I saw this trailer over on the Apple site for the upcoming film War Inc. with the always watchable John Cusack. I'm guessing this is his character (or similar) from Grosse Pointe Blank, as it's teaming him up with Joan Cusack and Dan Aykroyd again. The trailer reminds me a little of Wag the Dog; must go and watch that again and see if it's as good as I remember. The Lewinsky scandal broke after that film's release as did the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. From Grosse Pointe Blank:

"It's irrelevant, really. The idea of governments, nations, it's mostly a public relations theory at this point, anyway."

Update: Oops. War Inc. is a pretty cack-handed effort. Watch Grosse Pointe Blank instead.

In an interview in 1998, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said:

“In the online world, businesses have the opportunity to develop very deep relationships with customers, both through accepting preferences of customers and then observing their purchase behavior over time, so that you can get that individualized knowledge of the customer and use that individualized knowledge of the customer to accelerate their discovery process.If we can do that, then the customers are going to feel a deep loyalty to us, because we know them so well. They’re going to stick with us because they are going to be able to get a personalized service, a customized website that takes into account the years of relationship we’ve built with them.”

I really like this quote. I wish I had this grasp of the commercial possibilities of the web back in 1998. It makes me feel I’ve been playing catch-up for all the time that has passed since. We now use words like web 2.0 and social media as a shorthand for describing some of the things Jeff is talking about. He doesn’t use them because not only were they not being used in 1998 but there was no need to use them; instead they’ve been expressed in everything Amazon has done over the intervening years. This brings me to two articles I’ve read recently. One, discussed and linked to by my boss Antony Mayfield, asks “Why aren’t there more Googles?” and answers that question with “because every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out”. The concept of ‘selling out’ within a capitalist system and what the term implies is interesting, but we’ll leave that for another post. Antony goes on to highlight Craigslist as one that didn’t ‘sell out’ but what about Amazon? I take looking up things to buy on Amazon as a given these day, it’s my first stop. Not just things I might want to read or watch or listen to, but anything. I didn’t even notice it happening. I just find the site really useful and trust it. Which brings us to the quote above and the second article I read on Wired the other day called Cloud Computing: Available at Amazon.com today. Amazon has already been revolutionary. We forget recent history all too easily; the inflated share prices of 1999 and the turmoil of the subsequent dot com crash. Bezos was on the front cover of Time just prior to staff being laid off and the share price dropping by two-thirds. Yet here we are, ten years on with Amazon not just an online retailer selling its own inventory, but anyone else’s inventory too, new or secondhand. Amazon Associates created multiple entry points across the web directly into Amazon’s product pages with perhaps 40% of sales coming from this affiliate network. Auctions didn’t work but the Marketplace took off. How does it all work? Is Amazon a revolutionary retailer? Or a search engine? Or a software company? Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched in 2002, Mechanical Turk in 2005, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006. From Cloud Computing: Available at Amazon.com today:

“The more open it is, the more powerful it is. Consumers continue to get the world's best retail experience. Long-tail retailers get the world's best back office, plus shelf space in the mother of all malls. Developers get a cheap, instant, essentially limitless computing cloud.”

Here is the next revolution. Developers don’t need to worry about maintaining servers or restrictions on computing power or storage space as their new web application takes off. They can buy all they need from Amazon. Or Google. Think of the stuff that has come out of Google Labs. Think of the start-ups producing clever mash-ups. The infrastructure to support ideas and innovation on an unimaginable scale can be rented and rented cheaply. What would you do with near limitless computing power and storage available direct from your laptop? From Wikipedia's entry on Greg Egan’s Permutation City:

“Permutation City deals with... philosophical questions... is there any difference between a perfect computer simulation and a "real" person? - but pushes much further the paradoxes arising from the assumption of the Turing computability of human consciousness. Proceeding from here, through rigorous arguments, Egan deconstructs and undermines not only the traditional notions of self, future, and personality, but also of physical reality itself. Eventually, Egan formulates the Logic of the Dust theory of reality, arguing that our universe could be but an algorithm running without the need of any physical substrate.”

1 original comment:

Your best post, ever
Comment by CharlieO — 24 April, 2008 @ 2:19 pm

The latest version of Google Earth allows you to read news headlines based on the geographic region you're looking at. A NYT icon appears on the globe and clicking it pulls up the relevant geo-coded news article. Not a bad idea but not really taken far enough. Eventually I'd like to be able to focus on a region and move backwards in time to see historical news articles for that area. I'd also really like to see these stories linked to other related articles, especially if you can then 'fly' around the globe tracing a story through space and time.

Full details are over on the Google Latlong blog.  A good way to get background information to better inform your reading of news articles would be via Wikipedia; overlays from here are also available in Google Earth and have been for some time.

I recently finished reading The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. In the book the authors attack the notion that there is a counterculture that exists in opposition to the machinery of capitalism. I remember reading No Logo a few years ago and not being able to meaningfully resolve the way I was both indignant at the stories of exploitation while simultaneously being one of those individuals purchasing the consumer goods produced in those conditions. The Rebel Sell did a good job of putting this in perspective so is well worth a look. I particularly liked the notion of conspicuous consumption coined by Thorstein Veblen back at the turn of the 19th century. Rather than dribble on about the book I thought this photo I took of a shop window in Brighton's North Laines summed it all up rather neatly:

Presuambly it hasn't been killing slogan-bearing t-shirt printing capitalists nor the running dogs who purchase such merchandise or this rubbish wouldn't be assaulting my eyeballs. It could be a massively ironic statement on the part of the window-dresser, but I very much doubt it.

Today I sat in the gardens of the Royal Pavilion having lunch with Cindy in the sun. On Sunday we were watching it snow. I found it so nice that my friends and I were all keen to get outside and make the most of the fresh snowfall; mainly throwing it at each other and making snowpeople.

1 original comment:

Lovely photo – combines Winter and Spring beautifully.
Comment by Irena — 12 April, 2008 @ 1:57 pm

Last week I took the plunge and made the switch from Blogger to a Wordpress blog hosted on my own domain. So far it has been a lot less daunting than I expected as Adam smoothed the way by answering any questions I had about the process. Having someone on hand to deal with specific problems is the best help of all.

There were several reasons behind making the switch. I wanted to have my own domain to play around with, something I've been without since the turn of the century. I know I could use Blogger on my own domain but I wanted greater flexibility than Blogger was offering and my first impressions of Wordpress have been good.

The process was as follows:

1. Buy a domain (I used 123-reg).

2. Sign-up for hosting (Adam recommended 5quidhost; they seem good so far, I just have a free account to test things out and was able to do a one-click installation of Wordpress. Once my site is properly setup I can upgrade my account. Perfect for experimenting without too much commitment).

3. Import my old posts from my blogspot domain. This was the bit I was worried about but it went smoothly and everything, including comments came across. If you have photos uploaded to Blogger then you'll need to copy these across manually. Most of mine were okay as I'd been linking to my flickr account when I included photos in my blog posts.

4. Choose a theme. I went for Tranquility White by Roy Tanck as I wanted something minimal that I could play around with if I wanted to. Great work Roy!

5. Activate various plugins and widgets to do stuff on the blog. Akismet to stop comment spam, Collapsing Archives and Collapsing Categories, both by Robert Felty. Still fiddling with these to see what looks best.

... and we're done!

1 original comment:

Hey Mark, nice one. Looks like it was a lot more painless than our switch, although our problems weren’t 5quidhost’s fault.
Like the new theme, too.
Comment by handolio — 12 April, 2008 @ 1:20 pm

For our politicians the Olympics is a wonderfully cynical coming together of the nations of the world in the spirit of competition and national jingoism. It is a hugely expensive propaganda vehicle for the host country, a vehicle the British government is happy to play host to today as the torch is paraded around London. Imagine my complete lack of surprise when I discovered this morning that the torch relay was brought in for the 1936 Olympics to glorify the Third Reich. How appropriate that it should be carried today to focus our thoughts on the forthcoming Olympics in China while protests about the ongoing abuses of human rights in Tibet continue. Will Britain still be at war in Iraq and Afghanistan when the Olympic torch is lit in London in 2012 as countries meet to, in the words of Adolf Hitler, "... knit the bonds of peace between nations". On a joyous note the Britsh Broadcasting Corporation reported:

"Despite bitter temperatures and sleet, impromptu carnivals are expected as the torch passes iconic landmarks such as Nelson's Column, St. Paul's Cathedral and Tower Bridge."

Elsewhere in the country spontaneous outpourings of thanks will be required later today to show our heartfelt gratitude to the Brown regime and our hopes for the continuing good health of our glorious leader.

2 original comments:

BBC poll last week reveals that you and I aren’t alone in our Olympic cynicism, even if not everyone shares our specific misgivings.
Comment by handolio — 7 April, 2008 @ 11:02 am

I was speaking with a teacher friend over the weekend whose school kids were going to stand on the route and attempt to blow out the flame. I suggested to her – too late – that they all took candles and (solemnly, silently) extinguished them as the torch passed by…
Comment by RobertCinnamon — 7 April, 2008 @ 9:35 pm