Apple, Steve Jobs og sensur

Godt skrevet fra Gawker, og isteden for at jeg skriver noe tilsvarende mener jeg dette er viktig å tenke på – derfor klipper jeg bare en del rett ut fra artikkelen:
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In the days after Steve Jobs’ death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He’s been hailed as “a genius” and “the greatest CEO of his generation” by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man’s reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive.

The internet allowed people around the world to express themselves more freely and more easily. With the App Store, Apple reversed that progress. The iPhone and iPad constitute the most popular platform for handheld computerizing in America, key venues for media and software. But to put anything on the devices, you need Apple’s permission. And the company wields its power aggressively.

In the name of protecting children from the evils of erotica — “freedom from porn” — and adults from one another, Jobs has banned from being installed on his devices gay art, gay travel guides, political cartoons, sexy pictures, Congressional candidate pamphlets, political caricature, Vogue fashion spreads, systems invented by the opposition, and other things considered morally suspect.

Apple’s devices have connected us to a world of information. But they don’t permit a full expression of ideas. Indeed, the people Apple supposedly serves — “the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers” — have been particularly put out by Jobs’ lockdown. That America’s most admired company has followed such an un-American path, and imposed centralized restrictions typical of the companies it once mocked, is deeply disturbing.

But then Jobs never seemed comfortable with the idea of fully empowered workers or a truly free press. Inside Apple, there is a culture of fear and control around communication; Apple’s “Worldwide Loyalty Team” specializes in hunting down leakers, confiscating mobile phones and searching computers.

Apple applies coercive tactics to the press, as well. Its first response to stories it doesn’t like is typically manipulation and badgering, for example, threatening to withhold access to events and executives. Next, it might leak a contradictory story.

But Apple doesn’t stop there. It has a fearsome legal team that is not above annihilating smaller prey. In 2005, for example, the company sued 19-year-old blogger Nick Ciarelli for correctly reporting, prior to launch, the existence of the Mac Mini. The company did not back down until Ciarelli agreed to close his blog ThinkSecret forever. Last year, after our sister blog Gizmodo ran a video of a prototype iPhone 4, Apple complained to law enforcement, who promptly raided an editor’s home.

And just last month, in the creepiest example of Apple’s fascist tendencies, two of Apple’s private security agents searched the home of a San Francisco man and threatened him and his family with immigration trouble as part of an scramble for a missing iPhone prototype. The man said the security agents were accompanied by plainclothes police and did not identify themselves as private citizens, lending the impression they were law enforcement officers.

Steve Jobs created many beautiful objects. He made digital devices more elegant and easier to use. He made a lot of money for Apple Inc. after people wrote it off for dead. He will undoubtedly serve as a role model for generations of entrepreneurs and business leaders. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on how honestly his life is appraised.

iPhone app

Da er den endelig på plass, min iPhone app. Hvorfor? Jeg tenkte se om dette kan være enda en kommunikasjonskanal for å vise hvilken politikk som jeg og MDG står for og hva jeg tenker jobbe for hvis vi får tilstrekkelig antall stemmer i kommunevalget Bærum og til Akershus fylkesting.

Skal på ingen som helst måte si at den er spesiellt avansert, men en enkel listing på hva jeg skriver, når jeg er ute på stand i en kalender, at du kan kommentere og komme med ideer på hva som er viktig for deg.

Har du noen ideer på hva du ønsker at jeg og MDG skal ta opp, vær så snill og ta kontakt meg – det er dine tanker som jeg vil ha med, hvis jeg og MDG får muligheten til å representere deg!

Norske kommuners bruk av digitale kanaler

Areca AS har gjennomført undersøkelsen Kommunale Kanaler 2010, om norske kommuners bruk av sosiale medier og andre digitale kanaler.
Rapporten gir en grundig beskrivelse av hva kommunene gjør i digitale kanaler, hvorfor de gjør det og hvilken nytte de har av det.

Pressemeldingen fra Areca ser slik ut:
Areca AS har laget rapporten Kommunale Kanaler, om norske kommuners bruk av sosiale medier og andre digitale kanaler. Rapporten bygger på en spørreundersøkelse og kartlegging av 389 av landets 430 kommuner.

Rapporten viser blant annet at:
55% av landets kommuner bruker digitale kanaler. Den mest brukte kanalen er Facebook (32%), fulgt av Twitter (18%), video (17%), chat (12%) og blogg (11%).

Av kommunene som bruker Facebook er det 54% som bare sender ut informasjon, mens 41% har en dialog og svarer på henvendelser fra innbyggerne. 5% av kommunene har liten eller ingen aktivitet på sin Facbookside.
Tilsvarende tall for Twitter er 58% (enveis), 26% (toveis) og 16% (ingen aktivitet)

Hver annen kommunene sier at deres mål med sosiale medier er å få en bedre dialog med innbyggerne. Halvparten av disse har aldri besvart en eneste henvendelse på Facebook eller Twitter.

I 75% av kommunene er det uenighet/usikkerhet om hvem som har det overordnede ansvaret for digitale kanaler. Et eksempel på dette er en kommune hvor ordføreren mener at informasjonssjefen har ansvaret, IKT-sjefen mener at rådmannen har ansvaret og informasjonssjefen mener at IKT-sjefen har ansvaret.

Det er tre grunner som går igjen blant de kommunene som er negative eller usikre på å ta i bruk digitale kanaler:
• Usikkerhet rundt ressursbruk
• Usikkerhet rundt lovmessige krav til saksbehandling
• Usikkerhet rundt håndtering av personangrep, sjikane og andre useriøse henvendelser

Rapporten kan du laste ned her:

Hva er dine første to sider på iPhone

Etter mye tvil har jeg også har konvertert til iPhone tenkte jeg gjøre en meget uformell spørreundersøkelse, hvilke apps er det folk faktisk bruker. Jeg har pr idag fire sider som jeg bruker, laster opp apps og fjerner, men de to første sidene blir de som jeg bruker særdeles mest.

Her er mine to første sider med litt kommentarer:

Første siden er vel ganske så selvfølgelig synes jeg, alt i god sosial medieånd, at Shazam ligger der skyldes datteren som hører veldig mye musikk på radion og hun vil jo vite hva det er. Tweetie 2 er den beste Twitter-klienten mener jeg

På side 2 har vi noen litt mer spesielle ting: MLB at Bat er en helt fantastisk app hvis man er interessert i baseball og her mener jeg at både NRK og TV2 kan hente litt ideer hvordan man syr dette sammen. SnapDat funker helt strålende for utveksling av informasjon som visittkort osv. PS Mobile er Photoshop Light, ordner bildene du tar på 1-2-3. PGA Golf er til for de som liker å følge med på hva som skjer på golffronten, finnes f.ø en flott app for helgens Masters i Augusta. Matprat og Matglede er to norske gode apps for oppskrifter. SVTPlay er svensk television som har gjort en super app, her finnes det fantastisk mye morsomt å se på! Og til sist, MLB WS 2009 mener jeg er den beste sportspillet, baseball. Men skal vel innrømme at RockBand kommer faretruende sterkt,,,,

Så, spørmålet gjenstår, hva bruker du??

It’s Googles World, we just live in it!

This is a brilliant post from Salon, and Andrew Leonard! I’m posting it – read it, it gives some good ideas and do read the comments – there are some very intriguing words been said.

It’s fun to trash the search-monster’s Buzz, but there’s a method to its social networking smart-phone madness

Is this what world domination looks like? On Wednesday, Google announced it was building an ultrafast, one-gigabit-per-second broadband network designed to showcase “innovative” Internet applications. On Tuesday, Google launched Google Buzz, integrating social networking functions into Gmail. Last month, Google debuted its Nexus One smart phone.
So in little more than a month, Google has invaded the turf of the biggest telecommunication companies (Verizon, AT&T, etc.), directly challenged the reigning social networking giant (Facebook), and taken aim at the most fetishized gadget of the 21st century — the iPhone (Apple).

Even Microsoft, in its heyday, was never quite that ambitious. The multiple fronts on which Google is battling — and the huge prizes at stake — make the old Microsoft-Netscape browser wars look like a water fight waged with busted pistols. The scale at which Google hubris is operating is absurd: We will index all the world’s information, upload all the books, deploy the fastest network and design the coolest phone, while simultaneously managing your e-mail, pictures, blogs and anything else you’d care to upload to our online repositories.

There’s a natural urge to react negatively to so much expansionism, and it’s painfully visible if you dip into the Twitter-storm currently boiling over on the topic of “Google Buzz.” People who seem to have spent no more than 10 minutes exploring the service are wondering what’s the point, labeling it an “epic fail,” and, most popular, questioning why the world needs yet another social networking service.

It’s a valid point — especially since Google’s already toyed with at least two previous such networks (Orkut and Jaiku) . How many microblogging, status-update delivering, picture-and-video linking vehicles does one person need? With Facebook, a critical mass of my friends and family are already connected and happily sharing pictures and links and news — why would I want to try to rebuild that functionality elsewhere? What is so compelling about, as Greg Merritt, a guy whom I am suddenly getting Google Buzz updates from simply because we exchanged some bicycle related e-mails, observed, “a long-winded Twitter with awkward privacy management and tie-ins to everything that matters except for the 800-pound gorilla of Facebook.”

But there’s a pretty obvious answer to that, at least for people who already use Gmail. Adding functionality to a core platform in your life is much more attractive than setting up yet another entirely new service. Integration that works can be seductive — and Google is very, very good at making things work. I’ve been playing around with Google Buzz for half a day, and it is the easiest thing in the world to keep tabs on while checking my e-mail. Suddenly I find myself strongly considering making more use of Google Reader and Google’s Picasa photo app just because of how simple the integration is.

Gmail, Google Maps and, of course, the Google search engine are already second nature to millions of people. We should be paying less attention to how Buzz matches up to Facebook and Twitter in isolation, and much more to how Buzz might leverage all the other pieces of Google that we already use.

At The Big Money, Chris Thompson has a very smart piece arguing that Google’s real play here is for the mobile device world. Once you combine your social network with Google Maps and the GPS locator in your smart phone you open a whole new world of irresistible connectivity. A friend of mine recently demonstrated the app FourSquare on his iPhone while shopping at the local grocery store. I was mildly interested to see that there were three other FourSquare users in the Berkeley Bowl at the same time as us. I would have been considerably more interested to learn if friends or acquaintances of mine were nearby, or around the corner — something that would be extremely easy if my Facebook network or Gmail contacts were mapped to my mobile whereabouts.

More important, Google is hoping that its ability to figure out what is “relevant” will translate into something more than just a few useful search results.

Chris Thompson:
If you’re looking for a good nearby restaurant, Google Buzz will let you scan all the public posts about establishments in your area. You can even navigate this visually, placing yourself on Google Maps and scanning a universe of public comments about anything posted in your immediate vicinity.

This is not only useful; it’s a stab at changing the paradigm of social media. With Google Buzz for Mobile, Google is attempting to make where you are and where you’re going the most important criteria for ranking status updates and posts.

In other words, Google Buzz will try to show you what’s most useful to you, using your network, depending on where you are and what you are doing.

At PoynterOnline Will Sullivan points to the obvious corollary: The potential for targeted advertising is immense. The more Google knows about what you like and where you are the easier it will be for ads to pop up on your phone that are genuinely useful. (Or genuinely annoying.)

Google’s rivals are desperately pooh-poohing Google Buzz as nothing new. But they’re just putting on a brave face. In the future, we’re all going to be using smart phones as our primary interface to the networked world. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google — everyone knows that. Whoever makes that phone most useful to us as we negotiate our way through our lives will be well on its way to becoming the most powerful corporation on the planet. World domination, indeed.

Vinnere av Sermos superheltpris #sofaprat


Posted by ShoZu

During Sofaprat at Emil & Samuel december 17th, NRKBeta was a runaway winner!
This competition, held by Sermo Consulting,created some discussions within the Norwegian hard-core social media sphere.
From left to right are Thomas Tangen, Sermo, Thomas Moen ColtPR, Eirik Solheim NRKBeta, (hidden Arnt Eriksen Sermo) and Øyvind Solstad from NRKBeta.

Top 50 Facebook pages

From Viral Blog:
Facebook has been a revelation this year and will achieve much more the next coming year(s). Many people created their own profile but so have brands.

The Big Money helped out in creating ranking of the brands that are currently making the best use of Facebook. Various metrics—including fan numbers, page growth, frequency of updates, creativity as determined by a panel of judges, and fan engagement—were factored into each page’s score and ultimate rank on the list.

Twitter losing market share, or does it?

There has been a lot of discussions the last couple of days that Twitter is a trend, rapidly losing followers and users. VG wrote about it today here in Norway.
To some point it might be so, but as has been said, the news is about the site itself, Twitter.com.
Like me, I don’t hardly uses the site to publish information, I use TweetDeck and DestroyTwitter from my desktop and the brilliant Tweets60 on my Nokia.
And, the numbers have been given, havn’t counted those numbers in. So, there is lies and statistical truths, and news papers creating news. The interesting thing is too see how Twitter will develop during the nest 18 months. Me, I’m using it and like it a lot!

The Google Story

Been a extremly busy week, with both TV performance (or, rather, the taping of it) at TVNorges Superquiz, still jumping around being unable to practise because of a sprained ancle to put it mildley… and working on some exciting projects, very often with Kristian Osestad.
I’m still working on an article about PR and the future of it, because they just don’t know how to handle the wave of social media.
And, finally, just wanna’ show you a great recap of the Google Story, quite high on the Viral Video Charts. Myself, I’m on GoogleWave but haven’t had the time to do something about it yet, but it will come. Anyway, here is the the official video on the Google Story.

The 24-hours business camp

This is a concept which I’m deeply in love with. Put together a lot of creative minds, give them 24 hours to develop a Internetbased service which people can use, and commercialize it from there – then vote and cross your fingers that it actually works, there you have the whole idea.
Check this little video out, and hopefully, we’ll see this in Norway in a not-too-far-distant-time!

http://www.dn.se/webbtv/nyheter/har-fods-60-nya-webbtjanster-1.986505

Medie- og avishusenes 10 mest populære løgner!

Hmm, here we go again – writing in Norwegian… Anyway, this post is very much inspired/copied from the brilliant people at Mindpark, so the wrap-up is more a translation into Norwegian.

Judy Sims,from Toronto Canada, a very interesting professional have written a blogpost about Top 10 Lies Newspaper Execs are Telling Themselves, and here is the Norwegian wrap-up:

Løgn 1. Dette ordner vi selv med de ressurser som vi har internt.
Løgn 2: Våre selgere kan også selge online annonser.
Løgn 3: De som aggregerer (noen som har et bedre norsk ord), eks Google News, Kampanje, de tar død på vår forretning og konsept.
Løgn 4: Vi gjør oss selv eksklusive gjennom å lage betaltjenester.
Løgn 5: Ettersom våre lesere betalt for nyheter igår vil de gjøre det i fremtiden også
Løgn 6: Inntektene fra online er ikke tilstrekkelig for å betale våre tradisjonelle nyhetstjenester
Løgn 7: Det finnes ingen som kan overvåke og kommentere samfunnsdebatten (politikk,helse,sport, krim osv )som vi kan.
Løgn 8: Våre lesere er idioter, eller ihvertfall ikke særlig smarte…
Løgn 9: Demokratiet står og faller med oss!
Løgn 10: Vi kan så absolutt konkurrere med de beste digitale spillerne uten å delta aktivt i den digitale verden!

Min egen kommentar:
Judy Sims setter selvsagt ting på spissen for å skape debatt, men jeg mener at hun har mengder med poenger. Mange aktører i Norge gjør mye bra, men det er jo bare å se på resultatene til medie- og avishusene for å skjønne at det er ting som de bør ta inover seg. Om ikke annet håper jeg det kan skape debatt, for den er nyttig! Judy Sims siste setning bør man ta på ordet: “Stop that navel gazing and look around. You are outmatched.”

Mobile is growing in India

Despite the crisis in the business sector, the mobile industry in India is still growing, and they do it a lot, according to an article in todays Dagens Nyheter. The mobile networks and mobile communication is the only choices to communicate in the huge country according to the article. Today there is 479 millions mobile users and regular telephone users are ‘only’ 31 millions, and that number is decreasing.
The biggest operator, Bharti Airtel, have 105 millions customer, and the areas where they increase the most is within music and sms.
India

Continuing the debate in VG

It came to my attention yesterday that Arbeiderpartiet featuring Norway’s prime minister had a put an ad on Sidereel.com, a website which is on the MPAA blacklist as dubious, distributing illegal meterial. When the article was published today in VG I had some reactions from both Google and Arbeiderpartiet of course.

The reason for my criticism is simple:

The customer, is this case Arbeiderpartiet, should be very careful where they place their ads, since it’s about their reputation. The government have had a very strong policy about filesharing, and then see an ad with the Prime Minister in that setting, well, it speaks for itself…

Comment in VG 5th August

Microsoft will try to take a part in the search market with Bing

In an article today in AdAge, Microsoft is aiming it’s guns at Google, launching a campaign, somewhere in between $ 80 and 100 millions. Microsoft has tried a lot of tricks, almost everybody in the book, to grab a bigger market share in the search business. The results don’t match the efforts! Microsoft’s search query share keeps declining. In order to jump-start its search business, Microsoft attempted to buy Yahoo, but fail. It had bought a search startup, called Powerset, and is trying to build a whole different experience that will allow it to win market share. Microsoft Logo
A lot of people will argue that no amount of advertising Microsoft throws at the product will make a difference – the quality of search results is the only thing that matters. And that may have once been true; after all, Google built its brand on the back of a great user experience, results that were markedly better and zero ad support.

Apples iPhone Strategy

I’m sure many of us criticized Apple’s first generation iPhone as sorely lacking in the technology department. However, no one can doubt the buzz the impending launch of the iPhone OS version 3.0 has created. On the flip side, if we can look through the marketing, we can see that there is a very clever strategy at work here.

Kontra from the very excellent Counter Notions blog has a great analysis of Apple’s iPhone Strategy and how it has evolved from a device into a platform.
In summary, the first iPhone generation introduced us to a device that could pull in all your Stuff in a logical manner. The 2nd generation 3G iPhone created a platform where, by leveraging on the iTunes store, you could download all your Stuff. Finally with the release of iPhone OS 3.0, (very apt don’t you think?) Apple plugs up most of the holes we have been complaining about and almost perfects the product. Thus making it.
iphone
Kontra writes:

Apple consolidated its gains, marked its territory of 30M users+25K apps+800M downloads and built a very deep and wide moat around it. A moat so formidable that there’s not a single smartphone player capable of overcoming it.

Apple also methodically eliminated the vast majority of iPhone’s “missing” features: copy and paste, landscape text entry, global search, notifications, MMS, voice memos, new calendar format, Notes sync, stereo Bluetooth support, extended parental controls, browser auto-fill and anti-phishing… pretty much anything else that may have given potential customers a pause previously.

Another thing I like to add is that great products do not have to be 100% right the first time. Getting a product shipped that 80% right but with a 100% intrinsic benefit to your user is a lot better in my humble opinion. Just make sure to reiterate and improve your product very quickly after you have launched it.

This strategy is like a good baseball swing. You need to have a good follow through after you take your shot. Unfortunately the follow through is what many companies are just not good at doing.

I would highly recommend you read his analysis in full, both part 1 and part 2, to get the full course dinner!

Users of Twitter in Norway

According to Øyvind Solstad at NRK Beta there is somewhere between 20 000 – 40 000 Twitter users in Norway.
The last figure I’ve heard was 6 500, and that was three months ago. Could this be true? If so, and amazing developoment.
Below is the twitter between Solstad at and the journalist Hege Ulstein at Dagsavisen, who wrote an article about Twitter in todays edition, saying Twitter as a place for the elite.
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osol @hegeulstein Vi diskuterte Twittertall i går, @ninanord og jeg. Og heller til at det er mellom 20 000 og 40 000 på Twitter i Norge.
friday apr 24 13:08:22 from Tweetie in reply to hegeulstein
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