Message from Michael -- October 27, 2008

HEY, YOU, GET ONTO MY CLOUD

KNIGHTS IN WHITE SPACES

OUTSOURCING THE NEWS

HOW BAD ARE J-SCHOOLS?

COCKTAIL CHATTER – FOR WRITERS


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HEY, YOU, GET ONTO MY CLOUD: It seems that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is singing his own variation of the Mick Jagger hit, along with Yahoo’s Jerry Yang and Google’s Eric Schmidt as they all battle like World War I fighter pilots in the clouds of computing. Once known as grid computing, utility computing or distributed computing, the much sexier sounding “cloud computing” is being heralded as the biggest thing since the Internet started. We’ve talked about it in previous MfM’s, but the difference is that this week Microsoft is jumping into the fray with a vengeance at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. As usual Microsoft is late getting into the field but as always Microsoft is raising the stakes dramatically. Also, next month the first International Cloud Computing Conference will be held in San Jose. Sys-Con, which focuses on i-Technology media and actually produces a cloud computing journal, will host a cloud computing ‘boot camp.’ It probably tells you something that although there is agreement that cloud computing represents “an infrastructural paradigm shift,” there is no agreement on an exact definition. My untutored definition is that all your documents, all your storage, all your software, even all your applications are provided through a massive system of inter-connected servers so that you are no longer restricted by the size or speed of your computer. Amazon has its own version, EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) which provides “resizable compute capacity in the cloud,” making web-scale computing easier for developers. Earlier this year, Intel, Hewlett Packard and Yahoo joined forces with three international research institutions to develop six data centers to test the stability and security of cloud computing. And as noted before, Google is already providing a cloud of apps online which runs on an estimated 100,000 nodes – a fancy term for servers -- although the recent 24-hour outage of Google’s Gmail system has raised questions about just how reliable cloud computing can be.

If you want to follow Microsoft’s foray into the field, go to website microsoftpdc.com; if you want to follow the computing conference, go to cloudcomputingexpo.com. And if you just want to keep up with the concept, go to cloudcomputing.sys-con.com.

KNIGHTS IN WHITE SPACES: Okay, I know I’m pushing my luck with these headline variations of rock and roll hits. But like the knights of olde, TV and Internet groups are jousting over what to do with the so-called “white spaces” which are the unused radio waves in the VHF and UHF band of television transmission. On this issue at least, Microsoft, Google, HP, and Intel are all on the same side. They say they can use the white space to deliver high speed wireless broadband internet access, with speeds anywhere from 10Mbytes to 50 and 100 Mbytes, which is much powerful than the Wi-Fi spectrum. On the other side are all the major networks and the National Association of Broadcasters. They say that the use of the white spaces in the signals will interfere with television broadcasts if unlicensed devices operate in the same spectrum. Both sides have formed groups with cutesy, catchy names. The broadcasters have formed The Association for Maximum Service Television while the Internet groups have formed the Wireless Innovation Alliance. The Federal Communications Commission Office of Engineering and Technology submitted a report a year ago that said the devices did not reliably detect the presence of television transmission and so therefore could not be relied upon. But this month the same office issued another report that “tentatively concludes… that… AWS-3 devices could operate at a power level of up to 23 dBm/MHz equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) and with out-of-band emissions (OOBE) attenuated… without a significant risk of harmful interference.” Don’t you love it when I talk like this? It just goes to show you the level of technical detail that goes into these arguments. It may sound esoteric, but it isn’t. This is going to be the next ‘net neutrality’ debate that you will be hearing more and more about.

Side Note: Another group that you may never have heard of, but that directly affects you (at least it does, if you listen to Internet Radio), is SoundExchange. It collects the fees for the use of the different recording labels’ music. The group had applied to the federal Copyright Royalty Board to set royalty fees at a rate that many Internet radio operations said would put them out of business. Now, Congress has stepped in, passing the Webcaster Settlement Act to allow radio webcasters to negotiate lower royalty fee.

OUTSOURCING THE NEWS: The head of a major American newspaper group, who is also chairman of the Associated Press, says newspaper publishers should look at outsourcing news, possibly overseas. The CEO of Media News Group which publishes 52 newspapers says most of the preproduction work for its newspapers in California is already done in India, but now he says the group is looking at creating one “media desk” for all its newspapers and even possibly locating it “offshore.” As reported in USA Today, CEO Dean Singleton who also chairs the A.P. says no final decision has been made about outsourcing editorial functions, but they were looking at consolidating all editing and design. Regular readers of MfM will remember that an online news operation in California, pasadenanow.com, has outsourced its news, by having people in India write stories based on webcasts of city council meetings and information provided by ‘citizen volunteers.’ The proposal is obviously a response to the troubled economic times, which the former executive editor of The Washington Post says could mean local television news will disappear as fast, or faster, than local newspapers. Talking to the Cronkite News Service, former editor Len Downie Jr. says newspapers may win out on the rapidly growing Web with their growing use of video for the simple reason that newspapers can out-gun local television. For example, the Post has around 100 reporters covering the Washington area while the largest TV station in the market has, at most, a dozen reporters. He says that while newspapers are being squeezed, local television is being squeezed even more.

HOW BAD ARE J-SCHOOLS? Pretty bad if you believe the scoring on media website TVSpy.com. Its offspring newsletter, Shoptalk, ran an article listing the top ten schools based on a poll of its readers. They were: Columbia, Northwestern, UNC-Chapel Hill, Missouri, Syracuse, Indiana, California, Illinois, Maryland (Philip Merrill College), Ohio. Curious I went to the site to see the actual numbers. On a scale of 0 to 100, the top ranked school, Columbia, got a whopping 12. Yes, 12. Number 2, Northwestern, got a 6. Even more interesting, of the 16 schools listed, only four got positive grades; the other 12 were in the negative column. And I thought I was a tough grader! A sampling of others: Syracuse (-1), UNC and the Cronkite School at Arizona (-4), Ohio (-7), California (-8). The lowest scores: Montana (-37), Nevada (-38), and lowest scorer, Michigan (-43), which may be some consolation to football rival Michigan (-15). It’s not much consolation to us at the Grady College/ University of Georgia that football rival Florida also was in the negative column (-18), since we weren’t even on the list. I should note the grades vary daily as people vote, but the overwhelming theme remains the same – three quarters of the schools got negative grades. So, the obvious question is – why. And the reader with the best answer to that question will get a free subscription to Message from Michael. Oh, never mind, it’s already free.

COCKTAIL CHATTER. The creator of Harry Potter and the one-time single mother on welfare, J.K. Rowling, is the best paid author in the world with a ‘jaw-dropping’ $300 Million, according to Forbes magazine. The money drops dramatically for second place winner James Patterson but still isn’t too shabby at $50 Million. The ‘king of horror’ Stephen King came in third with $45 Million, followed by the master of the political thriller, Tom Clancy ($35 Million) and the doyenne of romance novels, Danielle Steel ($30 Million.) The rest of the top ten list includes John Grisham and Dean Koontz (both tied at $25 Million) followed by -- as Forbes puts it, thanks to a little Oprah magic -- Ken Follett ($20 Million), Janet Evanovich ($17 Million) and Nicholas Sparks ($16 Million). The winner of this year’s Writer’s Digest Best Writer’s Website is claudialuiz.com, so named of course for its creator, Claudia Luiz, a writer, psychoanalyst, and mother of two who does a column for her hometown newspaper in Norwood, Massachusetts. And as long as I’m on a writing kick, a reminder that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which you have one month to write a complete novel, kicks off November 1st.

Apropos of nothing in particular, except that I found it interesting… the Central Intelligence Agency took out a full-page ad in the New York Times magazine. In a special advertising section on diversity, the agency advertises for people who can “make a world of difference” working for the national clandestine service.

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