Have you ever had the nagging sense that there’s something not quite right with the adulation that follows Malcolm Gladwell – the author of Tipping Point? But you couldn’t quite put your finger on it? We’re here to help, dear reader.

Gladwell gave two vanity “performances” in the West End – prompting fevered adulation from the posh papers – the most amazing being this Guardian editorial, titled In Praise of Malcolm Gladwell.

It appears that we have a paradox here. A substantial subclass of white collar “knowledge workers” hails this successful nonfiction author as fantastically intelligent and full of insight – and yet he causes an outbreak of infantalisation. He’s better known for his Afro than any big idea, or bold conclusion – and his insights have all the depth and originality of Readers Digest or a Hallmark greeting card. That’s pretty odd.

So what’s really going on here? Who is Malcolm Gladwell? What’s he really saying? Who are these people who lap it all up? And what is it that he’s saying that hold so much appeal?

Let’s start with the first two first.

The Master at Work

Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it’s reassuringly predictable.
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bullient lawyer Chris Castle has a unique perspective on the Music Wars. A former Sony and A&M executive who “switched sides” to Silicon Valley, then found himself defending the original Napster, which he called one of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century. His clients range from technology companies to major recording artists.

So to introduce the first of some regular specials from Chris, here are his views on the music business’ biggest errors – and whether there’s any cause for optimism. He’s never dull, it’s mostly Chris in his own words…

Read more at The Register.

“The end came quickly,” as authors of morbid weepies like to say. On Monday WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson effectively admitted game over for his “Long Tail”, the idea he’s been dragging so lucratively around the conference circuit for the past four years. In as many words, he downgraded it from “the future of business” to something that’s, er, not very helpful for your business at all.

“I’ll end by conceding a point: It’s hard to make money in the Tail,” Anderson wrote. “The revenues are disproportionately in the Head. Perhaps that will never change.”

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Put yourself in these hypothetical shoes for a moment. My goal is to make as much money as possible by doing as little work as possible. I have no creative talent except for generating and recycling marketing buzzwords. I have no technical knowledge or ability – but I can get my head around a Twitter feed. It doesn’t sound promising, but you’ll want in, I promise.

Now let’s imagine a business that can achieve our goals.

The natural place to start this business is on the internet – where one can harness the labour of millions of people and pay them sod all for their work. Under the smokescreen of “collective intelligence” or harnessing “the wisdom of the crowd”, we can keep our supply costs at zero. And if we can keep reminding these rubes that “power lies at the edge of the network” or “in the Long Tail”, they’ll produce lots of stuff for us for nothing, without complaining.

That’s the supply side sorted out. However, we need to attract an audience.

We know that the traditional vices – gambling and porn – will drive substantial traffic to our service. But gambling has regulatory issues – and porn takes us away from the mainstream. That leaves music – the stuff of life, and proven crowd-puller. So let’s make music the main feature of our service.

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Australians could face ‘pay as you dump’ charges as part of a Toilet Tax. It’s all in the name of “sustainability” – and part of a growing eco-movement to replace flushing conveniences with smelly and unhealthy inconvenience.

Water use experts Mike Young and Jim McColl, of Adelaide University and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, respectively, presented new proposals to South Australia state parliament last week. The two renewed their call to create a market in sewerage, with the pricing element controlling scarcity. Such ideas aren’t new, but they’ve been given a boost in recent years by a parallel movement.

Sanitation saves lives, but UN-funded quangos which were once dedicated to improving human health now have mixed priorities. Take this example from the “Sustainable Sanitation Alliance”:

“In order to be sustainable, a sanitation system has to be not only economically viable, socially acceptable, and technically and institutionally appropriate, it should also protect the environment and the natural resources.”

The quango concludes, somewhat ruefully, that “there is probably no system which is absolutely sustainable”.

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The government’s climate minister in the House of Lords dropped a clanger on Monday evening, when he claimed that the polar ice caps were melting at a record rate.

“It is indisputable that polar ice caps are melting – we can see that with our own eyes,” Lord Hunt, Minister of State of the Department of Energy, told the house. Hunt described himself as a climate “agnostic” – but he was swiftly corrected by Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Chancellor.

“My Lords, that is not true of the past year; The noble Lord’s predecessors were seriously misinformed by his officials, and I suspect that he will be too,” Lawson replied. Twisting the knife he continued: “That is a real problem for him, and I feel for him.

“The fact is that in the Antarctic, where most of the ice is, the ice is thickening and has been for some time. In the Arctic this year there has been a greater extension of ice than ever before.”

The Lords were debating the Climate Change Bill once again – which the Commons voted through on an unusually snowy October evening recently. That Bill was passed by our elected representatives by 463 votes to 3. Would the unelected upper chamber – which has a reputation for rejecting and amendment hasty legislation – be show greater scrutiny?

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Unlicensed music distributor Baidu has admitted taking money from unlicensed medical companies.

Baidu dominates the search business in China, the bulk of its revenue coming from pay-for-placement in its search pages, which it calls “Page Rank Bid”. The company says it will now stop the practice, which accounts for 10 to 15 per cent of its revenue by its own estimates.

Investment bank Piper Jaffrey, a stock Booster for the NASDAQ-quoted company, puts the figure much lower, at 3 per cent of revenue. Baidu made the announcement after a TV investigation in China.

Much of Baidu’s appeal stems from its role as an enabler for the flow of free music, largely unlicensed. The company admits as much in its SEC filings, explaining that “a significant portion of our traffic is generated by users of our MP3 search service”.

As we revealed in September, a Baidu user can be almost guaranteed to find free music downloads. A mysterious network of domains ensures the music keeps flowing – despite takedown requests.

The international music group IFPI filed suit in February and a hearing took place last month. A verdict is expected by the end of the year.

Baidu’s investors include Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Fidelity and Goldman Sachs.

Here’s a conundrum. Top Media People want to come out of the shadows and get “closer to their listeners” – it’s what the Web 2.0 people urge them to do. BBC people in particular are obsessed with being seen to be bossy or “out-of-touch” – especially since three out of four license payers have a gripe with the corporation.

But the more of themselves media people reveal, the more the public sees them as clueless, self-referential and narcissistic bunch so many of them are. And the more time the BBC spends on peripheral New Media wankery, the more people wonder why they’re paying a license fee. You’d need a heart of silicon not to enjoy their agony. The poor souls.

At Monday’s “Radio At The Edge” forum at Westminster a panel of three: presenter Iain Lee, a Nathan Barley-type from Channel 4 called Dan Heft, and the BBC’s website’s tech blogger Rory Cellan Jones – better known as ‘Uncle Bryn’ in the hit comedy show Gavin and Stacey – all came to praise the glory of Twittering, Googling 24×7, and user generated content.

The audience was packed with BBC New Media employees – masters of JavaScript, and people who can say “social media” without blushing. So it all promised to be a swoon – with ritual noises of self-abasement from the broadcasters.

But what spoiled this was the panel’s chair, Fi Glover, who could barely contain her sarcasm or her scorn for the “Emperor’s New Clothes”, as she called it a few times.

Uncle Bryn took to the stage and spent the first minute taking pictures of the other panelists – and the audience – using his Blackberry. Asked what he was doing, he said he was trying to Twitter live that he was Twittering live from a panel about Twitter.

Over to Dan Heft, who reminded us that “you leave a trail of digital content out there”, but Bryn’s own trail had come to a halt – he couldn’t get his Twitter feed to work.

“I haven’t done any work – I’ve been blogging,” Bryn admitted, adding that he’d been “doing a helluva lot of Twittering”, too.

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A dozen London boroughs have implemented a “risk assessment” policy for live music that permits the police to ban any live music if they fail to receive personal details from the performers 14 days in advance. The demand explicitly singles out performances and musical styles favoured by the black community: garage and R&B, and MCs and DJs.

However all musical performances – from one man playing a guitar on up – are subject to the demands once implemented by the council. And the threat is serious: failure to comply “may jeopardise future events by the promoter or the venue”.

UK Music chief Feargal Sharkey told a House of Commons select committee that the policy had already been used to pull the plug on an afternoon charity concert of school bands in a public park organised by a local councillor.

“No alcohol would be sold, tickets were limited to three maximum, and the councillor offered to supply eight registered doormen. Police objected on the grounds that the names, addresses and dates of birth of the young performer could not be provided,” said Sharkey, speaking to the Department of Culture Media and Sport’s hearing on venue licensing today.

“Live music is now a threat to the prevention of terrorism”, he concluded.
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Parliament may need to step in with new legislation, to save the digital radio fail whale OFCOM admitted today.

OFCOM’s Peter Davies made the comments in front of a critical audience at the Radio Academy’s Radio At The Edge conference today. Davies was put on the spot by moderator James Ashton. After years of trying to put a brave face on DAB, the OFCOM man all but admitted the British radio industry now needed drastic action.

“Yes, it will require legislation,” he said, in order to restructure the industry, and lower costs, so that commercial operators could survive.

Davies acknowledged he’d have no choice if the commercial operators all decided to revolt en masse.

OFCOM effectively forces national operators onto DAB by making it a mandatory condition of a new 12 year analog license. But DAB is nothing but a millstone – costing about 10 times as much as analog to broadcast, and with very few listeners. If all the commercial operators handed in their DAB licenses back to OFCOM at once, what would the regulator do? Davies said that may be the cue for action. But he did warn that legislation took a year to pass through Parliament, so even if the broadcasters revolted tomorrow, it would be 2010 before

Asked if Britain hadn’t leapt into digital radio too early – the rest of the world is introducing more advanced and efficient standards – Davies said it didn’t really matter, as radios using a common profile would be technology-neutral. Which is too bad for those of us with plain old DAB.

So how low is DAB listenership?

One radio exec, Daniel Nathan of Brighton-based Juice, even went as far as suggesting that listenership was so low on the new digital stations, it might as well not go out over broadcast radio at all. Nathan pointed out that most get around 10,000 to 15,000 per half hour, and big hitters like BBC Radio 6 barely topped 50,000, with peaks of 61,000 on Saturday mornings.

“We might as well move them to IP,” he pointed out.

“Five years ago DAB looked like the future – but the world has moved on,” he said.

That was one one of the nicer things said about digital radio yesterday at yesterday’s Academy event.

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