history | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Saving the records of our times

The World Wide Web describes our times. San Francisco’s Internet Archive aims to be the keeper of that history

The World Wide Web describes our times but it’s an incomplete document as sites, pages and posts are lost, deleted or edited. San Francisco’s Internet Archive aims to be the keeper of that history.

As example of how fragile our online records are is illustrated by the tale of Kevin Vaughan’s Pulitzer Prize nominated story describing a 1960s community tragedy for the Rocky Mountain News.

The 34 part piece captivated the newspaper’s readership when it was published in 2007 but two years later, the Rocky Mountain News went broke and the story disappeared along with the rest of the website. The Atlantic Magazine describes Vaughan’s efforts to recover and republish his story.

Vaughan’s efforts to recover his work are not unique, websites are constantly being shut down, accounts censored and social media posts deleted. In the Coweb, The New Yorker’s Jill LaPore describes how the Ukrainian militia leader responsible for shooting down MH17 promptly deleted the message showing the plane’s remains and how the Internet Archive preserved that damming post.

Last week in San Francisco the Internet Archive held their Building Libraries Together event where director Brewster Kahle described their efforts to preserve as much of the web as possible for future generations.

The Internet Archive itself is in a restored church that seems almost custom built for the organisation. In her New Yorker piece, essential reading for those wanting to understand the project, LaPore describes Kahle’s affection for the building.

He loves that the church’s cornerstone was laid in 1923: everything published in the United States before that date lies in the public domain. A temple built in copyright’s year zero seemed fated. Kahle hops, just slightly, in his shoes when he gets excited. He says, showing me the church, “It’s Greek!”

For the Building Libraries Together event, the Internet Archive had spread out a series of exhibits on the organisation’s activities that range from trawling the web through to scanning books, digitising movie reels, saving old video games and collecting TV news broadcasts.

One of the important functions the Archive does is create collections around major events – the capture of the MH17 shoot down was part their Ukrainian War collection – which illustrates the problem of ‘link rot’ as many sites set up around events such as the Occupy movement or the Ferguson protests are now dead or occupied by cybersquatters.

Running a service like the Internet Archive is labor intensive and in an expensive city like San Francisco where almost all the staff could be paid substantially better working in the tech sector and the pay isn’t exactly stellar.

Kahle jokes “because we can’t pay stock options, those who stay three years here get a statue made of themselves.

The statues line one side of the old church hall that also doubles as an event space and the server room. At the back of the auditorium are the computers themselves quietly flashing away each time the archive is being read.

For the presentations, Kahle bubbles away with his thoughts on the importance of preserving the Internet and Kalev Hannes Leetaru‘s presentation on data visualisation raised some important topics on copyright and communications which this blog intends to explore deeper in the future.

The final part of the night’s presentation was an award to the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, John Perry Barlow, for his work in trying to keep intellectual property open and accessible.

At the end of the night, the crowd left with their gifts and t-shirts and the exhibits had packed up.

One of the stand out exhibits was the virtual reality stand where an old lady tried an Oculus Rift headset for the first time, “this is wonderful. I just want to reach out and touch everything,” she cried.

Preserving that wonder and the promised possibilities of our time is possibly the most important thing The Internet Archive can do. In an era where many talk of open information but few genuinely practice it, we run the risk of leaving an information dark ages for future generations.

How we preserve a record of our times for future generations is a pressing concern. The Internet Archive is one step to solving that problem.

Australia and Alan Bond

Deceased tycoon and embezzler Alan Bond’s life story provides a good parallel for Australia’s economic development

Last week convicted fraudster and one time Australian national hero Alan Bond passed away. In many respects Bond’s rise, fall and comfortable dotage tells us much about Australia today.

Originally born in England, Bond was a ‘ten pound pom’ – like this writer and two of Australia’s last three Prime Ministers – whose family took advantage of subsidised immigration programs to leave the cold climate and dismal British economy for sunnier, more prosperous parts.

Building the Australian dream

In Australia Bond prospered. On leaving school he became a sign writer and set up a business where he quickly gained a reputation for sharp practices and cutting corners. However as with much of his generation real wealth was to be made in property speculation.

As Australian cities expanded through the 1960s, developers and speculators were at the forefront of the nation’s economic growth. Perth, Bond’s home town, doubled in size between 1961 and 71 and the once dodgy sign maker made his mark as a wheeler and dealer as he traded properties and build his fortune.

As the 1980s began a cashed up Bond was ready to take advantage of the economic orthodoxy of the time that to compete internationally, Australian businesses had to consolidate domestically to gain the scale required to be global players.

Bond added to his claims in 1983 when he wrested the America’s Cup out of the cold dead hands of Long Island’s Newport Yacht Club. Suddenly businessmen were the national heroes and Australians, particularly politicians, fell over themselves to bask in the glow of the nation’s entrepreneurial summer.

Dancing on the world stage

Around the time of the America’s Cup win the newly elected Hawke Labor government deregulated the Australian banking industry providing a ready supply of hungry financiers prepared to fund the global ambitions of Bond and his contemporaries.

The rest of the decade saw Bond leading a wave of Australian entrepreneurs using easy money to build international empires. Bond himself ended up building one of Australia’s brewery duopoly, holding prime Hong Kong property, buying the nation’s most popular TV station and owning a Chilean telephone company.

Naturally much of his money ended up in Switzerland and Lichtenstein, something that would work in his favour early in the 1990s.

The larrikin streak

Bond’s disregard for the law, investors and anyone unfortunate to get between his cronies and a bag of money – politely described as a ‘larrikin streak’ by many – continued as regulators and governments indulged his behaviour.

One good example of the free pass he received from Australian regulators in the 1980s were his insider dealings with his then mistress Diana Bliss, the latter of whom exquisitely timed a purchase of a small energy exploration company stocks in 1988 a week before Bond Corporation announced a take over offer.

Regulators at the time dismissed any claim of insider trading after being assured that neither Bond nor Bliss would ever countenance such behaviour, the Sydney Morning Herald later reported.

When the luck runs out

Eventually the 1980s Australian economic miracle and the entrepreneurs leading it proved to be chimeras based upon property valuations. When the 1990 downturn hit, the rampaging Aussie business heroes all quickly fell as their overindebted empires collapsed.

Bond’s personal fortune however survived thanks to his judiciously salting away assets controlled by loyal advisors. His 1994 bankruptcy hearing ended in farce when he successfully convinced the court he was suffering dementia and couldn’t remember anything of his business dealings.

He couldn’t stay too far ahead of the courts however and ultimately Bond served two prison terms totalling four years for dishonestly pillaging companies to keep his operation afloat.

At the same time Bond was being chased through the courts, Australia’s banks were licking the financial wounds incurred from their irresponsible exposure to the nation’s entrepreneurs. The lessons they learned define modern Australia.

Bearing the brunt

The country’s small business community eventually bore the brunt of the Australian banks’ losses as lenders’ balance sheets were rebuilt through high interest rates, massively increased fees and charges and tightened lending criteria. Many of those high fees and rates continue to cripple Australian business twenty-five years later.

Adding to the Aussie small business sector’s woes, the 1998 Basel I Accords were coming into force favoring property lending over business finance. Increasingly it became harder for any Australian businessperson to raise money from local banks while property speculators were welcome.

Over the next twenty years the result was stark. One chart from the Macrobusiness website illustrates the huge growth in Australian residential property lending and the stagnation of business finance since 1991. Only at one stage, in 2008, has business lending matched the levels of the late 1990s.

That shift to an economy based upon property prices, particularly speculation on residential accommodation, has served Australia well with the nation not experiencing a recession since the 1990s downturn.

The Australian economic miracle

Australia’s success allowed Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens to sneer in 2010 that Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ warnings about the Australian economy lack of diversity were misguided and foolish – the mining boom coupled with never ending property price growth guaranteed the nation’s prosperity.

In this respect, all Australians have become Alan Bond. Just as the bold riders of the 1980s boom based their future on property valuations so too have Australian households and the entire economy thirty years later.

Hopefully for Australians in general it will end better than it did for Alan Bond in 1996.

One though should not weep too much for Alan Bond, after being released in 2000 he quietly rebuilt his empire and in 2008 BRW magazine estimated his wealth at $265 million and named him among the 200 wealthiest people in Australia.

Time will tell if Australians share the deceased tycoon’s luck but in a way we’ve all become little Alan Bonds now in our dependence upon the valuations of our real estate holdings and the indulgence of those financing our lifestyles.

It may well be having a few bob hidden away in Switzerland might the best way for Australia’s indebted homeowners to protect their future.

Reading the golden records – can we avoid a digital dark age?

Changing computer formats mean we risk a ‘digital dark ages’ industry experts warn.

In 1977 NASA’s Voyager mission launched from Cape Canaveral to explore the outer solar system, included on the vessel in case it encountered other civilisations were a plaque and a golden record describing life on Earth.

The record was, is, “a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” It containing images, a variety of natural sounds, musical selections from different cultures and spoken greetings in fifty-five languages.

Most American households in 1977 could have listened to the sounds on Voyager’s golden disk but were the spaceship to return today it would be difficult to find the technology to read the record.

This is the concern of Google Fellow and internet pioneer Vint Cerf who told the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in San Jose this week we are “facing a forgotten century” as today’s technologies are superseded rendering documents unreadable.

A good example of ‘bit rot’ is the floppy disk – the icon used by most programs to illustrate saving files is long redundant and few organisations, let alone households, have the ability to read a floppy disk.

For corporations the problem of dealing with data stored on tape is an even greater problem as proprietary hardware and software from long vanished corporations becomes harder to find or engineer.

As the Internet of Things rolls out and data becomes more critical to business operations, the need for compatible and readable formats will become even more important for companies and historical information may well become a valuable asset.

With libraries, museums and government archives having digitised historic information, this issue of accessing data in superseded formats becomes even more pressing.

It may be that important documents need to be kept on paper – although there’s still the problem of paper deteriorating – to make sure the 21st Century doesn’t become the digital dark ages and our golden records remain unread.

Living in a changing world

If we want to understand how to adapt to a rapidly changing world, we could learn from our great-grandparents.

“We’re looking at a future where every aspect of our lives could be utterly different to how it is now,” declared ABC Radio host Linda Mottram in our semi-regular technology spot on Monday.

Linda’s concern was based around our talk on 4D printing and the future of design and she’s absolutely right – life is going to be totally different by the end of this century.

We won’t be the first generation to experience such massive change to society and the economy, our great grandparents at the beginning of the Twentieth were born into a world without electricity, the motor car or antibiotics.

Those who survived the two world wars and lived to a ripe old age in the 1970s saw life expectancy soar, childhood mortality rates collapse and the western economies shift from being predominately agricultural to mainly industrial and service based.

From our position, it’s difficult to comprehend just how radically life changed in western countries during the Twentieth Century.

When we wonder where the jobs of the 21st Century will come from, it’s worth reflecting that many careers we take for granted today didn’t exist a hundred years ago and the same will be true in a hundred years time.

The technology we’re using may be new, but adapting to massive change isn’t.

Into the ruins of Bedlam – visiting the industrial revolution’s birthplace

A quick tour of the Industrial Revolution’s birthplace.

Nestled in a quiet wooded valley near the modern town of Telford in the English Midlands is the birthplace of the industrial revolution.

Today the three quiet villages — Coalbrookdale, Coalport and Ironbridge are quaint little communities but two hundred years ago they were the powerhouse of the Industrial revolution.

ironbridge-wooded-valley — The hills around Ironbridge

Coal and ironstone mining in the district started in medieval times with the locals having a wide range of words to describe different types of coal — Lancashire Ladies, Randle and Clod being just a few terms.

Iron had been smelted at Coalbrookdale from the late 16th Century however the arrival of potmaker Abraham Darby in 1709 that catalysed the industry with his method to reliably use coke for the blast furnaces.

coalbrookdale-by-night — Coalbrookdale by night – the Bedlam furnaces at their peak

Further downstream, the Madeley Wood smelter became infamous as the bedlam furnaces, named after the noise and confusion of London’s notorious asylum.

With the new reliable way to smelt iron and a string of blast furnaces along the valley, production skyrocketed and the valley’s natural advantages of accessible coal, iron and water meant it became the centre of the industrial revolution.

Increased production meant more workers and people flocked in from the surrounding agricultural communities — not in a dissimilar way to today’s experience in China.

That increased population meant more slums, what is today’s cute village was once sqaulid poverty, albeit an improvement on the life of an agricultural worker. Epidemics were common with 32,000 lives lost in cholera in 1831-2.

Despite the squalor of the workers’ quarters, the ironmasters were proud men and Coalbrookdale’s new bridge could only be build of one material — iron.

ironbridge-cast-iron-coalbrookdale — “This Bridge was cast at Coalbrookdale”

Ironmasters like John Wilkinson and Abraham Derby III were also ferocious promotors of their product and the bridge stands as a proud, strong advert for the strength of Coalbrookdale’s iron. Wilkinson himself built the first cast iron barge a few years later and was eventually buried in a cast iron coffin.

boy-and-black-swan — Boy and Black Swan cast iron statue

Eventually though the smelters of Coalbrookdale began to lose their competitive edge as mining and blast furnace technology improved, the ironmasters responded with moving into decorative and intricate cast iron features like the Boy and Swan statue that now graces the gardens of the Coalbrookdale Iron Museum.

ruins-of-bedlam-at-ironbridge — The ruins of the bedlam blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale

Despite their successes, Coalbrookdale’s slide continued, with coal production peaking in 1871 and a steady decline over the following century.

Today, there’s not a lot of industry in Coalbrookdale except for one plant that keeps the area’s engineering tradition running.

For Britain, the question is how the nation’s economy continues it’s engineering traditions, 45 minutes drive away is a relic of Twentieth Century industry — the Austin motor works at Longbridge.

Today an assembly plant fills a small corner of the formerly sprawling factory site and over it flies the flag of it’s new owners. The People’s Republic of China.

We live in interesting times.

And your message is? How Silicon Valley wrote its own history

Is the myth of the altruistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur an example of businesses rewriting history?

Sitting in on the Storytelling and Business panel of the Sydney Writers’ Festival it occurred to me how well Silicon Valley and the tech startup community have crafted an image for their times.

Author of What’s Mine Is Yours, Rachel Botsman focused on the need of businesses to articulate the organisation’s sense of purpose. While this begs the question of what’s the message if the business’ purpose is to enrich their senior management, it is an a good point.

What is a business’ purpose and how do you articulate it? More so, what is the purpose of your industry?

One group of businesses that has done very well in articulating their message is the Silicon Valley tech community who’ve portrayed themselves – regardless of the reality – as being driven by the altruistic aim of changing the world.

Steve Jobs was one of the leaders of this and, while we shouldn’t overlook his talents, he was a ruthless, driven businessman.

On the panel advertising industry elder Neil Lawrence raised Jobs’ ability to articulate Apple’s mission, telling the story of when the Apple CEO was challenged on the ‘Thing Different’ slogan not being good English, he replied “it’s Californian.”

Apple’s success in branding itself as a visionary, creative company – and Google’s image of ‘Don’t Do Evil’ – show how it’s possible to create an image for an organisation, an industry or even an entire industry.

In reality, Silicon Valley and the tech industry are as full of snake oil salesmen, mercanaries and paper clip counting corporate bureaucrats as any other sector, but legends have been built, and continue to be built, on the myth of selfless entrepreneurs sacrifice all to make the world a better place.

Contrasting Silicon Valley’s success with the Australian experience was interesting, Botsman was scathing about the ability of Aussie managers in telling the story about their businesses finding most of them have lost her by the second slide of their Powerpoint presentation.

We shouldn’t get too hung up though about the nobility of telling a business’ story, Shehan Karunatilaka, former copy writer and author made the major point about business communications “story telling in business is about shifting product.”

He went on to describe the tragic career path of the advertising copy writer who comes into the ad industry believing they are a world changing artist and ends up being burned out.

“you are not an artist – you are a mouthpiece for businesses” said Shehan.

The truth is most of us in business are not artists, some parts of our work may involve creative skills – like copy writing, design or financial engineering – in reality most of us are there to make a decent living, if not a fortune.

Silicon Valley’s mythmaking shows how you can cover the mundane truth with a noble, a constant narrative which has allowed ruthless businessmen like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to portray themselves as selfless visionaries rather than the modern equivalents of John Rockerfeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and other 19^th Century robber barons.

This is possibly the greatest message of all in business communications – history is written by the victors.

When you’re winning in your industry, you get to write the story.

Darling Harbour and the peak of consumerism

Sydney’s old docks reflect the changing economy

Sydney’s Darling Harbour was one the centre of the nation’s mercantile economy, from across the country millions of tons of grain, wheat, sugar and other commodities were loaded onto ships and exported to the empire.

Eventually Darling Harbour fell into disuse, the docks became containerised, bulk goods moved to specifically designed loaders and the new breed of cargo ships were often too big to fit under the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

What really sealed Darling Harbour’s fate was Australia moved from being a largely export based agricultural export economy to a service based consumerist economy.

Today Darling Harbour illustrates that change, the docks have become expensive restaurants, hotels and shopping centres. The notorious “hungry mile” of docks is being converted into “Barangaroo” complex of office blocks, apartments and possibly even a casino for “high roller” Chinese gamblers.

Even the cruise liners are going. The 1980s vision of Darling Harbour as a temple to consumerism and property speculation is complete. In this way, Darling Harbour has become a picture of the Australian economy.

Just as Australia’s mercantile era peaked just before The Great Depression of the 1930s – the depression of the 1890s was actually far harder on Australia, particularly Melbourne and Victoria – the consumerist era finished with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

It will be interesting to see how Darling Harbour evolves over the next hundred years.

For a glimpse of the final days of the old Darling Harbour, Island Shunters an ABC documentary from 1977 showed the working lives of railway workers in the goods yards on the Western side of the docks. Today those railyards are the Australian office of Google and Fairfax’s headquarters.

I don’t get it

“Getting it” doesn’t guarantee business success

“I don’t get Twitter or Facebook” says the talkback radio caller, “why would you want to tell the world what you’re having for dinner?”

Once upon a time people didn’t get the motor car. There were many good reasons not to – compared to a horse a steam or petrol driven vehicle was expensive, unreliable and restricted in where it could go.

The motor car ended up defining the 20th Century.

Those who didn’t get it – like the stage coach lines and later the railway companies – eventually faded into irrelevance.

Something we should remember though is that many of the entrepreneurs in the early days of the motor car who did “get it” went broke. As did those in earlier times building railways and canals.

“Getting it” is one thing, but it doesn’t guarantee it will make you rich or guarantee your business’ survival.

Tag: history