophe are, as yet, unconfirmed.

Shame on you, Ford. But read David Foster Wallace. Particularly his essay on Tracy Austin. You’ll never watch sport in quite the same way again.

This was going to be a mildly interesting riff on the fact that Easyjet seems very middle class these days. I flew to Portugal on Friday night for a weekend of golf on the Algarve (and how middle class it that?), and the Easyjet flight we flew out of Gatwick was wing-to-wing sensible fleeces and expensively casual jeans. The woman next to us sat down and ordered sandwiches and crisps for her kids and a couple of small bottles of champagne for herself. There wasn’t even anything remotely chavvy about her ordering - she just laughed at her own presumption, raised a glass to us and blamed it on “three sodding hours on the M4″. Hours spent on the M4 - I mean, say it again, how middle class is that?

And then I got back to John Harris in the Guardian today, and had one of those moments when a commentator you normally find intensely annoying says something which brings you up sharp and short:

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A cloistered metropolitan elite is in denial about Britain

At the risk of sounding hopelessly pious, it’s worth repeating some statistics: not just the fact that 12 million Britons live on or below the poverty line, defined in the case of a two-adult household at £180 per week, but some rather less-quoted numbers. In August unemployment hit a six-year peak of 1.68 million, spurred on by a big fall in the number of manufacturing jobs, now at an all-time low. Contrary to the idea that buying in and trading up are within everyone’s reach, one in three of us still live in rented accommodation; according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a third of all working households containing people under 40 “cannot afford to buy even at the low end of local housing markets”.

True words spoken with a degree of anger, and suddenly my facetious little thoughts on Easyjet were put into perspective. Because the fact is that, if you’re middle class, you’re increasingly existing inside a bubble where most people are affluent, most people have a mortgage and most people obey the accepted norms of polite behaviour. This is acutely true on a holiday airline. If you fly charter in the summer months, your little middle-class bubble is suddenly punctured because you’re shoved into a metal tube with a bunch of people who don’t behave in the same way as all your acquaintances, who dress differently, talk differently, exhibit aggression differently, have a completely different set of expectations of what the world will put in their way. Poor people, not to put too fine a point on it. And it’s more often than not a very uncomfortable experience, like being parachuted into a strange country where the language is similar but everything else is different.

So when I thought to myself “my, Easyjet is middle class these days”, what I was actually thinking was “ah, no poor people, how very pleasant.” Which is a sodding awful realisation. My world is now so completely disconnected from theirs that I actually suffer psychological discomfort in their presence. I’d actually prefer they were somewhere else. In fact, I’d actually prefer (as Harris points out) to construct a rationalisation in which they simply do not exist. Poor people live in a country I’ve stopped wanting to go to. Bleurgh.

baa woes, originally uploaded by lloydshep.

This sign spotted after 90 minutes waiting for baggage at gatwick

Mortal Engines in the Thames Estuary, originally uploaded by lloydshep.

One of the books my kids have read in recent years and which really caught my attention was Philip Reeves’ Mortal Engines, about mobile cities which migrated across a future landscape in search of sustenance and which basically ate each other (ie, absorbed each others’ resources). Childish fancy, I thought, until I read about the Maunsell Army Sea Forts in the Thames Estuary, which were built in WWII as anti-aircraft platforms. Weirdly anthropomorphic, don’t you think? More at Underground Kent.