Inside View from Ireland

Bailout for Irish Entertainment Industry

ONE OF THE MOST STRESSFUL topics of discussion in the online community of Ireland concerns the statutory instrument to amend the Copyright Act 2000. Once you crack the discussion open, you discover it's actually no more than a bailout for the entertainment industry in Ireland.

As things stand, a simple stroke of the pen could impose higher fees on everyone using the internet in Ireland. Those increased fees would be needed by internet service providers as they became the online vigilantes for the music industry. This allows the music industry to cling to its outmoded business models instead of focusing its efforts on providing better subscription services for a rapidly growing market of connected consumers.

A lot of people consider the ideas mooted by Deputy Sean Sherlock to be no more than an "Irish SOPA" because of the draconian nature of the stipulations engrained in proposed legislation crafted by Minister Sherlock. Irish Internet Service Providers (ISPs)  have "very practical and simple business reasons” to reject Sherlock's solution to a problem created by the Irish music industry.

Unseen Sweatshops Don't Bother Us

THERE IS MORE CHATTER in Ireland about Fairtrade coffee beans than about unsafe conditions in the factories where our consumer devices are made. And I doubt anything in the current dust-up about Apple's Foxconn operations will change our attitudes.

I played audio from This American Life to LIT students in our Applied Communications module because one of the themes of that programme explores worldly views of socialism and communism. Years ago, communist leaders might have set up factories for hand-made clothing. The pace would have been slower than what's in the sprawling Foxconn factories today. Things have to move faster because of pent-up consumer demands. Here in Ireland, we get antsy if more than a year elapses between updates to our iPhones (and Nokia phones that I buy), laptops, or kitchen appliances. That consumer pressure filters all the way to Chinese manufacturing lines where little hands assemble tiny parts. The sheer number of available employees gives little incentive to automating assembly processes. Many hands do fast work. And in Foxconn's case, that means 860,000 hands.

Who Died to Make Your iPhone

Learning through Internet-Mediated Communications

OUR FOUR-YEAR OLD learns via internet-mediated communications and she hasn't started formal schooling yet. She's touching screens to learn more things this year than I ever imagined.

I'm amazed at how she experiments in her own pathways of discovery. She is drawn into differentiated interpenetrations by exploring on-screen activities ranging from clever iPad apps, science videos, multilingual YouTube clips, multilevel gaming, and usage-based approaches to learning the alphabet. As I watch her, I marvel at the leaps we have made with the interface between life activity, learning, and cognition. Then I consider her immediate future in the traditional school system and hope there's enough in the classrooms where she will sit to continue her interest in self-learning through information technologies. Mia still has not discovered the hours of dinosaurs and historical timelines that await her, just a simple tap away on her iPad or Android screen.

---

Shot of Mia exploring the Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore.

edchatie

Shared Circles and a Confession

I HAVE A CONFESSION to make: my most retweeted items come from Google Plus Shared Circles. And now since my G+ activity is much higher than what I do on Twitter, I'm sharing the inside story.

Image compliments of Kexino.com

It's a story of how to find like-minded, engaging people on Google+ by tapping into a list of 139,000 names and over 900 circles on the Google+ Shared Circles Database. If you like eclectic, this is your honeypot.

The Shared Circles Database gets regular updates from the Google+ community. If you're a regular reader of my blog and someone has shared a circle with you that is worth recording, please take a moment to add it to the Google+ Shared Circles Database at goo.gl/PrcGo #SharedCircles

Here are the instructions http://goo.gl/Ktn6R and the current categories are below the break.

Watching Disruptions in Publishing

ALONG WITH A TEAM of third level students from the Limerick Institute of Technology, I listened to editor Eoin Purcell describe how electronic publishing is disrupting the print industry. I brought my Kindle to the table and listened.

Just before Christmas, I learned how Random House, the USA's largest publisher, was getting 20% of its U.S. revenue from digital sales. Every week Amazon tells me about another author who reached the million mark in Kindle e-book sales. In the middle of January, six of the top 20 titles on USA Today's Best-Selling Books list were e-books. Barnes and Noble looks to its Nook to strengthen the weakening bottom line of its traditional outlets. This is a watershed year for e-books and we're teaching students how to create for this emergent market.

Tina Jordan of the Association of American Publishers says that a best-selling title from a branded author can run upwards of 30% to 40% in digital sales. That's interesting for me as I look around and encounter students who want to have many choices in reading formats and ease of buying. Anecdotally, I see a migration by students away from hard covers and into e-books whose pages they can print on demand. At home, I watch my four-year-old daughter read from memory the iPad stories that can read to her when the audio is turned on.

Free Nokia Lumia Launches in Ireland

NOKIA'S LUMIA IS available from "free" in Vodafone Ireland shops, meaning a 60 euro monthly contract will get you a very capable handset.

Where I work, the monthly contract price is around 20 euro more per month than many legacy Nokia owners currently pay. I consider the extra money is the cost of being connected online while you're mobile. It costs a lot more to push data through 3G masts than it costs to run SMS texting across Ireland. The question for all the network operators is how to make data such a compelling service to attract tens of thousands of Irish to pay for it on monthly contracts. It's a tough sell.

It's also a tough sell to pull a happy iPhone owner back to Nokia. Tens of thousands of Irish who grew up with Nokia now own iPhones. Many of them are happy in an Apple ecosytem and they've paid for dozens of apps they use several times a week. Leaving those paid apps behind will be a big decision because in many cases, those iOS apps enrichen mobile experiences much more than intimate phone calls or conversations by text.

Learning from Pie Charts

VISUAL STATS OFTEN TEACH me more than lines of text and this quick screen (at left) from Google Analytics reminded me of a few things I'd forgotten.

I'd forgotten the power of a newsfeed. Google Analytics treats the 262 January visitors from Feedburner as part of a campaign, yet there's no campaign promoting the Inside View newsfeed. That's because the feed comes in too many flavours and I'm trying to ensure Feedburner is smart enough to deliver the correct content to the appropriate device. At the moment, I need a better feed result when content goes to Kindle.

With Say Media's help, I'm also cranking out feeds for all the categories on my blog. That's very straightforward on Wordpress but a little more work with the advanced templates I'm using on my own blogs. When I get it right, I'll have sections of my blog feeding out as a Kindle document subscription, available for the twelve people reading my blog via their Kindle, Kobo and Nook.

I think there's an untapped campaign in that cohort because I believe people are searching the web for "subscribe via Kindle" and taking the bait when they find it. That's a worthwhile campaign in my book.

---

Michele Neylon -- "Captain Obvious Says Blogging Regularly Gets Traffic, using Fat.ie as his reference point, blogging at Michele.me, January 29, 2012.

"Subscribe via Kindle" had "about 133,000 results" when this blog post published. "Subscribe by Kindle" had fewer than 10,000 results on a Google verbatim search.

The feed for my blog is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Irisheyes

analytics

Twitter Subordinating Censorship to Business

TWITTER IS TAKING STEPS to selectively censor messages country-by-country when it receives "a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity." I wonder what that means to free range tweeting but I imagine how some commentary from ground zero of protests will be muted.

Twitter already deletes content (tweets, images and links) when presented with DMCA requests. " I'm listening to what Christian Payne makes of the Twitter policy in the audio clip below. I'd expect Twitter would seriously consider requests to scrub certain hashtags from its timelines in the county of origin. Marshall Kirkpatrick wonders, "If told to do so by a government massacring its citizens in the streets, will Twitter render all people in that country unable to see messages of protest on its network? Will shouting into such an eerie silence change the way such Tweeting campaigns also engage with the outside world?"

This kind of thing is bound to happen before the end of 2012. I think it's the cost of doing business.

Documentally on Twitter and Censorship

---

twitter

Special Shout-out for Sean Sherlock TD

I DEDICATED MY SUNDAY NEWSROUND to making a shout-out to Sean Sherlock, the Dail deputy empowered to hammer home the Irish version of SOPA that will damage the innovation culture of Ireland. I'm unsure whether the Deputy is listening to the chorus of advice emanating from the Irish tech sector.

I've made a YouTube clip about the problem, using the excellent points raised by Adrian Weckler in his Sunday Business Post columns. Without being hyperbolic, I believe Ireland is at the same point in transitional history as the world was when the Church was trying to constrain Gutenberg from printing copies of the Bible for the common man.

Closer to the present, I know how easy it will be for a big business to get a court order that constrains a small company from displaying information on its website. With a well-argued copyright allegation, the music business could obtain a court order shut down a URL if the judge felt the alleged offender hadn't paid the market rate for a music sample in promotional material on a website. This happens now whenever This Week in Tech plays certain video segments about contentious issues on YouTube. If the TWiT newsclip merely repeats a portion of a video clip while a panel of experts discusses it, a rights holder can simply petition YouTube to pull the clip. With the Irish version of the law, a judge could be persuaded to shut down the entire website, not just an infringing video clip. This is wrong on so many levels. And yet, that's the kind of judicial power that Sean Sherlock and friends want to cede to the judiciary.

Don't Irish politicians see the immense harm they will inflict upon innovative creatives in the start-up community if they pass this law?

Shout-out to Sean Sherlock TD

---

Watch this on YouTube by clicking on the image or listen to it on Audioboo.

Stop SOPA in Ireland.

Text browsers can listen at http://www.insideview.ie/files/shout-out-to-sean-sherlock-td.mp3

sopa

Subscribe to Inside View of Current Affairs.

Nokia in Two Years

ONE OF THE FIRST things friends do when I hand them my Nokia Lumia 800 is flick through the phone's apps to see how many familiar icons they see. They often mutter something when handing back the phone.

Nokia have a lot of work to do during the next year if former Nokia users can be prised from their iPhones. Those iPhones were a quantum leap from Symbian for most owners because they did things faster and used an interface that people enjoyed. Nokia had 46% market share of mobile phones in Ireland when the iPhone launched in 2007. A lot has changed in five years, including the way people used their phones. When people started buying iPhones because their friends had iPhones, they often started connecting through apps, not voice or text. Now those apps represent the mobile environment through which people define their worlds. And as a late starter in the touchscreen game, Nokia has an apps deficiency.