Category Archives: Web/Tech

In praise of Steve Jobs

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Apple marks Steve's passing on its UK website, seen on the iPad, his last great creation

The world today mourned the death of Steve Jobs, the mercurial genius who revolutionised the music, mobile phone and computer industries with products that are a delight to use.

Steve's death was not a total surprise: he resigned as Apple's chief executive in August during his latest period of medical leave. But it was still a shock. Many still expected him to take part in Tuesday's launch of the latest iPhone 4S. Little did we realise his time was almost over.

Steve's story since he returned to Apple 15 years ago is the stuff of legend. Apple was in crisis. Many were writing the company off. But Jobs had a vision. Apple should focus on what it was good at. Only Apple would make Macs – ending the days of getting a cheaper 'cloned' Mac from another company. Great design would win back the fans – and new converts.

In time, Steve's vision reaped unimaginable dividends. The original, colourful iMacs created a stir. The iPod and later the iTunes store transformed the music industry, making Apple the world's biggest music retailer and stealing Sony's position as the master of music on the go. (Walkman RIP.) The iPhone made smartphones mainstream, and put the internet into our pockets. And the iPad proved the tablet computer had a future after ten years of failure by other tech brands, notably Microsoft. 

Steve's greatest strength was his ability to see things from the user's point of view. In an industry renowned for making complicated products that need huge instruction manuals, Apple under Steve took a different approach. My experience is typical. Back in 2008, I tried to find my way round London with a BlackBerry and a Sony Ericsson phone. I couldn't work out how to get a map on either device, and was forced to looked up an A to Z map in a shop. Days later, on my first iPhone, I was just one touch away from my location and destination on the map app. In the same way, the iPad got me to the BBC home page in seconds, compared with five minutes on my Windows laptop, as I explained on this blog: Greased lightning: why I love my iPad. 

Steve wasn't perfect. (Few people are.) By most accounts, he was very difficult to work for, with his punishing drive for perfection. I'd normally condemn such macho leadership, but I can't dispute the extraordinarily postive legacy Steve has left. And Leander Kahney, in his book Inside Steve's Brain, disputes the legend of Apple staff being 'Steved'. He quotes Jobs' former personal assistant Jim Oliver who says his old boss's outbursts were exaggerated by critics.

Critics say that Apple under Steve simply took advantage of other companies' innovations. They argue that Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, the smartphone or the tablet. True, but this misses the point. Jobs saw how all these things could be so much better – better to look at, to touch and to use. Anyone who endured a pocket PC powered by Windows Mobile circa 2001 or 2006 couldn't fail to see the Steve effect when they used the Apple equivalent in the iPhone and the iPad. Not everything Apple did under Steve was as good: I tried Mobile Me three times, and found it an abomination each time. (As Steve acknowledged when announcing iCloud in June.) But I'll forgive it one big #fail…

The other main accusation is that Apple is a 'walled garden' – with the accusers comparing the company's restrictive approach with the open approach of Google's Android mobile operating system. The accusation is accurate, but misses the point. Apple products generally 'just work'. Apple designs the hardware and operating system and approves the apps. Most users don't care that they can't tweek everything. It reminds me of a clash between the car and tech worlds circa 1998. A PC company was contrasting the revolutionary progress of the tech world compared with the car industry's snail-paced developments. An auto executive pointed out that if his industry was like the PC market, customers would be forced to reinstall the engine after popping a CD in the stereo. In short, most people want things to 'just work'. And that's Steve Job's greatest legacy: things just work. And are a joy to use.  

Rest in peace Steve. And thanks for everything.

 

 

A strange revolution: Ryan Giggs, the celebrity, Twitter and the law

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It's a crying shame that Britain's clash over the respective rights of privacy and freedom of speech focuses on a footballer's affair. It's hard to imagine a cause less likely to justify a public interest case – as opposed to the interest of tabloid papers. As the Guardian's Michael White put it, it's not exactly Tahrir Square, the centre of Egypt's revolt against tyranny. 

Yet it was obvious days ago that Ryan Giggs' injunction preventing him from being named was a futile exercise. Twitter users knew what newspaper readers weren't allowed to. Yesterday, a Scottish newspaper became the first to name Giggs – and this afternoon Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming relied on the protection of parliamentary privilege to follow suit. Within minutes, Sky News and other major news outlets decided to ignore the legal order. Despite this, Tugendhat J this evening became the second judge today to reject News Group's attempt to lift the injunction. The legal establishment is understandably reluctant to abandon the rule of law to what has been described as Britain's biggest act of civil disobedience. Yet the longer this goes on, the less respect the law will enjoy.

The biggest lesson in this saga is that a cover up often ends up creating a bigger story. Anyone wanting to minimise bad headlines should think very seriously before going to law to try to stop it. Ryan Giggs isn't the first person to find that managing the story might have been a far better tactic. 

But we should also pause before accepting that a Twitter storm is somehow more legitimate than a reasoned legal judgment. Alastair Campbell made the point well in an interview on BBC Radio 5's Drive show.  The media, he suggested, were relying on a 'useful idiot' like John Hemming MP breaking cover so they could name Giggs. He added that something that interests the public isn't the same thing as the public interest. News Group itself struggled to claim a public interest in naming Giggs. 

The prime minister weighed in again today, arguing that Britain's privacy rules were unsustainable. But he repeated his concern about judge-made law, rather than legislation passed by parliament. This is facile. Much of our law is case law – an act of parliament is never the final word. It's the job of judges to interpret the law and – in the higher courts – establish precedent. If parliament doesn't like the results it can legislate to change them, but parliament has a far from unblemished record – as anyone who remembers the Dangerous Dogs Act of the 1980s will recognise. That was a classic example of the adage that hard cases make bad law. 

The greatest irony is that Britain had no general right to privacy until the 1998 Human Rights Act incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law.  How curious that this new right should almost immediately be eroded by the explosive growth of social media and the new power of the crowd.  

 

 

Why RIM’s CEO shouldn’t have fled Cellan-Jones BBC interview

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The chief executive of RIM, the company behind BlackBerry, has become the latest interviewee to walk out of an interview. Mike Lazardis ended his encounter with BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones after the corporation's technology reporter asked about RIM's issues in India and the Middle East, where governments have challenged BlackBerry's encryption of messages.

The interview was set up to explain the new BlackBerry Playbook tablet, RIM's answer to the Apple iPad. But RIM's PR team must have known that Cellan-Jones would take the opportunity to raise other hot topics. At first Lazardis dealt calmly with the challenge. Had he stuck to that approach, viewers would have been reassured and left to focus on the Playbook. Instead, all the talk on Twitter and elsewhere was about the CEO who walked out. 

The golden rule of media interviews is to answer the question but bridge to your key message. Cellan-Jones appears to have given Lazardis ample chance to respond and get back to talking about the Playbook. I can't help wondering how the RIM CEO would have fared against a truly aggressive interviewer, such as Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys…

Happy 5th birthday, Ertblog!

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Five years ago tonight, I created this blog. I'd been tempted to start blogging for a while but Ertblog was created on Typepad with the help of a few beers on New Year's Eve 2005. 

That first blogpost, Welcome to 2006, was about two subjects dear to my heart: family and history:

"Hello, 2006. It starts with a fascinating blast from the past. We re-discovered a family bible from the 19th century. The ancient book contained a letter from a long-lost relative in the Australian goldfields in the 1880s, telling his brother and sister back in Wales about his trials and tribulations. Even today, with the world shrunk to fit the jet age, it's difficult to imagine living the other side of the world without a severe dose of homesickness. Now cast your mind back 120 years, when a letter took months to reach the old country…."

Blogging has given me an opportunity to indulge my love of writing and commenting. It hasn't always been easy – when I'm busy or stressed I simply don't have time or inclination to post, especially when Facebook and Twitter offer a chance to have a conversation or share photos and video in a fraction of the time. But blogging still offers depth and permanence – something Twitter cannot compete with. 

On reflection, 2010 has been a good year for Ertblog. I was prolific in the spring as the general election campaign caught fire and Britain saw its first coalition government since 1945. Ertblog was unusual in spotting amidst coalition negotiations the 70th anniversary of Churchill's appointment as PM. I also posted about carefree days, such as Owen's joy on a summer day with his friend Martha and a bike ride with me. Later in the year, my post about Tony Blair's autobiography, A journey, was amazingly ranked top by Google out of 211 million search results, suggesting I knew more about the dark art of search engine optimisation than I thought. On a more personal note, I was proud to share my fleeting memories of my grandfather 44 years after he died. 

Looking back, my most read post was probably my nostalgic post about the steam engine graveyard at Barry, South Wales, in November 2007. (Our train-mad two year old son, Owen, would approve!) Earlier that year, my recollection of the Falklands War 25 years on was also a hit. 

The beauty of a personal blog is the ability to talk about anything. In 2009, I shared my memories of Cardiff City's old home, Ninian Park. A year earlier, I celebrated Wales's latest Grand Slam and Cardiff City's unlikely progress to the FA Cup Final with Wales and City's Seventies glories. (I should add that the Bluebirds 1970s successes were far more modest than those of Welsh rugby!) 

Blogging takes time. But it's time well spent, even if I'm only writing for me, my dad – and my son! 

Beware anti-virus scam, says Get Safe Online

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Britain's online safety campaign, Get Safe Online, today received blanket media coverage for its warning about an anti-virus scam that targets huge numbers of people across Britain. Criminals call people claiming their computers have a virus. They then persuade them to pay for and download software they say will remove the virus. But there's no virus – in reality, the victims are paying to infect their own computers with 'malware' that enables the conmen to steal their financial details and even their identity. 

Get Safe Online's managing director Tony Neate took to the airwaves early today to explain the scam to Radio 5 Live Breakfast's Shelagh Fogarty and BBC Radio 4 Today's John Humphrys (amongst others). And I was pleased to play my part, spreading the word on radio stations from Cumbria to Jersey, and from Cornwall to Lincolnshire. (PayPal is a long-standing sponsor of Get Safe Online.) 

Many of the interviewers I spoke to reported that they or their friends had received such calls, underlying the extent of the problem. 

Ironically, this con takes advantage of our growing awareness of the need to protect our computers against viruses. The fraudsters claim to be working with well known IT companies. Yet almost 90% of us now have anti-virus software on our PCs, making it much less likely that we'll fall victim to a virus. 

The scam isn't a new one: the Guardian's Charles Arthur was one of the first journalists to highlight the issue, along with Computer Active's Dinah Greek. Get Safe Online was concerned enough to campaign against the scam during its high profile Get Safe Online Week. Its research suggests that almost a quarter of UK internet users have had one of these calls. We hope that Britain's computer users are now on alert to defeat the conmen. 

Note: Get Safe Online is a joint initiative between the Government, law enforcement, leading businesses and the public sector. Its aim is to provide computer users and small businesses with free, independent, user-friendly advice that will allow them to use the internet confidently, safely and securely.

Britain makes joking a crime – official

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Can you imagine a country in which telling a joke could give you a criminal record? Welcome to Britain, 2011. 

I've always been sceptical about warnings from civil liberties campaigners that Britain is fast becoming a police state. But I was wrong. We're fast losing our sense of humour and our love of essential freedoms. Government and the criminal justice system seem hell bent on using the terrorist threat to sweep away the freedoms and tolerance that once set us apart. 

So it should have come as no surprise that a foolish joke by a 27 year old man should have resulted in his conviction, and the failure of his subsequent appeal. Paul Chambers, frustrated by the closure of an airport near Doncaster, sent the following message on Twitter "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" He was held in custody for seven hours in a police cell, which should have been plenty of time for the authorities to realise this was a stupid joke not a terrorist threat. Yet mindless prosecutors still decided to waste public money taking him to court. Worse still, a judge called Jacqueline Davies upheld the conviction, as The Guardian reports, bizarrely claiming "Any ordinary person reading [the tweet] would … be alarmed." Any ordinary, out-of-touch, foolish judge maybe, but few other people. More sinister still, the Crown Prosecution Service deliberately prosecuted Chambers under legislation against nuisance calls rather than laws against hoax bomb threats because they required less evidence of intent. 

Any sensible person would have recognised that joking about blowing up an airport was foolish and in bad taste. I suspect Chambers quietly wishes he'd acted more wisely. But that's no reason why he should end up with a criminal record, a £1,000 fine and lose his job. Stephen Fry has offered to pay the fine. Let's hope the backlash against this stupidity makes us more vigilant in the defence of traditional British freedoms.  

Isn't it ironic that the airport at the centre of the storm is named after an outlaw? Looks like the authorities were determined to create another folk hero…

The Times they are a-charging: thoughts on those paywall figures

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Above: The future of paid for online news? The Times iPad app

Britain's media industry has been desperate to find out how many people have paid for online access to The Times and Sunday Times since News International installed its paywall in July. Ni finally issued figures this week, declaring that it had sold 105,000 'digital products' since July.

Media commentators have had a field day with the data. The Financial Times reported that experts doubted the figures, claiming they were vague or even an example of 'chicanery'. Robert Andrews at www.paidcontent.co.uk suggests that just 0.25% of Times Online readers have converted to paid subscribers (rather than pay-per-day customers). 

My view? I don't think we can read anything into these figures. We simply don't know enough to decide how well News International is doing. That 105,000 includes people on the introductory £1 for a month offer. It presumably includes people who have cancelled their subscription. Above all, it's just four months since NI launched the first paywall at a major British mainstream, mass market news website. NI will experiment with new offers, new products and new payment methods. It has enormous marketing clout. It will make this work. 

The critics suggest a host of reasons why the NI experiment won't succeed. They argue that NI is bound to fail while rival news sites such as the BBC, the Guardian and Daily Telegraph remain free. They suggest that NI is breaking a fundamental rule of the web: that charging for content is wrong. And they point out that the Times and Sunday Times have cut themselves off from online and social media communities – who's going to tweet links to stories that are locked behind a paywall? Oh, and many see Rupert Murdoch as the devil, and while they may have been happy to accept his content for free, they won't pay for it.

I don't accept the philosophical argument that all online content should be free. Why? If you value something, why wouldn't you want to pay for it? I am happy to pay for the BBC through the licence fee because I value its content and don't want that content to be scarred by advertising. I take the same view of online news. Good journalism costs money. True, I'm very happy if news organisations are happy to give it away for free. But I doubt this is sustainable as print sales fall and a generation grows up with the idea that online is the place to go for news. 

I started this post with a screenshot of the Times iPad edition. This might just show show the way to make paid for content work. (I recognise I was sceptical about this when the iPad was announced in January, but I might be wrong.) I'm not a natural Times reader, but I've thoroughly enjoyed the iPad edition this week after discovering that my online subscription includes the iPad app content. (I was sure it was separate.) The best thing is that I can download the day"s paper and then read it all offline, such as at my parents', or on a flight to San Francisco. The app isn't perfect – navigation is confusing and inconsistent – but overall I love the Times on the iPad. I'd happily pay extra on top of my Guardian print subscription to get an iPad issue. (And for the Media Talk and Tech Weekly podcasts if the Guardian decided to charge for them.) 

For me, that's the secret to paid content success. Experiment to find out what hits the spot for various customer segments. For some regular print readers, it may be adding an iPad edition for an extra £5 a month. For some online customers, it might be occasional print editions for an extra sum. News International seems to think culture is the only way to lure subscribers. I'm not a complete philistine, but it does nothing for me! Content, not culture, is king.

Disclosure: I am head of PR for PayPal UK. PayPal has pioneered payment services for digital goods, including online news. The Financial Times announced on 27 October that it was working with PayPal to further drive online subscription growth. 

Tony Blair, A Journey, SEO – and me

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My blogpost, Tony Blair: A Journey for the showman prime minister, on Wednesday night about Blair's autobiography, A Journey, has proved a hit on Google. if you Google 'a journey tony blair ipad', my post comes first out of a staggering 211 million search results, beating huge media organisations. And it ranks highly on searches about Blair's book on iBooks and Kindle. (I'm on page two of results for a straight search for 'Tony Blair A Journey.) 

I only discovered this when I looked at what had brought a flood of visitors to the Ertblog post. 

My blog is purely for fun, so I've never set out to optimise it for search engine results. But every now and again it scores very highly on Google. My post on why I love my iPad scored third out of 47 million under the search term 'I love my iPad'. And my 25th anniversary account of the Falklands war in 2007 did very well. 

This latest, unexpected success prompted me to think seriously about the dark arts of search engine optimisation, or SEO. What prompted Google to rank my post so highly against the torrent of other articles and blogposts about Blair's book? What gave me the edge over all-powerful media groups? 

I am no expert on SEO, but I suspect the reason is that I wrote about a specific aspect of the publication of A Journey: its absence from Apple's iBooks store, which has puzzled many iPad owners. They've Googled the subject – and hit upon my blog.  (Surprisingly, I'm still as high as the second page of results for a straight search for 'Tony Blair A Journey.) The title of my post was also highly descriptive (including Tony Blair and the name of his book), while I also included a number of hyperlinks, which may have helped. 

As a PR professional, I need to know more about SEO, and this experience has prompted me to learn. In the meantime, I'd welcome any comments from SEO experts about what I did right – and wrong!

Tony Blair, A Journey, SEO – and me

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My blogpost, Tony Blair: A Journey for the showman prime minister, on Wednesday night about Tony Blair's autobiography, A journey, has proved a hit on Google. if you Google 'a journey tony blair ipad', my post comes first out of a staggering 211 million search results, beating huge media organisations. And it ranks highly on searches about Blair's book on iBooks and Kindle. (I'm on page two of results for a straight search for 'Tony Blair A Journey.) 

I only discovered this when I looked at what had brought a flood of visitors to the Ertblog post. 

My blog is purely for fun, so I've never set out to optimise it for search engine results. But every now and again it scores very highly on Google. My post on why I love my iPad scored third out of 47 million under the search term 'I love my iPad'. And my 25th anniversary account of the Falklands war in 2007 did almost as well. 

This latest, unexpected success prompted me to think seriously about the dark arts of search engine optimisation, or SEO. What prompted Google to rank my post so highly against the torrent of other articles and blogposts about Blair's book? What gave me the edge over all-powerful media groups? 

I am no expert on SEO, but I suspect the reason is that I wrote about a specific aspect of the publication of A Journey: its absence from Apple's iBooks store, which has puzzled many iPad owners. They've Googled the subject – and hit upon my blog.  (Surprisingly, I'm still as high as the second page of results for a straight search for 'Tony Blair A Journey.) The title of my post was also highly descriptive (including Tony Blair and the name of his book), while I also included a number of hyperlinks, which may have helped. 

As a PR professional, I need to know more about SEO, and this experience has prompted me to learn. In the meantime, I'd welcome any comments from SEO experts about what I did right – and wrong!

Will e-books take off?

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The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones blogged about the Kindle, iPad and e-books again this week. It's prompted me to post my thoughts on the subject. 

I love books. We have a room full of them, and I can't imagine life without the printed page. But when I got my iPad in May, I saw the potential. I read a sample of Peter Mandelson's The Third Man autobiography on a flight to San Francisco last month, and loved the way I could increase font size and backlighting. It was so much more appealing than reading books on my old Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC in 2001. 

I really wanted to splash out on a few e-books for my iPad. I would have bought the full version of Mandelson's book, despite my contempt for the man's politics and love of the rich and famous. But I was unwilling to pay more for the e-book than I would have paid for the hardback. (Interestingly, three weeks later the Apple title is now priced at £12.99 – identical to Amazon's price for the hardback, but still far more expensive than Amazon's £9.99 price for the Kindle e-books version.) And Apple's iBooks store is so empty of compelling titles that I always leave it without buying. 

Apple has to cut book prices to have any hope of doing for publishing what it did for music with iTunes. Music was a far easier conquest: a 99p music track was a compelling product, compared with buying a CD single, ripping it to your PC and sharing it with your iPod. (Let alone spending hours making a compilation tape to use on your car stereo or Walkman.) Amazon gives us a vast range of printed books at low cost, with next day delivery, while eBay offers a similarly amazing service, especially for out of print titles. I can't imagine a mass market developing for e-books while the devices and the titles remain expensive. 

Disclosure: I work for PayPal UK, part of eBay Inc.