You have to wonder how often large corporates review the work done in their name through lobbying organizations, because it is definitely time that big names such as Dell, HP, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Nike and Wells Fargo consider whether their support of the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse – CADNA – is starting to undermine their credibility.

CADNA has been pushing wildly inaccurate information, mostly against ICANN, for a few years. But in a recent frivolous piece of nonsense, it has pushed out a press release claiming that new Internet extensions (gTLDs) will cost “brand owners” $746 million. The figure is pulled out from nowhere, doesn’t stand up to even the most basic scrutiny, and is in fact is no more than a press release. It also stands in stark contrast to the serious work that has actually been done on the possible impact of new Internet extensions on trademark owners.

How is it possible that CADNA – which famously held a Washington event on the future of ICANN and then refused to allow anyone from ICANN to attend – is allowed to get away with this kind of nonsense? The answer is that the companies that give the organization is vanishing credibility aren’t aware of what is being peddled in their name.

So who is CADNA? Well, based in Washington, CADNA is just two people – Josh Bourne and Phil Lodico. Josh and Phil were both previously from Register.com and CADNA is an offshoot and the main client of their lobbying company, FairWinds Partners.

Initially pitching themselves to US corporates as strategic minds for domain names, they soon realised that there were many more better equipped consultancies out there in a small market, and so switched to a lobbying group for Intellectual Property interests in domain names in Washington, offering big firms like Hewlett Packard and Morgan Stanley updates on a complex and fast-moving world. They successfully latched onto the issue of drop catching as a way to highlight bad practices within the small DNS industry.

However, drop catching and domain tasting were pretty effectively dealt with by ICANN. So in order to keep this niche lobbying organization alive in tough times, CADNA has resorted to fear-mongering and drum-banging about the introduction of new generic top-level domains and ICANN in general: this latest press release being just the latest example.

Typically any concerns raised in Washington regarding the DNS are swiftly repackaged by CADNA into a press release. It’s pretty shallow and pointless and CADNA has little or no credibility within the DNS community, but in the Washington echo chamber, it sounds as though CADNA is on the ball and helping to keep an eye on things.

What Dell, Nike, Wells Fargo and the other members don’t realise unfortunately is that all they need to do is talk to those already heavily involved in the intellectual property discussions within ICANN (such as the IP constituency) to find out exactly what is going on.

Of course the reason big companies provide their names and small amounts of money to lobbying firms is because they get updates, representation and don’t have to spend time and resources dealing with the issue themselves. However, there can come a point where a lobbying organization goes so far, and undermines its credibility to such a degree that membership starts to become a liability. CADNA is definitely there at the moment.

Internet thinker and political operator David Weinberger has posed an interesting question: how do we design a question-and-answer format for politicians that is truly democratic?

Weinberger’s blog post was noted by Andrew McLaughlin on his Facebook page – Andrew is the White House Deputy CTO and the man more than any other that could make a democratic Q&A system a reality.

And so I figured I’d have a stab at designing something since this is an area where I have a fair amount of knowledge and experience both as a journalist and as ICANN’s general manager of public participation. Here then is a rundown of a system that I think would broadly work:

Let’s start with some assumptions about what this system would need to do and how it would work. It would have to:

1. Be online – the Internet’s gift for communication and computers’ ability to parse information is the only reason we are even considering a fully democratic Q&A.
2. Be open and scalable, with limited need to register to use the service. Otherwise it will never get off the ground
3. Be resistant to efforts to fix the results – which would be inevitable in a political environment – on both sides
4. Produce useful results that could be built upon – otherwise, what’s the point?
5. Be manageable from the staff perspective – get the balance right between resources expended and useful results or the process will eventually be dropped as a “useful experiment”

This the idea I have come up with, presented from the perspective of the user, which I’ll then dig into.

To: kieren@kierenmccarthy.com
From: democracy@whitehouse.gov

Subject: An answer to your question

Thankyou for your recent question to the White House about the Economy.

A response has now been posted on the White House website, where you will also be able to see responses to other questions on the same subject and from people in your state.

If you are interested in learning more about this aspect of the economy, we have also provided links to those individuals in the administration that have day-to-day responsibility for these areas, and you will be able to follow them as they work through the issues.

To see the response to your questions, please click on the link below:

http://whitehouse.gov/qa/economy/2010/02/08/answers.html#3

Thank you,

The White House

You click the link:

Monday 8 February 2008

Q&A: ECONOMY

Click on the plus [+] sign to expand the question box to provide the answer

[+] Q1: Why does America have such a large deficit?

[+] Q2: What does it mean that China owns a huge number of US Treasury bills?

[-] Q3: What are you doing to get the country out of recession?

We are doing a number of things.

Firstly, there was the Stimulus Package that was approved in February 2009. That package provided $787 billion in funds to get the economy back on track. Roughly one third each was spent on the following three things: tax cuts and benefits; education and healthcare; and federal contracts, grants and loans.

You can follow how all of this money is being spent online at: http://www.recovery.gov/.

Secondly, the President announced a freeze on federal budgets for three years so we spend less as a government. This is not a simple task and will require significant assistance from Congress to make it happen.

If you are interested in following debates on the subject of the Federal Budget Freeze, please go to: http://whitehouse.gov/qa/economy/budget-freeze.html.

Thirdly, we are working on a Jobs Bill that will be designed specifically with the aim of creating more jobs and getting people back into jobs. The Bill was passed in the House of Representatives in December 2009. It will now pass to the Senate through the normal procedures before appearing before the President to sign.

We hope this process will be completed in the first half of 2010. To follow progress of this Bill, please go to: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/bills/jobs.html.

To find out more:

One of the President’s main economic advisers is Cecilia Rouse. She often contributes to the White House’s economy blog at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/issues/Economy

You can find out more about Cecilia and other members of the Council of Economic Advisors at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cea/about/members.

[+] Q4: How do decisions get made over the economy?

Sign up here to be emailed with a link to future questions.
Or ask another question yourself at: http://whitehouse.gov/qa/ask.html
You can also find this service on Facebook and Twitter.

The most popular ten questions asked about the Economy can be found at: http://whitehouse.gov/qa/economy/top-ten.html

So that’s the user experience. You’ll note that the answer above is answered by an anonymous, albeit friendly, third party, rather than by the President of the United States himself.

That is because of a number of aspects that I think would have to form part of any realistic system. Some of these below, along with what I think would be likely wrong approaches and assumptions in making such a system.

1. The bulk of the Q&A system would be done by and presented by staff. The reality is that the President is too busy and that if you only answers questions through one person, you are creating a system that will always disappoint the majority of the users.

You could have a rule of thumb for actual Presidential responses: minimum of three responses. One to cover events of the day (read: political fight); one a broader, larger topic (try to get above party politics); and one lighthearted to stop process from being dull.

2. Keep responses short. Under 250 words each time. Nothing is gained and much is lost with longer responses.

3. Always provide a link for further information on each separate topic. And if a suitable page doesn’t exist, it points to the fact that one needs to be built.

4. Avoid the sexy. Day-to-day governing is pretty dry and time-consuming. The key is to keep it light and short. Chasing the sexy aspects in the hope that will make it interesting will create a skewed system that worries more about perception than information, ultimately undermining the idea of a democratic Q&A. One example of the sexy is: the inevitable drive to find the perfect person to ask the perfect question. Say, a good-looking widowed black army mother who has lost her health insurance but will be saved through a clause in a new Bill going through Congress.

5. Don’t diss journalism. Both Weinberger and McLaughlin have a critical view of journalists. This is a very common habit among people on the inside of organizations trying to get things done, and it’s because journalists don’t care about difficult things are, and they don’t care about the hard work put in – they just want to know the end result and then get it out to people who care even less than the journalists.

Why is taking a critical view a bad idea? Because the process of journalism, for all its flaws, is the end product of a long history of the struggle for providing information. You shouldn’t seek to *replace* or reach over journalism. You should understand that it is the edifice shaped by years of weather. Understand it and then seek to shape it. So to design a democratic process without embracing and building on the current process is a surefire way to fail.

So while a particularly irritating habit of political journalism at the moment is to be “balanced” to the extent that bad ideas are propagated, and back-and-forth criticism takes the place of rational analysis, you can expect the exact same pressures to exert themselves on a democratic Q&A.

Likewise, chasing headlines, rather than providing a more in-depth perspective, is exactly what will entice people into a democratic Q&A system. Very few people are interested in all the work that goes into something – unless they are an intrinsic part of that process.

The ultimate success of this theoretical democratic Q&A would be to see the broader media report on its results.

Pragmatics

So the five assumptions:

1. Be online
2. Be open and scalable
3. Be resistant to efforts to fix the results
4. Produce useful results
5. Be manageable from the staff perspective

You allow people to send in questions in as many ways as possible. Online, Facebook, Twitter and possibly an iPhone app.

What you need to do is get people to tag questions themselves. And limit questions to a workable length (140-200 characters). That way you can break up the questions and provide their analysis to different people – cutting down on the overall time taken and reducing the gap between question and expert.

People typically overdo categories online. Any more than five and people start getting lost. That doesn’t mean though that you can’t have five options within five (although you would probably need to make the second five optional).

So, using the question above: “What are you doing to get the country out of recession?”

In a browser you would type this questions and then be prodded to put it into one of the five categories: Economy / Healthcare and Education / Security / Technology / Other. Under Economy, you are presented with a further five options: Budget / Jobs / Legislation / Recovery / Taxes.

The same menu and sub-menus can be repeated (and changed) across all platforms and also be used in the presentation of responses.

So, for example, using Twitter, a questioner would send to @whitehouseqa: “What are you doing to get the country out of recession? #economy #recovery”

You also get people to provide their email address or Facebook name or Twitter name to allow for responses and interaction.

And you get them to say which state they are from – which enables you to reflect back to people what people in their state are asking, and also helps provides a breakdown of issues by state, flagging up what may be regional issues.

Analysis

Now, here’s the crucial part – how do you process all this information?

My thoughts: you work on a weekly basis and expect a week turnaround. You have one person dedicated to each of the five main areas. They triage the questions as they come in: delete nonsense; add secondary subject tags; attach internal tags (answered previously; repeat question; current; broad; light-hearted).

Then you have a different person working on each sub-category. They should be able to discern the threads of questions coming in – and start clumping them together e.g. What are you doing to get the country out of recession? would be the accumulation of 20 questions all broadly asking the same thing: where is the stimulus money?; what are you doing about unemployment?; I’ve lost my job – what are you doing to fix the economy?

If you have an ID for each question, you can start putting the questions into different boxes, or appending different tags (like how Google does with Gmail).

Then the sub-category person can present a number of headline summarizing questions, with the actual questions asked produced underneath and then send them back up to the main category editor who goes through, makes edits where needed and sends them back down.

The sub-category editor then starts approaching people within government to get answers. Over time, they should start building a pretty good compendium of people who can answer questions on the basis of who gives the best answers; clearest answers; fastest answers. That way you factor in human intelligence at the right level – and at a sufficiently low level that the fears and perceptions of political minds don’t touch the process at the crucial information-gathering point.

You would need 30 people in this process – five of them more senior. But not dedicated staff, an add-on to existing staff or interns. Why would they do it? Because they get to speak to everyone in their area, across government – an enormously valuable opportunity to network and get to know people.

The experts – from wherever they are in government – could be encouraged to produce in-depth answers and post them elsewhere (on their own blog for example) knowing that the question is going to be highlighted in a formal White House Q&A. That way you start building a depth of information on giving subjects, allowing people to dig in deeper themselves, but without putting all the editing and decision-making on the shoulders on a few people.

The sub-category editor then sends up the information to the category editor, and then when it is all compiled, the category editors send the results to someone high up in the chain, who can then pick through the result to see which questions could be given specific Presidential attention i.e. a personal address.

All the other questions still get answered, and all the information is built up, but extra attention is then given at the top to a few hand-picked questions.

If there is sufficient effort put into answering a particular question by a number of experts across government, then the ability to adjust the question itself would be limited. Likewise, the category and sub-category editors would have an incentive to make the questions themselves as fair and straight as possible as they would be sending them out to lots of people. The idea is that this process would limit the ability for the Q&A to be bent significantly at the top, so limiting political interference.

Response

And then – the absolutely crucial part of the whole system – feedback to those that asked the questions.

They need to know that their question was read, and they need to be given an answer. The likelihood is that their exact question will not receive an exact answer, but if you have intelligent editors in the process, they should be content with the broader response.

If someone isn’t happy, then could ask the same question again. With luck, the editors would see if the same sort of questions kept coming in week after week and would be in a position to work on an answer.

What would be very important in feedback to the question-asker is that the response is written in plain language, free of jargon. And that links are given to further resources. The answer should assist people in finding out more information; the assumption should be in every case that the person has a right to ask the question and that they have a genuine interest in the answer.

And the last piece of the jigsaw is to allow people to give feedback on the feedback. Allow people to rate the usefulness of the answer they received – and then have that overall feedback summed together and sent to category editors so they can evaluate their sub-category editors.

You also allow people that have sent in questions and received answers to login and rate questions and answers – using those votes to produce a top ten of all questions and of category questions. Since you are asking people to rate questions that have been through the process, there is limited usefulness in people gaming the system.

Over time, this whole approach should help build valuable and threaded information about the process of government and the work being put in to solve various issues.

It uses Internet technology; it contains almost no barriers to entry; it is scalable; it is broadly resistant to fixing and gaming; it should produce useful results (so long as category editors strive to be clear and straightforward); and it spreads the work so should prove manageable.

So there you go – my idea for the democratic Q&A system.

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.

Four online giants have warned the UK government against a provision in the Digital Economy Bill, currently going through Parliament. In particular, clause 17 gives a government minister the right to restructure copyright law without having to go through Parliament.

The government says this helps it to “future proof” the legislation; Google, eBay, Facebook and Yahoo disagree strongly and say it risks undermining confidence and “stifling competition”. It’s not the only bad part of the Bill, which also proposes giving the regulator, Ofcom, far reaching powers over the UK’s Internet infrastructure; and comes up with an uninspiring – possibly damaging – goal of “fast” broadband access to UK citizens.

The Lords debate – going on as I write this – is worrying in that very few of the Lords have grasped the realities of the modern digital economy and tend to be applying old and outdated perspectives and mindsets on a crucial modern part of our lives.

You can see stories on the letter from the BBC and the Financial Times. The actual letter is pasted below:

eBay, Facebook, Yahoo! and Google call on Lord Mandelson

As the Digital Economy Bill has its Second Reading in the House of Lords today, four of the UK’s leading internet companies have joined together to call on Lord Mandelson to remove the controversial Clause 17 from the bill. Below is the text of the letter sent to Lord Mandelson today.

Dear Lord Mandelson,

As the providers of online services used by millions of people in the UK, we are enthusiastic supporters of the impressive ambitions set out in the Digital Britain report.

As the Digital Economy Bill has its Second Reading in the House of Lords today, we want to express our grave concerns regarding the inclusion of measures which risk stifling innovation and damaging the Government’s vision for a Digital Britain.

We strongly share the Government’s belief that an open Internet available to all and offering consumers the broadest range of innovative services brings huge social and economic benefits. We support measures to ensure this common goal. We are also convinced that the value of copyright will help unlock the potential for Digital Britain. Our companies play an active role in adapting content distribution models to the online environment and partner with providers, including the music and film sectors. A shared respect for copyright is, of course, key.

We fear, however, that the unexpected new clauses of the Digital Economy Bill will hinder, rather than contribute to, the Government’s vision.

In particular, we believe the bill’s Clause 17 – which gives any future Secretary of State unprecedented and sweeping powers to amend the Copyright, Design and Patent Act – opens the way for arbitrary measures.

This power could be used, for example, to introduce additional technical measures or increase monitoring of user data even where no illegal practice has taken place. This would discourage innovation, impose unnecessary costs, potentially unsettling the careful balance of responsibilities for enabling market change which Lord Carter outlined in the Digital Britain report.

This clause is so wide that it could put at risk legitimate consumer use of current technology as well as future developments. We all acknowledge that new business models need to emerge to support creative content.

They are inherently risky and entrepreneurs rely heavily on there being a consistent and stable approach to copyright enforcement. This clause would inject an unprecedented level of uncertainty in this regard.

The industry as a whole had hoped that the outcome of Digital Britain would be a clear, workable set of principles by which the industry could operate. On the contrary, Clause 17 creates uncertainty for consumers and businesses and puts at risk the UK’s leading position in a digital Europe.

We urge you to remove Clause 17 from the bill.

Yours sincerely,

Alasdair McGowan, Head of Public Affairs, eBay UK,

Sarah Hunter, UK Policy Manager, Google

Delighted to wake up this morning to find out that people acted on appalling press gagging regarding Trafigura and had used their collective voices to flip things over.

Much of the credit is going to Twitter so it is fitting that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger twittered himself about the “victory” when Carter-Ruck solicitors backed down at the last minute (just an hour before a court hearing questioning the Draconian court order restricting the newspaper from reporting questions asked in Parliament). Soon after, Rusbridger thanked those that had used Twitter to bring attention to the issue and for their great support.

I could go on and on about Twitter – everyone else has – but while this is a very interesting development in modern communication, ultimately the only thing that Twitter brings to the game is speed. I had never heard of Trafigura before yesterday, and this morning, when I went to type it in the company’s name to find out what had happened overnight, I found myself hard-pushed to remember its name – it was traffic-something.

This whole episode was certainly a victory for freedom of speech but it is but one fight is a very much larger war that it is up to journalists and politicians to tackle over a longer timeframe than 24 hours on Twitter. No one will remember Trafigura in even a month’s time. But in a month’s time there will be nothing to stop a firm like Carter-Ruck from doing exactly the same thing all over again on a story that doesn’t garner as much attention.

As the Guardian’s technology editor Charles Arthur also twittered – if the Parliament website didn’t exist and didn’t post the MPs questions, no one would have been any the wiser that this whole thing happened.

The cost of silencing a country? £100,000

The fact remains that a single company was able to silence the entire UK media and prevent it even talking about events in Parliament for a sum of money – the amount it paid to Carter-Ruck. How much does it costs to gag the two pillars of democracy? That’s hard to pin down because it was part of a much bigger campaign but I would guesstimate £100,000 – focused in the right place and with skilled practitioners of course.

This should never have been possible. No gagging order should ever have been approved. The Guardian shouldn’t need to go to court to argue against it. And it shouldn’t take hundreds of thousands of outraged citizens collectively shouting to pressure a company to withdrawing an order. This is a systemic problem and it needs to be fixed.

I see the Liberal Democrats are calling for a debate on this issue – press freedom and libel laws. But will they get the support they need from Twitter-citizens in order to make that debate happen and then to force changes on a legal system very, very resistant to change? I doubt it – I’ve not seen more than a handful of people tackling this wider point or asking people to email their MPs to keep the pressure up (answer: go to They Work For You).

Very few people are in this for the long-haul: they appear when outraged, then don’t stop until people back down, and then they expect the professionals to get on with making sure it doesn’t happen again.

So what are the ways in which this issue can be dealt with? I see several:

• Forcing the High Court to review flaws in its system

This path has already been flagged by the MP at the centre of the recent argument. Along with the main question about Trafigura, Paul Farrelly also asked: “To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what mechanisms HM Court Service uses to draw up rosters of duty judges for the purpose of considering time of the essence applications for the issuing of injunctions by the High Court.”

To prevent these sorts of orders in future you have to look at how they are approved. This gagging order should never have been approved. And it is NOT sufficient that someone can go to court to get it overturned. This idea of approval and then appeal makes sense to the legal profession but it does not work in reality. It is being gamed to the detriment of society.

The legal profession really needs to face up to the fact that the last 10 years of court actions against journalism has not improved the situation; it has made it worse. I would like to see some legal journalists starting to pressure lawyers and judges into debating this and overhauling libel laws in the face of the modern world.

• Parliamentary debates

Everyone likes to beat up on politicians but they remain the people’s representatives and they are the people who write and rewrite laws. This is a difficult subject – which means that unless there is a groundswell of support, and several champions of the cause – it will eventually be dropped by MPs.

But if it becomes a topic of public focus, if votes start coming into the equation, and if there are enough MPs who see and understand it is their duty to have these debates and to make real change for the betterment of the country, then you could see real change.

• Press make libel laws an issue

The press itself needs to organise and work together and make this an issue in the public’s eye. If there is one thing that newspapers in particular and really good at it is taking an issue and running with it.

It needs to be broken down into understandable chunks, people need to be kept engaged, informed of milestones and action points, and there has to be constant effort and resources put behind finding more permanent solutions than Twitter-victories.

Newspapers are currently so enamoured with Twitter and blogging but I wonder how many of them have any understanding of how to harness that power. Do they have any idea how to engage those people that came to their support today? Do they know how to build a campaign with people, rather than just inform people of their campaign?

I’m not sure they do. I might have to see what I can do about that.

I’ve got a Google Voice number. It’s +1 415 937 1451.

Although that appears to be a San Francisco telephone number, what happens is that I am able to cause that number to redirect to whatever other numbers I want – which means that I am now longer wedded to a telephone number and I don’t have to constantly update people when I shift home or mobile phone suppliers or numbers.

The service is quite interesting although far from perfect. Someone calls it, it rings a few times and then asks them to leave their name to see if I’ll answer. It then rings me and I can decide whether to accept the call or not. What is quite good is that if a message is left, Google Voice automatically transcribes what is said and then emails and texts me the transcript (so far, I would give the transcript accuracy 7 out of 10).

I had already put in place a system for allowing people to keep in touch with me – kieren.tel. This is a web domain that using the Internet’s own naming system to provide up-to-date info on how to contact me (including phone numbers, emails, addresses, websites etc etc).

All of these new services are creating an interesting phenomenon – the locationless person. It’s an interesting reflection on the modern world where we are constantly moving – not only physically but also virtually. With a way to make sure that people only need one access point, it enables you to switch products and services as and when you want, which in itself adds a big element of competition because companies – and nearly always the worst and most monopolistic ones – have tended to rely on the fear and hassle of switching to retain customers.

No we have freer markets, hence more competition and so more innovation. And, of course, it makes everyone’s lives easier. Now all you have to do is decide which catch-all service you want to use – a dot-tel domain, Google Voice, and ENUM number, of whatever else crops up in the next few years.

If you don’t use Twitter, that headline will look like gibberish, but basically one company that produces very short URLs has given up and publicly conceded defeat to a more popular service.

What’s annoying is that I have been happily using the loser – tr.im – and been enjoying the stats it produces. No more – the stats are gone and the ultimate display of the risk of fast-paced information becoming dead information, the short links will stopped working at the end of the year.

Here’s what is on Tr.im website at the moment: “tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

“Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

“We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

“There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

“We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.”

Interesting that even in these heady hype days of Twitter than no one would pay for Tr.im. Ah well, like the note says, now I’m shifting to bit.ly. I wonder how long it will be able to provide the service before desperately seeking funds.

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.

So everyone and their dog knows about Twitter. Now the problem is they have started using it – and you can see it through the pretty drastic impact on third-parties the past two weeks or so.

Services you use to make Twitter more manageable keep getting knocked offline. A few months ago Twitter itself was suffering from the attention and keep falling offline. It was at an inflexion point – it had grown so much that it needed an influx of money to build the system to deal with the demand. And that’s when the likes of Google started offering to buy it – leading Twitter’s owners to (somewhat stupidly to my mind) outright reject any suggestion of selling their company.

Twitter got some money and hired consultants – one of whom I know – to help them deal with demand. They shifted to the same style of server spread and backup that Google and Facebook use.

That wave has passed but now the third-parties are having the same problem. Tr.im – which allows you to stick in a long URL and get a short one out (which is ideal for those 140-character-only tweets) – has been falling offline repeatedly in the past fortnight. It’s got so bad that I’m ready to shift to a different company. And today Splitweet – which allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts – also went offline. It popped up an hour or so later saying it was under a denial of service attack. As of writing this I still can’t use its service.

The same is happening with other third-parties. SocialToo is running slow. And Twitterfeed keeps timing out while I’m trying to create an account with it because I can’t use Splitweet.

All this means that, after Twitter itself hit the wall and pushed through, that the third-parties feeding off this service’s success are also about to hit that wall. They are going to need money to maintain their (free) service. Who is going to stump up that money? And to which service? Should be interesting to see which services people think will be able to provide a return on investment, and which will fall by the wayside.

I love my Kindle. It really is a great machine. The Kindle 2 made all the right changes to the original Kindle, which is why I forked out a hefty $359 for it. It contains literally thousands of books – which has completely changed my reading habits (more reading, less lugging around of books). It is glorious and if you are a serious book reader you should invest in it.

Not so sure at the moment though about a new Kindle that Amazon just announced – the Kindle DX. It’s the same as the Kindle 2 but with a much bigger screen – just a little smaller than a magazine. I get the logic straight away – a bigger screen is much, much better for reading on. Particularly if you are reading PDF documents or magazines. It doesn’t matter with books – you want something you can shove in your bag and pull out.

But clearly Amazon has found out that alot of people are using their Kindle to read documents – probably work documents – on a device that doesn’t have a backlit screen and which doesn’t require you booting up a computer. I can see the logic, although I’ve not go into this habit yet.

Waiting for a colour screen

However, coming in at $489, that is asking a hell of a lot. And it’s still a black and white screen. I think the Kindle DX may be what the original Kindle was to the Kindle 2 – a terrific prototype demonstrating its value and worth. I’m not going to get one – but I see why people might.

Now if the DX had a colour screen… Well, when that day comes – and it surely will – then I may well find I have a travelling Kindle and a home Kindle. I have got so used to reading on an electronic device that I think I would find it pretty easier to dump the physical magazine for a large, colour Kindle.

You have to love Amazon for this. They really are doing great work at making ebooks not only a reality but a very attractive alternative.