I’ve also tidied up the page and fix a range of bugs so the site is clean and ready for some new posts. I’m still undecided how exactly to split up my two main blogs – kierenmccarthy.co.uk and kierenmccarthy.com. Or whether to just point them to the same place.

I’m tempted to make this (.co.uk) my personal blog and the dot-com site my professional face. But then I’m not sure I’d stick with that separation for very long and would find work posts here and personal posts on the dot-com site. Blogs sort-of dare you to be more personal.

Ah well, we shall see.

And, of course, as it always is, that airport is Heathrow. I hate Heathrow. I’ve always hated Heathrow. Even as a kid, I remember the sensation of life ebbing away from you as you sit in uncomfortable chairs next to grumpy people, eat dreadful food and get annoyed with snooty staff. It’s Heathrow, it’s British Airways, it’s delayed, and I’m flying economy, seat 49J, which means no sleep, cramped legs, and an incredibly frustrating effort trying to do work on my laptop for the next nine hours.

Still, I’m on my way to the ICANN meeting in Delhi which should prove to be the usual mix of fun, exhaustion, confusion and interesting events. Plus I’ve never been to India before. What’s happening at the ICANN meeting? Well, plenty. Discussions on front-running, on domain tasting, on new gTLDs and IDNs. And the JPA. And the translation programme – which I have been working very hard on and should really help ICANN become an international organisation. And, you know, all the other sorts of issues that underpin the future evolution of the Internet and which I now concern myself with every day.

I have to say though that I felt an itch as a journalist to get stuck into the US elections yesterday. Shame I wasn’t in the country for Super Tuesday. Ah well, new gTLDs and IDNs are going to have a bigger impact on the world than the next US president. And I mean that too.

I believe ebooks are the inevitable future. It’s just another step along the digital revolution. But – and what a but – have you seen the state of the “Kindle”? It looks like a prototype. A prototype designed by 18-year-old students back in the 1980s. Here is good technology and big demand with crappy design – i.e. the perfect opportunity for Apple.

The problem is that if Apple gets to it fast then the control-freak company will insist in tying in content providers into its new format, will do deals with big bookshops and newspapers and will screw up the huge leap that a quality ebook reader will provide society.

Amazon’s Kindle downloads content over wireless – which is terrific – another example of why wireless networks are changing the way we function as a society, It is too pricey at the moment – $399 – and the content is too expensive. But all that will change if this takes off. And that’s the big question – are people ready for an ebook reader? I would say yes. With better design. Mobile phones are too fiddly; laptops too over-spec’d and slow.

I also like Amazon’s system for people to upload books into its system. It looks easy and appears to work. I have the ebook rights to my Sex.com book so when I get back from a Thanksgiving lunch I am going to in five minutes, I will try to upload my book and see what happens. I also have US rights to my book by the way. My publishers have let me down with that one. As soon as my workload lifts I will spend some time getting the book into the States and pushing it.

It will be a great day when I see my book being read on a well-designed non-Apple ebook reader. I just wonder how long that will be.

What is particularly interesting about this is that Radiohead was entirely in charge of the whole transaction. They even extracted five pounds 45 pence from me simply by asking. I could easily have downloaded the album for free this afternoon.

Aside from being one of my favourite bands (no, I don’t find them remotely depressing, which makes me wonder about my base state of mind), Radiohead are an interesting and smart bunch. They are currently outside music industry contracts and so have control of their product. And so they decided on a unique project – they would let people decide how much to pay for their next album. Literally.

Aside from a 45p admin fee, you could type in exactly how much you wanted to pay for the album. It’s a fascinating experiment and I hope Radiohead releases the results so we can see just how people’s behaviour breaks down.

The Net effect

Because of their brains, self-reflection thanks to introversion, and enormous fame, the members of Radiohead have been pondering the impact of the Internet for some time. Lead singer Thom Yorke is, I think, less enamoured of the Internet than the rest of the group.

I remember him saying with disdain at one concert that peope would “probably be listening to this tomorrow morning on your iPods” – referring to the massive pirating around Radiohead’s music. He’s right – I have downloaded several albums’ worth of live material of theirs at concerts. My favourite is a gig two years’ ago in London’s Koko club. I couldn’t be there, so what the hell is the problem? It’s not as if Radiohead was offering me the material.

The fact is though that listening to this is more likely to want me to go to see the band live – and there you really do have to pay. I even flew to Barcelona once to see Radiohead. Made it an extended weekend with friends. It was possibly the greatest gig I have ever been to.

The rest of Radiohead already have more money than they want and love nothing more than tinkering with music and so have been working on ways to use their fame constructively – and good on em. Oddly enough it produces a sense of loyalty in me that the people behind the music I like also share some of my values.

Press speculation

The pricing experiment has, naturally enough, caused a frenzy of commentary in the press – most of it hopelessly ill-considered.

Some hailed it as the future. Which it quite clearly isn’t – at least not in this form. Radiohead is one of very few bands that can get away with this approach because there are less than a handful of bands in the world with their profile.

Others railed against the decision and fed the music industry line that Radiohead would never have existed without music industry backup and significant investment.

The truth is, as ever, somewhere in between.

The music industry is probably the most loathsome I have ever come across, and I have worked in the media for a long time, which has also provided windows into engineering, politics, computers, health and others. I think perhaps only modelling and arms dealing do a better job of destroying people by treating them as nothing.

The music industry does have some good parts but mostly it is an immensely cynical and exploitative industry that is hugely resistant to change and which constantly feeds lies about itself to protect profits.

How such an industry has managed to evolve to control music – something that people of all walks of life are inspired (and have always been inpsired) to spontaneously create, is fascinating. A good chunk of it is the mad egoism of those willing to put themselves up on a stage and play to crowds. Such unusual behaviour provides for all the self-interest an industry needs to divide and conquer the workforce.

Independence

What digital technology has done however is enable musicians to live within their own little worlds without needing such a strong guiding hand. The distribution channel has opened up. And that threatens to create a new stream of business of independent producers, promotors, agents and so on. If enough bands are able to get over themselves and not feel the need to act like rock-star children, and if a big chunk of the market starts going the independent route, then the music industry may have no choice but to adjust the balance of its role, providing less control and more “enabling”.

It will fight every step of the way of course but if I were a young and ambitious man (or woman), I would be looking at guiding bands the way of digital technology at a fascinating career path. Come to think of it, I am a young and ambitious man but I find musicians extremely difficult to work with – and this is the music industry’s secret knowledge.

As much as we like to think of these wonderfully creative people being screwed by nasty men in suits, the truth is that most musicians are a petulant, self-regarding, selfish and difficult bunch. There needs to be some growing up on both sides.

The music industry needs to stop pretending that only it is able to get music into the ears of the rest of the world. A claim that is resolutely ludicrous given the extent of the music and its importance to the human race.

Get over it

And musicians need to stop buying into the fame and fortune nonsense, start behaving more professionally and see the possibilities out there. Plus of course try to find the strength not to sell out their independent partners to the music industry as soon as they have some degree of success.

Listening to Radiohead and writing this, I feel, as I often do when listening to good music — elated and thoughtful in equal measure. Not many things that can do that to me. And that’s why we all love music.

I know because I’m here and I’m on of two official bloggers. See can see the full agenda here, and the front page to the blog, which I will be updating all day can be found here.

The conference is basically bringing together experts from across the world to discuss what these latest Web2.0 technologies – which the OECD has placed under the banner “the participative web” – mean, what impact they will, what we should do and not do about the societal, business and political changes they invoke and so on. The reason why this is important is because the OECD is one of the full bodies in the world that the world’s most powerful governments listen to.

So check it out. Reply to my blog posts – if they’re pertinent I’ll read em out in the meeting.

And Facebook is nice. I now have 26 friends and they can see what I’m doing (sort of); and I can see what they’re doing (sort of). And I can wonder how odd it is that my friends know so many people that I haven’t met; and wonder if they wonder who on earth are the people listed as my friends.

But I am beginning to get the same sort of feeling I started getting with LinkedIn about a month ago. At first, it’s kinda like collecting football stickers, except rather than having Gary Lineker staring out at you, it’s your old mate from university.

Networking?

Like football stickers, there is lots of vaguely interesting information next to their sticker and you have a look at their CV and it’s novel. And then, after a while, you wonder what on the earth the actual point is. Someone on LinkedIn, for example, who you vaguely know and figure out where from once you’ve Googled him asks to be linked with you and so you agree because it would be an unnecessary snub to say no. And as soon as you do that, the whole point of useful exclusivity is killed. You hit 30 connections and think that’s a lot – and then you see one of your people has over 500 connections. What’s meaningful about that? Suddenly it becomes less about useful networking and more the fact that you induced someone to click a button. What is LinkedIn ever going to do for me?

And I am rapidly getting there with Facebook. Someone who I have never met in my life asked to be my friend. I left him in the friend request pile for two days while pondering what to do. In the end I found out there was a “limited profile” option and gave him that. But I feel a bit guilty about it. He’s not the only one on limited profile either. Do people know if they are limited-profile friends? Don’t you risk actually annoying your new friends? And what am I am actually doing with Facebook? Every now and again I update my status with daft comments like..

Kieren is:

• sitting inside watching the rain and typing.
• unable to believe he put off buying a high-quality coffee-grinder for so long.
• trying to figure out how he got so much done today.
• back home at midnight, tired and a bit ill.
• going to write some interesting stuff on trains today.

And because I wrote whatever is in my head at that moment, it feels out-of-date and so I have to keep updating it. Why? Am I keeping in touch with people? Am I sharing interesting snippets that retains the bond of friendship across distances and time? Or am I just spreading tedious ditties about my life to people who really aren’t that interested? (I have noticed incidentally that other people have got stuck in a similar rut but over changing their profile photos.) I’m beginning to think that this Web2.0 stuff is terrific – but only if you’re a self-obsessed and self-conscious teenager. I’m just a bit too busy and too happy with myself not to be out of my mind with boredom over the magpie snippets of mine and others’ lives.

What’s worse is that I fear I might start mistaking reading a friend’s “wall” as being in touch with them. I’m bad enough as it is keeping in touch with people. I have always consistently forgotten to call people occasionally for my whole life. Facebook risks making that worse. I can imagine spending years never actually communicating directly with someone and happily maintaining the delusion that we are still close while in fact their marriage is on the rocks, or they have become a totally different person to the one I allow myself to pretend they are.

Cull

I think 26 friends is too many and was thinking of culling a few (fuck it – why not?). And then I saw a poll of other Facebook users. In fact I took a screengrab which I’ll stick below. The question asked how many “friends” people had on Facebook. There were 1,000 responses, at which point the poll was closed. Unbelievably, 19 percent had over 400. Four hundred! I don’t think I’ve even spoken to 400 people in my life – and I’m a bloody journalist. Then, 28 percent had 200-399 and another 28 percent 100-199. Only 11 percent it seems were as anti-sociable as me with 0-49 friends.

What does online friendship actually mean when there are over 300 people sending in christmas-cracker comments every day? What is everyone filling their heads with? I bet it’s all adding to the jittery zero-attention-span state I get into online sometimes that means I am over-stimulated while at the same time unable to do anything that takes longer than 30 seconds. Anyway, maybe I’m just being an old grouch but I have a strong suspicion that Facebook may go the way of these other websites I have signed up to at some point for some reason now lost in time, and die in slow obscurity. And, as ever, I will wish I spent all the time on it doing something that may have actually use or value in my life.

I just noticed that the poll on my blog is out-of-date. It’s still going on about the Sunday Times article that I “wrote” over a month ago. I am pleased to see that 54 percent of people thought my original con-man version was the best, with just 20 percent going for the Sunday Times article that was written for me. I wonder how many people actually read them or whether they felt obliged to be nice to me. Or if they didn’t really give it much thought. It was just another online poll, wasn’t it? Probably the 19th they’d filled in that day.

You have to feel sorry for historians of this era – how on earth are they ever going to filter all this crap into something useful?

Anyway, new poll:

Do Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and so on:

* Keep you in touch with old friends
* Help you make new friends
* Waste yours and everyone else’s time
* Destroy the few social skills you have

Vote on the right…

Unfortunately there is still a four to six-week delivery date on it, which leads me to conclude that my publishers have yet to strike a deal with a US publisher. I also note on a quick perusal of the Net that the Sydney Morning Herald and ran a whole extract in its edition today – Chapter 3, I believe. And I’m pleased to see that Techworld – where I was news ed – ran an extract last week. Alot has happened since I’ve been away.

I’ve also got a lovely review on Amazon.com. Although this doesn’t appeared to have helped my ranking much – it’s still way down at book no 186,461. Anyway, the review:

Review

Don’t enter the world of Intellectual Property without this book, June 6, 2007

By Jonglier

Forget the lubricious or lascivious, there’s little if any of that in Kieren McCarthy’s business-thriller/page-turner. Its essential subject matter is on the face of it dry as a bone: trademarks, internet domain names or URLs, intellectual property rights, and the civil legal system that arbitrates on all of the above.

Yet McCarthy makes the topic alive, fraught, fascinating and above all important: to you and me as media users, to would-bet net entrepreneurs, to anyone to whom ideas – and their protection and promotion – is important… But oh how close, in the dying days of the saga, victory looked like turning to the sourest possible defeat!

Rush to your credit card wallet and buy this book now. Buy two: you’re sure to know a net fiend who’ll find it instructive and enthralling.”

Now ain’t that nice. I wonder if I’ll get any money for all this.

The technology worked although thanks to some readers of different nationalities, it quickly became clear that the translations were not great – and in some cases barely comprehensible. Part of the reason is that I write in a very chatty fashion in English, complete with slang, odd sentence construction and often an idiosyncratic style. There’s no way a computer can accurately translate that sort of material. And it would seem that Google has decided not to bother at all.

Click on any of the flags on the right-hand column and I have just noticed you are informed that Google considers that your action “looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application” and that you may want to run a virus checker on your computer. There is no manual override. Google simply refuses to translate the page. So much for Google translation. I’m shifting to a different one that hopefully will be able to do the most basic job or telling a click on a website to a virus.

And people wonder why we shouldn’t get too caught up with Google software.

And so I have installed a translation plug-in for this blog as an experiment. There are about five out there that plugin to Wordpress. I would like to say I will test them all, find the best, and write about it but I already know I won’t have time. Anyway, let’s see how it handles this post.

Update:

This is terrific – looks at the little flags under the search on the right-hand-side. Just click on your flag and the site is translated. I have a choice of Google translation engine or BabelFish. Gone with Google for the meantime. Now the big question is: is the translation good enough to be worthwhile for people to read or is it just frustrating? It’s a very difficult thing to judge. Any readers whose first language is not English that may try this, please, please do comment below on what you think.

There is another very short crack out there for the High Definition DVD standard – much shorter that the infamous DeCSS crack released in 1999 – and the Movie Association is going all out again, threatening anyone that posts the 32-digit code with legal action. It told Digg that it expected it to remove any reference to the code, and so Digg complied, but then was hit by a tidal wave of complaints by its users, prompting Kevin Rose to write the following blog post:

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

You have to admire Kevin for standing up for what he thinks, but I very strongly suspect he has just made a big mistake based on beliefs that with a few years’ experience he will find don’t quite work in reality. My prediction: the movie industry lawyers will destroy Digg and the only good thing that will come out of it will be that the company makes its software open source.

First, look at the MPAA’s approach and success. It sues the hell out of anyone that is high-profile but which doesn’t have enough funds to stretch the case out or get the situation properly reviewed in the US courts (which would mean $5 million and around five years, going to the Appeals Court etc). This is a very effective tactic because it means the MPAA wins, it forms a weak sort of legal precedent and it scares the bejesus out of everyone else. The same approach took down Napster – yes, remember Napster? And despite dozens of creative ways of making the DeCSS code available, the MPAA was 100 percent effective in stopping the code from being readily available as a simple file.

The reality is that if you can’t type DeCSS into a search engine and download it straight-off, then 90 percent of the people that may have used the code, will never use it. No matter what way you look at it, this is incredibly effective legal pressure. It should also be noted that the MPAA managed this while failing to actually prosecute DVD Jon for DeCSS. It certainly made his life hell for several years, but ultimately the courts wouldn’t buy it. It didn’t matter in the end.

Scalp

So the MPAA will do the exact same thing again. When Napster was taken down, it stopped a threatened mass revolution of pirated music. When Digg is buried, it will take the wind out of the user-generated side of the Internet. Every other website will follow suit, and the MPAA gets what it wants – a very public scalp and as much containment of the code as it can reasonably expect to get.

There is a big difference this time however. The DeCSS code was relatively long. This latest bit of code is extremely short. And the shorter it is, the more ways there are to make the whole thing very easily and simply available – such as putting it in a one-minute song. The MPAA is really at the end of a losing battle with this one. Its tactics will work, it can kill Digg by throwing lawyers at the company, but if the MPAA doesn’t learn how to approach these matters differently, then next time this happens, they are going to be swamped.

I do think it’s a shame that Kevin Rose is throwing away a terrific site and company because he has mistakenly viewed users’ complaints as support. The fact is that the vast majority of Digg users will have continued to use Digg once all this had blown over in a month. And the other sad truth is that all those people that complained – and even the ones currently pledging unending support for the company – will melt into nothing if lawyers turn up at their house, or even if Digg puts out more than one call for funds to fight the legal battle.

Kevin should have kept schtum, he should have done what he could to remove the postings and then simply let the millions of Internet users out there bypass all the MPAA’s enforced controls (because the code itself is so short) on hundreds of thousands of other websites. What’s he’s done is give Hollywood a great big target to fire at. If Kevin has any sense, he will learn from Shawn Fanning and put Digg up for sale while all the publicity boosts its profile, so that a new boss can step in, cut a deal with the MPAA, and continue with Digg as is.

Still, good on him for having the balls.