Casting around for an example of the simple life to use in an Arab-bashing column, veteran columnist and editor Alexander Chancellor alighted on what he must have thought was the perfect foil to the free-spending Saudis.

It appeared right there in front of him, on his PC, nestling between some coloured balls.

Unlike Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, wrote Chancellor on Saturday, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin “don’t have private jets, Rolls-Royces, yachts or any of the other pointless accoutrements of the super-rich”.

“Page and Brin each own nothing more flashy than a modest Toyota Prius, the environmentally virtuous hybrid car,” he explained, adding:

“Like the other princes of Silicon Valley, they don’t show off. They are eager to appear unpretentious and affect to like simple things. Theirs is a world of jeans, sneakers, Starbucks, and girls-next-door.”

Chancellor didn’t mention high school bops, the Everly Brothers or bobbysox, but it was clear he’d fallen asleep by his PC, dreaming of some forgotten 1950s film (or girl).

Then the blue ball bumped into red ball, and reality returned.
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Reading has never been cheaper, and for most of us, requires no additional machinery – only the source material itself. So why do we need to pay the online retailer Amazon.com $399 to read books?
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In a victory for Register readers, MPs have rejected Ofcom’s proposal for a publicly-funded new media quango.

The Commons’ select committee for Culture, Media and Sport rejects the idea that the creation of a “Public Service Publisher” gatekeeper would help the market.

The report is here, while the Ofcomwatch blog broke the news here. The PSP would have cost taxpayers £300m a year, with the cash going to production houses to create interactive Web 2.0-style concepts.

Readers savaged the idea during Ofcom’s consultation process. One submission to OFCOM urged:

“As a self-actualising media node, I welcome this redistribution of government funds from provincial luddites to new media ‘creative’ Sohoites… Ed Richards’s initiative ‘gets’ new media on so many levels. Let’s flashmob this bitch up to escape velocity.”

(This, and other responses are on the Ofcom site.)

MPs go beyond saying that there’s no sign of market failure, which is a precondition for the regulator to intervene. The committee concludes that the new quango would distort the market. The committee writes:

“Geoff Metzger, managing director of the History Channel, perhaps summed it up best when he said that the public service publisher was a ‘cure with no known disease’.”

The “Public Service Publisher” is a quintessentially New Labour backscratching exercise, backed by friends of Ofcom chief Ed Richards, who calls it his “personal crusade”.

The quango would be “a new media answer to a new media question”, an Ofcom spokesman told us back in March.

Unfortunately, the hastily-scribbled concepts looked less like the future of media, and more like Look Around You updated with Web 2.0 buzzwords.

The regulator gave the job of studying the idea to executives at two media companies Andrew Chitty of Illumina Digital, and Anthony Lilley of Magic Lantern Productions, a tiny TV production house. The pair recommended it start life with a budget of £100m a year, although this may need to rise.

So Ofcom’s quango looks dead – but new media luvvies are getting the taste for hand-outs. Lilley continues to campaign for new media subsidies (aka “give me the money”) in his self-aggrandising Grauniad column, for example here. Only he calls them “investments”.

Don’t expect him to stop.

On Wednesday, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg boasted that the “next 100 years” of advertising began here.

On the face of it, it looked like Web 2.0 had found its “Long Boom” moment. Facebook has yet to turn a profit, so Zuckerberg hardly seems in a position to advise other people how to make money – let alone place himself in a pantheon of historic business greats. In Web 2.0-land, merely “being there” is a substitute for having “made it”.

But then Zuckerberg is no stranger to bluster. This, notoriously, was the 22 year-old who had “I’m CEO…bitch” on his business card.

Behind the calculated bluster were a collection of ideas perhaps equally designed to distract the attention (no pun intended).

Of the three ideas Zuckerberg outlined, one in particular provoked horror and ridicule. It was to turn Facebook users, accustomed to its clean and spare UI, into human billboards. Advertisers could build presences in Facebook – at the moment, you must be a person – giving users the opportunity to “affiliate” with them.

“Users can become a fan of a business and can share information about that business with their friends and act as a trusted referral,” is how the company described it.

“What do the users get in return?” asked the IT commentator Nick Carr. “An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with.”

But Nick is forgetting that this cuts both ways – it isn’t a static picture at all.
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“They’re coming to take me away – ha haa!” – Napoleon XIV

The Patient

A student, Robert Soave writing in The Michigan, the student paper at the University of Michigan.

Clinical Symptoms

The patient is fearful:

“The idea that information can be owned is quite terrifying”

He also fears a loss of identity. Once something is digitally encoded, all rights vanish, according the patient.

“How can one possibly lay claim to information?”

Soave says that creator’s rights are a philosophical impossibility.

“Critics might argue that musicians should be able to own their music because they created it and you should own anything that you create by default.

“Only with the government’s random mandates could anyone actually lay claim to something as abstract as information that is sent over the Internet.”

Soave also displays paranoid fantasies common to the digital utopian:

“Today, the government defends companies that claim to own music. Tomorrow, it may defend people who claim to have invented new feelings and emotions.”

“Such abstract claims of ownership may seem ridiculous, but the government has already stretched copyright laws past any definable form by criminalizing file sharing over the Internet.”

Prognosis

Not good.

(Thanks to Dean Kay for the tip.)

Radiohead last month let punters “set the price” for the digital download of their new album It’s Raining In Rainbows, which is coming out on CD shortly. Since people could download it for free – how much did they really pay?

Estimates to date have relied on self-selecting opinion poll data. This one, ComScore reminds us, is very different [see Update, below]. ComScore based its survey on software monitoring user’s behaviour (with their consent) – making it much more accurate than earlier polls.

In this survey, almost two-thirds of downloaders paid nothing for the album, and only 38 per cent made a contribution at all. However, the results show up an interesting quirk.

Overall, the band grossed about a quid per download, reckons ComScore. People who paid contributed an average of $6.00 (£2.89) – but once freeloaders were included, that falls to just $2.26, or £1.09 per album. Either way, you can’t build much of a business off a quid an album – that much we already knew (although digital utopians spend much of the time in denial about this).

Now here’s the quirk.

From the US, the average contribution was $8.05, but outside the US it was $4.64. That’s quite a disparity.

Since Radiohead made the download legally available for free, and since a consumer acts rationally to find the lowest price possible, one can surmise that US Radiohead fans are 73 per cent more irrational than Radiohead fans outside the United States.

The takeaway point from this will trouble anyone selling sound recordings, whether they’re a basement indie or an established label – it’s the fact that a top band with a worldwide fanbase which has been waiting four years for a new release, can only expect a quid from each LP in a voluntary model.

Comscore quotes independent A&R man Mike Laskow of Taxi:

“Radiohead has been bankrolled by their former label for the last 15 years. They’ve built a fanbase in the millions with their label, and now they’re able to cash in on that fan base with none of the income or profit going to the label this time around.”

(That’s not strictly true – Radiohead actually are releasing a physical CD of the album using an old school record company, and the low bitrate MP3 preview is just a marketing gimmick.)

“At some point in the not too distant future, the music industry will run out of artists who have had major label support in helping them build a huge fan base. The question is: how will new artists be able to use this model in the future if they haven’t built a fanbase in the millions in the years leading up to the release of their album under the pay what you’d like model?”

The instant response is that you use the internet to scale up to millions. But like so many utopian answers, the case for that at best is “not proven”.

We’ll know the answer once an artist has been able to build up and sustain a worldwide fanbase in the millions over the course of a few years – without major label support, and purely from sales of digital music. But we might be waiting for that for a very long time.

Clever bands who want a worldwide audience jump onto a major label. Now you know why. ®

ComScore writes:

“Our study was not based on a poll at all, but rather on the actual observed behavior of our panel of Internet users. In other words, we saw exactly what they paid for the album so there is no potential for survey response bias. Our total worldwide panel has 2 million consumers, and we observed a few hundred transactions at the Radiohead site. Based on the size of the sample, the margin of error would be pretty small.”

Nokia’s Music Store went live last week – but look in vain for anything by Led Zepp, John Coltrane, or Smokey Robinson. That’s because Warner Music Group (WMG) is refusing to license its catalogues to the phone giant, in protest at its Web 2.0 file swapping site, Mosh.

WMG says Mosh is a hotbed of copyright infringement. Nokia has responded by saying it employs humans round the clock, as well as using Audible Magic software to weed out unlicensed content. Warner sources have told Billboard that the two sides are far from a deal, and that litigation is a possibility.

Nokia launched the fully buzzword-compliant “social media” site back in August, we reported here, prompting reader Pascal Monett to hail it “a Nokia-centric happy slapping database”. In June, even before the public “beta” launch, we’d received emails pointing out cracked applications were being freely traded.

But unlicensed music isn’t really in evidence; it’s buried beneath mountains of user-generated crud. Much more in keeping with the tone of the site were gems such as “conservative party i love you” and “you-fat-bastard.mp3″: material at the vanguard of the User Generated Content revolution.

No surprise there, then.

More puzzling is the question – what on earth was Nokia thinking when it launched the file-sharing site?

It looks like another Dad-at-the-Disco attempt from a company so desperate to “get” the internet, it leaves common sense behind. Mosh would be a disaster even if it was never tainted by copyright infringing material.

Nokia has long been regarded as a soft touch by California technology evangelists and consultants. Now it has created a feedback loop for itself by only listening to buzzword-spouting bloggers.

Having to choose between Motown and “you-fat-bastard.mp3″ is just the sort of reality check Nokia needs. Perhaps it can bring the space cadet tendency at Nokia back down to Earth.