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rgelen

Listed below are comments made by rgelen between Friday, 29th May 2009 and Friday, 25th September 2009.

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Help Dave with a campaign slogan! 12:55pm on 25 Sep 2009 "Out Of The Frying Pan…"
Will you pay for a Digital Britain? 5:25pm on 23 Sep 2009 As it happens, I'm not particularly opposed to "nationalising the internet" in the sense that what we are talking about here is infrastructure – infrastructure we badly need.

I believe we require a fibre-based national network offering universal service, and that means one network, where extremely high-traffic and profitable routes subsidise expensive and difficult rural paths. That is impossible to do if you let individual companies cream off those profitable paths first. And as this is new infrastructure, there is virtually the entire new network to build (we aren't simply patching bots on to an existing structure) so a unified single national network is entirely practical conceptually.

Such a network infrastructure would ideally be non-profit and publicly owned in my view, and no, I do not mind paying for it. And come now, 50p a month isn't enough to buy a cup of coffee. Unfortunately it's probably not enough to buy a high-speed fibre-optic network either.

However, whether or not taxing landlines is the way to raise the money is another question.

Ideally a future 60Mb/s or so universal national network would be able to carry a whole slew of things that we currently use other means for (such as broadcasting and all kinds of communications) and would be backed and infilled by a WiMax-style high-power wireless network for mobile, remote and portable access. We addressed this in the Cambridge contribution to the Digital Britain Unconferences Report, p16 (http://digitalbritainunconference.wordpress.com/final-report/). As a result the infrastructure would in fact be used by everyone, and it might be more appropriate to pay for it via general taxation (adding a very small amount per capita) than by charging landline-holders.
What makes a tech story? 09:36am on 02 Sep 2009 Agreed with 22/31. Bill Thompson's insights are particularly valuable, both on the blog pages and on Digital Planet. You always get something interesting, thought-provoking and well-presented from him. He's an excellent asset.
What makes a tech story? 4:40pm on 01 Sep 2009 Another interesting piece. And the comments up before this one make useful points too. By and large I think you get the mix of coverage more or less spot on. However I'd note that I am not an average member of the audience, most likely. These are just my personal observations:

Yes, don't simply regurgitate a press release. But if the release prompts you to look at something going on behind the story the PR people want to give you, then it could be interesting.

Your newspaper visitor deliberately phrased their first three story headings negatively, but in fact there are good and bad points about each. Yes, data security stories can be worth doing, but not if they are merely sensationalist and you don't give enough information to act usefully. Yes, technology can be fun and exciting, but that doesn't mean you have to give a misleading picture. And you definitely SHOULD cover Bletchley Park, NMOC, Alan Turing apologies and similar. And yes, technology stories behind the companies, like the excellent Spinvox story, are exactly what I understand by the term "good journalism". Non-sensationalised revelations backed with facts and research are definitely of interest and the Spinvox story is a great example of that done well.

Basically, in my view, your department has a pretty good handle on what it should be doing as far as tech coverage is concerned, and "…we should aim to deliver useful - but not excessively specialist - information to as wide an audience as possible" is just about spot on. You will inevitably spread across into related fields – such as business – but in the same way, sports stories sometimes spread into general news. There are no sharp dividing lines between categories.

And finally, no you don't want to be ONLY geeky. You need to target the sector of the audience with a broad interest in technology, and if you've given something coverage for that audience, then by all means add a bit of detail for the niche markets – the tech blog areas are good for this, and so is on-air from time to time. What you need to avoid at all costs is "dumbing down". Never underestimate the intelligence of the audience and don't let preconceptions about the ability of the audience to assimilate information turn into self-fulfilling prophecies.

BTW, quite frankly I don't mind if you have "away days" actually away from the work environment (where they are most effective) or in a BBC office as you apparently did. Unlike some people, I am happy to pay my licence fee and do actually trust that by and large you'll use it wisely.

Keep up the good work!
What can music teach telly? 4:04pm on 28 Aug 2009 Wow, what a stunning amount of unanimity in these comments. I hope the observations get noticed.
What can music teach telly? 2:47pm on 28 Aug 2009 Useful and interesting piece as always. Certainly, there are plenty of mistakes that the music business has made, and a business model that treats the customer as the enemy is certainly one of them, as is quite evident greed over a period of decades. I very much agree with "evergrowingbrain" on this topic and would make the following enlargement on that theme…

The industry has not yet worked out all the answers, and as long as it deludes itself that it's "losing £xxx million a year due to illegal filesharing" (it isn't: you can't tell what people would buy if they couldn't get it free) and fails to include individual artist and smaller online record company sales and really knows how much music is being *sold* and not stolen (sales may be much higher than they believe, they just don't go to the majors), it never will.

Today, the cost of manufacturing/distribution is very small indeed, which was not the case until quite recently (though everyone knew that CDs cost under 50p to make and that a £15 selling price was a ripoff, so of course people copied CDs where a less greedy price would have encouraged them to own a legit copy). It still costs money to make a decent recording (and home recording systems are still not enough on their own) so the answers probably lie in offering added value.

For music, live performance may be part of the answer, with recordings being used to promote live and value-added events. Merchandising is another part of the equation.

It's not obvious how you could apply the former to TV, but certainly there are some lessons that can be transferred:
• Make programming available internationally at the same time via all outlets. Nothing annoys people more than delays in a show being available in a territory. They will get it and you will lose.
• To every measure there is a countermeasure. Don't spend time and effort trying to STOP people doing something they want to do: it will ALWAYS fail. Work out instead how you can make money out of what people want to, and will, do. Think how to make something possible, not difficult (there is no such thing as "impossible").
• Set pricing levels fairly and avoid people thinking you're ripping them off (people will know if you are). Offer added value and make it worth peoples' while paying for the real thing instead of hunting it down for nothing. Low cost, high volume, high quality and added value that people don't get with the illegal download
• Make it easy for people to get what they want: look at iTunes, Amazon's one-click, super-easy micropayments using an agreed system used by all major players so customers only have to register once.
• Use common formats and distribution systems, ideally open-source. Work together to make content available through common channels that work on all three major platforms and allow people to do what they think they should be able to do (the "CD model" if you will). Think "How do we make this easier to buy/obtain/enjoy" and not "Make it proprietary and hold on like grim death to everything."
• Ensure that the real thing offers exceptional quality. Sell quality, think quality, offer quality, and offer it first. Quality is the thing that is degraded by illegal transfers (even in the digital age: think lossy compression). Quality takes up bandwidth, so high quality is more difficult to steal as it takes more time. Terrestrial, cable and satellite TV offer HD in realtime, with bandwidths that most people will not have available via broadband for some time (Digital Britain? You must be joking). Make technical quality integral to the product and you buy time to think of new solutions.

I hope this helps as a start…
Spinvox, we stand by our story 12:54pm on 29 Jul 2009 Great research, Rory: this is the kind of thing that we need to see. It's content like this that will retain its value even when ordinary news can be found and spread by everyone: detailed research, analysis, informed comment, inferences drawn. Content like this is one reason I am happy to pay my licence fee and why I defend the BBC from detractors. Keep up the good work!
It Felt Like a Kiss - The Film 4:24pm on 24 Jul 2009 I regard everything I've ever seen from Adam Curtis as a "must-see". This is no exception. I do hope my friends in the US can watch this.
Listening to Mr iPhone 5:36pm on 01 Jul 2009 Fascinating item. Thanks for the report. Nice to know that British designers still lead the world even if few people have heard of them.
The culture of copying 12:27pm on 29 May 2009 I should note, in addition to my previous comments, that there is a lot of interesting material in the report and a great deal of work has evidently gone into it which will form an excellent basis for further study. I confined myself in my earlier comments solely to the fact that the report appeared to "take it as read" that industry reports of apparent losses were valid.

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