twopointouch

On Amazon, this book is tagged ‘liar’, ‘alcohol’, ’sociopath’ and ‘jail’. But also with ‘entrepreneur’, ‘web 2.0′ and ‘dotcom’. It should probably also be tagged ‘genius raconteur’.

The book tells the tale of Paul Carr’s successful beginnings - a published author while still at university, a Guardian columnist a couple of years later and a blogs-to-books publisher shortly after that - to the grisly end of his stab at Web 2.0 e-trepreneurship, Fridaycities (a site which continues under the leadership of his former business partner as Kudocities). With the Credit Crunch beginning to close its jaws on new Internet investment, Bringing Nothing to the Party couldn’t come at a more opportune moment.

We have to express an interest here - Carr spoke on a panel about social websites at our conference last year, NMK Forum, which gets name-checked within the volume. At that point, Fridaycities was still in business, and Carr was, as ever, an eloquent and intelligent contributor, despite (as he reveals) not having slept the night before.

There’s lots to like in the book, particularly if you have been to any London Internet social events. Carr captures the flavour of these sorts of evenings very well - khaki trousers and check shirts seem to figure prominently. Lots of the regulars show up: Michael Acton Smith, Saul Klein, Nic Brisbourne, Robert Loch, Mike Butcher, etc. Carr’s prose style makes for easy reading, and - as you’d expect from the architect of projects such as The Friday Thing - the gags come thick and fast. It’s a little like John O’Farrell’s Things Can Only Get Better, but with more swearing and a lot less politics. Carr is an excellent story-teller, and you’ll end up really wanting to corner him at the bar on one of these nights.

If there’s a problem with the book, then it’s that the alleged ’story’ - the rise and fall of a dotcom entrepreneur - doesn’t actually amount to very much. It’s the ‘padding’ that contains the most colour - the wild parties, the people he bumps into at bars, the wilfully doomed relationships, the back stories behind some of the big sites on the Web. That’s not an enormous problem, but if you already know about the origin of the name ‘Google’, for example, you sometimes wish he’d get on with it.

The other story, the real story, is about Carr, though. His journey from gonzo journalist, to accidental business owner, to accidental web business mogul, to very-near-jailbird, to working out what actually makes him happy in life. It’s somehow quite surprising how much we end up liking him by the end of the book, having documented his personal and business failings quite so comprehensively. It’s a well-worn formula in fiction that might make readers roll their eyes when the good-for-nothing protagonist finally achieves wisdom (cf. anything by Nick Hornby or Tony Banks), but when it’s real-life then that’s something different.

Bringing Nothing to the Party is available from Amazon and Waterstones, among other booksellers.

[cross posted from NMK]

But sorry it was too good, and at the very least, you must watch to from (thanks, Steve) 3:00′ish.

Via Jemima Kiss

I love the film Kes (1969). It was still modern when I went to secondary school, nearly ten years later  - some local authorities were still trying to get it banned when I was teaching in the 90s, and it’s still modern now. This scene, where the poor messenger boy from the second form gets beaten seems really resonant.

They had CP at my school back then and I don’t believe it made any difference to anyone’s behaviour. I don’t believe it did anyone any good. I remain undecided as to whether it did us any harm, but that’s a moot point, really. As the headteacher in the clip says, he’ll be beating them week after week with no evident impact. As the story goes, Ken Loach, who always uses improvisational techniques with his normally untrained actors, didn’t tell the boys that they’d be properly caned, hence their very realistic reactions.

PS: I bookmarked this link to the fantastically funny football scene in Kes with the much-missed Brian Glover a few weeks ago.

Fake Steve Jobs is rather more concise than me:

The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

Thanks to DrewB for this invaluable reminder of my status, via Ffffound:

I have three invitations to Ffffound, if you like pictures. First come, first served in the comments.

Many thanks to comrade Mayfield for his excellent presentation to the collected officers of the Social Media Commissariat … sorry Club, this evening.

To cut his talk short, he’d been thinking about the parallels between the birth of social media and the birth of print itself, as described in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe. The printing press caused a social upheaval and changes in the patterns of people’s thought that would last forever. Revolutions are often thought to be sudden and violent, but as well as that, if they are really revolutionary, they are about long-term, irreversible change.

The printing press, like the explosion of social media, changed access to the means of production and distribution of media forever. It smashed feudalism and church control. It also changed the ways in which people think - new modes of behaviour and activity like silent reading appeared. The emergence of continual partial attention through the likes of Twitter might be a modern analogy.

In a revisionist aberration, Mayfield suggested that marketing had always had a place in print, from its very origins, since early books were very often part advertorial for the author’s goods and services. He suggested in Gutenberg’s time, there were numerous helpful volumes that actually were about promoting the writer - think books along the lines of Tenne Most Efficacious Waies to Dryve Traffick to Ye Blogge. He also cited the division and combined hatred and approval created by this new media, a very familiar theme today when it comes to the media created by you and I and reactions to that from the press and the establishment.

Dialectical materialism and Web 2.0, then. The subsequent conversation revealed a few ways into such an analysis, most of which seem bleak in the short term:

(a) this apparent transferal of the means of production into the hands of the people (e.g. ‘push-button publishing’ for everyone) seems like a revolution. But that apparent liberation is contained within the illusion of freedom granted by a very few corporations. Fox, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. At the next level, our ISPs are owned by even fewer, larger players. Our sense of freedom and ownership in this space is a delusion. The recent Usmanov outage proved how fragile this freedom is. If corporations are the new states, then much of social media might be classified as Ideological State Apparatus to obscure the real relationships between those states and the peasantry.

(b) this is even more the case outside the bourgeois social media intelligentsia (viz. anyone likely to attend SMC). Most people are joining in, if at all, through portals controlled by media giants. Unwitting collaborators, my comrades, not revolutionaries. Maybe not the same media giants as ten years ago. But the same forces, same money behind them. Don’t mistake withdrawal from one account and investment into another for a sea change in how capitalism works.

(c) the myth of transparency. Transparency used as a way to bully lesser powers. Corporations remain psychotic: under US law, they are incapable of acting altruistically. If they do anything about the social media revolution, then it will be because they think it will be the best way to drive profits. Watch them, catch them out, be suspicious.

(d) so what/where is the revolution? Regrettably,there was reactionary talk based upon non-scientific doctrine during the evening that ‘life will out’ and that censorship and control will ultimately be bypassed because that it is the destiny of any new communications medium. Applying the scientific method of Marx and Lenin instead, we might conclude that the ongoing struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue and that the inevitable victory of the working classes will ensue to similar effect. Even the benighted might hit upon the truth sometimes. Print led to education, secularity and the spread of scientific thought, eventually, even though its first thrust came from the opposite direction.

Be watchful comrades. The day is near, but not yet at hand.

Update: somewhat more sensible posts on the event from Alan and Jenny.

You’ll recall the Million Dollar Homepage, the buy-a-pixel-for-a-dollar site that actually managed to raise a million dollars from astute marketing gurus looking for an exciting and original way to gain exposure hapless buffoons with more money than sense? You’re probably also aware that there have been various rip-offs since then that haven’t done quite as well.

The latest twist on the formula is www.milliondollarpubes.com. Yes, it’s real - I got a press release this morning that explains the premise:

Businesses can instantly purchase one or more pubic hairs by visiting the site at www.milliondollarpubes.com and simply clicking on the ‘BUY PUBIC HAIR’ link. You can then select exactly where on her body you would like your advertisement and link to appear. Upon checking out you also have the option to have the pubic hair posted to you. The owner of the site said "I hope that as many people as possible would like to receive my hair, but if you would prefer to just place your advert then that is fine too!" The site has already attracted a number of serious businesses who have seen the initiative as a fun way to achieve effective advertising and a great return on investment. Cost-per-click has never been so much fun!

5000 pubic hairs are on offer to raise the owner’s magical $1,000,000 goal.

With nearly 200 hairs already purchased interested businesses who want to gain great exposure at a low cost are advised to act quickly, and take advantage of this unique ‘hair today - gone tomorrow’ opportunity.

If you thought the original was bonkers, then this is surely the sign of a world gone mad. Ermm.. guys, there’s nothing on the site but ads - on top of a picture of a young lady’s fully-knickered nether regions - and the only people who would visit the site are people looking to place an ad.

*You will note that I have carefully resisted the lure of a headline along the lines of ‘advertising ***ts’.

It’s time for a new alternative…

Arsebook | Welcome to Arsebook!

Via. Drew Meyers

What do MySpace, craisglist and the ‘A listers’ have in common?