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	<title>Rav Casley Gera's Blog &#187; Technology</title>
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	<link>http://casleygera.com/blog</link>
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	<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:04:38 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>This blog post will cost you 3p</title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2008/11/01/this-blog-post-will-cost-you-3p/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2008/11/01/this-blog-post-will-cost-you-3p/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:22:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Posts]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://casleygera.com/blog/?p=522</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You know in Star Trek, when Picard orders up a record, piece of data or video by speaking to the computer? Imagine if the computer replied, &#8216;this media is brought to you by Toyota Galactic&#8217;&#8230;
The travails of Twitter are a reminder that the model of the free internet - where users rarely expect to pay websites [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>You know in Star Trek, when Picard orders up a record, piece of data or video by speaking to the computer? Imagine if the computer replied, &#8216;this media is brought to you by Toyota Galactic&#8217;&#8230;</p>
<p>The travails of Twitter are a reminder that the model of the free internet - where users rarely expect to pay websites for services or content - is hard to make work. New services are cautious about introducing advertising for fear of annoying users. With more and more audio and video content on the web, sites have experimented with adding audio and video adverts, with mixed success. But when speech becomes the main method of interaction with computers - a switch which, thanks to vast improvements in speech recognition technology, is finally looking likely - it&#8217;ll become effectively impossible for advertising to provide the main income stream for content and service providers.</p>
<p>Which presents a problem - because paid services have an equally mixed history. Monthly-subscription models at news sites like the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> have seen low take-up, prompting Rupert Murdoch to consider dropping the pay wall last year. The <em>New York Times&#8217;</em> pay model, TimesSelect, was dropped around the same time. Similarly, music subscription services like Napster - though I may like them - haven&#8217;t caught on in considerable numbers.</p>
<p>So what to do? The answer may lie in low charges and micro-payment systems. Expecting people to pay £2 an article or £20 a month for access is never going to become a mass-market proposition. But if every page-view, video-view, or listen to a piece of music on a website cost the user a couple of pennies, you could see solid revenue generation at a price that didn&#8217;t put users off.</p>
<p>The trick, of course, is the technology. The hassle of putting in credit card details is at least as much of a barrier to pay-per-article services as the cost. What&#8217;s needed is a single micro-payment system which sites could join. Once logged in, a user could surf a range of member sites - from newspapers to youtube to music providers - automatically being charged pennies for each page or piece of content consumed. A gauge in the corner of the screen would keep them abreast of charges. Once a month, the user would get a email bill for their total that month, and pay online or via automatic payment.</p>
<p>A system such as this is the only way smooth content delivery, without a point-and-click interface, can be funded. And in comparison to the advertising model, it could provide a far better revenue stream for content providers - necessary in areas like music and news where content creation is expensive. It&#8217;s also democratising - instead of a ghettoising division between free and paying customers, you get a natural spread of high- and low-demand users paying different amounts each month. In the long run, you could even adopt the same system for actual data charges.</p>
<p>The central obstacle is the lack of a simple system for in-the-background micro-charging with a monthly bill. What&#8217;s needed is someone to do it: ideally a globally-used payment service with a reputation for honesty and money for investment, which many websites already support and many users are already registered with. Now <a href="http://www.paypal.com" target="_blank">who could that be</a>?</p>
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		<title></title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2008/06/19/200/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2008/06/19/200/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:30:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Clippings]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[email]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[internet]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[yahoo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://casleygera.com/blog/?p=200</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[SAN FRANCISCO (AP) &#8212; Yahoo Inc. is offering free e-mail accounts under two new designations in an effort to attract Web surfers unhappy with their current addresses.
The Sunnyvale-based company expects to begin registering new addresses under the domains of &#8220;ymail&#8221; and &#8220;rocketmail&#8221; around noon PDT Thursday at http://mail.yahoo.com .

-Wired News
This is&#8230; wierd. rav-g@rocketmail.com was my [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<blockquote><p>SAN FRANCISCO (AP) &#8212; Yahoo Inc. is offering free e-mail accounts under two new designations in an effort to attract Web surfers unhappy with their current addresses.</p>
<p class="ap-story-p">The Sunnyvale-based company expects to begin registering new addresses under the domains of &#8220;ymail&#8221; and &#8220;rocketmail&#8221; around noon PDT Thursday at <a href="http://mail.yahoo.com/" target="-blank">http://mail.yahoo.com</a> .</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="ap-story-p">-<a href="http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/T/TEC_YAHOO_MAIL?SITE=WIRE&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&amp;CTIME=2008-06-19-03-19-38" target="_blank">Wired News</a></p>
<p class="ap-story-p">This is&#8230; <em>wierd.</em> <a href="mailto:rav-g@rocketmail.com">rav-g@rocketmail.com</a> was my first email address, in 1997 I think. Now it&#8217;s back! This can&#8217;t be progress, can it?</p>
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		<title></title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2008/04/20/183/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2008/04/20/183/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:18:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Culture &amp; Media]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Rav Idly Wonders]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[cinema]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[tv]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://casleygera.com/blog/2008/04/20/183/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[American cinema&#8217;s creative zenith was reached in the 1970s, just as movies were being displaced by TV. Now we have a golden age of American TV drama, just as TV is under threat of being completely displaced by the internet. Was it always thus? Are we doomed to see the economic models of great art [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>American cinema&#8217;s creative zenith was reached in the 1970s, just as movies were being displaced by TV. Now we have a golden age of American TV drama, just as TV is under threat of being completely displaced by the internet. Was it always thus? Are we doomed to see the economic models of great art forms disrupted, just as they have reconciled their artistic and commercial imperatives?</p>
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		<title>5 Things Facebook *Really* Needs To Do In 2008 To Not Become Completely Rubbish</title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2008/01/21/5-things-facebook-really-needs-to-do-in-2008-to-not-become-completely-rubbish/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2008/01/21/5-things-facebook-really-needs-to-do-in-2008-to-not-become-completely-rubbish/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:09:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Posts]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[facebook]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[internet]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[social networking]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[spam]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[web 2.0]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[

&#8220;Add as acquaintance.&#8221; Or &#8220;limited friend,&#8221; which might be more acceptable. How many times have you grudgingly accepted someone you barely know, out of politeness, only to be subjected to their never-ending succession of zombie-throwings and hotness-testing in your news feed? You can set certain people so they don&#8217;t show up in your feed, but [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align:center;"><img src="http://crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/facebeookmsftdeal.jpg" alt="" width="512" height="302" /></p>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-style:italic;">&#8220;Add as acquaintance.&#8221; </span>Or &#8220;limited friend,&#8221; which might be more acceptable. How many times have you grudgingly accepted someone you barely know, out of politeness, only to be subjected to their never-ending succession of zombie-throwings and hotness-testing in your news feed? You can <a href="http://www.facebook.com/feed_prefs.php">set certain people</a> so they don&#8217;t show up in your feed, but only 20 people and it&#8217;s a hassle. As well as setting friends so they can only see your limited profile, you should be able to set them so you only see limited stuff - pokes, messages and wall posts - from them.</li>
<li><span style="font-style:italic;">Instant messaging.</span> With Windows Live, Yahoo! and AOL still no closer to proper, easy interoperability, and IM moving more and more to the web, Facebook has a massive opportunity to enhance the user experience. <a href="http://www.allfacebook.com/category/chat/">A few applications have tried</a>, but they all require both users to add the application before they can chat - a massive limitation. Built-in messaging, added by Facebook themselves, could quickly reach the critical mass needed to be useful: chat, and share files, with any friend online, live. Sounds good, doesn&#8217;t it?</li>
<li><span style="font-style:italic;">Full mobile integration, now. </span><a href="http://m.facebook.com/">Facebook&#8217;s mobile site</a> is a joy to behold, but the real mobile killer app is text-message mailing, wall-posting, photo uploading and status-updating - the latter, in particular, to ensure Facebook can fend off the challenge from Twitter. Widely available in the US for years, <a href="https://register.facebook.com/mobile/?account">text-control has finally come to the UK</a>, but only for o2 users. Agreements with the other networks need to come fast.</li>
<li><span style="font-style:italic;">Better real-name enforcement</span>. Facebook&#8217;s attempts to police real identities have been controversial, but the real scandal is how little success they&#8217;ve had. Real identities are essential if Facebook is going to avoid becoming a messy hell of spammers and paedophiles like Myspace. With the advent of geographical networks millions-strong, the sense of community that made Facebook so vital in the early days has already severely eroded, but the fact that your friends&#8217; friends all have real names and real pictures still makes it seem like a safe, sane place. But with more and more members like the several called &#8220;Sexy Man&#8221;, this is starting to break down.</li>
<li><span style="font-style:italic;">Police applications - hard. </span>The allowance of third-party applications, while allowing Facebook to gain new functions at a dizzying rate, has also made it a potential boon to spammers, fraudsters, and general net-nuisances. FunWall and SuperWall are <a href="http://www.crunchgear.com/2007/12/11/rant-now-im-getting-facebook-spam-oh-me-oh-my/">particularly problematic</a> on the spam front. I haven&#8217;t a clue how exactly they should fix it, but it&#8217;s a vital challenge.</li>
</ol>
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		<title>With apologies to all of those whose CD collections I have plundered</title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2007/11/13/with-apologies-to-all-of-those-whose-cd-collections-i-have-plundered/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2007/11/13/with-apologies-to-all-of-those-whose-cd-collections-i-have-plundered/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:55:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Culture &amp; Media]]></category>

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		<category><![CDATA[digital media]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[music]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[napster]]></category>

		<category><![CDATA[subscription]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[
I&#8217;ve just deleted 20,362 music files from my computer. Over 1,400 hours of music, gone. I feel like a wave of liberation has washed over me, or something.
What&#8217;s going on? Simple. 25 years after I bought my first album (Meat Loaf&#8217;s Bat out of Hell II), I have turned my back on music ownership.
Not buying [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/davemorris/3864306/" target="_blank"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/2/3864306_a973147b1f_b.jpg" alt="Someone else's record collection." width="496" height="208" align="middle" /></a></p>
<p>I&#8217;ve just deleted 20,362 music files from my computer. Over 1,400 hours of music, gone. I feel like a wave of liberation has washed over me, or something.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s going on? Simple. 25 years after I bought my first album (Meat Loaf&#8217;s <em>Bat out of Hell II</em>), I have turned my back on music ownership.</p>
<p>Not <em>buying</em> music. I stopped doing that years ago. No, I&#8217;ve given up <em>owning music at all.</em> From now on, with help from the apparently-good people at Napster, I&#8217;m going to be a &#8220;subscriber&#8221;. I pay a monthly fee, I listen to what I want. I stop paying, it all stops working. Simple.</p>
<p>But why, you ask? Why would I give up on one of the most quintessential hobbies of modern times - building a music collection? Especially one as, frankly, ludicrously large as I had built up?</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll tell you why. Because I felt trapped. My music collection has sucked hours, <em>days</em>, from my life. Not time spent <em>listening</em> to music, oh no. I&#8217;m talking about time spent <em>administering</em> music. Even before there were downloads, I spent hours at University copying my friends&#8217; record collections onto MiniDisc. If I borrowed an album, I wouldn&#8217;t just <em>listen </em>to it, oh no. I&#8217;d copy it, painstakingly enter the titles on the remote control, give it back, and <em>maybe - </em>just maybe - listen to it a few weeks later. I have a box of over 100 minidiscs up in my mum&#8217;s loft, representing hours I could have spent studying, reading, or meeting people. And a fair few have never been listened to.</p>
<p>When PC music came along, it just got worse. Tom still gets nightmares, I imagine, remembering the 2 solid days and nights I spent in his room, almost without sleep, converting his entire WMA music collection (itself largely nicked) to MP3 to play with my new MP3 CD player. Again, I only listened to odd bits of it. Once I started actually owning digital music on a hard drive, it just got worse. Now I could waste hours correcting &#8220;metadata&#8221;. Adding the track number to the title. Removing it again. Correcting the year. Adding the cover art. For the first year after I moved to London, I didn&#8217;t even have a computer. Just a 80GB hard drive, full of music, and a crappy 20GB player I occasionally synced it with. I used to spend hours <em>in an internet cafe</em> fiddling with my music collection.</p>
<p>What is it about music that brings out the nerd in me? I don&#8217;t feel the need to suck up, hoover-like, people&#8217;s photographs, movies, or anything else. I think it&#8217;s partly because, unlike movies, music are something I enjoy repeatedly (I&#8217;m aware that movies work this way for other people, but not for me, generally). I need to <em>own</em> that album, not just borrow it, because I might want to listen to it in future. We might be having a party, and that track might be just <em>perfect</em> for a particular moment. So I have to have it, to keep it. And then, it&#8217;s part of the collection. And so it&#8217;s naturally got to have cover art, and to be properly sorted, and so on.</p>
<p>And on it&#8217;s gone, grabbing and copying and downloading and tagging as my collection has just got vaster and vaster and vaster. I&#8217;ve gone through three - <em>three!</em> - new hard drives in the last two years trying to keep up with it. And I&#8217;ve wasted hours just fiddling with Windows Media Player when I should be working, reading, or having fun.</p>
<p>Well, no more. Now, I just listen. If I like something, I download it, but it still isn&#8217;t <em>mine.</em> And far from being constraining, this is unbelievably liberating. And of course, though it has some annoying gaps, Napster&#8217;s catalogue also has some pleasing surprises included - a lot of comedy, for one.</p>
<p>Is this the future of music? I honestly don&#8217;t know. The vast amounts people seem to be happy to spend <em>buying</em> music from iTunes suggests no; but Napster seem to be doing OK with the subscription model, so good for them. My guess is that, just as some people insist on buying DVDs, some people will always want to own music.</p>
<p>But for me, I think those days are gone. It&#8217;s not just that it saves me hours of music geekery. It&#8217;s also had an unexpected benefit - it&#8217;s already widened my music horizons. No more flicking through my collection to see what to play. For me, it&#8217;s just a wide-open search box every time. So any band I&#8217;ve heard of and never listened to, or never got round to getting hold of, just gets listened to right away. It&#8217;s a little scary, but it&#8217;s also a great big adventure.</p>
<p><em><a href="http://napster.co.uk/" target="_blank">Napster to Go</a> is £14.99 a month, with a free 1GB music player when you join for six months.</em></p>
<p>P.S.: One unfortunate side-effect of the transition to Napster is that it&#8217;s not Last.FM compatible. So you&#8217;ll notice the list on this page and on my Facebook profile disappearing. But hey, if you want to know what I&#8217;m listening to, just ask.</p>
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		<title>Real Names</title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2007/04/11/real-names/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2007/04/11/real-names/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:35:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
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		<description><![CDATA[I got a little angry at friend of mine. Let&#8217;s call her, for the sake of example, Mandy Davis. Not a close friend, it&#8217;s fair to say: someone I&#8217;ve done a couple of film projects with, nothing major. Possibly she&#8217;ll invite me to the party, but definitely not to the actual wedding. That sort of [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I got a little angry at friend of mine. Let&#8217;s call her, for the sake of example, Mandy Davis. Not a close friend, it&#8217;s fair to say: someone I&#8217;ve done a couple of film projects with, nothing major. Possibly she&#8217;ll invite me to the party, but definitely not to the actual wedding. That sort of thing. But a nice, friendly, fun person, not someone I&#8217;d expect to get annoyed with.</p>
<p>As vaguely-out-of-touch friends do, she tracked me down on Facebook and friend-ed me. Which is all fine, and perfectly normal, and no, don&#8217;t worry, this is not yet another merits-and-drawbacks-of-Facebook discussion (it&#8217;s been around <em>three years,</em> people! keep <em>up!</em>). What made me annoyed was Mandy&#8217;s name on Facebook. Not Amanda Abigail Davis. Not even Mandy Davis. Just Mandy D. Accompanied by a non-identifiying, artsy picture.</p>
<p>I was genuinely irritated. Facebook is for <em>real life</em>, I thought to myself. Use bloody Myspace if you want to call yourself a funny codename and have a picture of Brad Pitt as your avatar. That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s populated primarily by teenage girls. Facebook works because people are real on it - real names, regular photos, bewilderingly complete contact information. It&#8217;s official, it&#8217;s trustworthy. It doesn&#8217;t purport to be a gateway to some magical other cyber-life. It&#8217;s designed to fit in with your real one. This is why, for example, you won&#8217;t find the obscure picture on the front page of this site on my Facebook profile, but one where you can actually tell what I look like.</p>
<p>Mandy said, after I grilled her, that she doesn&#8217;t want her identity stolen. Fair enough, though why not just hide your profile from non-friends? But really, the point isn&#8217;t just about Facebook - it&#8217;s about a wider shift in what &#8220;social networking&#8221; sites are supposed to do.</p>
<p>In the first few years of the internet, there was much written and said about its potential to afford people new identities and new lives. You might be a teenage girl in Iowa, but there was nothing stopping you becoming a legendary gay man on the New York club scene, a successful share trader, or a respected philosopher on UseNet. And equally, of course, you might be a 40-year old man, but you can exist as a 14-yr old girl in chat rooms - for at least as long as it takes to groom a potential sexual victim. Many of the services central to social networking services on the internet from webmail to myspace - operate on essentially this anonymous basis. There&#8217;s essentially no restriction on who you can be - as long as you can keep up the pretence.</p>
<p>But here&#8217;s the thing: we don&#8217;t really <em>want </em>wild, additional e-personalities. In many cases, we really just want to be ourselves. I&#8217;ve always been suspicious of cute e-codenames, usually going for the unexciting ravcasleygera. Increasingly, I&#8217;m seeing everyone else do the same - not just my twentysomething friends, but the teenagers who have essentially grown up with the internet too. They may have an additional, &#8220;secret&#8221; identity for particular interests - so do I - but they&#8217;ll usually have a straightforward online identity to pin their cyber-ego on.</p>
<p>Why? Because you only need an additional identity if you want to meet people you wouldn&#8217;t meet in ordinary life. In fact, though, we mostly want the internet to be an extension of our &#8220;real&#8221; lives. If you look at the average, e-savvy teenager&#8217;s myspace friend list, there may be 3000 people on it. But if you look at who they&#8217;re actually in regular message contact with, it&#8217;ll be friends from school. Groups services like Yahoo! Groups <em>do</em> exist for topics and virtual collaborations, but the vast majority are a supplement to a real-life group. Skype has conference rooms you can go into to talk to strangers; but of all the millions of people of Skype, there&#8217;s usually only a handful in them. IM, email, VOIP, even themed services like Flickr: I bet the majority of people you communicate through these mediums are your <em>actual real-life friends.</em> And where new friendships <em>do </em>blossom on the internet, they usually turn into real-life relationships - or wither. I&#8217;ve met two new people through myspace; one I went on to meet in real life, the other I fell out of contact with.</p>
<p>This realness - the internet as an extension of real life - is the key to Facebook&#8217;s runaway success. Facebook famously didn&#8217;t start open to the whole world, like Myspace. It started within an already very closed community - Harvard students. And it grew incrementally, through other elite US universities, all world universities, and then finally to non-students just last year.</p>
<p>I was at Harvard when Facebook launched. I joined on the third day, and I must have been one of the last. People pounced on it, because they saw a clear reason for it. In a closed community like a university, there are tens of people you know - maybe you took a class with them, or shared an activity like a play or sports team - who you don&#8217;t see on a regular basis - the kind of people who, if the only means of contact were in person, phone calls and emails, you could lose touch with. People like Mandy Davis, in fact. With Facebook they remain tied to you, albeit lightly, just enough to maintain contact. And it worked. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, one Harvard senior told me last year, has &#8220;had a more profound effect on college life in America than anyone in the last twenty years.&#8221; People didn&#8217;t swarm all over Facebook to escape their humdrum day-to-day, but to improve it.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s easy to sniff and say, if you care about someone, you&#8217;ll stay friends with them no matter what. But this ignores psychological realities. Anthropologists have noted that, as hunter-gatherers, we used to travel in tribes of 150-200 people. Then, when we settled down to agriculture, our settlements were around this size. And even now, if you take the average person, and measure the number of people in their social network - from the lady behind the counter at the dry-cleaner they chat to every week, to their friend&#8217;s brother they occasionally meet up with - you&#8217;re looking at about, you guessed it, 200 people. These relationships are significant; we don&#8217;t live in tiny villages any more, but a sense of belonging to a community - or, rather, of wanting to - is still hard-wired into us. You may only need six people to carry your coffin, but we&#8217;d all like to imagine a hundred or so people turning up to the funeral.</p>
<p>In a village, or a university, you might see these people in the library or greengrocer. In a city, though, you can lose them as quickly as you got to know them. The greatness of Facebook is the way it helps with that. It&#8217;s become a ritual - after you meet new people, on a night out, a trip away, or through a friend - you trak them down on Facebook. It&#8217;s a way of securing a connection that might otherwise fall by the wayside.</p>
<p>So, I&#8217;m not dropping my militant stance when it comes to real names - and real photos - on Facebook. Facebook is for real life in the real world. With more and more of us living in cities, and greater and greater cultural diversity, it&#8217;s becoming easier and easier to meet like-minded people. But with our ever-busier and more mobile lives, the trouble is keeping in touch with them. The great potential of the internet isn&#8217;t so much its capacity to enable new friendships and relationships. It&#8217;s to help secure existing ones.</p>
<p>Yours,</p>
<p>Ravinder Madron Casley Gera</p>
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		<title>Apple&#8217;s lesson for the NHS</title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2007/01/11/apples-lesson-for-the-nhs/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2007/01/11/apples-lesson-for-the-nhs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:43:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
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		<description><![CDATA[The world has been drooling recently over the new Apple mobile phone. Like the iPod, it’s sexy, slim, and simple to use, and it’s expected to fly off the shelves. But it’s not just phone companies who should pay attention: it’s the Government, too.
I got a posh new phone last week. It plays music, it [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="right off" title="idoc" src="http://www.mactropolis.com/images/blog/iphone-doctor.jpg" alt="" width="183" height="216" /><strong>The world has been drooling recently over the new Apple mobile phone. Like the iPod, it’s sexy, slim, and simple to use, and it’s expected to fly off the shelves. But it’s not just phone companies who should pay attention: it’s the Government, too.</strong></p>
<p>I got a posh new phone last week. It plays music, it does email, and it takes pictures, just like iPhone. But because it can play software made by other companies, it can do lots more besides, like play recorded TV or tell me where the traffic jams are. It can even tell me all 99 names of Allah!</p>
<p>Apple&#8217;s iPhone won&#8217;t do any of this, because it only runs the software Apple provides for it. Unlike other phones, it’ll only work on one network. And it looks like it’s going to be extremely expensive. And yet, it’ll fly off the shelves. After all, look at the iPod. It can’t play songs downloaded from some of the most popular music stores, only from Apple’s, and it costs far more than many rivals. But still, a whopping 70% of the mp3 players sold worldwide are iPods. Why? Because it’s so easy to use, your granny would love one.</p>
<p>Business is supposed to be all about choice. More ranges. More options. And the Government has got in on the act, saying that letting us choose our hospital will help fix the NHS.</p>
<p>But choice just makes things complicated. Apple’s products are easy to use precisely because they don’t give you a choice of software, or music store. It all works together because it’s all made by one company. Just ask Apple’s arch-rival Microsoft – after spending years making software that works with the biggest range of mp3 players possible, now they’ve given up and made a device of their own.</p>
<p>The more choice you have, the more confusing life becomes. Remember when, to call directory enquiries, you just picked up the phone and dialled? Now, you have to choose from hundreds of competing services, each with different charges and gimmicks. Now, fewer people use directory enquiries than ever before.</p>
<p>So, before the government thrusts any more “choice” down our throats, they should take a lesson from Apple. Make it simple, make it a pleasure to use, and we don’t give a damn about choice. If it works for phones, why not for the NHS?</p>
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		<title>Democracy 2.0</title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2006/10/22/democracy-20/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2006/10/22/democracy-20/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 22 Oct 2006 19:55:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
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		<description><![CDATA[In a faraway domain, a fragile democracy is fighting for survival. Everyday we watch on our screens it struggles to maintain order amongst chaos and defend its day-to-day operations against dissent and malicious attacks. What? No, not Iraq! I&#8217;m talking about Wikipedia.

We think of the internet mostly as consumers - we read sites, use them, [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In a faraway domain, a fragile democracy is fighting for survival. Everyday we watch on our screens it struggles to maintain order amongst chaos and defend its day-to-day operations against dissent and malicious attacks. What? No, not Iraq! I&#8217;m talking about <a href="http://wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=War_in_Iraq" target="_blank"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-223" title="fireshot-capture-1-iraq-war-wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia-en_wikipedia_org__titlewar_in_iraq" src="http://casleygera.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/fireshot-capture-1-iraq-war-wikipedia-the-free-encyclopedia-en_wikipedia_org__titlewar_in_iraq.png" alt="" width="500" height="268" /></a></p>
<p>We think of the internet mostly as consumers - we read sites, use them, buy from them. But the internet started off as a community. The first websites were bulletin boards, designed to let academics share information. They didn&#8217;t have staff or managers, and they certainly wouldn&#8217;t get sold for millions of dollars. They belonged to the people who use them: they were democratic.</p>
<p>Wikipedia is the biggest democracy on the internet. It&#8217;s <a href="http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&amp;lang=none">the 15th most-visited site on the web</a>, and every one of its millions of users can take part in its decisions. Not only can anyone edit pages, but anyone can vote – or stand – in elections to its managing boards. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/wikipedia">One American academic</a> thinks it might even be “the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration the world has ever known.”</p>
<p>But as Iraq is finding out, it isn’t easy maintaining order in a democracy of equals. Wikipedia has its own insurgents: vandals. It suffers thousands of vandal attacks every day – entries are deleted, defaced, or altered for political or personal reasons. “George W. Bush” is its most frequently edited pages. Politicians have admitted having campaign staff edit their pages to cover up criticism. And workers campaigning for better conditions have been known to alter their employer’s entries to put their points across.</p>
<p>In the early years of the project, such insurgencies plunged Wikipedia into civil war – between its co-founder and “chief organizer,” Larry Sanger, and a mysterious anarchist called “The Cunctator.” Sanger wanted a certain amount of authority to ensure the site’s quality; “Cunc” was in favour of total equality. After months of deleting each other’s edits to pages and sparring in the sites’ talk pages, the war ended with Sanger leaving the project.</p>
<p><img class="left off" style="margin: 5px;" title="seigenthaler" src="http://www.calico.ie/blog/uploaded_images/Tv_cnn_John_Seigenthaler_Sr-735242.jpg" alt="John Seigenthaler, Sr." width="245" height="149" /></p>
<p>Since then, Wikipedia’s reputation has been tested by the consequences of its democratic approach. In 2005, the American journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr. <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm">laid into the site</a>, calling it “a flawed and irresponsible research tool,” after taking objection to a paragraph of his biography on the site that said he had briefly been linked to the murders of John and Robert Kennedy. Siegenthaler almost certainly overreacted - who <em>hasn&#8217;t </em>been linked to the Kennedy murders? - but a chorus of political and media concern blew up, alleging that Wikipedia was riddled with errors and unsafe. A <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html">study in the Journal <em>Nature</em></a><em> </em>later in the year found that Wikipedia’s scientific articles were nearly as accurate as those in the professionally-edited <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica, </em>but <a href="http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf"><em>Britannica</em> hit back</a>, calling the study “so error-laden that it was completely without merit.” (<a href="http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_response.pdf"><em>Nature</em>&#8217;s response</a>)</p>
<p>Is Wikipedia laden with errors and lies? It&#8217;s hard to tell, but Larry Sanger thinks it might be. And he&#8217;s proposing an alternative, <a href="http://www.citizendium.org/">Citizendium</a> - a carbon-copy of Wikipedia&#8217;s database, but with expert editors who will have some authority to override regular users&#8217; changes. Editors will appoint themselves, but be required to meet certain standards of expertise. And vandals and troublemakers will be barred from the site by &#8220;constables.&#8221; The aim, Sanger says, is to create a site that &#8220;John Seigenthaler could be comfortable with&#8230; not only enormous and free, but reliable.&#8221;</p>
<p>Sanger&#8217;s announcement has generated <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Citizendium">a mixture of delight and horror</a>, with some Wikipedia users calling it &#8220;treason&#8221; (hey, if you thought Wikipedia was part of <a href="http://www.edge.org/discourse/digital_maoism.html">&#8220;the emergence of a new kind of person,&#8221;</a> you&#8217;d take it pretty seriously too). But lovers of Wikipedia&#8217;s democratic ethos shouldn&#8217;t worry - this is a natural process for democracies to go through. In fact, it&#8217;s striking how internet history is mirroring real-world history when it comes to the development of democracy. After all, the first democracies - in Ancient Greece - were small city-states where every citizen - at least, every free male citizen - had a direct say in the affairs of state - not unlike Wikipedia&#8217;s founding all-are-equal ethos. As democracies have grown from cities to nations, populations have become too large for direct votes on every issue, and representative democracy has developed, with elected leaders making most decisions. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Elections">Wikipedia has begun the same process</a> - just like in growing democracies, pressure of numbers of participants has made ways of arbitrating disagreements essential.</p>
<p>As democracies have grown and the issues facing them have become more complex, their governments have needed to find ways to understand their tasks. But if the people won&#8217;t always vote for the most expert people, what to do? All democracies create ways of appointing experts to advise and even shape government, even if they&#8217;re not elected. In Britain, it&#8217;s the House of Lords. Of course, as Government gets further away from the people, the chance increases of people feeling free to disobey its laws. So democracies developed police forces, who are granted authority by the community to act against members of the community in ways regular members can&#8217;t.</p>
<p>So with its experts and constables, Citizendium, too, is just responding to the pressures of growth as many democracies have. In time, these safeguards may well see it overtake Wikipedia in popularity. But will self-appointing experts be reliable? Or will Citizendium have its own Cunctator, its own insurgents? There&#8217;s also a lot of fuzziness in Wikipedia&#8217;s system, with articles &#8220;generally recognized&#8221; to be reliable or neutral. Will Citizendium develop more specific processes? Will it need to? In real-world democracies, such fuzzy ideas tend to get sharpened by being tested in courts of law - think of phrases such as &#8220;cruel and unusual punishment,&#8221; incredibly vague at first, but gradually refined by the courts. Will our twin web democracies be forced to go through a similar process, in order to clarify their own procedures?</p>
<p>It&#8217;s too soon to tell, of course. But Citizendium needs to be recognised for what it is - not a threat to Wikipedia&#8217;s principles of democracy, but a refinement of them, just as real-world democracy has been refined over thousands of years. These kind of changes aren&#8217;t a sign of weakness, but of the flexibility needed to survive. Democracy was never easy, after all. Just ask the people of Iraq.</p>
<hr /><em><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact">A nice backgrounder to the Wikipedia debate</a></em></p>
<p> </p>
<p><em><a href="http://www.citizendium.org/essay.html">Citizendium founding essay</a></em></p>
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		<title>Nothing But Bonfires</title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2006/06/12/nothing-but-bonfires/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2006/06/12/nothing-but-bonfires/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Nothing But Bonfires is my fabulous acquaintance Holly&#8217;s marvellous blog. And there are pictures of me! and other people.

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			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.nothingbutbonfires.com/">Nothing But Bonfires</a> is my fabulous acquaintance Holly&#8217;s marvellous blog. And there are pictures of me! and other people.</p>
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		<title>Hype Machine</title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2006/04/12/hype-machine/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2006/04/12/hype-machine/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Apr 2006 16:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
		<category><![CDATA[Culture &amp; Media]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[MP3 Blogs. Essentially a good idea. But with so bloody many of them, how do you keep up with the gems? Enter the shining white horse of technology, and riding atop it - The Hype Machine! This marvellous thing aggregates all the best MP3 blogs into an almighty daily list you can play in a [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>MP3 Blogs. Essentially a good idea. But with so bloody <em>many </em>of them, how do you keep up with the gems? Enter the shining white horse of technology, and riding atop it - <a href="http://hype.non-standard.net/">The Hype Machine</a>! This marvellous thing aggregates all the best MP3 blogs into an almighty daily list you can play in a thousand different ways - including a podcast, for those who desperately want to fill up their hard drives. The tech doesn&#8217;t matter - what it basically means is instant, free resource to a stupidly large number of great new (and some old) songs.</p>
<p>Enjoy! R</p>
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		<title>Googlism</title>
		<link>http://casleygera.com/blog/2005/09/26/googlism/</link>
		<comments>http://casleygera.com/blog/2005/09/26/googlism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Rav Casley Gera</dc:creator>
		
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		<description><![CDATA[try it yourself: www.googlism.com
rav is affordable
rav is configurable on a group or global basis
rav is implemented ? here is the core of the crystal email solution
rav is available on a wide variety of mail servers and os?s including
rav is de effectiefste antivirus oplossing die verkrijgbaar is
rav is an extremely flexible antivirus platform that integrates extremely [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>try it yourself: <a href="http://www.googlism.com/">www.googlism.com</a></p>
<blockquote><p>rav is affordable<br />
rav is configurable on a group or global basis<br />
rav is implemented ? here is the core of the crystal email solution<br />
rav is available on a wide variety of mail servers and os?s including<br />
rav is de effectiefste antivirus oplossing die verkrijgbaar is<br />
rav is an extremely flexible antivirus platform that integrates extremely well with a broad array of mail servers<br />
rav is required to survey up to 40<br />
rav is to mate esau and ishmael and separate the two messiahs<br />
rav is able<br />
rav is the peak performing arts touring agency in victoria<br />
rav is sometimes giving as many as three or four lessons a week<br />
rav is a 2wd<br />
rav is great<br />
rav is not a new concept<br />
rav is a mexican organization<br />
rav is involved in emergency planning for specific major events<br />
rav is committed to the principle that all personal information that enters our organisation is dealt with in a uniform<br />
rav is committed to communigate pro users<br />
rav is about two minutes<br />
rav is our greatest foe<br />
rav is ruling like rebbi elazar who is more stringent and holds that bi&#8217;ah she&#8217;lo k&#8217;darkah makes her pesulah l&#8217;kehunah<br />
rav is the more stringent opinion here<br />
rav is the best possible<br />
rav is the most advanced email services platform<br />
rav is a comprehensive financial planning and investment services company<br />
rav is one of the<br />
rav is our greatest enemy<br />
rav is sexier and has a slightly sportier image than other suvs<br />
rav is virus killer&#8221; rav antivirus is one of the best on market today<br />
rav is formeel een rechtspersoonlijkheid bezittende ?zorginstelling?<br />
die op regionaal niveau verantwoorde ambulancezorg biedt<br />
rav is a commercial product<br />
rav is a system<br />
rav is your online exotic car rental company offering the finest luxury vehicles<br />
rav is a product meeting the most exigent users<br />
rav is a twenty<br />
rav is watching<br />
rav is a gecad software product which they promote as a &#8220;highly efficient antivirus integrated suite<br />
rav is a project in development by the faa&#8217;s aos<br />
rav is set to scan all files<br />
rav is committed to build strong relationships with our distributors<br />
rav is more experienced and mature<br />
rav is keen on law and order and wants to make sure the scales of justice are kept well<br />
rav is to honor the memory of dick heinrichs<br />
rav is an independent expert group whose members are appointed by the swedish society of medicine<br />
rav is an inclusive<br />
rav is essentially concerned with his students&#8217; cerebral capacities<br />
rav is of the opinion that the need to recline only applies if they are going to eat bread<br />
rav is better in every way and can&#8217;t fail to win as many friends<br />
rav is a linux based antivirus protection system that keeps email virii out of your email system<br />
rav is er een opleidingscommissie actief<br />
rav is een regionaal samenwerkingsverband tussen de ambulancediensten en de centrale post ambulancevervoer<br />
rav is teaching is that an authentic judgement must not only decide in accordance with the dry facts<br />
rav is what you need<br />
rav is an excellent example of the advantages of car<br />
rav is accessed via an intuitive and simple command line and can easily be scheduled to run daily scans<br />
rav is a product of the company gecad<br />
rav is called &#8220;aba aricha&#8221; because of his height<br />
rav is a system for system<br />
rav is like an angel of hashem<br />
rav is unlike those rabbis ?who tie their handkerchiefs to their fingers as they speak of certain things<br />
rav is simply awesome<br />
rav is priced at an introductory rate of $599 per server and requires no third party antivirus software<br />
rav is a member of the italian association of the italian motorway and tunnel licencees aiscat<br />
rav is a terrific product that has daily updates to virus signatures; and unlike some of the other programs<br />
rav is much better appointed than mine in just about every way<br />
rav is at a loss to understand how any decent person<br />
rav is suitable for use with equipment which requires high reliability protection from external surges<br />
rav is not the only rubber<br />
rav is formeel een rechtspersoonlijkheid bezittende &#8216;zorginstelling&#8217; die op regionaal niveau verantwoorde ambulancezorg biedt<br />
rav is loved by all but has impacted the actions of none<br />
rav is to do chesed<br />
rav is probably quite limited<br />
rav is an nlm that will scan files upon open<br />
rav is cute<br />
rav is also from the sod of da?as; the gematria of<br />
erev rav is ?da?as?<br />
rav is a huge seller in the toyota fleet of vehicles<br />
rav is quick and agile in traffic and hums along as straight and steady as a<br />
cruise missile on the freeway<br />
rav is also actively involved in the work of the commission<br />
rav is just a swank toy<br />
rav is<br />
rav is heavily involved in the kickboxing industry working in various areas of the sport<br />
rav is very much focused on project oriented consulting work with a special interest</p></blockquote>
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