Month: January 2009

Going mobile

I’m going home
And when I want to go home, I’m going mobile
Well I’m gonna find a home on wheels, see how it feels,
Goin’ mobile
Keep me moving

Going Mobile (The Who, Who’s Next, 1971)

Pete Townshend was writing about a different type of “mobile” at the time, but that doesn’t matter, I’m prepared to exploit even the slightest opportunity to refer to one of the greatest albums ever. If you haven’t listened to Who’s Next yet, don’t waste any more time. Stop reading this and do the decent thing.

On the other hand, if, like many regular readers of this blog, you’re quite familiar with the album and its delights, then read on. For the purpose of this post is actually shown in the diagram below:

Taken from Good Magazine, it looks at the best and the worst countries seen from the specific perspectives of internet access and mobile handsets in use. You can see the original chart here.

I found three aspects of the chart intriguing:

  • One, the mobile statistics seemed far more revealing than the internet ones, overall.
  • Two, there were some unexpected names in the mobile top 10. For example, I was not expecting to see Antigua and Barbuda there, particularly when there is no other Caribbean country represented.
  • Three, the mobile bottom 10 made very depressing reading. Too high a correlation between the lack of freedom, economic weakness and mobile scarcity. There is more here than a simple digital divide argument.

I need to spend more time on it before I comment further, but felt that a number of you would be interested in the information even at this stage.

Musing lazily about catch-and-release and its application in the digital world

Some time ago I had the opportunity to go fly fishing for the first time, in the Provo, near Salt Lake City in Utah. It was an exhilarating experience, just what I needed at that particular time in my life. I hope to repeat the experience soon.

Beginner’s luck meant that I caught quite a few fish that day. Something far more important happened to me that day, though. I learnt about the joy of catch-and-release firsthand. There was something immensely satisfying about the process of making sure you took the hook out carefully, then let the fish go and watched it disappear at speed. There was a real sense of stewardship when you did it. In fact the whole experience was about stewardship. You had to be licensed before you fished, which meant there was some modicum of accountability and responsibility for the environment even before you began. It made sense that the money collected for the licence would go towards the upkeep of the environment. When you entered the water, you could see just how pure and clear it was, an eye-opening experience for someone like me, brought up with the Hooghly as the river of reference.

More recently, I was checking out how BookCrossing was doing. 735,000 members in 130 countries. Not bad. If you don’t know what BookCrossing is, here’s what they say on the site:

BookCrossing is earth-friendly, and gives you a way to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. A book registered on BookCrossing is ready for adventure.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym — anywhere it might find a new reader! What happens next is up to fate, and we never know where our books might travel. Track the book’s journey around the world as it is passed on from person to person.

Join hundreds of thousands of active BookCrossers daily in our many forums to discuss your favorite authors, characters and books in every genre throughout history right up through current releases.

Join BookCrossing Join BookCrossing. Help make the whole world a library and share the joy of literacy. Reading becomes an adventure when you BookCross!

Then, a day or two ago, I was browsing the Good Magazine site, and I saw this article. And in it BookCrossing was mentioned, using the phrase “read and release”.

And that made me think. I can only listen to only one thing at a time; I can only read one thing at a time; I can only watch one thing at a time; I can only mash up a small number of things at the same time.

Maybe I could buy the right to hold m songs and n books and p films “in the cloud” concurrently at any given time, as a bundle. Maybe, separately, I could buy the right to fiddle around with q digital objects at any given time, on an “if you change it you must pay for it” basis.

Maybe I can check these digital objects in and out as I please, constrained only by the total I can have, which in turn is related to the bundle I signed up for.

I’m still free to buy the physical disks as normal, this is just about cloud libraries. Maybe there’s room for a small number of players to be the safety deposit vaults for these digital objects, to collect the rents for their usage and to disburse it amongst the long tail of creators, much like a library would do. Maybe the Cloud gives us opportunities to do something about new business models for digital “content” by connecting price to capacity and metering usage simply as a result. [Yes I still believe there is a long tail, despite everything I have read. People are not measuring unfulfilled intentions properly, so the exercise often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for those that do not want the long tail to be true].

All this is amorphous, poorly formed, still inchoate. There’s just something about the catch-and-release model I like, something which I feel is applicable to digital objects. Something that resonates with the “extreme nonrival good” nature of information, particularly digital information.

So why am I sharing it here and now? Precisely because it is amorphous and poorly formed and inchoate. So that people like you can comment on it, criticise it, negate it, improve on it, make it your own, do something with it. Ideas are free. So steal this book.

As I said, musing lazily.

Donald E Westlake 1933-2008

Donald E Westlake, my all-time favourite mystery/thriller writer, died on 31st December 2008. A sad day for mystery fans everywhere.

Westlake was that rare beast, an author who was comfortable in multiple subgenres, each one completely different from the rest. He wrote true hardboiled mysteries under the name of Richard Stark, giving us the Parker series. He wrote wonderful traditional thrillers taking serious social issues and giving them the mystery treatment, books such as the Ax stand out in this context. He also turned out a number of screenplays, the most famous of which is “The Grifters”. He published over a hundred books under a dozen or so names. In the process he collected a whole pile of awards, winning Edgars in three different categories.

I’ve read every one of his books published so far (there is at least one more in the works, due this April), and have a number of his books signed by him. While I liked all of them, my true favourites were his caper novels, normally referred to as his Dortmunder series.

Just what is a caper novel? Let me try and explain.

Most crime novels are whodunits, where the storyline follows the discovery of crime(s) and then seeks to identify the perpetrator(s). Where the focus is on the general environment in which the crime took place, it’s a classic “mystery/thriller”, the main genre itself. Where the focus is on the process of “solving” the crime as if it were a puzzle, you could describe it as the subgenre of “detective fiction”, a la Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Where this solving process is described from the perspective of the forces of law and order, a la Ed McBain or Joseph Wambaugh, the book gets called a “police procedural”. If it is in the vein of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason through to the John Grishams of today, it would be called a “legal drama”. Sometimes the book is written in the first person by the criminal,  in a gritty and down-to-earth “authentic” style, as in the case of the classic Jim Thompson books or even Westlake’s own Richard Stark series: these tend to be called “hardboiled”. Much of what we call pulp fiction is hardboiled crime, and I’m delighted to see what Hard Case Crime has been doing to further this cause.

In all these cases, the crime itself tends to be committed opaquely, intransparently, and the plot revolves around finding out who did it.

The caper novel, on the other hand, is something else altogether. For one thing, it is written from the viewpoint of the criminal, the person or persons committing the crime. The crime itself is carried out in the open, completely transparently, there is no mystery about the perpetrator. The perpetrators tend to be less than perfect in their skill and in their execution, but this gets balanced off as a result of all other parties involved being similarly less than perfect: the victims, the forces of law and order, even the bystanders come with human failings and flaws.

Westlake’s John Dortmunder is the undisputed king of the caper novel.

I remember nearly doing myself an injury reading Bank Shot, one of Westlake’s early caper novels, while in my teens. The plot was simple, yet absurd. It was about a bank robbery. With a big but. Instead of robbing a bank, as you would normally expect, Westlake’s protagonists steal a bank, kit and caboodle. Now of course that meant they needed to find a bank that was housed temporarily in a portacabin, but that’s what literary licence is about, creating such an eventuality. Anyway, the police give chase while the criminals desperately try and break into the bank’s safe while careering down the motorway.

At the other extreme, more recently, I found the Ax gripping and sobering. Fortysomething manager of print operation gets made redundant, then proceeds to deal with the problem his way. Startling. Challenging. Different.

Donald Westlake gave me many many hours of unbridled joy with his writing, joy in many forms, but joy nevertheless. May his soul rest in peace.

Of Twitter and cricket and business models

Here’s something you don’t see every day:

Some wonderfully evocative phrases:

  • allen bowling feeling bitter
  • woodfull declining warners sympathy
  • one side unplaying cricket ruining game
  • time decent men get out game

So where is all this from?  Here’s the story:

Due to restrictions on commercial radio in the United Kingdom in the 1930s, radio stations were established on the continent to beam programs directly to the United Kingdom. The main station was situated in Paris. One of its advertisers was the Gillette Safety Razor Co. which sponsored reporting of the controversial 1932-33 cricket series played between Australia and England in Australia. These were the days before live radio and television broadcasts of international sporting events. Each day a reporter cabled very brief descriptions of play to Paris where they were transformed into full scripts which were then broadcast to the United Kingdom.

The State Library of New South Wales has seen fit to make the cables available to the world at large, a great and laudable gesture. You can read all about it here, and get to the original cables as well. How wonderful.

Looking at the cables reminded me, at least in part, of Twitter, in terms of the brevity of message, the use of abbreviated words, the terseness of communication. And I couldn’t help but smile at the “business model”, which, bluntly put, was “Typescript, commissioned by Gillette Safety Razor Company”. How long before I receive sponsored news on Twitter, with just a few tweaks on the 1930s model? One way becomes two way, the subscription process is democratic, the subjects covered are infinite, and the writers are global microbrands in HughSpeak?

My thanks to Lloyd Davis for tweeting me about it, and to CityofSound for covering it in the first place, where Lloyd saw it.

Delaney Bramlett RIP

It is with some sadness that I note the passing of Delaney Bramlett, who died last Saturday. For many of us he was just Delaney, as in Delaney and Bonnie and Friends. Friends who played regularly with Delaney and Bonnie, friends who included Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, George Harrison, Dave Mason, Leon Russell and Rita Coolidge. Here’s the full line-up as shown in Wikipedia:

Delaney Bramlett
Bonnie Bramlett
Eric Clapton
Duane Allman
Gregg Allman
George Harrison
Leon Russell
Carl Radle
Jim Gordon
Jim Price
Dave Mason
Rita Coolidge
King Curtis
Bobby Whitlock
Jim Keltner
Jerry Scheff

Oh yes, and he also mentored JJ Cale, amongst others. He encouraged Clapton to sing, taught Harrison how to play slide guitar, both Duane Allman and Leon Russell counted themselves as proteges of his. Some CV.

Most of us of a certain age remember many of the people listed above, some as sessions musicians, many as stars in their own right. Readers of this blog would know that the song many consider to be the rock classic, Layla, was performed by Derek and the Dominoes. But not many would know that all four of the members of Derek and the Dominoes were “friends” of Delaney and Bonnie: Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle and Jim Gordon. There is enough evidence to suggest that without Delaney and Bonnie, there wouldn’t have been a Derek and the Dominoes.

I first came across Delaney somewhat indirectly; I was watching a film called Vanishing Point which, to people of my generation, defined car chase films along with the incomparable Bullitt. And stuck in the middle of this classic Seventies film was a pair of musicians. Delaney and Bonnie. I had to know more.

There wasn’t an internet in those days, but what I did find out was enough. Delaney and Bonnie had formed the touring support act for a small group called Blind Faith.

I was hooked, and I continue to be hooked. Delaney Bramlett, thank you for all you’ve done, the enjoyment you’ve provided to a whole generation.