50 millions de blogs. Au moins. C’est Technorati qui l’annonce, c’est, en tout cas, son dernier recensement et donc c’est un chiffre réel. Il est vraisemblablement inférieur à la réalité si l’on imagine que Technorati ne recense évidemment pas la totalité des blogs publiés. Passionante
lecture

446 Million Watching TV on Their Cell Phones By 2011
IMS Research forecasts that by the end of 2011, nearly half a billion people will be watching TV on their cellular handsets. Driven primarily by the adoption of broadcast-based services such as DVB-H, mobile digital TV will experience 50% year-on-year growth through 2010.
Based on a recent study from IMS Research entitled Mobile TV – A Complete Analysis of the Global Market – 2006 Edition, mobile TV delivered over the cellular data network should experience strong growth and build on its early lead in the marketplace. However beginning early in 2010, cellular network-based mobile TV subscriptions will be overtaken by even quicker growth in digital broadcast services. By then, more than half of the world’s mobile TV subscribers will receive their video via a mobile digital broadcast service.

This being said it might be wise to note that, as a recent L.A Times reported, the lure of the small screen might no be as strong as the mobile industry (disclosure: we produce content for mobile phones) claims.

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for breaking the news about the doctored “Reuters” pictures from Beirut. This is, after all, what investigative (blog)reporting, a.k.a journalism is all about. Through a friend’s tip, Johnson was able to show that some Reuters copyrighted pictures of the IDF’s bombings on the Lebanese Capital had in fact been “photoshoped” by the photographer. Reuters fired him and remove every single of his shots from its archive. Ok. So we used to have IF Stone and Sy Hersh, we now have Charles Johnson with “Rathergate” and “Reutersgate”. But on some days, being in the media business makes you wonder: the taste of ashes lingers in the mouth: now that I know, what do I do? How de wo go about making sure those things don’t happen again. And how do we learn about such episodes and still not think this is the way the media works? The biggest damage done by those cheats is to give credibility to all those nice revisionnists out there who think 9/11 was plotted by Dick Cheney & Don Rumsfeld. Do we really need this?

lgf: Reuters Doctoring Photos from Beirut?

Like a digital modern Tchernobyl, AOL releasing private info on search patterns in the cyber/blogo/mediasphere makes me again worry about the potential for disasters of large magnitude. CC numbers spilled on the net, international wire transfers through the SWIFT system illegally monitored by the CIA, Google & alia caving in to the Chinese authorities, between the “technical” glitches, the squeeze on civil liberties and the recourse to illegal means, isn’t it time to reconsider the potential for catastrophies on the net? Would you actually be fool enough to use Google Spreadsheets for anything more sensitive than your favorite recipe’s cooking times?

Accordind to several recent studies, spamming is moving over to VoIP. Not that it has abatted, by a long shot, over the mail. But evidence is showing that the spammers have discovered “skiping“. Not only are they now taking advantage of the “cost nothing” factor, but they are overtly bypassing every regulation that forbids unsollicited telemarketing and phone sollicitation. The VoIP phone industry is, of course, claiming that it has already developed anti-spamming devices for unwanted calls. But you can easily imagine the nightmare of separating the good from the bad when receiving a simple phone call!Might a spamcall answering machine be the answer?

Video is all the rage. There is video everywhere, anywhere. Say moving pictures, rather, for some of this “content” is just noise, sometimes wonderful noise, mostly crappy noise, but noise in any case. Watching this avalanche of stale content reminds me of a question posed by Lev Manovich in one of his lecture. In substance, he was asking, “25 years from now, what will we be taking pictures of?”. Will we be photographing nature, people, or pictures of nature, of people. Will all pictures be digitally made?
Everytime I ask myself those kind of questions, I go back to oil or acrylic on canvas. Lately, I have been watching a lot of this guy, Andreas Leikauf:

FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - News Corp to sell films online
By Aline van Duyn in New York
Published: August 14 2006 00:01 | Last updated: August 14 2006 00:01
News Corp’s internet properties, including MySpace.com, are to start selling Fox films and television content on a download-to-own basis in an effort to create a foothold in this potentially huge new digital market.

The service, which will charge $19.99 for new feature films such as X-Men The Last Stand and $1.99 for TV series episodes such as 24, will be available from October to users of the News Corp-owned gaming-oriented IGN Entertainment sites, with MySpace and others to come.

Le PDC met le débat sur le rôle des infotechnologies en Suisse au premier plan avec une demande pressante au CF de “reprendre le leadership dans ce domaine” et d’exprimer ” une politique claire” en la matière. Contenue dans ce document l’initiative est extrêmement bienvenue face au manque de vision politique du CF en la matière. (à suivre)

Ai profité d’un peu de temps entre deux rendez-vous à Berne pour aller visiter la rétrospective Meret Oppenheim au Kunstmuseum… J’en suis ressorti avec un étrange sentiment: celui d’avoir vu l’exposition d’une faussaire* prédatrice  plutôt que d’une artiste. Oui, bien sûr, une faussaire prédactrice d’immense talent mais en tout cas pas d’une artiste. Tous les attributs sont assurément là: un catalogue impresionnant, un cortège de livres publiés depuis longtemps, rédigés par des auteurs et des historiens de l’art prestigieux. Mais rien à faire, je ne suis pas parvenu à y croire, je ne suis parvenu à me concentrer, à entrer dans l’exposition, dans les oeuvres présentées. Je n’y parvenais pas car j’avais l’impression de voir, recyclée par Meret Oppenheim, l’inspiration et le génie des autres, la plupart de ses amis: Ernst, Breton, Ray les Surréalistes…Tout ressemble à quelque chose d’autre, comme un vaste exercice de “sampling”…le centre,lui, est vide.

*Quelques jours après la rédaction de ce billet, dérangé par le mot faussaire que je savais incorrect, injustifiable, à propos de Meret Oppenheim, je corrige faussaire et le remplace pas prédactrice, qui me paraît mieux convenir à l’idée de l’emprunt numérique
J’écris ça en pensant à la manière dont le plagiat - et son ampleur - sont aujourd’hui aisément détectable dans le monde de l’écrit: plusieurs “écrivains” ont été démasqués quand les algorithmes ont simplement mis en lumière leurs “emprunts”. Parfois, ils ont de manière crédible plaidé l’innoncence, l’emprunt était le souvenir fort d’un texte ou d’une idée qui avait marqué…La mémoire avait fait le reste. Un jour peut-être, on pourra faire de même avec les peintres. “Cet Oppenheim-là est à moitié emprunté, celui-ci totalement…” Oui, bien évidemment le plagiat est la forme la plus haute de la flatterie. Tout est dans l’aveu.

I have always believed that for content people, understanding today’s information ecosystem requires understanding economics. Technology alone obviously does not offer any meanningful clues, and studying consumer attitudes can be short on long-term vision since it mostly concerns hypersaturated markets. The Information Revolution is indeed in progress, but the battleground happens to be in places where, you and I, most likely do not live. That in itself is noteworty, for it explains why the true dimension of the revolution is largely under reported. Sometimes, this silence is broken by a popular eyeopening account, such as Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, but most of the times, reporting from the ground is the exception. To be fair, the financial press, the WSJ and the FT mostly, among mainstream media outlets do a good job of pointing up the real stakes, but that’s not enough.

I thought I’d help explain what I mean by reposting this post from Cody Willard’s blog, one of the guy I need to read to further my comprehension of “what’s going on” in my own flat world.
The Cody Blog: Cody in RM: The Long-Term Bull of Free-Flowing Information: ”

We all focus on the Googles and Texas Instruments of the world when we talk about the information revolution, but there are implications are much, much bigger than just whether or not Google wins the next MySpace or AOL advertisement delivery bid or not. I argue that the incredible revolution of free-flowing information (and capital, which I will address again in an upcoming post) is the very reason that China, India and the rest of the developing world will become so economically viable.(…)
A story on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal underscored this revolution, perhaps without even meaning to:

An Entrepreneur Has Quixotic Goal Of Wiring Rwanda
Greg Wyler’s Internet Outfit Offers High-Tech Service In War-Ravaged Country
‘A Booming Metropolis!’
By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS

MOUNT KARISIMBI, Rwanda — Greg Wyler, an American tech entrepreneur, dreams of bringing the Internet to this troubled country. There are a few hurdles. One is a battered communications tower atop this 14,787-foot volcanic peak. The air is too thin for helicopters to transport the several tons of equipment needed for repairs. Instead, it has to go by hand.
In April I wrote in the Financial Times exactly about how burgeoning access to telephones and the Internet is by far the most important development for Rwanda and other places of horror in Africa. Forget “aid” — the best way to help these places is to invest in them. And the gains will be huge as the ramifications of networking, communicating and free-flowing information forever alter the balance of power in these places.

My near term caution notwithstanding, one of the most important tenets of my being so bullish on the markets, the economy and especially society over the next few years is the free flow of information and the impact it will have on all facets of society. The masses — all of us — have always been subjected to compromised, biased information flow. In this country, the information flow has mostly been controlled by massive media titans who focus on the very politicians, issues and events that they have vested interests in. In too many countries, the information flow has been controlled by corrupt, oppressive governments.

As the old saying goes, “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own the printing press.” And as I’ve written before, for the first time in history, the printing press is free. Whether we’re talking about blogs, which have completely eviscerated the need for any capital to publish information, or podcasts or YouTube, the results are the same: Information flow is no longer controlled by anyone but the content creator.

And while each and every one of us will always have innate biases in our writing and therefore compromise the “truth,” there’s no arguing that having no filter between writer and reader is infinitely better than the many layers which in the past always had to approve any information flow. That is, we get “better” information without all the filters. Moreover, having many of sources for information that provide for triangulation of the truth is always better than having few sources that can collude with and/or feed off each other.

As this information flows ever more freely and often and can be accessed by ever more people through new devices and sources, corruption, coercion and, as I wrote in that FT article, even genocide become ever more difficult to carry out. Why? Because information flow is always the enemy of evil — evildoers try to hide and don’t brag about their actions for a reason after all.