David Gerard 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (31)

• On the post: No, Twitter Use Is Not Costing Companies Billions

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2009 @ 07:08am

  Showing up to work at all �costs British economy £2.13 trillion a year�

  Two-thirds of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook during the working day, wasting an average of 40 minutes a week each.
  
  The survey was conducted by Morse IT, with no consideration whatsoever of the company’s extensive line of Internet filtering products.
  
  Twatbook was costing the economy £1.38 billion zillion a year, pointless meetings learning to synergise our buzzword growth were costing £65.23 billion zillion a year, MP3 file sharing was costing £12 billion zillion a year, reading the Daily Telegraph was costing £15.25, drinking tea and eating food was costing £17.243154 (recurring) billion zillion a year, blinking on the job was costing £5 billion zillion a year and employees going to the toilet rather than having catheters fitted to stay at their desks 24 hours a day was costing £6.66 billion zillion a year. b3ta was free, for some reason.
  
  The total losses to the economy added to more than the national gross domestic product, strongly suggesting that showing up to work at all, and indeed the capitalist system in toto, was a net loss, and we should all live off farming our back yards and send our tweets via actual carrier pigeons.
  
  Temp agency OfficeAngels disagreed. “As younger generations join the workplace, I believe UK businesses will, inevitably, have to embrace social networks, recognising the benefits of providing staff with potential for business networking. So they can find a job somewhere that doesn’t insult their intelligence by blocking a knitting needle shop as a ‘weapons site’ or something equally twattish.”
  
  (My original blog post.)

• On the post: As Newspaper Execs Discuss Putting Up Online Paywalls, London Evening Standard Paper Edition Goes Free

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 03 Oct, 2009 @ 05:34am

  Except the ES is horrible

  It would help if the Evening Standard wasn't completely loathsome shit. They've spent much of this year doing promos where they give it away free outside tube stations, or include a chocolate bar or an umbrella on rainy days with the 50p. People refuse to take it! They really, really hate the wretched thing. They would actually rather take the London Lite, because that's full of bright colourful pictures of celebrities and requires no thought from work-addled office workers on their train ride home.
  
  My blog post: http://notnews.today.com/2009/10/02/evening-standard-to-pay-readers-to-take-it/

• On the post: Only Took 9 Months, But Warner Music Videos Finally Back On YouTube

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 29 Sep, 2009 @ 03:02am

  Edgar Bronfman, what do you expect?

  Warner Music is now owned by Edgar Bronfman Jr, the Seagram's heir and lucky sperm club member who previously lost a fortune on Universal Music. His operating method at Warner Music seems to be to keep everything locked up forever. There are so many entire catalogues that are unavailable anywhere on earth, except via MP3 blogs. (As an Australian, I'm particularly pissed off he got his hands on the Festival/Mushroom catalogue when Festival was finally sold off for scrap.)
  
  But yeah, I can see his fear of having 96kbps MP3s of FM radio quality TV sound available on YouTube.
  
  *headdesk*

• On the post: Lily Allen Distributing Tons Of Copyrighted Music; Blows Way Past Three Strikes

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 23 Sep, 2009 @ 02:30pm

  The plot gets ficker an' ficker, innit

  Oh deary me. I have updated my post accordingly.

• On the post: UK ISPs Block Wikipedia Page; Cause Problem With UK Editing

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 08 Dec, 2008 @ 01:44pm

  Please give us your money, btw

  I hope it’s not too off-topic to note here that (a) we’re an educational charity (b) we live off public donations (c) we have a funding drive on right now :-)

  We have no money to spend on expensive legal assistance on issues like this. (We do have Mike Godwin, the world’s most famous Internet lawyer, as our general counsel, which is just unbelievably cool and very effective.) So all we have is people talking about these issues and giving us their spare bucks to keep the sites running. Thank you :-)

• On the post: Apple Now Banning Potentially Competitive Apps From The iPhone

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2008 @ 04:18pm

  Even their evil is better

  Microsoft is really losing it in the evil stakes these days. They used to be really good at evil. Now Apple is kicking their backsides for evil. When Steve Jobs goes "MuWAAAhahahaha!", the brainwashed minions listen. His henchmen are really loyal, not just getting paid to be. Poor Ballmer.

• On the post: Microsoft Gives In To Online Critics: Fires Seinfeld

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 18 Sep, 2008 @ 04:24pm

  I can see the next one

  "Vista's slow, it's fat, my software doesn't work, I can't get drivers, the User Access Control's a pain in the ass and my network grinds to a crawl when I play an mp3! What do you call that?"

  "... The Aristocrats!"

• On the post: Is Anonymity Good Or Bad For Wikipedia?

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 21 Jul, 2008 @ 08:50am

  Anons write quite a lot of content

  In terms of the normal operations of writing an encyclopedia, allowing people who aren't logged in to write stuff has been highly beneficial. There seems to be a core of a few thousand editors who do most of the polishing, tweaking and formatting, but quite a lot of the content is written by more or less drive-by editors. Requiring login is a massive barrier to contribution - everyone has 100 web page logins, another one is just a nuisance. We welcome drive-by fixes. And quite a lot of our regular editors started editing drive-by, not logged in.

• On the post: Techdirt Interviews Britannica President Jorge Cauz

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 04 Jun, 2008 @ 03:43am

  Neutrality

  "Not neutral point of view like Wikipedia. We don't strive for that. We think there are reasonable, informed points of view that are worthwhile exploring and letting the reader be exposed to it. We try to reach objectivity by having a fair share of these points and counterpoints being discussed in articles at great length. There's a huge amount of respect for factual correctness at Britannica, for objectivity."

  He just described Neutral Point Of View as it's ideally applied. Read for yourself.

  Does he really expect to get mileage from "neutrality = bad"? That'd be a masterpiece of FUD.

• On the post: HMS Britannic Optimistic About Deck-Chair Re-Arrangement

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 20 May, 2008 @ 09:56am

  Wikipedia vs nothing at all

  It's important to note here that Wikipedia has never set out to compete with Britannica. Indeed, as a bunch of nerds who think writing an encyclopedia is the height of really cool fun, we still regard Britannica as the gold standard of quality we hope to reach - they do so much better in average article quality, for example.

  But. Wikipedia gained its present hideous popularity through convenience - an encyclopedia with a ridiculously wide topic range, with content good enough to be useful no matter how often we stress it’s not "reliable" (certified checked) as such, right there on your desktop. There was no competitor. We took over a niche without realising it was a niche, let alone intending to.

  Most of Wikipedia’s readers (the people who make it #8 site in the world) wouldn’t have opened a paper encyclopedia since high school. Wikipedia fills a niche that was previously ignored when not botched.

  You're right that it isn't clear how they'll compete. Perhaps using the Citizendium approach (wiki-based, more restrictions on entry, an express role for experts, slowly building up a collection of good articles) backwards, starting with their present corpus and opening it to expert wiki editing?

  "Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect."

• On the post: Debunking The Wikipedia 'Brain Surgery' Myth

  

  David Gerard ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2008 @ 11:53am

  Brain not optional

  Well, we never promised you could read Wikipedia without engaging your brain at any point. I assume Prof. Lichtenstein's frustration is at students who flatly refuse to engage their brains; I think her error is blaming the materials rather than the lazy students. If people want to believe something they read on the Internet without having to think about it, they have problems Wikipedia can't help them with.