Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Weekly Column’

NSFW: 1200 words absolutely, definitely not about Rupert Murdoch and Google

One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the “suggesters”.

Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers – all containing useful links to stories they “assume I’ve seen”. And always with the same suggestion: “you should write about this in your column!”.

Worse than the suggesters are the “trusters”. They’re even more irritating because of their belief that they wield some kind of editorial influence. “Trust you’ll be writing about this in your column this week. Can’t wait to hear your take on it!” they say, blithely assuming that their lack of patience will ultimately be rewarded. Some of them even add a ‘LOL’ to further underline what total and utter wankers they are.

In truth, it rarely pays to indulge the recommenders or the trusters. If a subject has blipped across their radar then chances are, by the time my weekly deadline has come around, it will have been done to death by other bloggers and columnists. By Saturday even the person who ‘couldn’t wait’ to hear my take on a subject will be utterly bored with it.

The perfect example of this is Rupert Murdoch’s “threat” to remove News Corp content from Google, and his “negotiations” with Microsoft to make articles from The Wall Street Journal and the rest “only available on Bing”. It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire fucking universe has emailed me to say how much they’re looking forward to hearing my opinion on the prospect. Apparently my criticism of the aborted Microsoft adverti-raping of Family Guy means my views on Microsoft and Murdoch somehow matter a damn, and the fact that I’ve worked for old and new media means that I have some unique additional insight. Also, I swear a lot when I talk about Rupert or Microsoft, and people dig that shit.

After the eighty-six-millionth email dinged into my inbox, I did almost consider surrendering to popular pressure and dedicating an entire column to my analysis of whether such an arrangement is ever likely to happen and what it would mean for Google, and the wider world. But then I realised that I’m paid to write long, and that a column like that would read as follows (in its entirely)…

Will News Corp Remove Its Content From Google, And If So What Will It Mean For The World?

No.

And nothing.

…which feels lazy, even for me.

The fact is, as a Brit, I’ve seen Murdoch pulling this crap countless times before. The News Corp-owned Sun is the biggest-selling newspaper in the UK, and second biggest-selling English language newspaper in the world. In every national election for as long as anyone can remember, the candidate backed by the Sun has gone on to win. (And not just in the UK – the paper backed Obama for President, even though Murdoch also owns Fox News.)

The Sun’s endorsement of winners is, according to some, evidence of Murdoch-as-kingmaker; a man with the ability to shape opinion and to win (or lose) elections. Sure enough, the Sun’s recent shift from supporting Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to Conservative rival David Cameron coincided with a spike in opinion polls for the latter to become the next Prime Minister.

But to assume that Murdoch’s backing of Cameron lead to the spike is to flip cause and effect. Murdoch doesn’t create winners, he’s simply adept at spotting where public opinion is heading – waiting until he’s absolutely certain who the winner of a fight will be – and then endorsing them so loudly that when they inevitably win, he can share all the credit. “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”, the paper once declared after an election, when in fact a more accurate headline would be “it’s the Sun wot noticed it”.

The idea that Murdoch removing his content from Google will be the beginning of the end for the latter’s dominance is just nonsense. Sure a few smaller news rivals might be dumb enough to heed his rallying cry for a mass-boycott of Google News, but that will just be an added bonus to Murdoch. The numbers show that most searchers wouldn’t even notice if the Wall Street Journal and every other News Corp publication vanished from their results. What would definitely happen, though, is a huge drop in eyeballs and ad revenue for News Corp, which would certainly cost Murdoch far more than he could hope to recoup from a deal with Bing. Again, anyone familiar with the Sun (and its New York-based cousin, the Post) will know that Rupert will always put his hunger for eyeballs above his insistence that people pay for news – to the point where he is happy to slash cover prices to economically-suicidal levels to win readers.

But fortunately Murdoch doesn’t need to make that decision: unlike in politics where you can’t endorse both candidates, there’s really no reason for him to pick a horse in the search race. His ideal scenario is to continue to make News Corp content available via both Google and Bing, but to encourage both to display it in a way that drives the maximum monetizable eyeballs. Which is exactly what his current strategy will achieve.

By convincing Bing that there’s a chance he might drop Google – for the right price – Murdoch suddenly has a new partner falling over itself to give him prominence in their search results, on his terms. Sure enough, Microsoft has just agreed to help fund the next-generation search crawling protocol, ACAP, which gives content owners like News Corp more control over how their news is indexed.

Meantime, Google might not be worried about a mass exodus to Bing, but as more publishers start to consider alternative search services they have to at least begin to take ACAP seriously. After all, if you want to index the world’s information, you have to accept that a big chunk of that information belongs to Rupert. Again, this is win-win for Murdoch who can keep his content on Google, but with the option of locking some of it away behind un-indexable walls in future.

And that’s where we see Murdoch’s real genius: he has managed to use his illusion of influence to get all of these benefits without having to commit himself to anything, or expose himself in any way. There is no way in hell that News Corp content will vanish from Google and yet with every headline asking whether Google should be worried or suggesting that other companies might follow Murdoch’s lead, his image as a kingmaker is strengthened. It’s bad enough that he has millions of readers and viewers for his own outlets, without the rest of us doing his dirty work for him.

And it’s for that reason that I won’t be swayed by the recommenders and the trusters, no matter how many emails they send. I know Murdoch’s game, and unlike my poor misguided TechCrunch colleagues, I refuse to play it.

So, sorry Rupert, I don’t know what my column will be about this week, but one thing’s for sure: it won’t include a single word about you or your….

…oh.

Damn you’re good.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Read the whole story…

NSFW: Bringing Nothing To TechCrunch, And A Brand New Reality To The Unter-Trolls

I don’t know about you, but I give this ridiculously misguided experiment three weeks.

Three weeks until – at best – Arrington comes to his senses and realises that there’s a reason why I’ve been fired from every job I’ve had, most recently as a columnist for the Guardian. Three weeks until – at worst – I say something so insanely actionable about a deep-pocketed venture capitalist that TechCrunch finds itself sued out of existence.

But in the meantime, here I am, and it’s traditional in the opening episode of a new column for the writer to introduce himself and to generally sketch out his plans for the column. So here we go…

Hello TechCrunch readers, my name is Paul Carr and I’ll be your Saturday columnist for the next three weeks. Shortly after I was booted from the Guardian, Arrington called me and asked what it would take to bring me and my weekly column to TechCrunch. I immediately gave him a list of four things…

- Hookers
- A case of good rum
- Editorial independence
- A desk

The Editorial independence thing was particularly important to me. TechCrunch is a publication that never shies away from a good story, which sometimes means it makes embarrassing or amusing mistakes. I called out these mistakes with glee when I was at the Guardian, and I see no reason why I should stop now. Or to put it another way, the next time Erick asks the question “Did Last.fm just hand over listening data to the RIAA?” I need to be able to say “no, you idiot” without fear of reprisals. (Hello Erick. Love you, man).

Likewise when the wifi inevitably fails at TechCrunch 50 – which it will, because it’s a technology conference – I need to be able to write a slap-down at least as damning as the one I wrote about LeWeb without being taken out and shot (Hello Loic. Love you, man).

To Michael’s credit, he didn’t hesitate in agreeing to the editorial independence (”but if you suck, I’ll fire you”) and to two of my other three demands. And so with a hooker on my arm, and a pint of good rum in my hand, I’m ready to get started. But before I kick off my regular posting schedule, there’s one more thing we need to talk about…

We need to talk about You.

I’ve been a TechCrunch reader since long before I joined the masthead – and through the comments appended to each post I feel like I’ve got the measure of you, my fellow readers. The vast majority of you – it’s only fair to say – seem like great people. You post witty, erudite, knowledgeable comments and are always ready to add a new dimension – or lash on a few additional facts – to a story. It’s a genuine honour to be able to write for you and I look forward to your responses, for good or ill.

But then there’s the rest of you. The small but all-too-vocal minority of you who are – and I mean this sincerely – total freaks. Howling at the moon lunatics. Mentally unbalanced, socially subnormal trolls. Except, if Scandinavian mythology has taught us anything (and it hasn’t), it’s that trolls are strong, frightening and cunning creatures. You people are unworthy of the word troll. In fact there is no creature – real or fictional – that I could liken you to, without it being an insult to that poor beast. You people are unter-trolls.

I don’t want to get into a fight with you, for the same reason as Cyrus S. Ching once said you should never fight with a pig: you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it. And so, because you clearly need hard discipline in what you laughably call your lives, I’m simply going to set out some ground rules, not just for commenting on my columns but for every comment you ever make on Techcrunch in future. Listen carefully, unter-trolls, because I won’t tell you again…

Rule One: The next time one of you asks the rhetorical question “why is this news?” I swear to God I will come round to your basement, gather up all of your Wil Wheaton action figures and melt them down into a giant plastic phallus. If you’ve ever seen the Miriam Karlin scene in A Clockwork Orange, you know what happens next. Save us both a trip and next time you find yourself asking “why is this news?”, instead ask yourself “why do I still live with my parents?”. It’s news because people better than you said so.

Rule Two: See rule one again, but add the questions “really MG, another post about Twitter?”, “why should I care about this?” and “is this TechCrunch or Valleywag?”. That last one is particularly mental. If you’re genuinely incapable of telling the two sites apart then I’ll gladly help you by replacing next week’s column with a list of copied and pasted tweets, illustrated with a picture of Julia Allison posing in Pete Cashmore’s vest.

Rule Three: Anonymous comments. If I had my way there would be no absolutely no anonymous comments, not just on TechCrunch but the whole of Internet. They are the last refuge of a child molester. In fact, I would rather encourage my only child to trick-or-treat his way down the sex offenders register than to spend one moment in the company of someone who would leave an anonymous comment on a blog. Man up or fuck off.

Rule Four: Personal attacks. You’ll notice that I’m attacking you generically here, rather than naming and shaming any single one of you. That’s because I realise that this is just a technology news site and that nothing posted here is important enough to warrant an individual being insulted or threatened. Likewise, calling Arrington names or making cheap innuendo about Lacy became boring before it even started, not just because either of them, or every other TechCrunch contributor past and present, could write and report you little punks under the table. Realise that, feel ashamed and move on. And don’t even get me started on actual physical threats: that’s flashing blue lights, handcuffs and padded cell stuff.

Rule Five: Sometimes I write long. I really don’t care if the Internet is supposed to be limited to 140 badly punctuated characters of nothingness or one-note blog posts designed to leave a tsetse fly with ADD wanting more. For every comment I see complaining about the length of this column, I will add an extra 100 words to the following week’s instalment. Believe me when I say this is a battle that I will win.

Rule Six: I have written a book. It’s called Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore. Don’t worry, there’s no need for you to remember that title as I will be reminding you in every single post I write. I mention it here because I guarantee whatever criticism you feel the need to level about me – my unprofessionalism, my uncontrollable drinking, my inability to hold on to a job or any other relationship for more than five minutes -  I’ve said far worse about myself in the book. As such I’m immune to your lame retorts. To paraphrase Batfink, my wings of self-confessed loserdom are like a shield of I don’t give a shit.

Ok, that’s enough rules for now. I’m sure I’ll think of others as we go along – you freaks never fail to surprise me – but I think you get the gist. Just remember that you bitches are my bitches from hereon out, and we’ll get along just fine.

As for the rest of you – the sane, rational, intelligent un-anonymous majority of the TechCrunch community – I’m really sorry you all had to witness that undignified scene.

It sounds twee, but I really do see this column as a weird dysfunctional partnership between me and you – my Kermit to your Statler, my Gonzo to your Waldorf. Like you, I adore TechCrunch, in the way I would adore a smart, funny, flawed, bipolar and sometimes-just-plain-wrong lover. I really couldn’t be prouder to be joining the team of professionals who inhabit the terrifyingly-quiet TechCrunch offices (little known fact: there is actually sound on CrunchCam, it’s just that no-one has ever said anything) and I’m really looking forward to being your eyes and ears, responding to your comments and helping to grow the vibrant community that makes TechCrunch such a unique beast.

So, as TS Eliot almost said; let us go then, you and I, when the Valley is spread out against the sky. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll call out the bad guys and celebrate the good, we’ll travel the world and get kicked out of Le Web, uninvited to TED, sued by delusional entrepreneurs and write miles of gushing prose about Last.fm just to piss off Arrington and Schonfeld. Really, it’s going to be a blast.

For three weeks at least.

[Photo credit: Geoffrey Ellis]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Read the whole story…