moving to www.richarddelevan.com

to all those with whom I haven't been back in touch, my apologies.

quick version - back doing some writing, some media training, some other dark arts stuff can't talk about, and blogging about the US presidential elections over at Daily Telegraph 's Brassneck blog by Mick Fealty. (Yes, the Englightened one).

New website , thanks to assists from Gavin, is starting to come together.

In the meantime I discover this site's been nominated for journoblogging at the Irish Blog Awards - maybe. Anyway, vote for me!

Check the new address:

www.richarddelevan.com

Obama, Hillary, The New Yorker and TodayFM

Great in-depth piece by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker on Barack Obama's relaunch against Hillary. It's revealing. Obama as a candidate has demonstrated that he's got some steel in his soul as he finally makes the argument (if still in a dignified way) against a Clinton nomination. He's figured out that it's not enough to wait for the media to make the anti-Clinton case. The media, he argues (correctly in my view), is rewarding Hilary Clinton for her tactical excellence at playing the established game.

He even shows that he knows he has to play at least some of this game, even if he is simultaneously raising the stakes in Iowa by rolling up his sleeves:

On November 5th, Obama’s campaign sent reporters a research memo that criticized Hillary Clinton for changing her position on ethanol, Iowa’s most parochial issue. The Des Moines Register, Iowa’s major daily, ignored it, but when the campaign offered Obama himself for an interview a story was assured; it appeared on November 7th, with the headline “OBAMA: CLINTON FLIP-FLOPS ON ENERGY.”

I asked Obama whether ethanol was a subject that merited such personal attention. “It has less to do with the particular issue and more to do with her change in position,” he replied. “Now, Hillary has been in the Senate for seven years now. She has consistently voted against ethanol, because the perception in New York state is that this is making gasoline more expensive and that it’s a boondoggle. Those of us in farm states, obviously, have had a different perspective on it. If she came here, and she made a cogent case as to why she doesn’t think ethanol makes sense and why she voted against it, that’d be one thing. After seven years, she comes here and suddenly she’s an ethanol proponent! Well, how did that happen?” He managed to sound genuinely astonished by such brazenness.

Maureen Dowd also noted the un-Bambi version of Obama last week. If he doesn't beat or effectively tie Hillary, is there enough in the tank for New Hampshire and beyond?

BTW, am I the only one completely freaked out about how this US presidential bears an eerie resemblance to Seasons 6 and 7 of The West Wing? Read Rudy Giuliani [or McCain, or Romney] as Arnold Vinick, right down to reassuring the social conservatives on judges; read Obama as Matt Santos?
Given how obsessively the English-speaking world's political class watched/watches the DVD set of The West Wing, and how everybody projects their guy/gal candidate into that universe, is it entirely surprising that they would appropriate, even subconsciously, some of the narrative as their own? Or not so subconsciously - as when the Tories nicked a parliamentary tactic explicitly from a West Wing episode?
Life imitates art?

Another BTW, kudos to Sam Smyth and the TodayFM Sunday Supplement for bringing on an Irish-American (Eddie Hayes, the inspriation for DA Tommy Killian in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities) not so tanked up on Clinton Kool-Aid that he can talk coherently about Obama and the race.
It was in marked contrast to what can charitably be described as a (disappointing and surprising, to me) recitation of pro-Hillary platitudes by Marian Finucane's RTE panel - with the honourable exception of ex-colleague David Horgan, who as usual talked sense...on the Dollar, Oil and China.
(Also a nice contribution from Damien Corless on hate figures - but about Heather Mills, not Hillary).

Making Money from BlogBang?

Every blogger I've ever had more than a ten-minute conversation with eventually comes around to a confession of their deepest, darkest desire. For love of the game, eventually, doesn't pay the bills. It's why some of the island of Ireland's best bloggers have, from time to time, had to scale back to focus on the day job.

Often this means quite sensibly dropping a bit of utopian rhetoric and pragmatically using the skills they've honed while blogging to advantage in paid-for work. Often using their blog - or a separate blog - to do some marketing for their line of work.

But for those bloggers who long for a more direct return on investment...well there's something for you. Even if, at the moment, it's not much.

The Wall Street Journal highlights BlogBang, a venture 60% owned by the Paris-based advertising conglomerate Publicis. In Ireland its most visible face is the award-winning ad agency Publicis QMP and related marketing and PR operations including Pembroke Communications.

The Journal's story focuses on the efforts of Nescafe to attract bloggers to take part in an ad campaign. But the real story here is something more interesting. User-generated advertising with real money to the winners:

BlogBang also has tried to draw bloggers into the creative process. Companies looking for new ways to pitch their products can post requests for bloggers to develop their own campaigns. BlogBang's members can then put their homemade ads on the site. The one that gets the most clicks is spread around the bloggers' Web sites, and the author of the winning ad earns a fee.

This sounds a bit like the Superbowl ad experiments last year or, in one of his least coherent moments (and that's saying something), seems to worry Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen. (or perhaps he'd prefer this one)

So in the same way that blogs have proven successful in helping aspirants become a paid MSM columnist, or YouTube a tool to help aspiring directors, is Publicis on to an idea that could offer a vehicle for aspiring AdLanders?

Facebook Ads Scarier for Privacy than Google?

Damien Mulley posted an unimpeachably comprehensive look at the hyper-targeting ad programme that Facebook's exponentially growing popularity - 167,000 Irish users and growing, according to my former colleague - is making possible. For advertisers it seems like a dream come true.

Maybe more of a nightmare for the advertisees, however.

Earlier this week privacy advocates started to get the heebie-jeebies about the formerly clean-cut Harvard-bred do-no-wrong social networking star when they realised that Facebook was tracking (and posting) users' visits to non-Facebook websites, alongside ads for those websites or related services and *pictures of the Facebook user*.

As the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday (subs req - at least until Rupert gets full control next month, after which he's said he'll remove the subs wall):

Some users of the Facebook Inc. Web site have been startled by a new feature that tracks their activity outside of the site and shows it to their friends -- renewing questions about the privacy implications of a growing practice of exploiting personal information in online advertising.

The social-networking service earlier this month began posting updates about users' activities on Web sites outside of Facebook and on commercial pages within Facebook -- in some cases, alongside ads from the companies behind those Web sites or pages. Facebook is posting users' photos alongside certain advertisements, another feature that has alarmed some privacy advocates and users.

For instance, a user who logs on to Facebook might see an update in a section of the site called the "news feed" noting the movie a friend rented from an online site, along with a photo of that friend and a movie-rental ad.

Jeez, I don't know about you, but I know a few people who wouldn't like their video rental habits broadcast to anyone who might want to know. Even if it's opt-in, it just seems like a train wreck.

Isn't this exactly the sort of abuse of trust everyone has been afraid Google would commit all these years?

**UPDATE: Missed on the first read. *There is no opt-out for the service*. Again, the WSJ:

Users can't opt out of the program, called "Facebook Beacon," altogether. Instead, they have to opt out on a case-by-case basis when they use one of the outside sites.

Bad, bad, bad, bad move by Facebook? Your thoughts most welcome in email or in comments for use in future article - pls specify if you wouldn't like to be quoted.

Electric Cars Get Deadly Serious

This column first appeared in Business & Finance magazine in November 2007.

Richard Delevan

In Ireland we - or at least the 70% of us who use a private car to get to work - are worried that Brian Cowen will look to balance the budget on the back of drivers by raising taxes on petrol and diesel. Given that fuel prices have risen 15% and that even a strong euro can't insulate us from $100 a barrel oil, this seems like enough to worry about.
But events in China last month should be a warning about how bad things could get. In Shandong province, a man was stabbed to death and in Henan another man died in a brawl. Both were killed at petrol stations. By other motorists. For trying to jump the queue. Because China refuses to let petrol prices rise with the world oil price, refiners no longer able to make a profit have either stopped producing or are hoarding, causing shortages, long petrol queues and arguably the first direct fatalities of the era of Peak Oil.
Fortunately we're not (yet) in the scenario of the new "documentary", "Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash" that opened in cinemas this month, and there's some cause to believe that oil prices are now so high it might actually prompt some radical changes in the way we think about cars. Like maybe we should give them away for free and charge them for the fuel.
Crazy?
Not according to Shai Agassi, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was up for the top job at software giant SAP. In early November 2007 he announced he'd raised $200m for his startup, backed by venture capital from Israel and the US. But his company won't be making electric cars. Instead he wants to create a network of battery-charging forecourts across the US in order to keep a new fleet of electric vehicles going. Instead he wants to give the cars away.
It's like mobile phone operators giving away handsets in order to charge you airtime. And mobile phone operators are exactly the business model Agassi sees as the future of the transportation industry.
The economics are pretty stark. On his blog, "The Long Tailpipe" [actually stumbled across it when reading Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog] Agassi does some back-of-the-envelope calculations to make his point. He reckons there are 100m or so cars in Europe that are at least 8 years old. Each would cost you $5,000 to buy. Filling up with petrol for a year at 20 miles per gallon - which he says is roughly what the average performance of the European car fleet was 10 years ago - requires more than 600 gallons. Result? Even before the current price spikes, that meant it would take more than $5,000 to keep the car rolling for that year. (It gets even harder to take if you factor in longer commutes from further suburbanisation and petrol-guzzling traffic jams.)
So, Agassi argues, "the cost of the average used car in Europe is now cheaper than the cost of [petrol] to drive it for a year - talk about razor and blades businesses."
Agassi's new venture, "Project Better Place", isn't some warm and fuzzy attempt at fluffy PR from a traditional car company or oil company looking to tart up its image - despite the name. It's an archetype of a new kind of technology startup - one designed specifically to capture the opportunities inherent in the Peak Oil/climate change crisis. Besides the Israeli venture capital fund, other backers include VantagePoint Venture partners, a US technology VC fund, plus a former head of the World Bank. And Morgan Stanley.
What makes Agassi's business interesting is that, even though it's a Silicon Valley startup, it sees its main target market, initially anyway, in Europe. In part because the price of petrol is so high - he estimates we'll see €2 a litre in the next year - there will be more of an incentive to make the switch. Agassi says pilot programmes will be running - most likely taxi fleets in big cities - next year, with a build out from there. He doesn't specify, but the pilots sites look far more likely to be in Europe than in North America.
It would be nice to think an Irish city might be considered for a pilot, but it seems unlikely. If Ireland's electricity grid has trouble getting up to the basics of "smart metering", what hope it could adapt to moving a chunk of our vehicle fleet to plug into the grid.
There are two other facts that suggest Ireland will be a lagging, not leading, adopter of electric vehicles. First, most of our cars - as any commuter sees from the license plates - are less than five years old. So we're a while away from turning over the vehicle fleet. Then there's the cars themselves. Most electrics are as safe in a crash as your average golf cart, without being as fun to drive. But still.
It is easier to transport electrons than octane molecules, and the ubiquity of the grid makes it a lot more likely that the electric car will be the end state of 21st century vehicles - with ethanol or hybrids being merely a (very expensive) waystaion on the way. Agassi's case for the electric car gets more compelling every time the tank needs filling.

ends

After filing this story, I saw that the Irish Indpendent profiled the people behind GreenAer, a new venture importing the Indian-made (!) REVAi electric cars. Haven't sat in one yet, but it looks pretty small.

Of course, this wasn't the best week to talk about electric cars in Ireland. Not with this shower planning to turn off the country's lights for Christmas. Wankers.

The 10 Tribune Stories I'm Proudest Of

In the 20 months I was business editor at the Sunday Tribune, I was privileged to work with some superb reporters, subeditors and photographer. I'm glad we paid attention to topics before most others did in the Irish market. In particular, we paid serious and sustained attention to Dublin's relationship to the US subprime crisis beginning back in March 2007, culminating in Jon Ihle's still-controversial scoop of 2 September. Our attention to the Irish angle on the biggest financial story in our lifetime is not something I regret, even though a lot of vested interests began whispering. I was even quietly brought for coffee with a well-known Dublin PR, who explained to me that as far as Dublin's banking community was concerned, the very act of asking questions about Ireland's regulatory environment was the same thing as making accusations.

I am also proud of the sustained attention we paid to the Business of Green. The private sector is going to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to dealing climate change, and we paid more attention to the issue, earlier, than any other Irish business section.

We were not afraid to call attention to Ireland's attitudes towards migrant workers, or highlight that a lot of US firms are thinking about reducing or eliminating altogether jobs in Ireland.

And I'm proud of the story that drew attention to the naked hypocrisy of property interests, mindlessly talking up a market despite what they know to be true.

Below I've linked to 10 stories with which I'm particularly happy to be associated.

Financial Regulator knew Ormond Quay risks three years ago
2 September 2007
Jon Ihle's important story that asked what Irish regulators knew about the Dublin-listed subprime spectacular that is still reverberating through the German financial sytem.

Half of US Firms Consider Part Pullout
20 May 2007
The American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland commissioned a survey by Indecon about attitudes at US multinationals. But for some reason they didn't want to release the most significant finding - that nearly half of US firms were considering at least some job cuts.

Immigrants make up 78% of construction job cuts
9 September 2007
A story that was right there but few other business pages seemed interested in.

Concern about ACC lending frenzy
5 November 2006
Bill Tyson's short-listed scoop about orgiastic selling at ACC Bank.

O'Brien says Ryanair bid would be "a disaster"
8 October 2006
Denis O'Brien, less than a month after he resigns from a bunch of Irish corporate boards but also in the middle of the Ryanair bid for Aer Lingus, decides to take a few press questions after a business breakfast in Dublin at 7.30 on a Friday morning. Why would O'Brien be doling out advice to Aer Lingus employees? We went big with the story. The next week O'Brien bought up enough Aer Lingus shares to halt O'Leary/Ryanair momentum towards control. We're still not sure why - the ad about flights to Malta alluding to O'Brien's tax residency there? Or did O'Leary really steal O'Brien's car parking space at GPA?

Ryanair worst carbon offender
30 September
Someday soon, the average investor will demand to know a company's carbon exposure - if nothing else because it will eventually affect the shareprice. We got carbon audit firm Trucost to look at top Irish public companies. It's not perfect - particualrly the Tribune's website version, which I note is still uncorrected, starting with DCC at number 1 instead of its real ranking, 11. But carbon disclosure is quickly becoming a mainstream investment issue. We were there first.

RTE and TV3 look set to miss as YouTube and Joost ready landmark video-content deals
17 June 2007
Our intern Jeff Moskowitz, with a little help, scooped a little story that Google was hoping to save for the following week at a big to-do in Paris.

Subprime loans could mean trouble at home
18 March 2007
Our first piece really looking at how the US subprime crisis might affect events here.

Irish-listed subprime debt threatens pensions
15 July 2007

Irish-listed CDOs are downgraded
22 July 2007

Why Obama Can Win

The guy goes 20 minutes with no notes. American politics hasn't seen anybody like this in a generation.

It's into the home stretch in Iowa, and it's like the guy is just getting into his stride. A few weeks ago when Hilary edged him out in fundraising it was looking dodgy, but he's still in it. Have a listen to the content and you understand why.

Goodbye to Journalism and all that...

This column was filed on 2 November and first appeared in November 2007 in Business & Finance magazine.

Richard Delevan

Journalism as we knew it died at about 11.15 pm Dublin time on November 1^st, historians may record.

It was the moment on the conference call, staged by Google, in which it unveiled how far it had gone in putting together an alliance of social networking websites that would challenge the rise of the social network, Facebook. When Chris DeWolfe, the CEO of MySpace, got on the call and said how happy he was to join Google's alliance, teaming up with rivals including bebo, LinkedIn and Google's own Orkut.

Google's PR coup surrounded the launch of something called OpenSocial, a software thingee for developers of "widgets" – little mini-applications that let people compare and share their favourite books and films, host their own opinion poll, or dozens of other things not yet dreamt of. OpenSocial will let those developers create a "widget" that will run not just on MySpace but practically all other social networks.

For people under the age of25, time spent on their online social network is quickly displacing time spent with other media like newspapers and TV. As wireless broadband gets better, devices like the iPhone get cheaper and the software wrapping social networks together gets smarter, it looks as if social networks may become the main portal through which people consume media.

That brings us to the second factor. Also in late October, an ex-RTÉ journalist called Donnahca DeLong emerged as the international poster boy for "old media". Now the editor of Amnesty International's website but presuming to speak for his whole profession, DeLong's byline appeared above a story in the National Union of Journalists' in-house publication headlined, "Web 2.0 is Rubbish". It was a preview of an official report to be released this month by an NUJ committee on multimedia journalism of which DeLong is a member.

"Isn't increased participation and feedback from our 'users' – readers and viewers – a good thing?" DeLong wrote. "Of course it is, but the problem with Web 2.0 is not how it introduces these elements to the media, but how it's seen as replacing traditional media."

DeLong was instantly transformed into a transatlantic whipping boy. Guardian columnist and new media evangelist Roy Greenslade announced he was quitting the NUJ – citing DeLong's attitudes as symptomatic of how irredeemably suicidal the union had become in the face of new technology. Shane Richmond of the Daily Telegraph laid into him. Even on the other side of the Atlantic, new media pundits Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen found DeLong a figure worthy of scorn.

Another quote from DeLong was held up as particularly revealing of attitudes about the emerging technologies: "In one of the main examples given to explain Web 2.0, Wikipedia replaces Britannica Online. Is that the kind of democracy we want – where anyone can determine the information that the public can access?"

With the much-ridiculed former RTÉ journalist now the English-speaking world's symbol of why the old order in journalism will be swept away and personally responsible for discrediting arguments in favour of professional journalism, DeLong has almost single-handedly robbed the credibility of fellow critics of what the internet might do to journalism.

Combining the two factors is a little-known project going on today at Chicago's Northwestern University, home of the famous Medill School of Journalism. But the project at the school likely to have the most impact on the media is happening not in the journalism department but in the computer science department.

News at Seven (newsatseven.com) is an experimental programme whereby an avatar – a computer-generated character – presents the news. The news itself is selected and culled from newswires, blogs and – wait for it – social networking sites, and packaged together in a news show done to simulate a news broadcast.

But because News at Seven isn't a broadcast, but something produced on the computer individually each time it's viewed, the news programme can be tailored to each individual's tastes, or those of your own social network. So that your own personal newscast could begin with stories about topics you'd responded well to before. It might include comments from like-minded people about politics or your favourite sports team. The entertainment news might well include the fact that your best friend, on her bebo page, has discovered a new band she likes, and offer to play a clip of their latest video, then offer to sell you the download of their album.

News at Seven is just one experiment, and it's in its most primitive stage. Soon, something like it will be a "widget" you can add to your personal webpage on your social network of choice. And it will change everything we understand about news.

But the time is upon us when the idea of mass media journalism as we understand it will be made irrelevant by something quite like it. Google's OpenSocial provides the means for delivering it to the social networks that have increasingly captured the eyeballs. And thanks to Ireland's own Donnacha DeLong, there's no credible critic to stand in its way.

ends

...what did you think this would be about? Oh. And on the other thing. Thanks to the many who sent such kind messages. And we did our own reporting and checked our facts.

Good night and good luck.

rdelevan@gmail.com