Sour Alba

This piece originally appeared in w00tonomy’s Content Marketing Watch column.

Hotfoot from ScotWeb2 – a get-together of those with an interest in the public sector and the internet. Organised by Alex Stobart, a recovering civil servant,

The highlights, apart from my workshop on making the most of content, were talks by James Munro of PatientOpinon and Simon Dickson of Puffbox.

Treehouse Media Project has unveiled a manifesto for embittered journos everywhere. (Thanks to Irish-Swedish internet guru Mark Comerford for flagging this up.) Let me give you a flavour with this superbly passionate line:

Laid off? Bought out? Pissed off? Or just overworked because you’re one of the “lucky” ones still working for the walking corpse that is the daily newspaper? Join us, the diaspora, as we work to recapture the joy and passion of our noble profession.

The project has a noble aim: equipping journalists with the entrepreneurial skills to survive in a Web 2.0 world. It’s right: we should go it alone. But it strikes a bum note for me by starting off its homepage with “F*** Google. F*** Craig’s List.”

Even if this is just a come-hither to embittered hacks, it’s a mistake. Google, Craig’s List and other changes to online advertising give us the tools to be free.

Message to journalists everywhere: The internet is not the enemy, your employer’s business model is.

The internet will last. Big newspaper companies that screw profits out of cowed staff and unsophisticated advertisers are doomed.

Good.

F*** ‘em. Not Google. Not Craig’s List. F*** big media. They deserve to die. They have betrayed our sacred calling. And everyone who’s really a journalist in their hearts, guts and gonads will water their graves in the only way we know how – on the way home from the pub.

I’m inspired by Treehouse’s manifesto. And its prompted me to begin my own. But it’s not a manifesto. It’s a business plan. And while its mired in the net up to its oxters it still has that sickly sweet smell of printer’s ink.

Oh yes, print.

Print’s not dead. It’s just going through a painful adolescence.

Like all true hacks, that ink’s in my blood. Before I moved to the web in 2000, I’d experienced the joy-cum-terror of the “hold the front page” call. Until I became a husband and father, the proudest moment of my life was my first byline (The Scotsman, 1988). I’ll never forget my first splash (The Sunday Mail, 1994) or my first interview (Joe Strummer for The List, 1988.) On my wall I have three copper printer’s plates of The Scotsman from 1972 and 1999 – as well as a framed picture of the first edition of that paper not to carry ads on the front page (1956). And I know that for the consumption of some information print is the best answer.

But it’s only part of the whole picture – and the whole business plan. As I have said many times before, I believe that the net has brought us to the verge of a golden age of journalism. In fact, there has never been a better time to be a journalist. It’s just that there’s never been a worse time to work for a newspaper.

So don’t work for a newspaper. Work for a news organisation which understands the 21st century and isn’t relying on a business model that started looking dated after the invention of radio.

As for Scotland, it has one world-class newsroom in it. One which would stick the heid on the Times, Guardian, BBC and tediously navel-gazing US papers. Sadly, this talented newsroom is spread across dying titles, desperate news agencies and PR-land.

But it doesn’t need to be that way.

Let me paint you a picture of a world of direct communication with the reader. A world that rewarded the best in journalism with the greatest readership. A world of untainted revenue, without advertising department twats in ties with overlarge knots. Imagine a life without 30% profit margins taken out of your pocket. Dream of a life free from megalomaniac proprietors and muppet editors who exist only to trim costs and wouldn’t recognise a story if it kicked them in the old Niagaras with steel-toed boots embroidered with the words: “I AM A STORY, YOU STUPID, PAPERCLIP-COUNTING CHOOB.”

I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you … but only because I’m going there on a motorbike.

Anyone coming for the ride?

MORE FOLLOWS

I believe this is the first anyway… It’s about my experiences being embedded in the civil service for a while.

 

 Sour Alba podcast 1: Historic first and the civil service [2:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

For those of you who are still struggling with what this Web 2.0 thing is, I’ve some bad news (though really it’s great news): Web 3.0 is just around the corner, according to the man who invented these tangled Webs.

Tim Berners-Lee says in an interview with Paul Miller that the Semantic Web – a crucial part of the Web 3.0 vision – is open for business.

“Wow,” I hear you say. “Web 3.0. The Semantic Web. Great … Err, what the **** does that actually mean?”

Well, the sainted Sir TBL puts it this way:

Web 2.0 is a stovepipe system. It’s a set of stovepipes where each site has got its data and it’s not sharing it. What people are sometimes calling a Web 3.0 vision [is] where you’ve got lots of different data out there on the Web and you’ve got lots of different applications, but they’re independent. A given application can use different data. An application can run on a desktop or in my browser, it’s my agent. It can access all the data, which I can use and everything’s much more seamless and much more powerful because you get this integration. The same application has access to data from all over the place.

Now in my view all data is content. What we are looking at is a future where you will be able to access all data (or content) from any device or any application anywhere. But that does not mean that the Facebook Vampires application will stalk you to the toilet or “private personal enhancement medication” emails will start tumbling out of your iPod. One of the key characteristics of what’s known as Web 2.0 has been the organising of data (content) to enhance relevance. As technology allows the universal sharing of data this trend towards completely targeted relevance will become even more pronounced.

It’s good to know that TBL believes William Gibson’s oft-quoted dictum: “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

(Also posted on w00tonomy.com.) 

Before you cash in your pension to invest in the semantic web, you might want to read this piece on the BBC about a survey which claims the internet needs £66bn spent on it to prevent it all slowing down to the extent that we’ll all be back on 56k dial-ups.

US analyst firm Nemertes Research predicted a drastic slowdown as the network struggles to cope with the amount of data being carried on it. Such gridlock would drastically affect how people use the web and could mean the next Google or YouTube simply doesn’t get off the ground, it said.

Just as I was starting to panic about my career choices I saw that the report was “part-funded by the Internet Innovation Alliance which campaigns for universal broadband in the US”. That would be a body whose interests are helped by the report then… I noted with interest The Internet Innovation Alliance’s members include telecoms companies. Surely it’s within their power to invest this money and sort out the problem now?

The ever wonderful Register (”Biting the hand that feeds IT”) has a nice take on the British dimensions of this.

We had a bomb scare at the fortress this afternoon. A suspicious package was found in the munitions store. It was suspicious because it did not look like a big bag of things that go bang.

Fortunately, Honoured Master Utsubo, our resident explosives expert in accordance with the teachings of the Ninjitsu on Never Cutting the Red Wire, was on hand. He quickly verified that it was an improvised explosive device, had the room cleared of all ordnance and prepared to carry out a controlled explosion.

Then Brother Wakasagi, our Chief Blog Guru, got involved. (Actually, I don’t remember the Order ever appointing a Chief Blog Guru but he insists that’s what he is.) Brother Wakasagi stopped Honoured Master Utsubo’s work, saying: “Man, you are sooooooo last century. Before we do anything else we should consult the online community.”

Honoured Master Utsubo replied: “Why? This is a bomb. We need to detonate it in a controlled fashion.”

Brother Wakasagi: “That’s only one opinion. I suggest we involve e-experts worldwide to open our minds to other possibilities. Perhaps we do not have to blow up the bomb.”

Before Honoured Master Utsubo could insert his spanner into Brother Wakasagi’s I/O port, Honoured Mistress Moroko, our Head of Ninja Facilitation Facilities, stepped in: “Does this mean we could save money on repairs? I think we should listen to our Chief Blog Guru.”

“But,” said Honoured Master Utsubo, “I have trained all my life to render explosives safe. I have studied the most arcane Ninjitsu texts on the subject.  Since I was five years old I have been defusing bombs. My father used to throw them at me: happy times… ”

As he reminisced about his childhood, Brother Wakasagi piped up: “Well, according to the How To Defuse Bombs Blog, we should cut the red wire. There are 27 comments that agree. And four that say cut the green one. One comment says you can make your penis bigger but it does not elaborate.”

Honoured Master Utsubo exploded (not literally). “That is rubbish. Only in Hollywood movies do people cut wires. The only way to make this thing safe is to detonate it in a controlled way.”

Brother Wakasagi said: “Well, I’ve found 34 online experts who disagree. The net is like a giant brain and it disagrees with your old-fashioned, narrow thinking. Who are you to dictate whose point of view is valid?”

Honoured Mistress Moroko then spoke: “Brother Wakasagi’s argument is powerful, particularly if I can save 30 Yuan from my budget by not redecorating the room.”

Other directors of the Order who had appeared agreed with her. Brother Wakasagi then picked up a pair of pliers. He approached the bomb. And Honoured Master Utsubo started running.

Our Chief Blog Guru saw the old ninja go and shouted: “Lolz, n00b, move with the times, you dinosaur.”

Those were his last words. We were going to dig Honoured Mistress Moroko out of the ruins of the west wing but Honoured Masters Toro and Hamzo, who had been absent, told us that we should not be hasty and a full cost-benefit analysis should be undertaken before any rescue.