Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Month: January 2009 (Page 1 of 5)

snarebrained

29 January 2009 / / 1 Comment

FOUND play at The Mill, 6th October 2008

FOUND play at The Mill, 6th October 2008


Remember FOUND, the five-piece innovators from Edinburgh?  They are off to the South by South-West festival in Texas, and are raising money for the outing by producing a new album.  In a RadioHead style gambit, they’re giving punters the chance to choose what price to pay for the collection.  I’ve gone for £7.50 because

  • I’m short of cash; and
  • its pretty much the amount I would have spent for eight songs on iTunes.

You could spend as much as £49 if you’re flush.
Their online marketing techniques remind me a little of the MC Yogi tactic discussed earlier: a little something for free (or in this case, below the market rate) might lead to new paying supporters later.  Appallingly though, their Flickr photos fall foul of the same Creative Commons malaise I whined about yesterday.  Since I know the musicians personally, I’m going ahead and reproducing one of their images without fear of retribution.  But guys: It doesn’t have to be this way.

Misunderstanding Creative Commons

28 January 2009 / / 0 Comments

I’m a fan of Creative Commons, the fantastic project that provides ready-made licences, with increasing degrees of freedom, that you can bestow on any content you create.
One thing I find amusing and irritating in turn is the inappropriate use of these licences. Over on Flickr, I see countless examples of people giving their snap shots an ‘All Rights Reserved’ licence, as if they are part of the Getty or Magnum elite.
There are thousands of examples of this, so I hate to pick on anyone.  But the latest example I have come across just happens to be the Flickr group for The Last Tuesday Society, a bizarre yet highly successful events company based in London.  Now, I’ve been to a couple of events that they have put on, and they are great fun.  Sexy, risqué, warped, funny.  They upload literally hundreds of snap-shots for each event they run, but Mr Victor Wynd uses a simple domestic camera with a built in flash, so, to be frank, they’re not all that impressive.  And yet bizarrely, there’s no way I can reproduce this photo, or that photo, or even this photo, because they are All Rights Reserved.
And that’s just silly.  The people taking and uploading the photos is in the business of promoting events, and so it would be in their interests for their images to be seen by as many people as possible.  Especially photos like this, which would, I’ll wager, sell a fair few dozen tickets if they appeared on a large news website or even in the Metro, or londonpaper, or London Lite.
And its not just companies that are guilty of this particular misunderstanding.  At the risk of alienating certain friends of mine, I do wonder why the images for mkultra, strangerpixel and rossfadam are not given a more liberal licence.  Doing so would surely bring their work to a wider audience, and may even increase the rate at which their images are used for editorial or illustrative purposes.  As we saw with the case of MC Yogi last year, providing some work for free (however high the quality) can lead to greater exposure, and paid for contracts, a short way down the line.
Amusingly, a more liberal approach has worked for me.  I recently found that one of my photographs has been included on the popular Schmapp website.  It is actually a rather average image, poorly lit and unimaginatively framed.  And its inclusion is also unlikely to make me any money.  However, it does mean an increased exposure for my Flickr stream, and also fulfils a particular purpose for the community.  A net gain all round?

The Botanical Gardens in Sheffield, September 2008

The Botanical Gardens in Sheffield, September 2008

The Printed Blog

27 January 2009 / / 0 Comments

Meanwhile, down the rabbit hole, The Printed Blog is a US newspaper created entirely from blog content.  The founders are currently “beta testing” the newspaper at “select locations”.
It reminds me of Things Our Friends Have Written on The Internet.  The Main difference being that The Printed Blog is a paid for product, not a labour of love.  I know Blurb.com offer a blogbook service.
As the internet becomes exponentially more popular, and the international credit-crunch hits home, newspapers have been identified as a failing industry.  Clay Shirky criticises their business model in Here Comes Everybody and Andrew Sullivan has been chronicling the possibility of a newspaper “bailout” to save the New York Times.  Its odd that a publication that uses twenty-first century technology to supply its content, should be experimenting with a twentieth century sales and distribution model… so I’m not confident it will succeed.
What could redeem the project, is if the publication is launched as a customisable, subscription product.  For example, I could select the blogs or newspapers I like, and some system compiles a customised newspaper that is printed digitally and despatched to my door.  It would be the first step towards the dynamic electronic newspapers from science fiction – Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, which I just finished reading, includes such fantastic technology.
(And yes, The Printed Blog does have a blog).

Update

From 1981:

A Note on My Note on Modern Liberty

26 January 2009 / / 0 Comments

The Convention on Modern Liberty has invited its attendees to post video responses to the messages that their key speakers have created in support of the project.  I’ve had a go, and created an archetypal ‘head to camera’ YouTube video:

My take is to highlight the problem of small, minor liberties being taken away without comment. If we guard against the loss of these, then the large incursions onto our freedoms, the kind that bring about a totalitarian state, will never happen. But those freedoms are also valuable in themselves.
I am slightly uneasy about saying that the large infringements, such as the 42 days detention laws, or the existence of Guantanamo, are somehow ‘abstract’. Some might see this as an insensitivity to those who have fallen victim to such state-sponsored action… and that may indeed be the case. However, my aim in making the video (or rather, making the point) was to provide a persuasive argument that may convince people that remain ambivalent, rather than a place to show anger, solidarity, or both.
I think that feature has come to be the tone of this site over the past, say, twenty months. I’ve found this is less a place to rant, less a place for me to find catharsis… and more a place to push an argument into new places. If it appears to some people that I have missed the point, then there’s a chance that the argument wasn’t intended for them in the first place.

Satire Resumes

23 January 2009 / / 1 Comment

Is it hard to make fun of Obama?  Chris Rock:

He’s just one of those guys, you know, like Will Smith. There’s no Will Smith jokes. There’s no Brad Pitt jokes. You know, what are you going to say? “Ooh, you used to have sex with Jennifer Anniston. Now you have sex with Angelina Jolie. You’re such a loser.” What do you say? “Ooh, your movies are big. You make $20 million.” There’s nothing to say about Brad Pitt. [And with Obama] it’s like “Ooh, you’re young and virile and you’ve got a beautiful wife and kids. You’re the first African-American president.” You know, what do you say?

Not so, Chris, not so. Jon Stewart (until recently labelled as Obama’s Fawner-In-Chief) has resumed the satire.  And a good thing too.

Update: Other Inaugural Addresses

While Stewart compares Obama to George W. Bush, Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight thinks that the new President’s speech had echoes of FDR.
Elsewhere, a MetaFilter user has located inaugural addresses dating back to 1901 (via Kottke). Watching at the Kennedy speech, I’m struck by how his delivery matches Obama’s on Tuesday. Neither “soar” in the manner we saw in Obama’s 2004 convention speech. Instead they seem businesslike and assertive, which is probably more appropriate. In fact, Kennedy’s delivery doesn’t age well – the parody of his style by Dan Castellaneta as Mayor Quimby in the Simpsons sadly damages the gravitas, I feel.
It strikes me that we may actually have seen the last of Obama’s barnstorming speeches. They were appropriate for a young, upstart candidate seeking to break a glass-ceiling and an establishment lock on the nomination. Less so for a President, who must exercise greater caution, diplomacy and tact than the Average Joe Politician.

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