— Uneven Distribution.

The erosion of the middle class may well accelerate, as the divide widens between a relatively small group of extraordinarily wealthy people – the digital elite – and a very large set of people who face eroding fortunes. In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards. – Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch (2008)

Given we’re likely hours away from the announcement of Facebook’s IPO, I couldn’t help but post this. Interestingly I’d say that if you suggested to Nicholas Carr back in 2008 that four years later a website would hold a $5billion IPO, even he would have thought that was ridiculous. But here we are, a few hundred Facebook employees are about to enter the digital elite.

The big question though, is whether the investors in this IPO will be the “very large set of people who face eroding fortunes”.

So what has digital culture brought to the conversational dinner table? Quick-fire and efficient online talk – which is more about exchanging information than emotions – threatens to send the quality of conversation back to the MiddleAges.

I realise the crushing irony of grabbing a snippet out of this brilliant piece by Roman Krznaric at The School of Life, so please head over and read the whole thing.

There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism. In that mass market, the opinions of the politically engaged readers didn’t matter much, outnumbered as they were by people checking their horoscopes. This suited advertisers fine; they have always preferred a centrist and distanced political outlook, the better not to alienate potential customers. When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come to matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.

Clay Shirky – Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users

This isn’t the shortest read on the topic, but Clay Shirky dissects the challenges that Newspapers are facing better than anyone. The core problem is that if paywalls are to work (which they must do for classical journalism to survive), newspapers need to acknowledge that their audience has fundamentally shifted (and shrunk).

It’s interesting that Crikey has pretty much nailed this model, and New Matilda is battling hard to make it work. Due to our size, I wouldn’t be surprised if Australia manages to be the first country to emerge with a working model of new journalism.

More and more people are looking to computers to save the world, but the people who run them certainly don’t know how. Nobody’s in charge, not even Google, though everyone in the dot-com world pretends. They’re all too busy with I.P.O.’s and market share, trying to start fads or come up with idiotic names.

via Theodor Holm Nelson – On the Information Superhighway, Destination Unknown – NYTimes.com.

This post was also published on Technology Spectator.

“The computer industry is converging with the television industry in the same sense that the automobile converged with the horse.” – George Gilder , Life after the Television

IPTV seems to be on the verge of hitting the buzzword bingo card. I’ve had a lot of questions on it recently, and figured I’d post a few key bits I’d written in responses.

The below was originally published on Technology Spectator.

Sometime in the past few days, Google+ passed 20 million users. That’s not remarkable just because it’s the fastest piece of technology ever adopted. It’s remarkable because there are 20 million people who are putting a lot of trust in Google. A trust that this time is not simply about privacy, but something much bigger, and arguably much more important -  the trust of creating and curating what defines us as a global, national, and a local community. The ideas that create culture.

Given the rather hectic pace of TED, I thought I’d summarise the last two days in one final post.

Alain De Botton spoke about religion 2.0. It was brilliant. I won’t go on much more because I’m sure it’s all going to be in his book.

Erik Hursman is one of the people responsible for Ushahidi. If you’ve never seen or head of Ushahidi, go check it out. Started as a way of mapping reports of violence in Kenya through an open-source and accessible platform (anyone could SMS reports and they would instantly show up), the platform expanded to become applicable to all sorts of crises where collection, visualisation, filtering and aggregation of data was critical.

TED’s all about “Ideas Worth Spreading”. So in that spirit, here’s something that someone didn’t say at TED today: You shut your goddamn carbon-taxin’ mouth is a piece by Geoff Lemon. Please go read it if you haven’t. (I’ve just noticed the original post is down, luckily Marc testart re-published is here)

Geoff’s amazing, and is not just the most talented writer I know, but one of the most amazing people I have had the pleasure of spending many beers with. The media’s epic overhyping of the apparent assault on Australian’s “cost of lifestlye” seems to be reaching ridiculous proportions. I’m glad that with this piece Geoff has probably reached more people in the last 24 hours than Andrew Bolt.

Super quick braindump of highlights from Day 2.

Nathalie Miebach is yet another person who has challenged my anti-dataviz position in the past two days. She weaves weather data. Absolutely amazing.

Sonaar Luthra, one of the TED Fellows presented the water canary. A brilliant product in it’s own right, but part of one of the big trends I’m already noticing here – openness. The hardware is open sourced, meaning anyone in the world can improve on the idea. Which when you’re talking about detecting clean drinking water to prevent cholera, is a good idea. To finish off the day Allan Jones from the Allen Institute for Brain Science talked for 18 minutes about the most complex neuroscience you can imagine. I didn’t understand a word of it. But in the last 2 minutes he talked about the fact that all of the utterly amazing work they’re doing, will be an open data source. In the traditionally competitive and guarded world of bleeding edge science, this openness is a real positive change.