We’re heading to the UK for Christmas. I’ve been meaning to try out this online video/picture tool at Animoto for work reasons. The two combined…

ICANN released the fourth version of its Applicant Guidebook this week. The process has been going on for so long with so many endless controversies and scandals, that those that actually want to apply for a new Internet extension have developed an amusing gallows humour.

I’ve just been sent a doctored version of a slide purporting to show the timeline for new gTLDs. It comes from a long-suffering wannabe applicant who has developed a new “Big Night Out, Morning After” model to explain ICANN’s policy and implementation processes.

Enjoy. (Click for larger version.)

I think Apple really needs to rethink about how it launches products. The Steve Jobs super-secret wham-bam thing is all well and good when something really new comes out – like the iPod with video or the iPhone – but in between the super-hype is just tedious.

I recall a number of jazzed-up keynotes that simply announced improved versions of the iPod and years before that, super exciting launches that basically just improved iMacs. But this time there was a whole new product – The Tablet!

From the over-the-top reactions, especially considering no-one has any real information, it might as well have been the Ten Commandments tablets, except this time God felt we only needed one and he use Steve Jobs to deliver them to the world.

The Tablet – renamed a quite dodgy iPad – is basically a great big iPhone (without the phone). It’s sort-of like the giant cricket bat that was banned back in 1800-and-something for being too wide and covering all the stumps. Worse that producing a huge product that is already being mocked as the iTampon, Apple failed to launch the one thing that did seem interesting about the iPad – its use as a new medium for ebooks.

Amazon has created the first effective market for ebooks with its Kindle, but it is being a little bit monopolistic about it, so everyone – particularly publishers – was excited about the idea of such a big and bold competitor – especially one that is going to use (is it?) a common ePub format.

But then Apple completely fails to launch iBooks. We saw it on the screen but it’s not downloadable. Which kind of makes you wonder what the whole point of the event was. The iPad isn’t available for three or six months, depending on what model you want. The iBooks app isn’t there yet. Apple doesn’t even have iBooks.com. And – if you look for it on the Apple Store, you are instead offered “iBoobs”.

It all seems, well, a bit drap. Not that the iPad isn’t a nice idea. I might get one if others’ tell me they really like it. But was it worth the hype? No. Do I think less of Apple as a result? Yes.

I posted the video of the United Nations’ representative Sha Zukang losing it about a week ago but forgot to stick up a blog post about it.

It was a remarkable thing: Egypt’s first lady had inserted her own agenda into the Internet Governance Forum’s schedule – which caused no end of problems as everything had to be reshuffled. But also her visit brought with it some over-the-top security precautions: no mobile phones; extra invites to be allowed into the building; restricted access; and – the big issue – everyone being locked down in the main room, unable to leave, while she wandered around in the “village” of booths outside.

Anyway, after the First Lady’s little segment about protecting kids online and a panel of “experts” forced to find some way of tying the IGF into the youth of today and protecting kids online — which was a complete waste of everyone’s time, to be frank — she wandered off but left everyone stuck in the main room.

Not everyone was happy about this. Many people wanted to just go to the toilet having been in the room for several hours. The UN’s head honcho – a very prickly Chinese man called Sha Zukang – was also unhappy as he had trouble getting back into the room to chair the next session on the future of the IGF itself.

As you can see from the video below, Sha was annoyed with the fact that lots of people were standing at the back waiting to be allowed to leave. But even when the situation was explained to him, he was already too wound up to care and came out with an extraordinary outburst.

Considering this has only been one or two minutes, it was really too much – and everyone commented as such. Of the many comments I heard at the back of the room, and that evening, the most common description of the short-fused Zukang was “prick”. The event also sparked a few UN old hands to recall other similar outbursts.

Anyway, here for your viewing pleasure is what happened:

I’ve always thought Eddie Izzard was supremely funny but I didn’t realise that he’d be a really nice bloke just to know and have a conversation with until today.

I embarked on some rather silly Twitter-following very early this morning (all sparked off by Stephen Fry tweeting about Trafigura) and ended up discovering that Eddie Izzard was in Los Angeles for a documentary about his life. I missed a Q&A he gave earlier this week at a screening (bloody shame) but he tweeted that he’d be on some chatshow I’ve never heard of – Kevin Pollak.

As it turns out this is a low-budget, Internet-only chatshow that makes me want to call a few mates, drive up to Hollywood and completely overhaul because there have been some interesting guests but the format is painful. Kevin, bless him, needs an audience to be funny (plus there is a reason canned laughter tracks exist) and he is a truly dreadful interviewer, but if you press play on the show (embedded above) and come back 17 minutes and 20 seconds later you’ll find Eddie Izzard giving a really interesting interview.

Far from going off on his surreal semi-structured humour bursts, Eddie Izzard was actually in a relaxed and chatty frame of mind. I’ve no doubt that having watched a documentary about his rise he had been pondering about his life and existence and clearly had some thoughts running through his head.

What came out though was what a smart, driven person Eddie is. He has retained copyright on his DVDs (he did accounting exams), he carefully and methodically approached his career of choice, he has interesting insights into his profession. And he was clearly willing to talk about personal details: the death of his mother when he was six which, apparently, the film goes into in some detail and is the main driver in Eddie’s life; and the fact that he had had a relationship with the film’s director.

I really wish it had been me interviewing him because he was relaxed, in a small room and willing to open up. It’s rare that such a practiced and polished performer is willing to let his guard down that much. Anyway, we shall never know. It does make me want to get into Internet video though – and do a really professional journalistic job of interviewing interesting people.

Eddie Izzard’s film Believe is at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 cinema on Sunset until Thursday and then it moves to New York. Initial reviews have been very positive.

Purely by accident I just came across a “technobile” column piece that I wrote for the Guardian a few years ago. I have to say I amused myself. Posted below but grabbed from the Guardian site:

Technobile

Concerns grow about internet users who are dangerously addicted to Google. Quick, read it now!

I can’t believe Google gives no results for “Internet Derived Lethargic Episode”, because the search engine is a major cause of IDLE. It is a particularly destructive illness where the victim, having spent days working at their computer, awakens to discover they can barely recall a single event, save a joke about the Lib Dems.

Bombarded by stimuli, the victim ends up in a state of highly excited lethargy where any activity taking longer than 30 seconds is too tiring to tackle. The brain, fizzing with chemicals, produces an effect similar to a caffeine overdose but combined with dangerously high levels of pathos. Overfilled with trivia, the sufferer can often be found transfixed in front of his computer.

Electronic doubt and pixelated anxiety drive some to self-harm – purchasing worthless articles of nostalgia from auction sites or entering into fruitless chatroom discussions.

Doctors are concerned about the spate of otherwise normal adults presenting with an array of symptoms and emoticons, and have called for an independent commission into IDLE. Many fear it is too little, too late.

“I receive over 3,000 headlines through RSS feeds every day,” one man posted on a site dedicated to sufferers. Another spoke of how he hadn’t correctly spelt the word “great” in two years.

Matthew, 26, boasted of how he would know the details of a major news event minutes before his peers. “I used to have all the facts, plus a witty analysis on my blog before anyone had even heard of it.” Now he cuts a forlorn figure in the Berners-Lee hospital in Waddington and can’t even remember what the current version of Firefox is.

Victims often don’t realise they have the disease until it is too late, Idle specialist Professor John Trillian told me. Worst of all, it strikes hardest at those with creative minds. “Ginsberg wrote: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’,” Trillian explains. “Now young minds are being destroyed by the ability to discover within seconds that fact, the date it was first said, where, and who Ginsberg was sleeping with at the time through a simple Google search. As a result, knowledge is built in a haphazard, disconnected fashion with no effort made to discover context. We are building a generation of cultural magpies.”

As if to explain, Trillian handed over a poem written by an Idle patient.

The emails are not wanted now; delete every one,
Pack up the Apache and dismantle the Sun,
Tear up the superhighway and power down the net;
For nothing online will ever give what you get.

“WH Auden would have flamed him,” Trillian said gravely.

It makes me proud to be British when I see something as simultaneously wonderful and hilarious as a middle-aged woman brow-beating a government minister into changing government policy.

Joanna Lumley is a treasured British asset – a ludicrously posh but much-loved and fearless actress – and she has been spearheading a campaign against the government for its treatment of Nepalese “Gurkha” British Army fighters.

Just look at this video in which Lumley speaks and then stares at immigration minister Phil Woolas just daring him to contradict her. The finest traditions of a British Battleaxe. He cowers under her summary and then embarks on a droney, bureaucratic explanation of how it all works and why the government hasn’t just made a complete arse of itself. I think Woolas’ political career is effectively over.

So what was it all about?

Well, Gurkhas are a throwback to the British Empire days but they have a strange kind of symbolism because they are renowned for fighting incredibly hard in extremely difficult situations for a country that has never really done much for them.

Recently, however, a number of Gurkhas has been refused the right to stay in the UK, setting off the quiet but deadly rumblings of Middle England who just don’t think that’s fair play. And Middle England found its perfect frontwoman in Joanna Lumley who has almost single-handedly forced the government in all its officiousness to change its policy by “not bloody having it”.

The Labour government lost a vote on the issue recently, causing the prime minister to invite Lumley to Number 10 for tea where he promised to sort it out. But then the next day, in a complete civil servant farce, a number of Gurkhas has their applications to stay in the UK turned down.

Lumley, furious, set off to the BBC to do an interview, but Woolas was already there. Then, apparently, the two went off for a private meeting and then this impromptu press conference was held. A royal farce and all of it done with incredible British politeness. I love it. And Joanna Lumley has gone from Institution to Legend.

It seems that the Internet is catching on with the most powerful men in the world. Both the Pope and the new US president Barack Obama have this week announced new web strategies and told anyone that would listen how much they love this Internet.

The conversion is hardly surprising – both men derive most of their enormous power from being able to communicate directly to millions. And if there’s one thing the Internet does well, it is mass communication. Here the question though: who loves the Internet more – Obama or the Pope?

Let’s find out in a head-to-head competition…

Obama	The Pope
YouTube
The Obama team have embraced YouTube so heartily, you wonder whether it feels a bit winded. First there was the Change.gov YouTube channel, then the Inauguration YouTube channel, and now the White House YouTube channel. Where’s it going to stop? A Potus 24-hour headcam? But is the love fading already? There were 67 videos posted to the Change.gov channel; but only 14 to the Inauguration site and so far just four to the White House. With just over 70,000 channels views and just under 7,000 subscribers, this is not looking so good. Is the message – it’s fine when you need the message out there for votes, but not so fine when you’re in the job? And aren’t the videos, well, a bit boring?	The new kid on the block, Ratzinger aka Benedict XVI has ventured the first time into YouTube territory this week. The result? Over 200,000 channel views and just over 6,000 subscribers and climbing… If you want a power base of followers, you’ll be hard pushed to beat the Catholics. What’s more, His Holiness’ people seem to understand the game better than the US presidential team, posted 16 videos already and, according to their new media man Father Federico Lombardi, they are planning to post up to three more every day! The videos themselves are coming it at under two minutes – much snappier than the ponderous-by-comparison Obama versions. And the Pope is offering his site in four languages – Italian, English, Spanish and German. A late start but an impressive one.
Phone, text and email
Obama has famously fought and won with the Secret Service to be allowed to keep his Blackberry and so be in instant email and text contact with his devoted followers, sorry, his senior advisers. The president is also supposedly on Twitter – although the messages are no more than staff-written links to other events and rarely updated. In the run-up to the election, the Obama/Biden team also went mobile-crazy, setting up a WAP site (a wap site?), sending frequent update texts, logging supporter’s mobile phone numbers and even producing a special Obama application for the iPhone. A frequent emailer, it is possible that a laptop will appear for the first time on the desk in Oval Office for Obama’s use. Previously, Presidents had been prevented from using email so that it didn’t become a part of official archival records and so eventually be made public (so far only a handful of emails from president@whitehouse.gov have ever been sent; fewer received). That may be about to change.	The Pope has never been so much as pictured with a mobile phone, and it’s not clear that he has ever sent an email. However, in his favour he does have his own Popemobile, which is famous throughout the world for being a bullet-proof popefish bowl on the back of a small Mercedes. Not that this lack of person use has stopped the Pope from reaching his flock. The Vatican promotes His Holiness’ email address – benedictxvi@vatican.va – on its website, and you can apparently get a daily text message from the Pope from PopeMessage.com – although the $9.95 a month price tag make me a little suspicious. On a recent visit to his home in Austria, the Archdiocese of Vienna did the job for him – offering a free daily text service with quotes from him delivered to the faithful. The same was true for World Youth Day 2008. At 81 years old, perhaps it’s a little too much to ask of the Pope to be typing messages into a G1, but even so he falls down here.
The World Wide Web
It was thanks to the radical use of the Internet as a social networking tool that Obama’s team managed to raise so much money and get so many people on the ground moving. It was impressive, although there are already questions whether the same techniques are allowed or even legal when in power. The White House website has had a much-needed overhaul from something that crossed bland announcements with an historical archive into something more dynamic. But, interestingly, the same ideas as on the campaign trail have been pulled into the White House, which again makes you wonder whether Obama really loves the Internet – or just its ability to get voters excited when your rival is out-of-touch enough to admit that he has never emailed or been online. But how far does Obama really embrace the Internet? His team certainly appear to have misunderstood the value of blogs as amore personal form of communication – using the official blog to do little more than list press announcements. The earlier exciting use of photos also seems to have vanished. There is an official White House photographer – why not a Flickr feed of his pictures? Currently, there is no Wi-Fi at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.	The Vatican was one of the earliest huge-organization adopters of the Internet, sticking up a website long before most people were online. It wasn’t a very good website but it was better than nothing. The website can been through a few iterations since then, and its front page was all the rage just a few years’ ago but there is not much content once you’ve got past the homepage and it is still sporting a "Christmas 2008" masthead nearly a month after it all ended. That’s not to say that the Vatican isn’t savvy when it comes to the Internet – representatives from the Vatican turn up at alot of Internet industry functions and also keeps an eye on the policy issues – see this interview with the Vatican’s top geek, Sister Judith Zoebelein. There are a huge number of Catholic networking site – at least one of which the Pope has supported. So, overall, quite bad, except for the fact that the Vatican has its own piece of the Internet. At 110 acres and with less than 1,000 inhabitants, the Vatican is the smallest state in the world – and yet it owns and runs the Internet suffix ".va", with just 23 domains, all of them with the Pope’s oversight. For what he lacks in depth, he makes up for in size.
Institutional Change
Come into power promising change, and with new media credentials fluttering around him like magic doves, people are expecting the Internet to have a similar revolutionary impact on the White House as it has in many other parts of society. The revolution was flagged up in an early blog post on the new White House website, promising that "Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov". But all it gave was three vague buzzwords – communication, transparency, participation – and a form to fill in. One of those new media advisers then had a second stab at explaining what new, exciting development there were. And they were pages on: YouTube, Facebook and MySpace; a pdf database of boring policy meetings with a search on "internet" yields only seven results, one being a briefing paper from Microsoft and two other a meeting with the blind community, and another on "interfaith immigration". Apparently learning little from the UK government’s e-petition approach (good idea, introduced without sufficient thought and safeguards); the entire participation element appears to be the Citizen’s Briefing Book – or, to give it it’s more accurate title, The Mentally Ill Citizen’s Ranting Book. So, far from stunning. Perhaps the much-anticipated plan to hire the US government’s first-ever Chief Technology Office (CTO) will see the Internet used as more than shiny new baubles. The setting looks good – a series of stated goals and priorities – with two of the six directly involving the Internet. But so far, the most interest in the job has come from endless speculation in the media and self-promoting Net heads swelling up with their own ideas about what the new CTO should do. The one ground-breaking idea may end up stillborn after Julius Genachowski turned it down to become FCC chairman and have some real influence, and journalists in a frenzy have found themselves reporting that none of the big names in tech want the job either. So far, not looking promising.	Originally not a great fan of the Internet, complaining that it can be a negative force that promotes hatred, intolerance and degradation, the Pontiff has warned to it in recent months, giving a speech just this week on New Technologies, New Relationships: Promoting a culture of Respect, Dialogue and Friendship. Recognising his age and the digital revolution, he picked out the young as being the key to future communication for the Catholic Church. "It falls, in particular, to young people, who have an almost spontaneous affinity for the new means of communication, to take on the responsibility for the evangelization of this ‘digital continent’," he said. The head of the Pontifical Councils for communicating with the faithful, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, told reporters that statement was a "real watershed" and went on to talk about how the internet had profoundly changed the world of communications. And while Obama’s team want every American with broadband access, it seems that the pope wants everyone in the world online, saying that it would be a “tragedy” if the "extraordinary potential" of the internet "were not made accessible to those who are already economically and socially marginalized". The Internet should be open to all, he went on and modern communication tools are "truly a gift to humanity". If that’s not a ringing endorsement, nothing is. Despite this enlightened viewpoint however, you will be hard pushed to see where the Pope’s love of all things new media will extend to the Vatican itself. For an organization that still works largely in secret and maintains centuries-old traditions that don’t even pretend to make sense (burning logs with coloured smoke; making guards dress up like weird toys; and so on), it is not at all clear that Benedict XVI is letting the Net into his life. Certainly better rhetoric than Obama’s team, but to fail to embrace what the Net can do for you is to love it only at a distance.
The RESULTS!
The WINNER! with 13 out of a possible 20 points is Barak Obama. A strong love for the Internet during the heady days of campaigning may be waning now that he’s in power, but his personal use and experience of the Internet, email and mobile phones is just enough to push him in front of the Pontiff. A close call that should have seen Obama zooming ahead. Must try harder.	The LOSER! but with a respectable 12 out of 20 points is Pope Benedict XVI. It was neck-and-neck until the very end, with the Pope’s recent conversion to the power of New Media nearly enough to claim the prize. But he was let down by a lack of personal awareness and knowledge – it’s one thing to be advised; quite another to understand it intrinsically. Plus of course, Obama already has good form, where the Vatican is still largely reliant on others picking up the gauntlet. On the plus side, the Pope has a much longer timeframe in which to get across his vision. Obama has four years to make a splash; Ratzinger has got until the end of his natural life.

The Internet and email are wonderful things most of the time. But the dreadful simplicity of this form of communication has some downsides – most significantly in that it allows people’s idiotic thoughts to be transmitted beyond themselves.

Everyone has idiotic thoughts. Some people have many more than others. And mostly you control them; keep them safe until you’ve checked them internally. Some people however have so many stupid ideas in their head that they can’t help but leak out. These are the people that most love the Internet.

If you ever had to deal with a wider community online (I have as an author, a journalist, a news editor, a blogger and now a general manager of public participation), you get your fill of people talking utter nonsense or – better – misreading or misrepresenting what you said and then attacking you for what they believe they have read.

For all of you fellow sufferers out there – I know you are many – here is a helpful release, courtesy of my good friend Rachel. It is called spEak You’re bRanes and you can find it at:

http://ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com/

It comprises of choice comments from readers of the BBC website, and it is terrific. The editor delights in surreal attacks on the wonderful collection of idiots, bigots, liars, fools and general nutjobs that have found the Internet and aren’t afraid to use it.

Just one example, in a post asking why people are willing to torture, a loon claiming to come from Rockall (he doesn’t, it’s uninhabited as I can personally testify) has this to say:

They need not have bothered.
Just ask how many people laugh at situations you see on You’ve Been Framed.
We all have an inbuilt trigger that laughs at someone falling over.

Mr James T Haddock, Rockall Island (Scotland), United Kingdom

Our editor has this offer in response:
I don’t know where to start with this one. By pointing out the subtle differences between complicity in atrocities and shitty home-staged slapstick? By gently breaking it to him that the laughter he hears on You’ve Been Framed isn’t really people? Or do I just dive straight in with the electrified nipple-clamps and laugh my arse off?

There’s much more. It will help you laugh it off.