Lawsuits and rumour sites

A good example of the issue is found in the reporting and satirising of the tension between technology firms and bloggers. The tension arrises because bloggers appear less willing to entertain established journalistic principles, such as tending to verifiable fact rather than rumour, respecting confidential information and so on. This tension is revealed in litigation between Apple and some bloggers who may have induced others to breach their non-disclosure agreements and publishing this proprietary information (business secrets).

This issue recently came to a head when one of the rumour sites, Thinksecret (http://thinksecret.com) settled with Apple and agreed to close. A more recent site called the Fake Steve Jobs (http://fakesteve.blogspot.com) has satirised this, claiming to have an offer from Apple to also close. Roughly Drafted (http://roughlydrafted.com), one of the most analytical commentaries on Apple, and especially the reporting of Apple vs Microsoft vs Linux news has also weighed in on the issue, highlighting in particular the way that bloggers are induced financially and through privileged access to cover (or even create) stories in a particular way.

The key posts in this issue are:

• http://www.thinksecret.com/news/settlement.html
  
• http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/im-weighing-offer-from-apple.html
• http://roughlydrafted.com/2007/12/23/daniel-lyons-cries-wolf-the-real-bill-gates-behind-the-fake-steve-jobs
  

I am interested in three things that are relevant to this issue, related to funding of commercial media, the analytical ability of an audience and the role of news in society. I’ll look at each in turn.

Media and money

We understand that commercial media is a business. Media here means more than just television, radio and newspapers. It also includes websites and trade publications. The logic can also be extended to anywhere there is an audience that can be sold to advertisers (such as, annoyingly, on the Heathrow Express and on airlines, where we must listen to sales pitches for duty free and frequent flyer programmes).

Traditionally, the commercial media earned its keep through a combination of advertising and/or subscription. Consumers are generally much less willing to pay for content than businesses, so consumer media rely much more on advertising than business to business media.

However, consumers are become more sophisticated users of advertising, able to filter, co-opt, subvert, parody as they please. This, of course, makes traditional advertising less effective. The industry gets around this in two ways.

• First, companies such as Google, try to add more intelligence to the placement of advertisements to increase the relevance of the advert to the reader / viewer, making the reader / view less likely to block it out. This works in electronic but not traditional media, and has arrived first on the internet, and will moving to digital cable television in due course.
• Second, the advertising industry and media outlets have been experimenting with public relations (PR) activities and product placement (the logical extension of PR). The two activities work by circumventing the queues that consumers normal use to activate their advertisement filters. PR activities try to make commercial products and services into stories while product placements typically site brands inside television shows and movies.

I don’t have any particular problems with the former, and consumers appear generally willing to trade off some of their valuable personal information for more relevant advertising (and maybe less of it). If consumers are informed about this, then it appears to be a conscious and win-win situation. Consumers give information about their preferences (i.e., by having Google monitor their surfing through cookie tracking) and see fewer but more relevant adverts as the price for free content. Advertisers don’t waste money showing their adverts to uninterested consumers and get their adverts into less cluttered media (i.e., with less competition with other advertisers). The proviso here is the extent that consumers are aware of the data collection and how it is used and distributed.

I have a larger issue with PR and product placement because they a new set of skills to discern the difference between advert and fact (in fiction this wouldn’t seem to matter so much). The more sophisticated this process of PR and product placement, the harder it is to discern the difference between news and advert.

The audience as informed analyst

There the media is being used by a particularly informed audience, this might not be a problem. So, one would hope that professional users of the technology media, for example, might have sets of criteria for selection of products and be able to evaluate those products accordingly.

However, less informed users rely on analysis published in the commercial media to make decisions about products that are important to them but about which they cannot develop suitable expertise (for reasons of cost, time, education) to evaluate. This is where the commentary in Roughly Drafted prompt considerable cause for concern.

One of the ways that consumers deal with this problem is by using networks of their own. Traditionally, consumers have done this by asking relatively expert friends for advice. Now they can also use online forums in order to quiz peers and educate themselves. Of course, business knows this an also seeks to infiltrate the forums, potentially undermining their usefulness.

News as entertainment

Where does all of this leave commercial news outlets. In one sense, we might say that they have tended toward becoming just another source of entertainment. This is the hyperreal environment in suggested in the introduction: emotions in the movies are more emotional than in real life, fiction and entertainment look like news programmes and the news unravels as soap opera.

The Fake Steve Jobs plays exactly into this postmodern environment and plays a part in dismantling traditional boundaries between fact and fiction; between real, unreal and hyperreal. It does this by creating a soap opera about a real person that is more interesting than the reality. The satire about the lawsuit is a particularly accute example of this. While writing as the “Fake Steve Jobs” the site is clearly satire. However, when writing as the author (rather than implied author) the boundary is less clear. This would be fine if, as I note above, if we can be sure all readers understand the difference and the intent. If this is not the case, then it undermines, at least more some of the audience, the usefulness and value of news and satire. That a company like Forbes, who makes their money and attaches their brand to the masthead of a serious newspaper is amusing for some, troublesome for others.

Entertainment, however, is not without its ideological affect. What I ignore above, and what Daniel Eran Dilger tackles in the Roughly Drafted article I reference above, is the way that humour has its ideological side and, deliberately or otherwise, reveals and challenges particular worldviews. Tradionally, journalism as careful(ish) to note its ideological stance, potential conflicts of interest and so on to empower the reader to deal with them. Humour and journalism that plays on the blurred line between real, unreal and hyperreal doesn’t do this. Whether it doesn’t do this deliberately or through lack of reflexivity is another issue.

In OSX Server, Apple has the beginnings of a powerful product for SMEs (a fact that is currently receiving attention). There are, however, a number of areas where some incremental extension could make the product a more persuasive sell. Specifically,

• Improvement of syncing and support for iPhone syncing
• Addition of standards based VoIP
• Addition of a virtualisation option, so that OSX server hosted services could become more widespread

I examine briefly each of these in turn.

Calendars, Address Books, Mobile Users and Syncing

One of the key frustrations for those who seek to use their mobile phones or PDAs to help organise their work are the imperfect syncing features. For example,

• Categories are not supported and synced in tasks and calendars
• Groups are not supported for address books
• Contacts for calendar appointments are not supported

Apple has already announced that extended calendar features will be available in Leopard (see Apple’s ‘sneak peak‘). When we consider the announced changes for calendar and address book in Leopard, the potential gap between desktop features and mobile capabilities becomes even greater. The new calendar features will support group sharing and document buckets (where you can ‘dump’ relevant files for a meeting that will be distributed to others sharing that entry).

Surely, one of the ways that Apple can justify the higher price of the iPhone is to make sure that these features are extended to the phone. For example, when adding a new contact to the phone, we could also put them in a relevant group and this would be synced. Importantly, it would be great to be able to sync over wifi of cellular data (e.g., to receive and read updated PDF documents on the iPhone).

With the current noise about the suitability of OSX server and xServe being ideal for SMEs, putting some of the syncing capabilities (i.e., being able to avoid using .Mac sync) would be a step forward, speed syncing for local users. While this might loose some revenue for .Mac, the target markets are not really the same, .Mac being primarily of interest to individual users and families, the scenario above being of interest to SMEs.

iChat and Talk.

When Apple introduced Tiger, iChat was updated to include XMPP (Jabber) instant messaging support. At the same time, OS X Server was updated to include a XMPP server. Jabber sessions on the client could be used (with or without OSX Server) to initiate audio and video conferences between iChat clients. With respect to standards-based chat, Apple is performing–as noted above, iChat supports XMPP and the next version of iChat server will communicate with other XMPP servers.

However, with respect to standards-based voice, OSX lags behind. iChat won’t do voice and video to other SIP devices. Third party products are limited. For example, eyeBeam doesn’t yet support H264 to communicate with SIP based video phones (including 3G mobiles) and xMeeting, while making progress is still in beta. My hope is that the next release of OSX Server will include a sip registry server and proxy server and that these will be integrated with the iChat server and director services. If this is done, adding a user automatically will add a voice user (who could use iChat or a hardware SIP phone) and also use Google’s proposed extension to the XMPP standard to initiate voice and video calls.

There would need to be some extra settings in both iChat and iChat server to support this, include a method for handing over calls to the PSTN network. Ideally, the iChat client on iPhone would fully support this so, when in wifi range, users could have their office extension (and when not, the preferences could be set to transfer the call via the PSTN network to the mobile (or other) number. There are literally thousands of SIP based VoIP providers to support this. Importantly, there are plenty of open source projects to provide the guts of this functionality.

Exploiting the Campus Base

Apple already has strong support on university campuses. One of the trends on campuses is to move users to VoIP, this helps students keep the one phone number as they move rooms and dormitories and enables faculty to stay in touch from home (given that many of them work from home a lot anyway). Simplifying this move and unifying contact details (i.e., everyone would be reachable by the their user@domain.edu address).

PSTN to VoIP routing is not a problem either, since existing switchboards can often route to VoIP. Moreover, if Apple built this software into OSX incentives would exist for hardware vendors to write OSX drivers for PSTN interface products.

Video, voice and the graphics industry

Another industry where Apple has strong support is publishing. Apple has already announced some improvements to iChat that link other applications to video conferencing (such as Keynote and iPhoto). Why not extend this with some voice and video APIs that allow any application to steam output to a audio or video connection. For example, Final Cut Pro users could steam a live preview (suitably compressed) over a standards based video connection to preview work to clients and simultaneously talk through the issues.

Virtualisation on xServe and extending the SME business

All of the above is great, if you have 40 or more users and can justify the cost of an xServe, the disk space, suitable backup, etc. But what about for smaller SMEs who would like to take advantage of these kind of things?

I’ve been struggling to work it out and there don’t seem to be any single suppliers that can provide it all. So SMEs are required to use one provider for their web and email and find (if they can) a separate hosted XMPP server service and a separate VoIP supplier (and even then if you want to have sip:user@domain.com addresses you may be out of luck).

If Apple supported virtualisation on xServe this problem could be addressed. Each xServe could then run multiple instances of OSX Leopard and these could be rented (much as we rent virtual hosts on Linux or Windows). Each virtual server administrator would have access to Apple’s fantastic (and getting better) administrator tools for adding users, setting VoIP policies, etc., etc.

Imagine how nicely this could work. An SME (or keen individual) signs up for a hosted OSX Server account. The hosting firm gives them an IP address and the addresses of the slave DNS servers. The new customers downloads the (free) OSX server admin tools, points them to the IP address, sets up their users and accounts and then points their domain to the DNS. Easy.

A whole new business would emerge that could entrench OSX Server and xServer as the ideal choice for SMEs. And of course, as the SME grows, it might move up to owning their own xServe.

[posted with ecto]

I should have my first blog entry in the next day or two (as soon as the my DNS settings filter through).