broadstuff

Mary Meeker's Internet Presentation 2009

Its probably because I was around in the dotcom era, but when Henry Blodgett praises a piece of work from Mary Meeker I get nervous. Anyway, here is her slide deck from the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday, and it has lots and lots of facts and figures.

But caveat emptor - bankers, by and large, are not rewarded for being bearish. And while her mobile projections are exciting, I have found over the last 10 years that dividing any projection that comes from Planet Mobile by 2 is a very useful approach.

(Read the comments on the TechCrunch article covering Ms Meeker, tres funny)

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, fulminating on the need to restructure the banking sector last night - Bloomberg reports:

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King stepped up his call for governments to tackle the dangers posed by banks that are “too important to fail,” saying new capital rules won’t shield taxpayers from funding any future bailouts.

“The massive support extended to the banking sector around the world, while necessary to avert economic disaster, has created possibly the biggest moral hazard in history,” he said in a speech in Edinburgh late yesterday. He indicated that one solution could be to split up banks and separate riskier activities from more stable businesses such as taking deposits.

And in the Times today, a piece on the Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, which informs a lot of the FSA thinking:

At the heart of the centre’s work is the recognition that capital markets do not operate as classical economics supposes. Traditional theory is based on the idea that investment decisions are made by an infinite number of self-interested, rational households.

That is bunkum, Dr Woolley argues. The reality is that investment decisions are taken by their agents — fund managers, who have different priorities and enjoy access to better information. “Incredibly, the academics fail to take into account the agency problem,” Dr Woolley says.

It is a problem that permeates financial services. Agents — fund managers, pension fund consultants, bankers, brokers and company directors — all stand between assets and their beneficial owners. Quite rationally, they behave in ways not in the interests of their clients.

Their presence is highly distortive, raising the cost of capital and drastically shrinking investment returns. Dr Woolley estimates that without the agency problem, private sector pensions could be twice as large. “And that’s probably being conservative.”

People who laud the huge size of the City as evidence of its success have got things competely about-face, Dr Woolley argues. “It’s testament to the malfunctioning of markets, not their efficiency,” he argues.

All very fine and good, but it would seem its just a lot of hot air for all its impact on the banks, which are preparing to pay individuals massive bonuses again (based on their "success" at having stayed alive from the money used by having to bail them out in the first place). Today, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International said (as reported by the Times):

...said that British taxpayers should “tolerate the inequality” stemming from the investment bank’s plans to dole out a record $22bn (£13.4bn) in pay and bonuses this year for the sake of the “common good”.

Apart from one Mdmlle. Antoinette's famous "Let the Eat Cake" quip*, this is about as strong a tell you will get that the bankers do not believe the Government, Bank of England or Regulators will touch them as they prove that they (like an earlier generation of French nobility) have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing, from the Crunch.

Lest we forget, it was their greed and folly that brought it about, and it was our (taxpayer) money that saved them. I thought the deal was they paid us back, not paid themselves with it. And all this at the same time the said Government is softening up the taxpayer for a c 7p in the Pound tax hike to pay for the hole left by paying for the banks that are now paying them....oh, never mind, you get the picture. Without some form of concerted action, the Taxpayer is going to be royally ripped off by all parties - again.

So what, I hear you ask, has all this got to do with the New Technologies, that this 'ere blog talks about most of the time? Well, in about two hour's time The Chancellor, Alastair Darling, will be interviewed by Social Media on questions We The People put to him, thats what.

And following on from the impact recent campaigns such as the Trafigura campaign, the Vox Populi using Social Mediums may just start to self organise itself and get its voice heard high up in the Faulty Towers to actually change the natural propensity of bankers, bureaucrats and politicos to help themselves to your money at the slightest drop of a living standard.

As Reuters' Head of Mobile, Ilicco Elia (who is facilitating some of this and took the picture above put it today:

"Next year will be most interesting, esp. with our new found 'Public Voice' hope we can put it to good use"

So, here are the details:

At 1:30pm British time on Wednesday, October 21, Reuters is hosting an exclusive Web 2.0 interview with Darling and we want you to send us your questions to put to the top man from the Treasury.

From the crippling global recession to the debate over bankers’ bonuses, it has been a tumultuous year at Number 11 Downing Street. You may want to quiz the Chancellor on one of these topics, ask him about the government’s plans to prevent another downturn or how Labour plan to defy the polls and win the upcoming general election.

During the interview we will put as many of your questions as possible to the Chancellor and will be running a liveblog of the event.

Leave your question in the comments box below the article (over here) or via Twitter (using #askdarling) and join the Web 2.0 interview with the Chancellor.

So, get your questions ready, good people. And if you need prompting, here are a few thoughts:

- The sum of UK bank bonuses this year will be a shade lower than c £100bn, which funnily enough is not far off the UK public sector shortfall - do you plan to tax citizens yet again for the shortfall, or would you consider taking some of that money back directly from the bankers?

- To quote one Twitternaught at the moment "the only 'economic recovery' is for the bankers, the rest of us are going to pay for the mess." For a generation, probably - £1.3 trillion is a lot of money. Would Mr Darling like to comment on the disparity between Mr King's and Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach's views and tell us where he stands on "the common good"?

- Mr King, Mr Turner and most thinking people believe the banks have been handed trillions of dollars with no requirement to change themselves, and G20 attempts at reform to date have been laughable - what guarantee can you give that the banks will not just cause the same problem again, in fact worse as they now know they will be bailed out?

Taxpayers of the World Unite, we have nothing to lose but our life savings, our homes, our kids' education money and our retirements!

Update - so I attended the virtual session, virtually - the transcript is here but my overall take is that it was a ducked bill of platitudes, here are some examples:

- "I wanted banks to behave far more responsibly. We've got to comply with G20 conditions."

- "We've made it clear there can't be any rewards for people who have failed."

- "People across the world are saying 'we won't tolerate tax havens'."

Clearly the sort of stern stuff to make overbonussed bankers, hedge funders joining the Sleight Flight to Swiitzerland, and Sir Fred the Shred et al all quake in their boots while they are filling them

The questions from the participants were in the main very sensible and pertinent, I thought, and would be a good set of issues for HMG to think about as being on the "real electorate"'s mind (ie not the beasts they seem to get in focus groups, judging by some policy decisions) going forward.

Kudos also to Mr Darling for attending, I think he came across quite well as a real person - which helps to build trust in tough times in my view

PS I only really wrote this article for the headline

*But did she actually say it? mais non! (Hat tip Shefaly for pointing it out in the comments below)

I've been reading some fascinating stuff on business models this afternoon, here are a few for your enjoyment:

One - Microsoft (aka The Borg) struggling to use its market , from Fake Steve:

Look, the Borg has never been out ahead on anything. The difference is, they used to be able to catch up. They've always been copiers. That's been their business model from the start. Let others go out and create a market, then copy what they've done, sell it for less, and crush them. They got into the OS business by stealing DOS from someone else. They created Windows by stealing Apple's ideas. They got into desktop apps by copying Lotus and WordPerfect and then having the bright idea to bundle all the stuff into one cheapo suite. They pulled the trick off again with Internet Explorer versus Netscape, in the late 90s -- that was the last time they were able to let someone get out ahead of them and then pivot and copy and give it away free and take them over. By the end of the 90s they had broken through 50% market share in browsers, and that was it for Netscape.

But what happened after that? This is what we were wondering. Larry says two things happened. One, the Borg got slower. They got big and fat and bureaucratic. Two, everyone else got faster. Look at Google. They got so big so quickly that there was no way for the Borg to claw them back. Same for all these other Web businesses. Amazon, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Twitter. They came out of nowhere, and what they were doing was free, so the Borg couldn't just do a crappy knockoff and sell it for less. They were up against free -- the Web companies were using their own strategy against them.

Two - Building a Video Empire - Demand Video, churning out hundreds of low quality "how to" videos each week as reported on Wired..:

is a factory stamping out moneymaking content. “I call them the Henry Ford of online video,” says Jordan Hoffner, director of content partnerships at YouTube. Media companies like The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, AOL, and USA Today have either hired Demand or studied its innovations. This year, the privately held Demand is expected to bring in about $200 million in revenue; its most recent round of financing by blue-chip investors valued the company at $1 billion.

......

By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year. Demand is already one of the largest suppliers of content to YouTube, where its 170,000 videos make up more than twice the content of CBS, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, Universal Music Group, CollegeHumor, and Soulja Boy combined. Demand also posts its material to its network of 45 B-list sites — ranging from eHow and Livestrong.com to the little-known doggy-photo site TheDailyPuppy.com — that manage to pull in more traffic than ESPN, NBC Universal, and Time Warner’s online properties (excluding AOL) put together. To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.

Did you get that - "He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else." There are some business models you really hope will fail, but somehow I think this one will work as it arbitrages nearly all the new' nets inconsistencies. The NYT does a nice precis of the issues

The start of rational behaviour in online music (Guardian)

Dizzee Rascal, Travis, Speech Debelle and a host of other artists are set to enjoy windfalls after a landmark deal between independent record labels and YouTube.

The PIAS Entertainment Group, which represents 200 independent labels, has signed a global licensing and marketing deal with the online video giant that will mean artists and their record companies get a share of revenues from adverts shown alongside their works.

The deal covers both official audio and video releases as well as user-generated content.

PIAS says it will also work with YouTube to try to drive up traffic to artist pages and develop partnerships with brands, such as channel sponsorship.

"Some of the world's most iconic artists will now be able to engage with their existing fans and win new ones," said YouTube video partnership director Patrick Walker.

The last one, some good advice on the issues with PPC from SEO guru Dharmesh Shah:

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) can be effective, but will not protect you. One of the popular forms of marketing today is pay-per-click advertising through programs like Google AdWords. I’ve seen entrepreneurs get really, really good at figuring out just the right bidding strategy and figuring out precisely how much they can afford to spend on a given word based on their conversion rate and lifetime value of the customer. This is all fine and good, except for one thing. PPC programs like AdWords run as a real-time auction. She who pays gets the clicks. It’s easier to describe why this is a problem with an example: Let’s say that you’re building a web-based app for home theatre installers (random example that I just made up). Let’s also say that over time, and with some maniacal focus and PPC bidding ninja skills, you figure out that you can afford to pay up to about $2.76 a click based on the traffic that these clicks generate, how many clicks lead to purchases, and the value of each purchase. Life is good. For every $1 you put in to the PPC machine, something > $1 comes out. This goes on for weeks/months. Then, all of a sudden, you wake up one morning, check your analytics and discover that for some reason, the price for your most important keyword went up. Way up. Enough that your morning coffee comes shooting out your nose. After some poking around on the Interwebs, you find out that some lame startup on the other coast just raised $5 million from some lame VC. They just emerged from the shower freshly sprinkled with a new round of funding, hired a VP of Marketing who then went out and started buying AdWords. Your AdWords. The real tragedy with this story is that this competitor is not all that bright. They don’t know that they can’t really afford to pay that much for a click and make profits (they’re not thinking about profits — they just raised a bunch of money). Your problem is not that they’re super-smart, it’s that they’re super-ignorant. And that’s the thing with PPC. You’re basically at the mercy of the stupidest market entrant. Call me simple-minded, but that doesn’t sound like a particularly effective barrier to entry when someone can just come along and drive your cost of customer acquisition (COCA) up. And, it doesn’t happen overnight — it happens immediately.

(I loved the bit in bold)

Stop Press - I added Ning flogging virtual goods (hat tip Nic Brisbourne) - TechCrunch:

Today Ning, the platform that lets users build their own social networks, is launching a new feature called Ning Virtual Gifts, bringing a built-in virtual goods store to the site’s 1.6 million networks. Virtual gifts have become increasingly popular over the last few years, largely thanks to their popularity on Facebook, and I’m sure plenty of Ning’s Network Creators are eager to cash in on the trend.

Ning is letting Network Creators choose from a library of pre-made virtual gifts, but they’re also free to create their own. This means that the site’s Brooklyn Art Project network can offer gifts that are miniature versions of handdrawn artwork. It also means that the New Kids On The Block network can sell gifts of… the bandmembers’ faces (I do realize that I’m not the target demographic with those, and Britney Spears has seen quite a bit of success selling her face as a gift on Facebook).

Ning will be taking a hefty chunk of the revenue from each gift: after PayPal’s processing fees, half will go to Ning, and the other half will go to the network creator who sold the gift. To help spur interest in the new feature, Ning is giving everyone on a Ning network 100 credits, which is enough to buy one gift (each gift normally costs 75 credits which translates to $1.50).

This is truly shocking - at a Yahoo! Hack Day event in Taiwan last weekend, there were Lap Dancers of the sexy, scantily clad female variety, and instead of shouting Yahoo! the Geeks were scandalised ( but not before putting up all the pictures ).

Our industry is still young. If we want an all-encompassing technology scene, we need to actively work to cultivate an inclusive environment. This means a zero tolerance approach to this kind of entertainment. Booth babes, tequila girls, and scantily clad gyrating women simply set the wrong tone, here or abroad. Heck, this isn’t just about offending women—many guy geeks I know would be mortified by this kind of thing.

(Actually, the thing that shocked me was that the Geeks noticed. In my day (said the old curmudgeon) Real Geeks wouldn't know what a girl was, never mind actually get a lap dance off one . )

OK, OK cheap jokes aside, there is this issue of making the industry attractive to more women which we alluded to yesterday, and if you want to attract women, you need a less macho industry. Simon Willison was by and large right to say what he did above.

This (Lap Hack) was over the top. There is a time and a place for everything and this wasn't it!

But at the same time, looking at some of the responses, the risk of going the other way and being all PC is that one can be a bit too pious, in that any industry with sales(men) in it will be prone to this, so one needs a bit of give and take. We dont want to invent the New Victorians either, or do we?

Chippendales, anyone?

Craigslist's Craig Newmark has some interesting thoughts re the issues plaguing Olde Media on HuffPo:

Firstly, the media failed its public's interest:

An increasingly media savvy online public sees that recent major problems involved some really good journalism, particularly the current financial crisis, and also that "weapons of mass destruction" thing. Good reporters told us that something was amiss in both situations, and we did see some really good journalism in both cases.

However, the really good journalism was buried, not curated into the front pages, and then, infrequently if at all repeated. As news consumers, if big news is not prominently displayed, and then repeated, it's a tree falling in the forest.

So, these major news organizations reported on matters of great importance to the world, but the curation model failed to really warn the public about those issues, in any way that genuinely delivered the message.

Craig sees this as a failure to understand the role of trust and effective curation:

The new model for news curation and selection, I feel, will be a balance of professional editing and collaborative news filtering. In one incarnation, news organizations will look at feeds from highly respected news fans, and that will drive stories that are featured more prominently.

Now, remember that "trust is the new black."

Another issue is hiding unpleasant truth behind "objectivity", often used as a way of obfuscating commercial interests

In presenting two sides of a story, news organizations will allow both sides to present their positions. That sounds fair, but it's common practice to give those opportunities to "front groups," or "astroturfers," people who are paid to deceive the public in specific matters. This has been very well investigated, documented, and reported. It's a major problem in the public forum, for example, in the health care reform debate, badly hurting our country.

His proposed solution is very interesting:

The successful news organizations of the future will pursue models for news curation/selection which is a hybrid of professional editing and collaboration among talented consumers.

A major opportunity is to be found by rejecting the involvement of professional disinformation groups. New models for fairness in reporting will balance the current vision. That's probably captured in the statement that "transparency is the new objectivity."

We have hypothesized before that the future News Organisation will use an 80/20 approach to automated/curated production on economic grounds. This is interesting as it implies that there is value if even the automated systems can be selected for trust and objectivity.

Now on the one hand this is a very interesting blueprint - but on the other, according to some anyway, Craigslist has nearly singlehandedly destroyed today's News industry in the US by removing their classifieds advertising.

So, can such a dispassionate type of news survive economically- its not exactly going to attract much of the PR fraternity, there will be no sponsorships from special interest groups - so will it have to live on subscriptions from the sort of people who are bothered about the truth while the lumpen majority get Ad-served, self selected, self satisfying pap thrown at them?

Or, will it attract the sort of people some advertisers deeply desire, and will thus be prepared to relinquish influence for access?

Clay Shirky implies the former, and that someone will have to subsidise proper reporting if it is to be seen by the average citizen

Two years ago we were asked to help define the content management strategy and then help in the high level specification of the end to end delivery system for a fascinating product, which is now now nearing market launch - Plastic Logic's Que e-Reader.

So, thats the disclosure out the way (and no one handed us a press release today for what its worth, nor has anyone given us a Que to play with recently, and most certainly no one has paid us to say this) but what follows I would say anyway - ie we would queue for the Que.

This is mainly because it is based on next-generation technology, and offers a step change in user experience to the current end-of-3rd generation products. What this means is that the size of page, weight of device, brightness and contrast are significantly better than current offerings and give a near "order of magnitude" better experience overall.

Now clearly success in a market is more than just the device, and current players will respond, but the arrival of such 4th generation systems guarantees a step change in the market. (And the obvious risk for all players is an Apple entrant, complete with content-to-device integrated but proprietary supply chain - iBook, anyone?)

Also, if we were hypothesising about the future market, powerful e-Readers will enter into the competition for "final mobile multimedia end device" with netbooks, smartphones and next generation Tablets.

2010 should be an interesting time.....

We have been banging on about this for ages, here it is yet again from Computer Weekly.(Hat tip Sarah Blow for link)

....irrespective of the reasons for people's lack of understanding, the argument for more women in technology needs to be made really simple. So here's an easy reason to get on board for those who just don't get it: Money! Profit! Lots of lovely revenue! Amazingly enough, companies with a mixed workforce make more money, in general, than companies without. An article in the Harvard Business Review last month said that the female market has twice the potential of China and India combined. And a study by advertising consultancy Lady Geek, founded by Belinda Parmar, found there's a possible £0.6bn up for grabs in the UK technology market alone. That's right, you could make loads of money convincing me I need another one of your lovely laptops. If only you'd stop slapping butterflies on them and trying to tell me they're a fashion accessory.

The money is there for the taking - if you get it right (which very few companies have yet). And what's more, to tap into this market, you need people who are able to get it right (which very few companies are yet). If you want to make money out of women buying technology, you need more women working for you. It's genius! I might patent this idea before the big boys catch on.
In a further extraordinary revelation, McKinsey's 2007 "Women Matter" report showed European companies with the highest proportion of women in senior management experience better-than-average financial performance. It makes logical sense, because different types of people are likely to have different ideas. Discussion will hopefully throw up the best way of approaching something. (That's if everyone is capable of communicating and discussing things properly, which is admittedly a fairly big if.) There's a steady stream of articles and books backing up the claim that mixed teams do better.

Readers of this blog will know that our hypothesis is that having women designing services for women will create fairly sustainable advantage over male dominated businesses. It is interesting to think about why this obvious stuff is not being acted on, given the arbitrage afforded to people who will act on it.

(Although, on a related matter, I'm glad that Nichola Pease has started to highlight the economic costs of maternity leave on very small startup companies in the UK - the law is fine for large companies but potentially crippling for small ones)

No sooner has Twitter excelled itself in pushing Democracy 2.0 to new heights with the Trafigura Injunction Scandal, than it plumbs new depths with the Jan Moir weblynch. Now Jan Moir is one of those real "test cases" for Free Speech. She has completed the "how to be hated" triple crown of slagging off a just-dead, gay, boy-band member in the Daily Mail of all papers.

The original article is here, and the gist of it is that the author (said Jan Moir) believes that the death of Stephen Gately, gay boyband pop star was perhaps not as accidental and natural as it is being portrayed. There is no evidence in the piece, just innuendo about a menage a trois that potentially went wrong. So far, so what - normal hack fare, I hear you say....

And, as you know, fans of social media and the Web are all progressive, forward thinking individuals and take this in their stride. And they would, at a heartbeat, say they would support Free Speech to the death of their last iPhone battery.

So here comes the rub - Ms Moir chose to couch her over-the-top allegations with over-the-top undertones of homophobia which, while playing to the Daily Mail gallery, also of course has all the good people incensed, and the homophobia-phobes frothing at the mouth, and the #rentacause lot grasping for links, and everyone is calling her many very rude names as well as suggesting her instant removal from the paper, twitter, this life, the universe etc.

And the problem is, supporting free speech is defined, roughly, as ""I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". (Voltaire, btw*)

Of course, her right to Free Speech doesn't mean that you have to agree - or even listen - and you have the right to rebut and even disagree, vehemently as in the Grauniad - or even better, get snarky and sarcastically clever like the excellent Daily Quail piece.

And there has been a terrific response, and the correct one in my view, as Twitternauts have flooded the various complaint boards - Stephen Fry has weighed in with how and where she goes against IPCC guidelines, and many people have given guidance as to where to object. and how (it breaches sections 1, 5 and 12 of its code of practice.)

But I'm afraid not all have kept to this standard, in fact the Wisdom of the Crowd has turned into the Baying of the Lynch Mob at times. And in my view some of the hatemail makes those people no better than Jan Moir. And there are a lot more of them. And they are on the side of popular opinion so its far harder to take a shot at them.

So, what worries me more than some hack with a homo-cooked chip on her shoulder is this very real evidence of this darker side of Social Media - the speed at which mobthink can break out online is quite worrying. Or am I the only one (not in the Jan Moir fan club, that is) who is more worried about this aspect than what she actually wrote?

For the record, my view is that (i) I totally disagree with her logic, (ii) I reserve the right to say her article is full of sh*t, but that (iii) I totally agree with defending her right to say it and (iv) I wish I'd written the Daily Quail piece (You will, Oscar....).

Update - 24 hours later and its running and running, there are polls, campaign groups on Facebook etc all dedicated to getting Jan Moir fired or otherwise shutting her up. There has been a brilliant set of comments on the blog, and there were also a few good comments about this post such as these two by @TLockyer on Twitter, viz:

- Trouble with extreme free-speech argument is that if it defends Jan Moir, it must also defend those (NOT all) being nasty to her. (@shefaly made a similar point - "The critics have as much right to criticise as Moir has to her homophobia.")

- And those paid to write for commercial or ad-supported mass media can rightly be held to higher standards on sensitive stories

Absolutely agree with the former, free speech must equally defend the rights of those who wish to complain/criticise/condemn her. The latter is an interesting point, since, as many people have pointed out, her schtick - and that of the Daily Mail overall - follows a certain flavour that some will find offensive, so in my mind there is a "well, what did you expect" argument too.

What I do totally agree with is the idea that extreme commentators should face up to the consequences of the collateral damage they cause, and social media has been excellent for that - she can be in absolutely no doubt about how cross so many people are. I also thought the idea of having a go at the advertisers on the site was a very good one. Also, if after all the protests, her employer feels that she is too hot a potato and chooses not to provide a platform, that too is fine, others are justified in denying access to their platforms.

Predictably, Ms Moir issued an apology-that-was-not-an-apology - all very mainstream media, and accused the online-o-sphere of a concerted campaign against her. I think this is typical Olde Media misunderstanding, on 2 fronts:

- the "sharp riposte and flounce off" gambit only works in the Old Media, where access to reply was very expensive and newspapers controlled dissent via a small "letters to..." page and burying apologies in the smalls - but now a columnist who tries this will be hung out to dry by his or her own petard on multiple blogs across the planet. The New Media is a conversation, people listen, respond - and then expect a conversation.

- there was no "concerted action" initially, its more like a dispersed organism reacting. People tell their groups of friends about things, if those people feel strongly enough they pass it on, and so forth. It is also true that a series of concerted activities came about later (the Facebook campaign etc) but this would not have happened via a small cadre of "instigators" - it only happened because enough people felt strongly enough about the issue. I hope Ms Moir and the Daily Mail can grasp the difference between trying to move the masses (Old Skool Media) and a mass movement (New Media). What does happen in New Media is it moves very fast, so people don't reflect enough on their reactions to things that may incense them initially (hence my worry re WebMobRule and Free Speech)

I'm going to use a quote from one of the comments below, from Patrick Hadfield:

I also think we need to allow people we disagree with a voice: I hate what the BNP have to say, and I don't want to hear it, but I think they should be let on Question Time so that their ideas can be shown up for the distortions and lies they really are.

Evan Harris MP made a telling comment at February's Convention of Modern Liberty: the real test of human rights is on those we might feel don’t deserve them – criminals, prisoners, terrorists… It was a good – and powerful – point: human rights are universal, and that means everyone, however distasteful we might find their deeds or beliefs.

Free speech is one of those rights.

So trying to shut her up is just wrong, wrong, wrong. If you genuinely support Free Speech it means you have the right to argue with her but not to try to get her shut up, and personally I abhor the crude ad-hominems! Just because I disagree with you does not make you a "sh*tfaced c*ntb*tch" to quote one erudite commentator.

In fact, If I were a tad cynical (as if ) I may not have have been surprised that some of the other mainstream media (and Twitterers) have seemingly been less interested in defending the Freedom of Speech mast that they nailed their Trafigura colours to a few days ago, and are in fact seemingly taking out Mob-Injunctions to silence someone else's right to free speech! Possibly (surely not) in the interests of traffic and short term popularity?.

A Volte-farce? - Perish that thought, Voltaire would be turning in his (very old) grave

*for you, @shefaly

It could only be on Gawker:

For a digital bible, Wired has been turning surprisingly analog over the past year. The latest regressions: The publication just fired two top editors from Wired.com and may soon lose the founders of Reddit.com.

The print version of Wired, you may recall, is run by Freeconomics pundit Chris Anderson:

Anderson's ad-hemorrhaging Wired print, mind you, has thus far escaped unscathed by the McKinsey cutbacks, we're reliably informed. Despite his good fortune, Anderson is even rumored to be advocating that Wired.com get by on more crowdsourced, written-for-Free blogs like GeekDad. Asked about this, Anderson wrote, "Evan Hansen runs Wired.com, not me." Hansen declined to be interviewed.

Subsidy for the advertising haemorrhaging print version then, and only Freeconomic straws to the rescue then for the online version? As Gawker points out, despite McKinsey advice, its hard to understand:

...why Condé Nast would starve key websites — the best hope for its future, really — of resources. Granted, it's much easier to remain in a state of denial than to confront real and looming problems.

This one we will watch with interest..... we suspect this is a case of all the king's horses and all the king's (hired) men still fighting the previous war.

Update - at the risk of teaching McKinsey to suck eggs, I'd point Conde Nast at this precis of work we've done on the dislocation of the media industries. In a nutshell, you don't win by cutting costs on the future growth industry while subsidising the old ones. Option theory and all that, boys....

It is a near-truism that any time a company owner says "Company X is not for sale", then within a fairly short period of time it gets sold. What, then, do we make of Twitter?:

....on Thursday Twitter's Biz Stone sought to put an end to the persistent talk that he wants to sell the company.

"Twitter is not interested in being acquired by a bigger company, we want to build an impressive company on our own and we believe that we can," Stone said to an audience of Twitter users at an event in Tokyo on Thursday evening.

This on the same day that Google announced its third quarter results, its $22bn in the bank and its desire to "buy something big every year or so"

Pure, idle, irresponsible speculation, mind you

But it would plug a real time search hole - and it just emulates the Cisco strategy after all (if you can't beat it, buy it)....