Interesting Links for 8-1-2011

[andrewducker]

• Radiohead: are they any good? (A sceptic listens to the first five albums - funny and well written)
  (tags: music radiohead reviews)
• The S stands for Simple (Thankfully I don't have to work with SOAP, but if you ever have, this is hilarious)
  (tags: humor xml programming software web soa soap)
• The cowardly fudge behind the rhetoric of Control Orders (This being the bit that worries me about today's speech)
  (tags: law uk rights freedom government)
• Nick Clegg's speech on civil liberties. More of this please - reminds me why I couldn't vote for Labour last time around.
  I'm nervous, of course, of what the actual laws will be. But this is generally pointing in the right direction.
  (tags: uk government law rights freespeech libel terrorism)
• Glasgow pantomime dress broke Geneva Convention
  (tags: law uk)
• Facebook made profits of $350m in 9 months. Valued at $50Bn. Not sure that multiplier makes sense to me...
  (tags: facebook business web2.0)
• Harry Potter plagiarism case dismissed. (They claimed that she copied the idea of wizards travelling on trains. WTF?)
  (tags: harrypotter law books)

Comments

[birguslatro]

Facebook. "Not sure that multiplier makes sense to me..." Maybe the multiplier's a simple $10 per account?

[andrewducker]

Are they going to start charging that? Because if they can find a way to make $10 off me this year, I'll be surprised...

[birguslatro]

Look at how many of your recent posts have been for other people's media, include ones with subjects like 'I want to see this very badly'.

No, they're not going to start charging $10 a year. But there's no doubt some advertising rule of thumb for how much a successful social media site is worth based on how many members it has, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's $10 per member, just to keep the number nice and round.

But then, not all members would post regularly about stuff that's for sale and only a small number of those would have an exceptional number of friends. So some would be worth way more than $10 a year to Facebook's advertisers.

This is a sucky system, as it not only means those providing the content the advertisers feed off aren't getting any of the cake, but the hardest working of them are the ones making the most for the advertisers.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

It's this particular bit of blatant plagiarism that bothers me, particularly considering many (really bloody stupid) people seem to think it's the other way round

[andrewducker]

I'm not convinced that that's plagiarism. As the remainder of that long list makes clear "Small boy discovers that he's an important magician and goes to school to learn magic" has a very long tradition. But I can understand the frustration for the author when people get it the wrong way around.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

It's definitely not blatant plagiarism (unless you can show me the exact copied passages of text -- that's your textbook definition). And I don't think it's even likely to be influenced by the other book.

HP taps into a long-running traditional genre, the English boarding school novel: a lot of the tropes (scheming rival student, sporting contests between houses, kindly headteacher and irascible/antagonistic master or mistress) are stock items.

HP also taps into a separate traditional sub-genre, the lonely kid who discovers they've got magical powers and grows up in the process of developing them (self-realization).

Banging two sub-genres together until you get something new out of the fusion is SOP for a whole bunch of authors (including me). I'm about 99% certain that Jill Murphy and Joanne Rowling entirely independently banged the same two extremely-popular ideas together to develop their own stories; the bizarre thing is that Harry Potter became a worldwide marketing phenomenon.

I will concede about a 1% probability that J. K. Rowling read "The Worst Witch" when she was a kid -- she'd have been 9 when it came out -- and bits of it stuck in her subconscious. None of us write in a perfect vacuum. However, TWW didn't go bestseller and would consequently have been extremely easy to miss.

An author writing a kid-goes-to-magic-school novel today has no scope for claims of ignorance about Harry Potter. But as Lev Grossman shows (in "The Magicians") being able to rely on your audience's prior familiarity with HP can actually be a good thing, if you're working to defeat their expectations.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. My comment was pretty much hyperbole in response to the "wizards on trains" bit. The sentiment though (that Jill Murphy was fairly unlucky, and that it's bad that she's the one that sometimes gets accused of being derivative of HP) remains.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

It seems like a very natural mashup to me, and looking at the list in Wikipedia, to a lot of other authors too...

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Plagiarism really doesn't imply exact copied passages of text. Wiktionary has 'The act of plagiarizing: the copying of another person's ideas, text, or other creative work, and presenting it as one's own, especially without permission.' OED gives 'The action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft.'

And I'd put the chances of Rowling having read The Worst Witch *much* higher than that. It was certainly a pretty popular series when I was growing up (the first book came out four years before I was born) - Wikipedia informs us 'They have become some of the most outstandingly successful titles on the Young Puffin paperback list and have sold more than 4 million copies.[1] In 1986, the first book in the series was made into a Halloween telefilm.' Given she would have been pretty much exactly its target audience, I'd go so far as to say it would be distinctly surprising if she'd missed it entirely.

You're quite right apart from that, though.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Wow. As I'd never heard of "The Worst Witch" (and am 18 months older than JKR) colour me surprised.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

things that made me smile: Neil Gaiman on whether Rowling nicked from The Books Of Magic...
[paraphrasing].. 'No, she didn't. She's a very intelligent woman. She'd have made changes that would erase the question. It's sheer coincidence. I can, however, give you a list of stuff she *did* steal, but I only know that because I stole them too'

and on whether Sandman will ever be a movie: 'Hollywood is a big meat grinder. I have no interest in feeding Sandman into that grinder' [followed by MASSIVE audience applause]

[autopope.livejournal.com]

On the topic of FB: we can extrapolate their profits for the whole of 2010 as being something like $0.5Bn (they're still growing, so Q4 will be bigger). Revenue will probably be on the order of $1.5-2Bn.

In a sane market, the multiplier for a valuation is revenue x 8; in a bubble market it's revenue x 30-50. I figure a sane valuation for FB would therefore be somewhere in the range $15-20Bn, taking into account the prospects for further growth (which aren't as good as they would be if FB hadn't already grabbed 500M users).

A $50Bn valuation is either making disturbing assumptions about FB's future growth prospects -- disturbing because it implies FB can milk its user base enough to triple the per-user revenue, or can triple in in size to 1.5Bn users -- or it's a bubble valuation.

[andrewducker]

Aaaah. I thought that share value was generally done from profits, not revenue. If it's based from revenue then it's still massively inflated, but not quite so insanely.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I may be wrong, but I thought it was revenue that was used. (Way back in 1994, when SCO IPO'd, it was turning over $200M a year, but had never made a quarter's profit until 6 months before the offering -- profits mean you have to pay tax and dividends, so they were always ploughing the surplus back into expansion. They had to show a pro-forma profit after the IPO -- otherwise, no dividends for shareholders -- but IIRC the valuation for the run-up to IPO was based on their turnover.)

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I'm used to P/E, which tells you something about how long it's likely to take before dividends pay back your investment. I guess that with FB their EBITDA might be signigicantly higher, which would mean that in the long term they're in good shape and will be able to extract more money.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Profits don't necessarily mean dividends - more and more companies are doing share buybacks instead of dividend payments, which has several advantages, including tax efficiency for shareholders (in many jurisdictions), perceived as less of a signal of Total Disaster if cut in later years, and directly increased share price - hence a harder takeover target (and less desirable since the cash pile is reduced). Oh, and of course, the execs might just have a direct incentive to raise the share price.

Also, in an economic downturn, an investment in expanding the business is a chancier proposition, but a share buyback is still guaranteed to raise the share price, and risk-averse execs might prefer to use cash for the safe option.

(I'm sure you know all this, and better than me - just expanding.)

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Facebook opens up a whole world of valuation theory and practise.

If I were Zuckerman I'd take $50bn soon as look at you.

Personally I'd take less than an x8 multiplier of profit on Facebook. I think it is vulnerable to generic competition and therefore becoming a commodity.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

The Radiohead one is interesting. I thought it was only me who could be heavily put off a track due to not liking the sound of the vocalist's voice. Nice to know I am not alone...

[andrewducker]

By no means just you. Hal felt the same way about Radiohead too.

S stands for Simple

[darkoshi]

I work with SOAP somewhat. That page explains/summarizes it better than I have seen anywhere else (I still struggle with the RPC vs doc/lit vs wrapped thing, and how to tell which one is being used), and it may be why I've never gotten a "warm & fuzzy" feeling of understanding about it. On the other hand, I feel comfortable with XML schemas, even though I don't know it all off the top of my head.

Re: S stands for Simple

[andrewducker]

I don't mind schemas. But I prefer nice simple message passing - I construct a request, pass it over, get back a reply. Easy to understand, and you can do it without a huge amount of overhead.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

SOAP is a nightmare. I spent a week trying to consume a SOAP resource in Ruby that EBI have. At the end of the week I gave up and started using their provided Java client.

[andrewducker]

I believe that at work we actually use SOAP to transmit data back and forth from GUI to business service servers. But it's a wrapper, and it's all done for us by a framework, so we just have to deal with the request/response.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it all works fine if you're SOAP service and SOAP clients are all generated by the same framework (or if all the types are simple types (usually))

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

J.K. Rowling may not have plagiarized from "Willy The Wizard," but her books are based on a very, very old German fable about a boy who goes to a school for wizards.

It's so old that it's surprising she found out about it, but the similarities are a bit too "coincidental." Since the fable was written before there were copyrights I think she's okay, legally.

Now if someone would just slap her for book 4, 5 and that last piece of crap from the series.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Could you elaborate on this at all?

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

I don't know much more than I've been told. The person who told me said their German grandmother was told the story at bedtime as a little girl, but it seemed to come down through oral tradition more than print, from what my friend inferred.

There may be a copy of the fable in German somewhere. If I could find it, (and I tried,) I would love to read it.

[undeadbydawn.livejournal.com]

that's great Nick.

Can you IMMEDIATELY instruct the riot police to stop launching cavalry charges on student protesters? And the whole kettling thing is a bit naughty too. Especially when a number of those protesters - who have a legal right TO protest - are minors

cheers, mate