The Wall Street Journal asks who’s responsible for the fall in price of crude oil over the past few days: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/08/12/falling-oil-whodunnit/

Thomas Friedman in the NYT (clearly just back from strawberry picking in the Nordics) asks is it better for oil to remain high: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10friedman1.html?em

Tom Raftery has been saying for months that oil is better off over $200 per barrel: http://greenmonk.net/the-sooner-oil-hits-200-per-barrel-the-better/

And back to the WSJ which claims at off-shore drilling is really a complete non-issue despite the above: http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/08/12/rigged-why-does-offshore-drilling-dominate-the-debate/

Here’s a talk made for us at TrashBlanc.com. On Thursday 31st July the ICA poses the question of why it’s so hard to ship fresh English lettuce into E1.

The blurb:

Leila McAlister of Leila’s Shop will pose questions about why, from her position in central London, E1, it is so complicated to stock certain ‘normal’ things, such as fresh lettuce from England. James Alwyn of Chi London, a company that promotes commercial opportunities to reduce carbon emissions, will talk logistics of transporting and the artist Caitlin Elster will discuss materials and packaging, addressing the normalisation of salad bags.

Lettuce will be available on the night.

Tony Juniper, the director of Friends of the Earth is stepping down this year. He writes at length in the Guardian about the issues he’s faced over the past 30 years and those still in front of us. This final analysis stands out:

In order to solve global problems, we need a different kind of
globalisation, based on different global networks, global agreements,
and global level playing fields. This, in turn, suggests that western
environmental bodies should put far more of their resources into
building up their partner organisations in other countries, especially
those in the developing world. In fast-growing emerging economies in
particular, it is necessary to urgently create a new politics that sees
development and environment as complementary and overlapping - rather
than competing - agendas.

A different emphasis will need to be
built into organisations’ campaign strategies. Campaigners should seek
common cause with human rights activists and labour unions, as well as
economic actors. Conservation groups need to broaden their horizons to
embrace questions of consumption and the economy. Development groups
must deepen their ecological analysis, not least because efforts to end
poverty are being massively undermined by environmental change.

What Tony doesn’t mention is the role of networked media in global conservation and environmentalism. New media giants like Google and Facebook have the oppertunity to take a huge leadership role in this space and drive change faster than any government could. And what’s more, they don’t even have to do the hard work themselves, they can facillitate the rest of us.

David Kaplan at PaidContent.org looks at a skeptical report on the ability of magazines to profitably transition to digital. Nothing particularly surprising, but it is incredible to think of just how few magazines have moved successfully to the web. Magazines publishers employ a ton of smart, creative people. Why can’t they find a way to publish successfully online?

FACT! £20bn of wasted food goes down the swanee every 365 days in the UK. On wasted food. That’s according to this three month old report in the Independent.
There’s lots wrong with food in Britain right now, from battery operated chicken to Gordon Ramsey’s utterly inconceivable ubiquity. But surely none of these issues come close to the sheer scale of the waste mountain we’re creating. Forget late night eating. It’s time for Trash Blanc to live up to it’s name, get amongst the garbage and see what sort of madness is going on in the Great British food industry.

That’s 30,000,000 people. Nearly half the population of the UK. Not exactly a few poor farmers kicked off their land by unthinking palm growers.

Earth2Tech reported this yesterday. The number is staggering. And further on in piece they highlight another heinous issue related to biofuels that is going largely unreported. The CO2 impact of the palm oil plantations.

The report goes beyond the humanitarian consequences and puts numbers to the environmental boondoggle that is the current biofuel economy. Oxfam estimates that land-use changes largely from the palm oil plantations that have popped up around the world’s equator, are emitting a huge amount of CO2, and it will take 46 years of projected 2020-level biofuel use to make up a “carbon debt.”

So it’s time to tell UK transport minister, Opus Dei practitioner and ardent biofules supporter, Ruth Kelly, exactly what you think of the UK’s continued support of this energy source. Information on how to do this is here.

There’s always been new media. McLuhan traced the rise and fall of the Roman Empire to shifts in adoption, usage and availability of papyrus. Gutenberg, to paraphrase David Cameron, was the future once. So simply hailing or blaming new media for your particular organization’s respective good or bad fortunes is a little lazy.

I mention this in relation to the ever continuing debate over the death of news journalism and the role of bloggers in the media. I’m not particularly interested right now in what future news rooms will look like, whether they’ll be staffed by editors, journalists, bloggers or algorithms. What I am interested in is what makes this blog infused new media “new”. It seems to me it’s the conversation. Yes I’ve said this before in relation to broadcasting, but lets look at it again in the context of the written word.

Greenslade mentions this today.

I say this as a preliminary to explaining why journalists, especially print veterans like me, are so suspicious of bloggers. We have spent our lives dominating conversations. No, that’s wrong of course. We did not converse at all. We lectured. We provided the information that people feasted on in order to hold their own conversations.

The King James Bible wasn’t meant as a conversation starter, it was a diktat on how to live your life. When the Sun asked the last remaining person in Britain to “turn off the lights if Kinnock and Labour won the ‘92 election it was telling its readers exactly what to do, not inviting them around for a considered debate on the single currency.

Further on, Greenslade really nails the crux of what I’m getting to here.

I think journalists are failing to grasp that truth. Blogging, though democratic in spirit, does threaten the established order of journalism. I was inspired to write this after reading a blog posting by Adam Tinworth (courtesy of a tip from Kristine Lowe. Many thanks). Tinworth writes: “Most media people don’t realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process… They certainly don’t think of it as a conversation.”

Yep, it’s the conversation. Never before has it been possible for all range of people to have global conversations they way they are now. That scares much of the news media. It shouldn’t. Because never before has it been possible for the news media to facilitate and host conversations at a global, 24/7 level. We should be enthused and excited by these possibilities.

It’s what Ballmer was getting at when he referred to IP advantages over TV. And if Steve Ballmer at Microsoft gets it then so should any high ranking executive in the news business.

Now for the really exciting bit. These conversations shouldn’t just be left to the tail end of blogs and the depths of Technorati. They should be taking place all around our news media, both written (by pros and amateurs alike) and video. Tools like Discqus, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and for video in particular the Seesmic Wordpress plugin are starting on the edge of the blogosphere and moving in towards big media, but big media shouldn’t wait.

We have to start innovating around the conversation and that innovation should start with syndication.

Let’s wrap a the conversation around the content layer wherever that content is consumed and wherever there is a danger of the conversation breaking out. News organizations aren’t doing this quickly enough.

A practical example of what should be possible here is the Associated Press in the US.

The AP have been in the news over the past fortnight for trying to shut the convesation down, not allow people use their direct quotes as part of their everyday blog conversation. How stupid is this? Imagine the feds busting into your office and taking down the guys by the water cooler because they were quoting verbatim scenes from the Office. Ridiculous.

The AP actually should be embracing the conversation. Jeff Jarvis mentions that one way for the AP to move forward would be for it to stop homogenizing content and list the source news agency. Well how about this. How about it lets anyone take its stories, but as part of the deal you’ve got to take its simultneous conversation feed. And that’s an absolute must all newspapers and websites downstream of the original AP article. In one go this move brings in a huge amount of intellectual capital to the AP content eco-system. The AP ends up providing a centralized discussion engine, a virtual Speakers Corner.

All of a sudden we have an old media giant using its inherent advantages (relationships and distribution channels through all media) to enhance rather than shut down conversation. The challenge for the rest of us to how to do this without these advantages. We have our users and if our content is any good we have the conversation starters. That should be enough to get going.

Julian Cope discusses the “Northern Heathenism & Paganism Beyond Rome” lecture he gave at Birmingham Town Hall last month. Of course he does. Worth reading.

One grumble though, Julian mentions he’s not publishing the 70 minute lecture as it forms the basis of a chapter in an upcoming book. Julian, by publishing the chapter you’ll surely drive much more interest in the overall book, you’re taking the attitude of a music industry exec here.

This is great. Not only are Americans leaving their urban sprawls for cleaner, greener, cheaper cities, the Telegraph of all papers has a report on it.

Looks like Steve Ballmer and Keepfakingit are pointing in the same direction on this broadcasters-treating-their-viewers-with-contempt theme we’ve been banging on about recently. Except Steveo is coming at it from a different angle. IP he says is the delivery method that will transform all media not just TV.

Ballmer notes to the Washington Post that kids playing XBox Live are interacting using TVs with people all over the world. Why? because they’re using an IP network that enables two way communication. He’s convinced that within ten years all media, TV, magazines, books, will be delivered this way. And once they are people can start talking to each other and back to big media.

Last night we contended that it would take all viewers having a device, a laptop, iPhone or some other wi-fi gadget (note all IP), on their lap before broadcasters were willing and able to respect their audience. Well here’s the other option. Deliver the broadcast to the device, whether that’s the gadget, or a set-top box.

Once that happens we can get on with building all sorts of interesting communities around the content. This surely is a better way of driving extra revenues for broadcasters than fleecing their viewers using premium sms and phone charges.

Summing up keepfakingit’s previous post: Broadcasters have for years in the UK shown nothing but contempt for their audience. Despite their audience paying their wages, the corporations have insisted that the AUDIENCE PAYS (through SMS, premium rate calls etc.) every time they communicate with the broadcaster. This is ridiculous.

Let’s examine a few facts here. I recently wrote about Clay Shirky’s assertion that people are clawing back some of the time they spend with their TVs and putting that into more creative endevours. Shirky calls this Social Surplus. As someone who works for a broadcaster and sees far too much TV, keepfakingit calls this common sense.

Now let’s look at a trend that’s on a huge upward curve in the US and is following suit in Europe, the simultaneous usage of PC and television. TV ownership per household is somewhere north of 3 right now (can’t find a reference so you’ll just have to trust me on this one) PC ownership is over two and rising fast. Something’s got to give right? According to Shirky there are only so many hours in the day we can consume (or create) media. Well not really. In ever increasing numbers people are watching TV whilst warming their knees with their 15″ Latitudes. IMing and Facebooking whilst contemplating which buffoon to vote out of Big Brother, by text of course.

Right now I don’t see any major broadcasters attempting to tap this in a meaningful way. Yes the news channels ask and use UGC in ever increasing amounts, but live TV has not yet embraced IM, Twitter or even simple commenting and ratings systems.

Dual users are still in the minority but there’s one breakthrough coming that’s about to push dual usage into the ascendancy. Usable, affordable mobile internet. When everyone’s got virtually free bandwidth in their pocket thanks to wi-fi devices, all of a sudden everyone has a conduit to shout abuse at Davina McCall.

And they won’t have to pay for doing it.
All of a sudden Soccer AM’s MySpace profile or Facebook group can have a meaningful roll before, during, and after each show.

It’s time for the producers and creatives involved in mainstream television to start listening at their viewers level, and maybe even start listening where their viewers are talking. With SMS and premium line voting now almost untouchable in the UK, what have broadcasters got to lose?

The BBC are in trouble again today over what is essentially information flows and how they communicate with their paying public. The Daily Mail and other fine institutions of British journalism are claiming that the Match of the Day “Goal of the Season” result has been rigged. Their evidence, a ton of cash has been laid on a Emmanuel Adebayor, Arsenal’s Togolese hitman. True, it’s a great goal, but it had been only third favourite until yesterday. Something stinks.

Whether or not the BBC is in the manure for real on this one or not is irrelevant. The episode serves only to illustrate that at this juncture the public simply don’t trust either the BBC, ITV or any other national broadcaster in the UK. Thanks to stealing their viewers money by way of rigged phone-in and SMS quizzes the broadcasters have only themselves to blame.

Much has been made of live TV shows who kept asking for more audience responses after they’d already decided the result. Or production teams to asked for competition entrants from any part of the country when it was already decided that only those in a certain region would win. But these underhand tactics by producers and APs belie an ignorance and contempt of their audience by short sighted layers of management from top to bottom.

Let’s look at the facts, even if Ant and Dec hadn’t been taking the piss, and oh yes, taking the piss they were.

First, what the hell were BBC and ITV doing asking their audience to pay the relevant broadcaster so that said audience was “allowed” talk to them. Seriously. We pay expensive TV licenses in the UK that fund the BBC. And ITV is no bleeding heart charity. So why should I have to pay to tell Ant or Dec which crappy Cher rip-off I think deserves another shot next week. I shouldn’t. They should be honoured and thrilled that I want to interact with them.

Second thing, if I do find programming that is so compelling I want to communicate with it, or shout at it or whatever, surely there’s a better way than automated switchboards and text messages. These methods of communication, certainly in the context they are employed by the broadcasters do nothing but atomize an audience. They are one way missives that become detached and decontextualized from the viewer as soon as the send button is hit.

There’s got to be a better way.

There is a better way, and I’m going to list some tomorrow, so Grade, Thompson and Duncan, listen up guys.

SXS-Eats: The 6th St. Pizza showdown part II.
TrashBlanc.com takes it to the house for the second in our heavyweight pizza reviews. Check it.

Overall rating: * */2
(out of 5)

Price: $4 per spinach/mushroom slice.

Video’s here.

Two of TrashBlanc.com’s favourites appeared on BBC Radio Four this weekend debating organic food. George Monbiot, environmentalist, anti-capitalist and all round do-gooder, and Delia Smith, middle England’s favourite go-to-girl when it comes to traditional Brit food recipes.

TB missed the show and we can’t find it on the BBC’s iPlayer. However we are led to believe Delia has no time for organic food and by all accounts takes pleasure in shipping various variety of pea from Kenya to the UK. No doubt for the half time spread at Norwich City football club where she’s a big time shareholder. In fact Delia is convinced this does a lot of good for the Kenyan economy. We here are TrashBlanc.com aren’t.

Has Delia ever heard of cash crops, does she know about the Fair Trade movement, is she concerned with the central distribution and long range transportation of food? Absolutely no idea and as we can’t find the show in question we’ll just have to come to our own conclusions. If you can help us on this one do drop us a line.