The Bewilderness

Will curation spawn a killer app?

What does 2010 hold for the web, and us, its users? This is the question that launches a thousand articles, one of which I have read.

The first trend that strikes a chord with me is the search for immediacy or real-time exposure. This stems from the development of mobile connections and social networking. But immediacy cannot be divorced from curation. Immediacy, augmented reality and changes in privacy are all linked to that pivotal issue:

In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization.

In 2008, the first and most obvious to this overload was to use one's existing social networks (friends, fellow professionals) as filters. But we should view these as an amateur dawn for the phenomenon known as curation:

Meanwhile, Google's Social Search experiment is investigating whether Web searching is improved by using information gleaned from your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and the rest. Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption, from Web links to movies, books and TV shows.

Professional "curation" has its place, too: Who better to direct our scarce attention than experts in their fields? I explored this possibility in a CNN article last month titled "Twitter lists and real-time journalism" .

Curation is the key to the development of the internet. Curators, in whatever form, will act as gatekeepers to information. Like earlier incarnations, there will be aggregators, different forms and a race for status.

The key point here, will the need for curation spawn a killer app?

Quote of the day

'For politicians, passing laws is like passing water', said Narayan. 'It all ends down the drain.'

Rohinton Mistry, 'A Fine Balance'

Labour buried justice

Abdelhaset Al-Megrahi was a millionaire, released under mysterious conditions of mortality, to the lasting shame of the Scottish Parliament. It now appears that he is no longer in hospital, a puzzle given his mortal prognosis. He has now survived longer than the diagnosed two months, imploding the claims of clemency and mercy.

Yet, Gary McKinnon will be deported to the United States despite his mental condition and the prognosis that he is a suicide risk, under a despised extradition treaty.

What justice could my country invoke if Al-Megrahi lived in Libyan luxury and David McKinnon took his own life far away from kith and kin?

Catch-2010: Labour's monetary policy staggers to crisis

The Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England declined to confirm that its quantitative easing programme would end in February or stay at the limit of two hundred billion pounds. Pundits could only confirm that there were doubts over the spread of assets bought: that would be Labour's entire deficit.

Our entire monetary policy is now in a Catch-22, its output monopolised by governmental capture, its effects on the economy crowded out by Labour's public spending splurge. Without radical differences on saving and lending, could this 'crowding out' have prolonged our recession, expropriating valuable resources that may have produced some growth during this bear market rally? There is a poetic irony in this.

Two conclusions: first, that every institution set up by Labour has been suborned to their electoral need (control over interest rates has been abandoned for the printing of money); secondly, that this monetary system is vulnerable to external events, notably a rise in inflation, and potential change.

2010 will be a year to remember.

The Chilcot Committee favours the Labour establishment

Brown will not give evidence to the Chilcot Committee until after the general election. This is undertaken on the following grounds:

In a statement, the inquiry said: “Sir John Chilcot stated on December 17 that the committee is ’determined to remain firmly outside party politics’ and that ’the Inquiry should not be used as a political platform for political advantage’.

“For this reason, the committee has decided to wait until after the election to hear from those ministers who are currently serving in the roles about which the committee wishes to question them.

“The committee believes that only after the general election can these ministers give their evidence fully without the hearings being used as a platform for political advantage.”

Gordon Brown, David Miliband and Douglas Alexander, all serving ministers, have been recused until after the summer. Since the Iraq war is not an event that can bring advantage to the Labour party, this neutral statement already imparts a bias: that giving evidence would bring public embarrassment to serving Ministers.

More peculiar is the reason for not undertaking the interviews: that the evidence could be used as a “platform for political advantage”. It is not the case, for Sir John Chilcot, that the evidence will materially disadvantage or handicap the committee in undertaking its work. Therefore, the ministers have been recused to avoid politicisation from opposition parties. This could be construed as a dishonourable slur.

William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, complained that delaying ministerial evidence gave the impression of favouring the Government.

"The public will rightly ask why it is that numerous officials have given evidence to the Inquiry about their role in carrying out the Government’s policy on Iraq, but not a single Minister has had to face questioning," said Mr Hague.

“It is becoming clearer and clearer why Gordon Brown delayed setting up the Inquiry for so long after it should have begun its work. His intention throughout has been to ensure that the Inquiry won’t report until after the coming General Election. Now we have the added effect of Ministers not having to give evidence at all before the election. Gordon Brown's efforts to delay the inquiry have been the very opposite of open and accountable government.”

Chilcot has made no effort to appear truly impartial and has indicated that bias towards Labour formed part of this judgement. One wonders of this was a coded rebuke to serving Labour ministers who refused to appear or a willingness to place government comfort over public transparency.

Brown welcomes us to the debtors' prison

If we were to visualise individual bankrupts, we would want them to pay back the money spent for the rest of their days with suitable burdens on their aspiration. A price for failed entrepreneurial ventures must be paid. Surely, the penalty for immoral forms of financial irresponsibility, as opposed to setting up your own business, should be higher. Moral hazard must be avoided.

Therefore, the political class must pay a price for the financial irresponsibility they have taken. The 'get out of jail free' card that is quantitative easing must halt some months before the general election. Only then will Labour face the consequences of their policies. The continuation of the quantitative easing programme beyond February is tantamount to a financial subsidy for the present government by the Bank of England. The tap must be stopped, and Labour, as the representatives of Britain, must come face to face with its creditors.

The reaction of gilts buyers is clear:

Julian Callow, Europe economist at Barclays Capital, said Britain is nearing the eye of the storm as the Bank of England starts to unwind quantitative easing.

“The Bank has bought more gilts over the last nine months than the Government has issued. It has magically eradicated the cost of financing the deficits, but this is going twist dramatically the other way in early 2010. Markets know this. They are demanding a risk premium on sterling.”

Neither Labour or the Conservatives seem to have the political will to curb public spending and reduce the power of the state. Fine, then let the markets do their work. Let the crisis begin and end with national bankruptcy and a brick wall.

A debtors prison has both positive and negative connotations. But, a notion of natural justice, demands that Brown is in office to face the consequences. That Labour fails and falls in the storm, their final recklessness punished.

Texts per day will soon exceed grains of sand

In the US text messages exceeded 4 billion per day during 2009, the average call length fell and the smartphone continued its fast crawl to the net enabled future.

I remember a time when Europe had a 'comparative advantage' in mobile phones. That didn't last long.

Is money a growth industry?

Professor Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics is warning that monetary indicators do not tell us a good story.

Reconstructed data shows that M3 shrank at an annual rate of 7.2pc in the three months to November. Bank loans have fallen from $7.1 trillion (£4.4 trillion) to $6.75 trillion since the end of May.

In the eurozone, M3 has fallen slightly since February. Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said credit contraction on both sides of the Atlantic has been the steepest since the 1930s, risking a slide into deflation next year.

Banks are tightening credit for two reasons: losses from the crisis, and tougher capital adequacy rules imposed by regulators. Mr Congdon said it is bizarre that the European Central Bank (ECB) seems unwilling to take steps to prevent a monetary implosion in these circumstances.

Borrowers continue to pay down debt, showing better sense than their governments.

Gordon finally enters the heart of Europe

Gordon Brown found the triumphs and constraints of Copenhagen frustrating. Denied an opportunity to spin his saviour routine, he has lamented and, in true tranzi fashion, called for reform as only he knows how:

A new global body dedicated to environmental stewardship is needed to prevent a repeat of the deadlock which undermined the Copenhagen climate change summit, Gordon Brown will say tomorrow.

The UN’s consensual method of negotiation, which requires all 192 countries to reach agreement, needs to be reformed to ensure that the will of the majority prevails, he feels.

Read that again, the EU writ large across the globe! No matter whether you were democratic and liberal or nasty and authoritarian, your vote would count the same and override any form of national sovereignty, in the name of the environment.

The first question that arises on this ill-thought proposal was Brown raising a balloon for himself in a post-electoral role. Secondly, the sanctions required would kill it. But do we need a Prime Minister whose unrealistic response to defeat is to roll out some dream puff and ride roughshod over those who disagree. Surely a high mark for Labour at the heart of Europe!

UPDATE: I should have noted that Brown has nade a radical break with Un governance in his comments. Is this a first?

The debt rack tightens another notch

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (AEP) is one of the more discussed and read columnists on the Telegraph, profiting from that strange axis of finance and geopolitics that has emerged in recent years. Some thoughts on that emergence could include the decrease in thought or quality amongst public commentators or the withdrawal of foreign policy debate from popular terms. Dependent upon subscription, financial pundits will use a comprehensible discourse.

AEP's latest guide is on the proposed re-emergence of terrorism in southern Europe. This is a self-fulfilling reference as he was quick to propose political unrest following the credit crunch. We are not quite there yet.

I do not know if this can be called a 'Mediterranean triangle' of anarchist violence, as this is a diverse set of violent responses to particular governments. Why is it worse now than the late 90s? Will these countries break down?

The EMU system has condemned Club Med to structural depression, with no way out. The logical – yet politically absurd – response of German Chancellor Angela Merkel is to talk of overriding national democracies in order to save the euro. "The question arises over what authority Europe has to tell national parliaments what to do, in order to avoid damage to Europe itself? National parliaments don't like to be dictated to about such things, but we need to address the problem," she said.

Sovereignty and democracy will triumph eventually, though Merkel must be unwilling to fleece German taxpayers to salvage these countries. The wheel is getting tighter.