Over the past two years or so, he has moved into a blogging format an email newsletter he and others in Bhangladesh built into a 20,000-plus member network.  The subtle beauty and brilliance of the photos alone are worth a visit.  The storytelling is equally good.

In this most recent post titled The Game of Death, he offers a moving and clear-eyed perspective on the complexities that are political life in Pakistan in the times defined by power, death and uncertainty.

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The Game of Death

The extra-judicial killings during Benazir’s rule are well documented. The fact that no investigation was done when her brother Mir Murtaza was killed outside Bilawal House, the family home, fueled the commonly held belief that her husband Asif Zardari had arranged the killing. Even Edhi’s ambulances had not been allowed access. Not until Murtaza had bled to death. Anyone who witnessed the murder was arrested; one witness died in prison. Benazir was then prime minister.

Murtaza had been vocal against the corruption of Zardari. Benazir defended her husband stoically throughout. Despite the Swiss bank accounts, she assured people that he would be seen as the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan. With Zardari now tipped as the new chief of PPP, Pakistan’s Mandela and his Swiss bank accounts might well be the new force. Whether Pakistanis will see this polo-playing businessman as the saviour of the day remains to be seen.

Supported by the US, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had been largely responsible for the break up of Pakistan and the genocide in Bangladesh. The current string pulling by the US has hardly made Pakistan a safer place. The western support of militarisation in Bangladesh and the growing importance of Jamaat is an all too familiar feeling. If Pakistan is an omen, it is a sinister one.

Perhaps Mrs. Packletide would have known how the former prime minister of this nuclear nation died. But the government’s attempts to cover-up will do little to quell the conspiracy theories. Like the Bhutto family, the military too have burned a lot of bridges in getting to where they are. There are too many skeletons in their closet. There is no going back, and no price too high.

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Tags: Shahidul News, Shahidul Alam, Benazir Bhutto, Asif Zardari, PPP, Pakistan

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My colleague Fred emailed me this morning with a link to the following blog post:

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Sony BMG UK adds blogging to the job description
By Andrew Orlowski

We’ve all heard about employees being sacked for blogging. But as the fad begins to wane, will staff soon be sacked for failing to blog?

Last week, Sony BMG UK issued a new corporate marketing strategy.

According to an official release from the group, Ged Doherty, chairman and chief executive of SonyBMG in UK and Ireland, said the company "has made it obligatory for all senior staff at both Columbia Records and RCA Records to start blogging actively".

So what happens to staff who refuse to toe the corporate line, or perhaps fail to produce the required quantity of blog blather?

We had to find out.

A spokesperson for SonyBMG told us "you won’t be sacked for failing to blog", but added, rather ominously: "If you don’t blog, it’s going to be frowned upon. Ged has made it clear that staff are expected to blog and participate in the community. He sees it as part of people’s jobs."

But what if you’re in, say, accounts?

"It’s more for staff in the creative areas of the company. It’s unfair to insist someone in the royalty department dealing with the backend engage in this, but if you’re a marketing peerson then you should."

It’s an attempt by the group to rise to the challenge of MySpace, which allows fans to build direct relationships with their fans.

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I replied to Fred by email with the following:

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Unfuckingbelievable, actually !

How clued out do you have to get to believe that you can order / command people to blog - especially when it’s about something they may not care so much about.

]]> http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/29/as-a-colleague-says-too-funny/feed/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/the-ongoing-redefinition-of-media-in-a-connected-world/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/the-ongoing-redefinition-of-media-in-a-connected-world/#comments Sat, 29 Dec 2007 03:36:00 +0000 admin http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/the-ongoing-redefinition-of-media-in-a-connected-world/ [As a follow-up to the previous post about forecasts of media transformation - thi spost first published in January 2006]

In Thermo[SAT]’s first post my blogging colleague Michel Dumais set out one of the primary targets of media companies (the consumer’s living room) as it becomes more and more clear that what we understood as broadcast media is being “blown to bits” (in the vernacular) – fragmenting, unbundling and from what we can see from “early signals” reconstituting itself around an interactive two-way pull-and-push infrastructure driven increasingly by the consumers … who are also rapidly becoming *producers*

As people are becoming producers (and if not producing at least re-mixing what is broadcast to them using tools like TiVo, podcasting, blogging, aggregation of RSS feeds) it is becoming evident that there are significant implications in the areas of business logic and business models, intellectual and copyright law and governmental regulatory policy and implementation. While the basic thrust of the Internet’s impact on traditional media is understood by those who have been following the issues since the early days of the Internet, this awareness is now becoming more and more widespread as new capabilities and service offers keep coming on stream, such as Bittorrent, Rocketboom, Youtube or Brightcove. David Schatzky, a Jupiter Research media analyst, provides a short and succinct perspective on the ongoing fragmentation of the media we know: Regarding the US media industry (and by extrapolation the rest of the Western world, to some extent), he poses the question …

“this is a time of dramatic disruption and transformation that will remake the industry landscape and see formerly dominant companies whither into irrelevance and test the resilience of an industry that has led the world through all of the last century. Will it lead the world in the current century?”

He then offers a high-level elaboration to his point of view:

The driver of this disruption is the dynamic of fragmentation, which is playing out along three dimensions simultaneously. Audience fragmentation. As an expanding array of media and entertainment choices make claims on consumers’ time, the amount of time they spend with traditional media, from television to magazines, is declining. Mass audiences are shrinking. Personal fragmentation. Consumers are spreading their media time and dollars around, spending less time with TV, magazines and other traditional media in favor of newer media like the Internet and video games. Media fragmentation. Media itself is beginning to fragment in dramatic ways. Individual songs and episodes of TV series are available for sale via download. Digital “feeds” of newspaper and magazine content allow consumers to read parts of a publication out of context without ever seeing the rest. Cable companies may soon offer individual channels a la carte.

Consumers increasingly expect to be able to consume media when and where they want, on any platform or device, in any context. The technology and media industries are beginning to oblige them. Fragmentation is both a cause and effect, creating a cycle in which fragmented audiences lead to fragmented content, which allows audiences to fragment further, and so on. These changes will threaten established practices and entrenched interests in the media and advertising sectors, but consumers will benefit and ultimately, companies that can ride this wave will benefit as well. They have no choice.

His prescription ?

As fragmentation transforms the media landscape, media companies will need to adapt to remain relevant. They will have to:

- Support multiple platforms for their content, from public venues such as theaters to digital media hubs in the home, to portable devices on the go. Content not available across the spectrum of platforms used by consumers will become irrelevant to them.

- Enable disaggregated, a la carte models that offer singles, episodes, feeds, fragments, samples, and so on to consumers who increasingly expect to select and consume their media granularly.

- Integrate more closely with advertisers, looking beyond the thirty-second TV spots, for example, to a multitude of new formats, from much shorter 5- to 10-second units to branding experiences that are integral to the media they sponsor, such as product placement.

- Collaborate more with consumers who, in online discussions, blogs, and podcasts are increasingly creating their own media.”

Terry Heaton, another prominent media analyst, provides an ongoing watch on his PoMo blog over the re-structuring of the television industry, and offers a clear and substantial perspective on the major changes being experienced by the television industry in a recent short article.

So what happens to broadcasters? TV Networks and program producers can make more money off downloads of their programming than they can through advertising. That is the remarkable conclusion of a couple of noted researchers and reported today by Diane Mermigas in The Hollywood Reporter. The math is pretty amazing, and it validates what a few of us have been saying for years about the role of the local broadcaster — that the Internet destroys middlemen in the existing value chain of media.

The mass-market acceptance of broadband in the U.S. has tipped the scales back to content producers and packagers, with the proliferation of distributors diluting the de facto gatekeeper strength of television stations, cable and satellite systems, cellular and video telephones, personal digital assistants, personal media players and Internet service providers. That should theoretically boost the economic fortunes of content players, though much will depend on the details of new business models and prevailing of old business models. So while the "economic fortunes of content players" are getting boosted, what about the old distribution system?

Heaton elaborates on how making money in the traditional media world is being “blown to bits” in another article titled “The Economy of Unbundled Advertising”, in which he explores possibilities that seem to be just around the corner.

Advertisers are projected to spend $292 billion in 2006, and like the content players they support, the industry is dealing with real threats due to the unbundling of media. The same energy that’s pulling apart the packaging of media also demands that merchants who sell goods and services do the same in their communication with the public. Who wants to sit through the pitch of a sales person at any kind of dealership? Just give me the price, man. This essay proposes a form of advertising that doesn’t currently exist but certainly could. Like the personal media revolution, the concept levels the playing field for anybody wishing to sell goods and services, so I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to predict that something like this will come about.

The trends are evident, and the fragmenting and unbundling of media (and the attendant online advertising) continues apace. These changes are important … so important that the changes will not unfold smoothly, or without pushback from the established power in television, cable, satellite and the telecommunications infrastructure that is (to date) enabling the disruption.

Doc Searls is a senior editor of the Linux Journal, and a widely-respected expert on the impacts of the Internet and interactivity on media business logic and business models. He is the author, with David Weinberger, of a manifesto titled “World of Ends” in which he sets forth some fundamental reasons why such a massive power shift … away from top-down broadcast models and towards fragmented, do-it-yourself content production … is occurring.

In a more recent article titled “Saving The Net: How To Keep The Carriers From Flushing The Net Down The Tubes", Searls outlines the pushback that has begun from the carriers of bits, who today are assertively stating that it is their pipes that are being used to carry out this revolution. They want regulatory policies to be changed in favour of their control over access and distribution of content. Many commenters who follow these issues, arguments and developments have noted that the eventual outcomes will define whether or not we get more traditional television-and-radio broadcast models applied to the Internet environment, or whether the regulators and telecommunications companies will have to be a party to what has been called “the democratization of information”.

]]> http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/the-ongoing-redefinition-of-media-in-a-connected-world/feed/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/neither-good-nor-bad-just-how-it-probably-will-be/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/neither-good-nor-bad-just-how-it-probably-will-be/#comments Sat, 29 Dec 2007 03:30:00 +0000 admin http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/neither-good-nor-bad-just-how-it-probably-will-be/ I notice that Hugh Macleod has linked to an old post I wrote about the looming battle for your attention in your living room being waged by the digital entertainment giants Microsoft, Apple and Sony.

As a strategy consultant, about 2 1/2 years ago I researched and wrote a report on digital culture and networked markets for the Canadian government, followed by an update a year or so later (co-written with Michel Dumais).

The blog post Hugh links to is from research that formed the core of that update, wherein Michel and I discussed the early strategic moves with regard to the XBox 360, Windows Media Centre, Apple TV, the Mac Mini and so on.

I am posting this to note that just for the record I am not saying these ongoing developments are a good thing or a bad thing, they just are.

I think it is a foregone conclusion that our lives will be surrounded by thin screens and flickering moving sliding images, and that increasingly, whether we like it or not, we will almost always be "on" unless we consciously choose to be offline … and I think that eventually it will take considerable discipline to exercise that choice.

It will be good, for example, to be able to almost completely avoid the mainstream television networks.

]]> http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/neither-good-nor-bad-just-how-it-probably-will-be/feed/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/geert-lovink-on-blogging/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/geert-lovink-on-blogging/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:53:06 +0000 admin http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/geert-lovink-on-blogging/ Geert Lovink runs the Networked Cultures blog, the Institute of Network Cultures and Amsterdam Media Research Centre, and has written several books about the internet and networked culture(s).

I ran across these (though not for the first time) as I was following links about Sara Diamond, now the President of the Ontario College of Art and Design.  Sara invited me (and quite a few other artists, media activists, and collaboration theorists) to a Banff Centre / Banff New Media Institute Summit conference on Participate / Collaborate: Reciprocity, Design and Social Networks in the fall of 2004. 

She’s a very interesting person, and one of those blessed to have pathways to engage her creativity and capabilities in fun and interesting ways.

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The Dreamer
Introducing OCAD’s brilliantly loopy new president

Appointed last July, Diamond is the 21st president of the Ontario College of Art and Design, the country’s largest art school, alma mater to such names as Arthur Lismer, Michael Snow and Joanne Tod. It’s her good fortune to take over as the institution is shedding its reputation as the worthy but somewhat moribund dowager of McCaul Street.

Granted university status in 2002, and graced in September 2004 by architect Will Alsop’s spirit-lifting, coffee-table-on-chopsticks addition, the school seems poised for flight as well.

Diamond is committed to breaking through the age-old division between art and design (“I kicked off a cross-disciplinary task force the moment I landed”) and to making OCAD “a hub of diversity and excitement.” And though it would not be accurate to describe the 52-year-old Diamond as flighty (she has impeccable administrative and teaching cred, with some 14 years at the Banff Centre, a creative think-tank, and has taught in both Canada and the U.S.), she does have flash.

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At any rate, the OCAD and Sara is not what this post is about.

The post is about participation, reciprocity and making meaning.  I have written about these dynamics before here and there, and consider the essay The Medium Is The Meaning We Consume and Create to be the exemplar (not of the subject, but of my limited reflection on the subject).

I found Geert Lovink’s blog post (Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse) from the spring of 2006 to be meaningful and to offer food for thought.

I wish I had looked up Geert Lovink each of the last several times I have been in Amsterdam.  I’ll have to remember to see if I can connect with him the next time I go there.

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Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse

Blogs are successors of the 90s “homepage” and create mix of the private (online dairy) and the public (PR-management of the self). As there are tens of millions of blogs it is next to impossible to make general statements about their ‘nature’. I will nonetheless do this. It is of strategic importance to develop critical categories of a theory of blogging that takes the specific mixture of technology, interface design, software architecture and social networking into account.

Instead of merely looking into the emancipatory potential of blogs, or emphasize its counter-cultural folklore, I see blogs as part of a unfolding process of ‘massification’ of this, still, new medium. What the Internet after 2000 lost is the “illusion of change”. The created void made way for large-scale, interlinked conversations through automated software, named weblogs, or blogs.

After a general introduction into net culture I will present my specific work that centres around the often voiced criticism that blogs are cynical and nihilist, because they merely comment and dump on the establishment (be it leftist, liberal or conservative). Instead of trying to prove that blogs are, in essence, good, I have taken up the challenge to interprete blogs as nihilist vehicles. Nihilism is not a lifestyle or opinion but a condition in which (Western) societies find themselves.

In the Internet context it is not evil, as Rüdiger Safranski suggested, but triviality that forms the drama of media freedom.

Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog adds to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. What’s declining is the Belief in the Message.

That’s the nihilist moment and blogs facilitate this culture like no platform has done before. Blog software assists users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness. The printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value.

Instead of presenting blog entries as mere self promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the broadcast model.

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Tags: Geert Lovink, Sara Diamond, Insdtitute of Network Cultures, participation, blogging, nihilism, wirearchy

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]]> http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/28/geert-lovink-on-blogging/feed/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/22/management-and-organizational-consulting-firms-licking-chops-as-they-eye-organizations-curiosity-about-wikis-blogs-and-interactivity/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/22/management-and-organizational-consulting-firms-licking-chops-as-they-eye-organizations-curiosity-about-wikis-blogs-and-interactivity/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2007 03:55:00 +0000 admin http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/22/management-and-organizational-consulting-firms-licking-chops-as-they-eye-organizations-curiosity-about-wikis-blogs-and-interactivity/ Ken Milloy is a long-time friend of mine, and a highly-skilled consultant in the arena of internal / employee communications and corporate storytelling organizational change.

]]> http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/22/management-and-organizational-consulting-firms-licking-chops-as-they-eye-organizations-curiosity-about-wikis-blogs-and-interactivity/feed/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/22/audits-sunlight-and-stories/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/22/audits-sunlight-and-stories/#comments Sat, 22 Dec 2007 17:59:13 +0000 admin http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/22/audits-sunlight-and-stories/ A blogger I know, Rob Paterson, recently started a blog about Blackwater titled Blackwater - Our Stories aimed, according to him, at bringing some balance to the relentless rage and misinformation directed at Blackwater’s (to be scrupulously fair, allegedly mercenary) security force in the media.

]]> http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/22/audits-sunlight-and-stories/feed/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/21/once-more-into-the-breach-eight-things-you-dont-know-about-me/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/21/once-more-into-the-breach-eight-things-you-dont-know-about-me/#comments Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:29:00 +0000 admin http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/21/once-more-into-the-breach-eight-things-you-dont-know-about-me/ Tagged by Luis Suarez, reminded by Stuart Henshall’s response to Luis.

UPDATE:  Dave Snowden tagged me as well.  I had already created the responses outline below.  There are some perhaps additional interesting things about me almost all people do not know, but they will have to wait for a more meaningful game or be divulged in private or semi-private settings (though I will add one here because it is an area in which Dave and I share (I think) an intense interest:  Just as I was quitting my job with a major global organizational consulting firm, I was asked to head up a new practice for the firm, leading a small team of senior consultants in providing innovative work design methods and processes for some of the firm’s largest and most productive (revenue-wise) clients because said clients were pretty much fed up with the inability of the firm’s standard methodologies to deliver the flexibility and leverage needed for high-level non-routine knowledge-and-expertise based work).  Alas, I was already too fed up, though my ego appreciated the gambit to try to get me to stay on.

For the eight-things-you-don’t-know game, you’re supposed to follow these rules:

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1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List EIGHT random facts about yourself.
3. Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged

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OK.

1.  I was born in the USA (Syracuse, NY) and almost immediately was registered by my parents as a Canadian Born Abroad (thanks, folks).  My parents were both peripatetic academics at the time (though of course in those days almost all women moved when the man / the husband decided to.  My mother was no exception, though she got much more assertive as the years went on.

2.   I have lived in cities most of my adult life, but spent almost all of my life up to the age of 17 in bucolic semi-rural areas, often with woods and fields and nothing-but-country for miles and miles behind our backyards.

3.  I learned how to read just shortly after my 3rd birthday, and was the proverbial flashlight-under-the-covers kind of kid.

4. My first job after graduating from university was as a prison guard (7 whole months .. why I did that more than one day is a mystery to me).  My second job was as a bank management trainee.  seven years later I was a young middle manager in a very large national and international bank.

5.  I am fluent in the French language, both spoken and written, though writing well in French is quite a different challenge than speaking French well.  My spoken French is better than my written French, but I can write an intelligible letter or brief report if I have to.

6. Like Stuart Henshall, swimming is my keep-fit sport.  I swam in the 1972 Olympic Trials, once even in the same pool as Mark Spitz.  Needless to say, I couldn’t see his heels.  I still swim quite regularly, but have gotten spoiled by the fantabulous outdoor swimming pool we have in Vancouver (137.5 metres long, 12 lengths to a mile), so I tend to get lazy once that pool closes in mid-September.  My New Years’ resolution for 2008 is to get up and go for an early morning swim workout 5 out of 7 days per week.

7.  I have never been married and do not have children.  I always thought I would marry reasonably young, and well.  I have been privileged to have great female partners in my life, but the first and second long-term partners I lived with, it just didn’t work out.  Much pain, much sadness, many regrets, long stories that you do not want to know anything about (nothing sordid or nasty, more just sad).

I recognize that I miss deeply the experience of being a parent.  I was a step-father to one young woman, and she remains very close to me and me to her.  I have often been told I would be a good father, and I believe I would be so.  I work at listening to and respecting kids, whilst also being playful and light-hearted.  Many of the kids I know find me to be funny (in a good way).

8.  I have wanted a dog for a very long time.  It would be uncomfortable, if not cruel, for me and Raman to have a dog in the (very) small space we currently inhabit.

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I don’t yet know who I am going to tag with respect to this "game".  Hopefully I won’t over-annoy those whom I choose to tag. 

They may elect not to play, which is fine by me.

Brian Moffatt

Mike Golby

Phil Wolff

Ken Milloy

Jeneane Sessum

Matt Mower

Dina Mehta

Phil Cubeta

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]]> http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/21/once-more-into-the-breach-eight-things-you-dont-know-about-me/feed/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/20/the-basics-of-social-computing-in-the-workplace/ http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/20/the-basics-of-social-computing-in-the-workplace/#comments Fri, 21 Dec 2007 02:31:00 +0000 admin http://blog.wirearchy.com/2007/12/20/the-basics-of-social-computing-in-the-workplace/ I’m going through and cleaning out old files in preparation for a renovation of this blog.

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