Dadblog

Like Phil Spector, I have a Christmas gift for you. If I’ve read a more blatant piece of journalistic hagiography than David Smith’s Observer interview with Roman Abramovich I can’t remember it. This from the same newspaper stable that brought the only analysis of exactly how Abramovich amassed his fortune I have seen. Smith’s article includes the gem “Was there something untoward about the way he amassed his billions in the ‘cowboy capitalism’ of Nineties’ Russia?” Well, yes, David, there was, as you might have realised if you read your sister paper.

Rigmaster Ramazanov slurps his tea. “We didn’t understand the concept of owning shares, and there wasn’t even a Russian word for ‘privatisation’. More educated people took the opportunity.” While most Russians grappled with what to do with their vouchers, Roman Abramovich relished the challenge set down by Moscow. By 1992, the 25-year-old was already familiar with the notion of a free market, having taken advantage of the legalisation of private businesses introduced by Gorbachev in 1987 to set up an oil trading company. For five years, he had bought cheap Russian oil for a few roubles a barrel and sold it abroad for a considerable profit. Now Abramovich allegedly bought up blocks of vouchers from oil workers, converting them into shares in western Siberian energy companies - there was nothing to stop him, it was perfectly legal.

So, my Christmas present to you: a nice puff piece on a nasty man. Gives you some faith in humanity. Pass the polonium, dear, this turkey’s a bit dry.

• Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Pandora Goes Social
  But the major news in there is that it’s now powering MSN Radio. I did not know that.
  (tags: msn pandora music)
• Matt McAlister » Fun with ads on my blog
  Great post about the latest in ad serving from RightMedia and Feedburner
  (tags: advertising messymedia revenue rightmedia feedburner)
• Matt McAlister » Valleywag is becoming essential
  True. I snarked about the original firing, but it IS really good now and fascinating to read from London.
  (tags: gawkermedia valleywag messymedia)

So, even super-cool last.fm is subject to the Christmas naff-attack. Behold, the top three movers on last.fm listens: Greg Lake, Jona Lewie and the rocktastic Bing Crosby/David Bowie! At least Slade isn’t on there

In a nice, concise, punchy top 10 format, the chair of Dow Jones has outlined his ten biggest problems with journalism and media. The whole thing is interesting, but I think this in particular is surprising and insightful:

The matter of power. The press is at least partially responsible for greater public skepticism toward traditional institutions in America. But the truth, not lost on our public, is that the press is a large and powerful institution, too: “60 Minutes” is more powerful than almost all of the subjects it exposes. This newspaper, arguably, has more influence on national economic policy than do most corporations. Networks are owned by giant industrial corporations, magazines by entertainment conglomerates, and most newspapers by national chains. Given these realities, we cannot plausibly pretend to be a David out there smiting Goliaths and expect the public to believe it.

I like the way that places the press, and those who work within it, inside the establishment and not outside of it. That blurring of the lines was starkly exposed during the Hutton affair here in the UK, and of course the BBC is perhaps the most obvious example of a journalistic institution that is at once inside and outside the state. But there’s something else going on here. When I was at the Guardian, I worked on the diversity steering committee, which was set up as an acknowledgment of a simple fact: that this vaguely counter-cultural, distinctly progressive and apparently super-modern publication was peopled overwhelmingly by white, university (and even Oxbridge) education men and women.

One of the things that the explosion in personal publishing has allowed is the airing of new voices with new concerns, and it is by now a cliche that many younger people are more engaged by single-interest concerns such as globalism than they are by the chatterings inside a particular political village. But are these things being reflected by the powerful media institutions out there? Are the BBC, the Times, even ITN all that different now than 20 years ago? Or are they simply the new Goliaths, leaving the Davids to tap away into Blogger and Typepad and Wordpress?

Sure I’ve written that headline before, but so what? It’s probably the most salient political comment voiced by anyone since WWII. And it’s what I’ve been saying to a lot of middle-class grumblers who seem to have signed up to some myth that David Cameron will waltz past Gordon Brown at the next election, swept into No. 10 on a cloud of pink fwuffy wabbits and good feeling.

Nice, then, of Polly Toynbee to articulate why this belief is such profound, utter bollocks:

Why isn’t Labour doing worse? It’s the economy, stupid. Look at Ipsos Mori’s end of year assessment and it is the one issue where Labour gallops a mile ahead. People are secure in work in the most prolonged growth since records began, while every day the papers predict next year’s house price rise at 7%, 10% or 15%. That means 70% of the population gloats daily over their rising wealth and good luck their parents never dreamed of. This is the true national lottery - and all home owners are winners.

Thus Gordon Brown personally is well ahead of the three party leaders as “doing a good job”. Blair’s rating is -34, Cameron is -5 and Campbell -9. The Cameron myth has cracks: he is not scoring well with women, and he is only ahead on traditional Tory turf - tax, crime, asylum; leading a little on health is his one break with tradition.

Something else may be at work. Whatever grumbles people dutifully repeat to pollsters, what they see about them everywhere is the effect of Labour’s great burst of public spending. Walk into most schools, clinics or hospitals, wander through any park, look up at public buildings, note the state of the streets, the number of visible police, wardens, cleaners, buses (in London and now soon everywhere), and compare it with the public squalor of 10 years ago. There are enough voters who will not want to see spending cut again. They may be angry with Labour - but surprisingly, they are not all that angry. All now depends on what Brown brings to the premiership - but as this bad year ends, Labour still has remarkably solid foundations to build on.

Frankly, given the war, given the NHS, given transport and given the emerging market-driven dogma in education, Blair should be handing Brown a poisoned, peevish legacy. He’s not. And this is perhaps the political genius of Our Gordon, or perhaps just a kind of dumb luck - the things that he’s pushed through, the public investment, the moderate redistribution of wealth, the fiscal prudence, are the foundations on which Blair has built his modernist, Tyler Brulee political edifice. But, as someone said on Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares (my current favourite political and business text) this week, if you’ve got a good foundation, you can rebuild the house. And because Blair’s house has such very thin walls, it’s actually going to be moderately easy to rebuild. Although this time without the Britart and the maps of the Middle East, please Gordon.

As for Cameron, here’s my bet: Brown will increase Labour’s majority at the next election, Cameron will get some heavyweights in and maybe have a decent run next time. He’s a clever guy, but he’s not Blair. And George Osborne is a gazillion miles away from being Gordon Brown. The great thing about British politics is that, almost without exception, the guy who can actually run the country will win the election, unless (as in 1992) there are two guys running who can’t run the country, at which point the electorate will stick with the devil they know. Bring on 2009, I say.

Dave Winer recently described Web 2.0 as “an after-market for Google“. Google has been so generous (and I use the word advisedly) in essentially giving people free access to its data, whether that be maps, or searches, or even emails, that many, many people have built up bits of business around the place on the back of its APIs.

This has worried me for a long time. Anything that looks like unalloyed altruism is either a: unalloyed altruism or b: a sinister masterplan or c: short-term. Of the three options, it’s beginning to look like SOAP Search API, at least, is a c. Google’s closed it down. And it’s replaced it with something that gives Google at least half a chance to monetise people’s use of its search API. See this from Quoderat:

Forget about the SOAP vs. REST debate for a second, since most of the world doesn’t care. Google’s search API let you send a search query to Google from your web site’s backend, get the results, then do anything you want with them: show them on your web page, mash them up with data from other sites, etc. The replacement, Google AJAX API, forces you to hand over part of your web page to Google so that Google can display the search box and show the results the way they want (with a few token user configuration options), just as people do with Google AdSense ads or YouTube videos. Other than screen scraping, like in the bad old days, there’s no way for you to process the search results programmatically — you just have to let Google display them as a black box (so to speak) somewhere on your page.

To which the non-geek response is, I’m afraid, “well, duh!” Of course Google is going to try monetise this market - it’s exactly what it did with AdSense. Why should it provide its search results to web developers to do what they like with.

And, perhaps most interestingly of all, this came unannounced from Google, previously one of the most transparent organisations on the planet. Like a New Labour spin doctor shuffling out massive news under the cover of some other public hysteria, this API being closed down this close to Christmas without an announcement is either a: a cock-up or b: significant as an indicator of Google’s nervousness about what it’s doing. Up next: in-line ads in the Google Maps API. Or something.

• Inside the secret and sinister world of the BNP | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
  “The BNP already has significant numbers of members living in those areas. They include Peter Bradbury, a leading proponent of complementary medicine who has links to Prince Charles, Richard Highton, a healthcare regulator, and Simone Clarke, principal da
  (tags: politics bnp exttremism)

So ITV1 still knows how to make hit shows. According to BARB and MediaGuardian the troubled commercial broadcaster had eight of the top 10 shows in 2006, excluding the World Cup (what, with a week still to go?). The shows where:

1. Coronation Street (12.6 million viewers)
2. Eastenders
3. Dancing on Ice
4. Lewis
5. Wild At Heart
6. X-Factor Final
7. A Touch Of Frost
8. I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here
9. Strictly Come Dancing
10. Emmerdale (9.8 million)

So, three soaps, three big-ticket dramas (two of them policiers) and four (count ‘em) reality shows.

10 years ago, it looked like this:

1. Eastenders (30.10 million viewers)
2. Just Good Friends
3. Coronation Street
4. Only Fools and Horses
5. Prince and Princess of Wales in Private and in Public
6. World Featherweight Championship
7. Blind Date
8. Last of the Summer Wine
9. People Do The Funniest Things
10. Duty Free (17.35 million)

Some random thoughts:

• No comedy. I would have thought there would have been the odd Morecambe and Wise special or something in that list 20 years ago. My contention: comedy is much more “fragmentable” and less hit-driven than even reality shows (which by their nature require large simultaneous audiences to work). And this fact seems to have killed-off the sitcom as a mass-audience medium. We just don’t experience comedy as a group anymore.
• Overall far smaller audiences. Rather obvious.
• Sport. The top five audiences in 2006 were actually for World Cup matches featuring England. In 1986, there was also a World Cup, but it was in Mexico. The big shared sporting occasion was Barry McGuigan winning a boxing belt. Boxing is now almost entirely a pay-TV experience, and so disappears from the big picture. What this means for our collective national sanity I wouldn’t dare to comment….
• The emergence of reality TV. This may reverse the previous point.

But my overall point is: is ITV seen to be “troubled” partly because it only really does hits? Does it have a long tail? And can it grow one?

Last night, I took my daughter to see the restored The Wizard of Oz at the Curzon Soho. Fabulous. Genuinely fabulous. Previously, my most profound small-screen-to-big-screen experience was seeing Alien in a proper cinema for the first time, but this trumped it. The sepia beginning was truly beautiful, and for some reason the shot that stayed with me was Judy G sitting on the tractor singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow with Toto sitting on the seat beside her. Iconic and from an age when they weren’t afraid to leave the camera still for a chuffing moment.

But then, Judy G opened the door, the colour kicked in, and the jaded sundanceistas in the Curzon audience audibly gasped. It was a cinema gasp quite unlike any I’d heard before, as if everyone was saying “oh, so that’s how it’s meant to look.” Munchkin Land was orgiastically colourful and oddly terrifying, the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion the apogee of the make-up artist’s craft, and the Wicked Witch greener than anything you can recall.

Do go and see it, and take kids if you have them. Having seen it in the cinema for the first time, and having seen the audience’s experience of it, I would argue that it might be the film that packs the biggest experiential whallop of them all.

One subsidiary question: why do people in arthouse cinemas take four times as long to buy their tickets as anywhere else? I’ve noticed this in the Ritzy in Brixton too - every ticket purchase is accompanied by an agony of indecision over seating choices, a flurry of mature student ID cards to secure concessions, and a wriggle of money changing hands as everyone tries to find the exact change. Just get a credit card.