'The bloggin' bosses'

No, not another insult to throw on the picket lines, Paul Caplan has an interesting update about which CEOs are blogging and how they're getting on.

Not that many are, Paul calls it:

imagine the leap of faith needed by a Boss. Like King Theoden in Lord of the Rings, they have their own (usually paid) Wormtongues whispering in their ears.

But the ones doing it are enthusiastic. Hardly surprising because CEOs tend to like to, well, speak and give their opinions!

And as Steve says:

They make it easier for those of us who are talking to the frontline troops in the public sector and saying: “Yes it’s OK to get out there and have conversations. Yes it’s OK to talk like a human being and tell stories.” Because now we can add: “… because look, your Boss is doing it!”

He has lots of links to these 'heroes/heroines'. Now I wonder how many union leaders are doing it ...

What Rev. Wright actually said

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Pass it around.

Google: like to-tally white, dude

Secret's out. Or should be.

There are no black people at Google. I saw one throughout my entire tour, (other than the man I mentioned outside of the elevator,) and he might have been visiting too. Indians, Asians, Canadians: yes. African Americans: no. Really. Forget about China. Somebody call Al Sharpton.

Asked about this in Congress today, Laszlo Bock, Google's white vice president of 'people operations', was asked:

"How many [of Google's employees] are African-American?"

"I don't actually have that data at my fingertips," was Bock's reply. "I apologize."

You have to be, like, shitting me man.

Someone tell Trevor Phillips. Seriously.

Five years on: rare American TV Iraq debate

It's been reported that when 4,000 US soldiers had died, only two US newspapers put it on their front page.

Surprise, coverage is biased. Which makes this debate with Iraqis Sinan Antoon and Ali Fadhil, hosted by Charlie Rose on PBS, of particular, rare, interest.

Well worth 18' of your time.



Hat-tip: Glenn Greenwald, who comments:

In the American media's discussions of Iraq, when are the perspectives expressed here about our ongoing occupation -- views extremely common among Iraqis of all types and grounded in clear, indisputable facts -- ever heard by the average American news consumer? The answer is: "virtually never."

You could say the same of the UK.

AdBlock shock: still no threat there

Back in September, Nicholas Carr posted a long, highly combustible diatribe invoking Geezuz against AdBlock Plus: the Firefox extension which will stop practically all those revolving, screaming ads (that's one way, my way, of looking at it). Much online advertising is still stuck in the throw-mud-at-wall stage and, sorry, but I can't read when I have intense visual or auditory distraction. So, like a few other useful extensions (list in right-hand column), AdBlock saves my time and energy.

I explained, at length, how Carr was plain wrong and more than a tad hysterical (although he was timid compared to some hysterics who think it's all about Marxism in disguise). This was simply because it remained and would remain largely a geeky thing. At that point, the only numbers which anyone could source on AdBlock's worldwide usage was 2.5 million, which is nothing.

Because I was reading him again I thought I'd try and find some numbers on AdBlock usage seven months later.

It's now 3 million 'active daily numbers' (where the 2.5 million came from) and probably X3 - 9 million, not-daily, say the geeks who are very excited it's that many. Here's the details.

When Firefox claims it is approaching 20% of worldwide browsers and in a month where China finally eclimpsed the USA as #1 for web users, even 9 million is a pittance.

I suppose getting-a-grip in a follow-up would be out of the question, Nicholas?

How piracy helps business

Karen Croxson, a Junior Research Fellow in Economics at New College, Oxford, gave a lecture at the Royal Economic Society Annual Conference explaining how software and music piracy can actually help businesses.

While piracy may harm sales, it can also serve to provide free marketing, helping to create ‘buzz’ about a product.

This is product specific and may explain certain protections: console games vs. office software for example.

The unauthorised copying of digital goods such as software, music and films – a practice referred to as ‘digital piracy’ – has been claimed to place in peril the viability of whole industries. With perceived losses running so high, one might expect to see all sellers moving mountains to safeguard their intellectual property technologically. In fact there are some puzzling differences in attitudes.

Piracy can displace sales but highlights the importance of being realistic about this: not every copy implies a lost purchase. In any market there are some who value the product but never would buy (perhaps children with limited pocket money) and their piracy poses no threat to sales.

Given that the cost of piracy is likely to come down to a personal calculation (related to such things as the value of time, fear of penalties and moral costs), there may be variation across markets in the genuine sales threat – the temptation to pirate by those who would otherwise buy.

Croxson using the example of the Arctic Monkeys to explain how valuable 'word-of-mouth' is, although putting a sterling value on this is very hard to do.

The instant success of the music group's first album was due not to traditional marketing muscle but to the energy of early consumers who hyped its songs through social networking site myspace.com.

• Lecture (PDF)
• Karen Croxson
  

Hat-tip: Etre

Think before you blog!

Object lesson for bloggers in the story of the Medway Tory Councillor, John Ward, now resigned, who posted about sterilising so-called 'welfare mothers' on his blog:

"A pushy cold caller at the door got me so irate and upset that I didn't finish what I was doing correctly".

Despite his rather Nazi-like sympathies (Lynne Fetherstone gave a good example of where this thinking would lead), I actually felt sorry for him. He can think what he likes (and one look at the Mail's comments shows just how prevalent this type of thinking actually is) — it helps no-one if he blogs it without thinking through and in anger (or blaming someone else who's trying to make a probably very small living).

There are lots of resources and support for blogging councillors and many have now been doing it for ages: all the perils are well understood, explained and out there. Did the council actually support his blogging and do any of that, I wonder?

Try Designing for civil society, David Wilcox's blog, and a host of others in my eGov links.

NB: Ward has a really badly designed site - but it's not as bad as this ... get out the sunglasses.

Sarkozy: what is he on?

Er, doesn't that affect your sperm count or something ...

Free our bills

If you haven't seen this and you're British, go and sign up for MySociety's Free Our Bills Campaign.

It's about getting Parliament to produce Bills in a way that others can reuse the content online, rather than having to retype from parchment or whatever they do currently. i.e. It's 2008 FFS!

This is because TheyWorkForYou cannot currently do things like:

• We can’t give you email alerts to tell you when a bill mentions something you might be interested in.
• We can’t tell you what amendments your own MP is asking for, or voting on.
• We can’t help people who know about bills annotate them to explain what they’re really going on about for everyone else.
• We can’t build services that would help MPs and their staff notice when they were being asked to vote on dumb or dubious things.
• We can’t really give a rounded view of how useful your MP is if we can’t see their involvement with the bill making process.
• We can’t do about 12 zillion other things that we’re not even bright enough to think of yet.

They are resorting to their first campaign because lobbying failed:

• There’s some vague notion that it’ll all get done one day, as part of some miraculous project plan to make everything OK, but we understand ‘sod off’, even when spoken in Whitehall-speak.

And I love the Aussie freshwater marsupial they're using for the emblem. Any campness gets a big tick in my book (and she's camp).

Quite interesting stories about platypuses: when the first specimens arrived back in London, they were assumed to be fakes (Engels was one who thought 'those damned English are trying to fool me!'). Then they thought it was a bird. They puzzled scientists for years. They're also venomous, though it won't kill you. And it's a snout, not a bill :} Though 'free our snouts!' sounds like something MPs would support ...

Guido is pathetic

Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes shows his true colours in today's bigoted attack on Chris Bryant. Lots of lovely undeleted comments follow on.

Gives me a chance to run the video again of when Michael White casually exposed him on Newsnight.

What a pathetic little man he is.



Postscript: Tim Ireland and others have been doing some digging on Mr Staines ...