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Radiohead backs WW2-style austerity program

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Radiohead on tour?

Misery will be compulsory, if top rockers Radiohead have their way. The band have thrown their weight behind a “World War 2”-style programme of austerity measures: including restrictions on behaviour, and higher taxes.

Last week, two newspaper columnists called for a return to the kind of social coercion only ever seen before in wartime. It’s all for the sake of “the environment”, but as we’ll see – it’s a very peculiar and selective version of environmentalism.

Singer Thom Yorke told The Observer:

Unless you have laws in place, nothing’s going to happen…

Nothing of this is going to be voluntary. [sic] It’s a bizarre form of rationing that we’re all going to have to accept, just like people did in the Second World War.”

It’s the War On CO2, of course, and Radiohead will be doing “their bit”.

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Teachers: Feel my Truthiness – Jimbo

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Yes, it’s that time of year when children eagerly gather round a kindly old man with a beard. He makes great promises to them, if only they just work hard enough. But they just get a load of obscenities back.

Only it’s not Santa.

Wikipedia’s Maximum Leader and peripatetic salesman Jimmy Wales breezed into London yesterday. This time he’s pitching Jimbo’s Big Bag of Trivia at teachers and lecturers.

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Nokia radical bundling deal deserves applause

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You could be forgiven for thinking that Nokia’s music announcement yesterday was yet another subscription service. The phone giant didn’t help dispel the notion by omitting some details from the official press material. However, we were able to put more flesh on the bones of the announcement last night. It’s beginning to look as if Nokia’s move, blessed by the world’s biggest and most aggressive record company, represents a radical new direction for the music business.

Essentially, the deal bundles digital music for “free” with a Nokia phone. You can acquire unlimited songs for a year through the Nokia Music Store, then keep the music you’ve acquired if you don’t want to continue the deal. You’ll be able to play the songs on a PC (alas, not a Mac or Linux) and your Nokia.

By contrast, most music subscription services on offer today time-bomb the music, so that when you leave the service, it dies. That’s fine if you think of it as a sort of “cached” on-demand radio, but not as a way of acquiring a permanent collection; it’s proved unacceptable to consumers, who are used to keeping the music they’ve acquired for life… or until they’re burgled, or the house burns down.

In other words, it’s a loyalty program for Nokia customers, with music as the bait.

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How Web 2.0 concentrates power, and makes Microsoft stronger

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One IT Manager, bemoaning his lot to me, recently compared the rise of Web 2.0 enthusiasts to the problem the Police has with Freemasons. The blog and wiki evangelists within are not as secretive, of course, but they’re equally cult-like: speaking their own language, and using the populist rhetoric of “empowerment” for relentless self-advancement.

He couldn’t care less that employees were “wasting” time on Facebook – that was a “problem” for their line managers to deal with, and not an IT issue. (Why should IT be blamed if staff played with Rubik’s Cubes all day?) He had always encouraged people to try new software, so long as it remained within the firewall. The real problem, he thought, was that the Web 2.0 cult is loyal to what’s perceived to be good for the greater “Hive Mind”, not the organisation.

This resulted in staff with conflicting agendas.

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I’m in privacy trouble … bitch

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Three weeks ago, Facebook unveiled a three prong strategy to monetize its active base of 50m users. (See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/09/facebook_analysis/.) It hasn’t taken long for one those prongs to go prang. Facebook’s privacy-busting referral scheme called Beacon is to be modified. If you buy something elsewhere on the web, this information is piped back into your … Read more

‘Use me as a mouthpiece’, pleads Guardian hack

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Ben Goldacre, The Guardian‘s Mr “Bad Science” writes witheringly about sloppy science journalists. Many of them are simply “juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk,” he writes. They trade on scare stories, and … Read more

Google’s founders are less humble (and jetless) than you think

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Casting around for an example of the simple life to use in an Arab-bashing column, veteran columnist and editor Alexander Chancellor alighted on what he must have thought was the perfect foil to the free-spending Saudis.

It appeared right there in front of him, on his PC, nestling between some coloured balls.

Unlike Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, wrote Chancellor on Saturday, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin “don’t have private jets, Rolls-Royces, yachts or any of the other pointless accoutrements of the super-rich”.

“Page and Brin each own nothing more flashy than a modest Toyota Prius, the environmentally virtuous hybrid car,” he explained, adding:

“Like the other princes of Silicon Valley, they don’t show off. They are eager to appear unpretentious and affect to like simple things. Theirs is a world of jeans, sneakers, Starbucks, and girls-next-door.”

Chancellor didn’t mention high school bops, the Everly Brothers or bobbysox, but it was clear he’d fallen asleep by his PC, dreaming of some forgotten 1950s film (or girl).

Then the blue ball bumped into red ball, and reality returned.

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MPs reject Ofcom’s Nathan Barley quango

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In a victory for Register readers, MPs have rejected Ofcom’s proposal for a publicly-funded new media quango. The Commons’ select committee for Culture, Media and Sport rejects the idea that the creation of a “Public Service Publisher” gatekeeper would help the market. The report is here, while the Ofcomwatch blog broke the news here. The … Read more

I’m a walking billboard… bitch

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On Wednesday, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg boasted that the “next 100 years” of advertising began here.

On the face of it, it looked like Web 2.0 had found its “Long Boom” moment. Facebook has yet to turn a profit, so Zuckerberg hardly seems in a position to advise other people how to make money – let alone place himself in a pantheon of historic business greats. In Web 2.0-land, merely “being there” is a substitute for having “made it”.

But then Zuckerberg is no stranger to bluster. This, notoriously, was the 22 year-old who had “I’m CEO…bitch” on his business card.

Behind the calculated bluster were a collection of ideas perhaps equally designed to distract the attention (no pun intended).

Of the three ideas Zuckerberg outlined, one in particular provoked horror and ridicule. It was to turn Facebook users, accustomed to its clean and spare UI, into human billboards. Advertisers could build presences in Facebook – at the moment, you must be a person – giving users the opportunity to “affiliate” with them.

“Users can become a fan of a business and can share information about that business with their friends and act as a trusted referral,” is how the company described it.

“What do the users get in return?” asked the IT commentator Nick Carr. “An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.”

But Nick is forgetting that this cuts both ways – it isn’t a static picture at all.

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