History Repeats And Then The Fever breaks

Nur weil es ein Hobby hier ist, sich an alten Scheiß zu erinnern und dann die anderen damit zu belästigen, eine kleine Erinnerung an Thad Anderson, den schon fast vergessenen Vorläufer von Herrn Assange.

Uns wäre nicht aufgefallen, dass Mr. Anderson in der neueren Berichterstattung viel vorgekommen wäre. Vielleicht haben wir auch bloß nicht aufgepasst.

Dabei hatte Thad Anderson seinerzeit (2006, long ago) nicht nur bei uns, sondern auch bei seriösen Medien schon ganz ordentliche Coverage. First mover advantage war immer schon ein Scheiß pattern. FMD and LMA rule. Amen.

From Human Gatekeepers To Algorithmic Ones

You might have read that interview with Anthony D. Williams on derstandard.at or you might not have. You might also have watched Eli Pariser's embedded TED Talk "Beware online "filter bubbles".

The interview is rubbish but as that talk is well worth watching in its full length, her it is again for all who missed. We do not agree with all of what Mr. Pariser says in that speech but with the larger parter of it. This is exactly why for all of these 14 years since 1997 we have consistently and adamantly resisted the idea of offering personalized news media. Personalizing is for the person who does it anyway and routinely, but not for the provider to offer.

And the thing is, that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. Well maybe it is slowly becoming true that they did and do not anymore. But then, on the other hand, we wish everybody lots of fun while coding the embedded ethics into the algorithms. Take care though, we won't accept proprietary embedded ethics just open readable source ones.

Enjoy!

Back To The Coffee House, For Sure

Every now and then, a member of our staff turns up at a news-stand, produces oldstyle coin or paper money and buys the odd magazin or newspaper. Strictly singular for we have canceled all subscriptions we have ever had.

And while tinytalk plc. has completely given up on killing trees and printing on rags many years ago, our stuffers still enjoy reading in the bathing tube and on the occasional busride, both environments, we deem, where print on paper in all its ruggedness, flexibility and its lack of disturbing links still has the advantage when it comes to the enjoyment of consuming what talented professional writers, photographers and art department people are still able to communicate by these outdated means. The gems get fewer but are still there. On weekends more often then on workdays.

Long introduction aside, what we really have come to write about today, is a grand special that the Economist, which is in the list of print products we occasionally peruse, put together for its latest number. That special is about the future of news media, a topic we are obviously interested in.

THREE hundred years ago news travelled by word of mouth or letter, and circulated in taverns and coffee houses in the form of pamphlets, newsletters and broadsides. “The Coffee houses particularly are very commodious for a free Conversation, and for reading at an easie Rate all manner of printed News,” noted one observer. Everything changed in 1833 when the first mass-audience newspaper, the New York Sun, pioneered the use of advertising to reduce the cost of news, thus giving advertisers access to a wider audience. At the time of the launch America’s bestselling paper sold just 4,500 copies a day; the Sun, with its steam press, soon reached 15,000. The penny press, followed by radio and television, turned news from a two-way conversation into a one-way broadcast, with a relatively small number of firms controlling the media.

Here then be the link to their special report that tries to explain, how the news industry is returning to something that might be closer to the coffee house of yonder years. Give it a try, it is worth the read and justifies the money that we have spent despite of online free content and all.

Three More Things

All of this sure rings a bell with us, for, at least as students and as budding professionals we have read far more issues of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Le Monde, the New York Times and the Daily Gleaner in a coffeehouse than at home.

It is a pity that the scan of the Economist's front in the online edition is so badly resolved. We think it is nice drawing: I saw her on ThouTube. 'Twas Ghastly. - I hear Tom Paine's all a-twitter. - Wilt Thou be my Visagebook friend? Funny to old farts like us, for sure.

The special also provided us with a nice new acronym for our glossary of unusual vocabulary and acronyms in tinytalk (GUVAIT): PFKAA, pronounced pee-eff-kaa, meaning: People Formerly Known As The Audience. Before that we used to call them KTMIFO (kay-tee-myfo), the krill that the media industry feeds on. Definitely a move to the better (DMB).

Faulty Data or Phenomenon? - More Metrics Trouble!

Comscore has released data on internet usage across Europe:

The stunning data point in this table is 14.1 average hours of internet usage per visitor and month in Austria. This is so far from comparable countries and so deep below the continental and worldwide averages that any observer would lean to have second thoughts.

If true it means that on an average Austrian internet users spend less than half an hour per day with the internet. That would be only 53% of the usage time of Norwegians, 72% percent of the Swiss, 40% of the Dutch, but even more stunningly a lot less than Poles, Spaniards or Portuguese. Austria would be on a very clear and significant last rank for internet usage in Europe.

Now the figures and ranks do not mirror reading "serious" media or difficult blogs, they just sum up every kind of activity, be it smart or dull, good or bad, interactive action or merely passive consumation.

Is this just another illustration of what the Pew organization titled: Digital Audience Growing, But Metrics Are a Mess? Or is this true and does it correspond with the falling PISA data Austria has the grace to receive these years?

Astonishing in any case and interesting nevertheless.

The Bad Thing About Love

Assertion: The badest thing about love is that from the constitution of the civic individual it is alway greater then he or she.

Clarifications: He or she in a civic person means his or her ego-structure. Ego is used in the sense S. Freud used to use it. If it is not greater than the ego, be assured it is not love what the person feels and thinks but at most a kind of simulacron of it.

Illustration: This painful ratio and the complication it induces are the reasons why the civic individual in the 500 years of its existence had such eminent troubles with love, and especially love for a member of a different gender. The fact has been beautifully exemplified and explored in the best of novels, e.g. "Madame Bovary", "La Chartreuse de Parme", "Анна Каренина", "Wuthering Heights", "Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein", "Доктор Живаго", "Die Marquise von O…" and other lesser works as well as so called love songs and love movies uncounted. As a nice example of the later genre we recommend 臥虎藏龍 (Wòhǔ Cánglóng), which you might know under the title of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and which of course is no Wuxia movie as wikipedia claims but a modern love movie by two of the today's masters of the dying art of narrating failed romances.

Consequences: If you are able to admit and enjoy love then you know you have already transgressed the world of civilization. On the other hand, if you insist on holding on to your maximum of civic independence of the ego, you cannot have arrived at love quite yet.