Liberalism, Atheism, and IQ

The article states that current research indicates a (statistically significant though not extraordinary) correlation between liberalism / atheism and intelligence.

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Let’s move back, for a minute, and consider the state of the music industry, ca. 2001. Napster had moved the task of finding, downloading, and sharing digital mp3 music from the realm of hackers and nerds to the broad public. Suddenly everyone was able to get music in an instant. For free. For years to come, the music industry, and its legal companion, the RIAA, tried everything imaginable to hinder mp3 music sharing, and lecture (or even force) people to buy expensive CD’s or download incompatible music instead. As indicated, by this quote from Jimmy Lovine – Founder and chairman, Interscope Records, it wasn’t until the advent of the iTunes & iPod behemoth, that the market of legal digital music exploded. By now, iTunes has surpassed CD sales and is the worldwide major music distribution platform.

How did Apple achieve this? First of all, there seemed to be a latent demand for legal digital music. People oftentimes claimed that they’d buy music in an instant, if it was available in something other than the arcane CD format. It was, however, possible to buy digital music online before the iTunes Music Store came along, a fact that diminishes the strength of the ‘legal music’ argument. Another important reason was of course the combination of iPod, iTunes, and iTunes Music Store. While previous approaches to selling music online were limited & rather unknown, the widespread success of the iPod brought access to millions of potential customers. Finally, there’s an often-overlooked but very important reason: The ease and comfort of Apple’s solution.

Napster reached such a wide audience not only because of the simplicity of the task, but also because the availability of of music. One could enter an artists name, find tons of related (or unrelated) tracks, and download them with a click. But Napster also had a ton of problems: Many tracks weren’t available at all, it was nearly impossible to get complete albums – mostly only a small selection of tracks, the files were not always in good quality, and almost every download took ages because the sharing party was accessing the Internet by modem.
Whereas iTunes brought best-of lists, fast downloads, high quality files, cover art, a big database of content (except for the Beatles), complete albums, reviews, and much more. And best of all, it was only one click away from the regular iTunes music experience.
I’m fairly confident, that the superior success of the iTunes Music Store lends itself a big deal on the usability of Apple’s solution.

So, going back to the future (or rather lack thereof) of journalism, how can we apply the merits of the digital music solution to newspapers? Since news is already free on the Internet, this market lacks a significant demand for ‘legal’ news. However, as explained above, this wasn’t a big deal for digital music either. The difference is actually marginal: Before iTunes, people could buy digital music, but illegally downloaded free stuff instead. After iTunes people could still buy digital music, but did download far less illegal music. Now, people can buy paper news, but they access free, digital news instead.
If Apple really was to try to reinvent the newspaper, it would need to offer a seriously simplified, less cumbersome, very usable interface. But is this possible? Online newspapers have been evolving for years, the NY Times employs a constantly growing team of web developers to optimize it’s site. These sites still follow a model that lends its basics from the classic newspaper. A frontpage, departments, current articles in chronological order, features, and a ton of adds.
These simple thoughts establish a basic framework which allows to draft a set of requirements for a device that could establish itself as a news platform:
- The perfect size: It certainly has to be bigger than an iPhone. It needs space for a splendid layout, big fonts, high quality pictures, and a general feeling of comfort. However, it shouldn’t be so big as to be considered clunky.
- The layout: Visit Google FastFlip), which introduces a blazingly fast way to read news. Instead of html content, the site serves screenshots of news sites. I’m hardly convinced that Apple will not use WebKit for the iTablet newspapers, but that’s not the point: They just need to find a way to make the browsing and loading of articles incredibly fast.

When I applied the probable factors of success of the iTunes Music Store onto journalism, I left one factor out: The giant userbase of the iPod. The Music Store not only did benefit but wouldn’t have been possible at all without the already available incredible amount of iPod owners. The iTablet, on the other hand, isn’t even on the market yet. So, in comparison to the iPod, where the physical product helped sell the digital content, with the iTablet the digital content would need to help sell the physical product. I imagine newspaper access to be one of Apple’s arguments for the iTablet. While this certainly limits the applicability of the thoughts above, the App Store has shown that even a new content platform can quickly become a selling argument.

If only a bit of these thoughts apply, it would be a chance for journalism. The iTablet scenario won’t help solve many of its inherent problems, like bias, uneven news distribution, or the rise of entertainment, but it might at least help journalism to stay alive – maybe until a conclusive ‘future of news’ has been found. Because weblogs, social news, or Twitter cannot replace journalism.

Much like Apple saved the music industry with the iPod & iTunes combination, I'm quite confident that they're now en route to save the dying newspaper business with the upcoming tablet. Whatever one might think about Apple: For the valuable sake of keeping journalism alive, let's hope they succeed.

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As mentioned earlier, I fear the same. It's sad, because WebOS is a great Platform – just still in its infancy.

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Update: Just stumbled upon this Billshrink.com Smartphone comparison. They compare the iPhone, Pre, and the Droid. In the following (about) 40 user comments, one guy laments the lack of Windows Mobile, another one the lack of BlackBerry, and finally the last comment just notes ‘No mention of Nokia.. again’. That’s three out of forty.

RIM only has two options. First, invest serious work in their current platform. Or second, develop a new platform that eases development and enables developers to target different devices with one code base. Currently, they seem to try to sit it out instead.
There is a stark and distinct relationship between the usability of a Software development kit and the amount of software being developed with it. Current BlackBerry users buy the device because of the email and texting features. But with the increasing feature set of Android, this primary BlackBerry advantage will diminish. A wide range of apps (or a small range of high quality apps) are increasingly influencing purchase decisions. RIM has neither.

(via Andrew Keen)

Very nice essay on the differences between operating a startup and a regular job.

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(1) Apple has steadily improved and refined its brand. Most current consumer ratings place the Apple brand at the top of the list. Our modern society introduced and needs brands as a method of reducing the complexity that the free market as well as globalization bring along. An unbelievable huge amount of slightly differing and ever updating products for any kind of problem can’t hardly be understood and processed by a single person. We’re using mechanisms like journalism / reviews, peer information / opinion leaders or brands in order to artificially limit the range of choices we have to process for coming to a purchase decision.
Brands are especially interesting as they allow to overshadow primary product dimensions: A great brand makes up for product features, product price or product support. If we have a no-name product, we scan for technical features or price. If we have a branded product, most people don’t.

This means that jumping the Apple brand bandwagon sounds like an excellent opportunity to improve sales without improving products (covering problems, so to say). This is why WWDC was almost overshadowed by companies and people trying to feature their products in context of the Apple brand momentum. Around Moscone there were literally tons of people handing out flyers describing interesting up to weird services. There was a truck featuring a big advertisement for a flight simulator game that drove around Moscone all day all week – talk about saving the frakin environment. I even got approached by a 11 year old (or what) advertising his iPhone App Review club or something. And apart from that, there was the weirdest thing of them all: The iPorn Party; a desperate attempt to get developers into a strip club and (sucessfuly!) land articles for a small porn portal in the main Apple related media. The idea of a porn company trying to improve its perception by advertising in the context of WWDC – a conference geared around Mac Development – would have sounded very very awkward just two years ago.

(2) There was a tangible and visible change in the actual people attending WWDC. Sure, there were still the regular geeks with funny hats, witty (in a technical fashion) shirts and (not seldom) interesting beards. But more than ever before, there were two new types of attendees: Women and business people. I think two years ago I could count the attending women by hand. This year there were far more. As someone on Twitter wrote: This was the first time that, in a WWDC session, two girls were sitting next to each other. Probabilistic factors hadn’t allowed for such an event to happen in previous years. Not that I want to conclude anything from the looks of a person, but many of them were good looking too, and dressed in a way that, if you’d see them on a street, wouldn’t let you think they knew how to fire up XCode (please bear with me here, I’m not in any way misogynic).
Apart from this, there were lots of business people around. Wearing suits, sometimes even walking around with Thinkpads and Windows.
I conclude from this, that the iPhone halo has put the conference in a light, that will bring along fundamental changes. For next year I expect more business, and all in all a more heterogenous audience. The Mac & iPhone are strongly moving away from a niche or geek market to big money.

Summarizing just like shit attracts the flies money attracts the big business. Let’s hope they don’t corrupt the very nice Apple culture with their processes, calculations, economics and no fucking clue for interface design.

But what about the other Twitter-Like services? I can’t call it twittering when I use identi.ca. And, quite frankly, Twitter wasn’t even the first. Years before Biz Stone even thought about Twitter, Dave Winer himself had a similar feature implemented in his OPML editor. As soon as I want to address the more broad form of communication one performs while using Twitter or similar services, I have to refer to microblogging. People often tend to ignore current Twitter alternatives due to the limited amount of users, but if you look closely, then even Facebook offers microblogging. The features are all there: One can update his status, one can see updates, there’s an API.
So, recounting on this simple observation, it sounds easy: If I talk about my personal car, I talk about my Audi. If I talk about cars in general I use the term, well, ‘car’.

There’s a striking difference though: If you ask any of your friends for the definition of a car, you’ll get a simple answer. Ask them for microblogging, and you’ll earn blank faces. They (verb*)facebook, they (verb*)identica, they(verb*)twitter or they (verb*)friendfeed. But they don’t microblog. And that’s fine. In the short run people can call it as they wish – as long as the bigger perspective can clearly be defined. The fact that like everyone says ‘I googled it’ instead of ‘I searched it on the internet’ doesn’t abolish the semantical linkage between ’search’ and ‘google’. Google is still a search engine, no matter which word people use to define the process. And Twitter is still a microblogging service, no matter which word people use to define their usage of said service.

This doesn’t matter now. But this will matter in 1, 5, 10, or 15 years when there’s an alternative to Twitter or when Facebook grew so big that people use their services to perform similar-to-twitter needs, or when something totally different came up and won us all over. Then I’m not tweeting anymore, but still microblogging.

Which means that one should use the term Microblogging as soon as one wants to talk about anything including Twitter. That’s clearer and more concise.

Yeah sure. So he doesn’t like Apple at all, but wants Microsoft to copy everything Apple is. Maybe it would be best for Microsoft to just buy Apple Hard- and Software and exchange the Apple for a Microsoft Logo. I guess that’d make Paul’s day.

via OSNews Thom Holwerda