Google Street View has been a controversial development. Most people seem initially excited by it, right up until the point where they use it and find on display their car, their garden, their house, and, sometimes, their front rooms.

In the UK, the response has been largely negative, perhaps due to Labour increasingly turning the country into a surveillance society. However, in today’s BBC article, Villagers challenge Google camera, Google makes a particularly weaselly statement:

“Imagery is taken on public property and is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.”

Technically, this is true—Google’s car drives along public roads, and takes photos that anyone could take. But this ignores the all-inclusive nature of the photography—I doubt ‘anyone’ could take the sheer number of photos the Google car does, even in a single town, without massive investment.

Also, I bet if ‘anyone’ tried to emulate Google, either driving or walking around a major town, taking dozens of photos every few metres, and subsequently published them online, they’d be arrested, not defended, by local police forces.

A couple of days ago, Josh Marshall’s article about his Kindle on Talking Points Memo got me thinking. He relates how on experiencing the device, he surprisingly got sucked into using it, which was subsequently followed by a dark epiphany:

“In our living room we have two big inset shelves where I keep all the books I feel like I need or want ready at hand. And last night, sitting in front of them, I had this dark epiphany. How much longer are these things going to be around? Not my books, though maybe them too. But just books. Physical, paper books. The few hundred or so I was looking at suddenly seemed like they were taking up an awful lot of space, like the whole business could dealt with a lot more cleanly and efficiently, if at some moral loss.”

This is the kind of statement I’d have scoffed at a few years ago, but we do seem to be rampaging ever onwards into a digital-only future regarding media. Newspapers are struggling, being replaced by online equivalents. The CD is clearly on its last legs, about to be obliterated by digital formats for all but those in the niche space. And although video has resisted this transition, things are on the move, and it’s clear that a combination of bandwidth and storage issues is the only thing holding this particular shift back.

And so, wither books? Almost certainly, and largely for convenience. As living spaces get smaller and the amount of crap we own grows, space is at a premium. Although I’m a staunch buyer of CDs, I almost never play them, instead ripping them to a Mac and playing the music back via iPods and amps. I keep threatening to put our CDs in the loft, but at that point, why bother even buying new CDs in the first place? (And, yes, I’m fully aware that online music purchases are generally in compressed format, but for the most part the formats are now in a decent enough quality that I can’t tell the difference, and most music is mixed so poorly and compressed so heavily that it makes no odds anyway.)

The danger, of course, is in terms of longevity. In moving from physical product to digital-only, we’re in danger of creating very temporary history. Already, people are finding that digitally printed photos often fade frighteningly quickly, massively at odds with faded but still perfectly visible black and white photos from the early portion of the last century. And digital file formats rapidly change and evolve. JPEG and MP3 may be dominant today, but what about in ten years? What about in 100? Are we rapidly moving towards a time where everything we create will be potentially lost within a few generations, all in the name of convenience?

This is the news!

Being late to the party, I just watched Newswipe while eating breakfast, thereby setting myself up to be thoroughly confused for the rest of the day. Superficially, the show is like a news-oriented version of Brooker’s first-rate TV-bashing Screenwipe being smashed into The Daily Show with a hammer.

Although superior to previous BBC4 Daily Show wannabe The Late Edition—primarily a vehicle for Marcus Brigstocke to be smug and patronising, and Steve Furst to be as unfunny as humanely possible—Newswipe at times left me bewildered, and may just be the instrument that propels reality into a whirling vortex of postmodern news doom.

The problem with Newswipe is the news itself. When Chris Morris parodied the genre, in 1994, via The Day Today, he was remarkably prescient, but still able to stroke the absurd stick until it burst, exaggerating every aspect of the news to comic effect. Unfortunately, the news subsequently became The Day Today. While idiots in 1994 somehow mistook the Morris show for real news (“Sacked chimney sweep pumps boss full of mayonnaise”/”Headmaster jailed for using big-faced child as satellite dish”), today, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the real from the fake, such is the flash, sound-bite-oriented, ratings-grabbing and absurd nature of modern news broadcasting.

And so with Brooker, the show begins with him being Chris Morris (the newsreader and the comedian), talking in Chris Morris fashion about real news, which is being portrayed in a manner like The Day Today, without irony, and continues to dissect news broadcasts that look like they’re written by Chris Morris by highlighting the absurd nature of them by sometimes being Chris Morris and by sometimes being absurd.

Overall, the show—bar the odious poetry section—is still worth a look. Brooker’s entertaining, and he briefly waggles his fact muffin to debunk a few of the wilder news claims. But I couldn’t help feeling that the show is almost redundant. The news has become a parody of itself, and trying to create a comedy vehicle around it (albeit one concentrating on satire and deconstruction) results in the frustration of a show being slightly drier and more serious than what it’s reporting on, which is supposed to be dry and serious in the first place, but isn’t.

It’s enough to make your brain hurt.

The BBC reports that London mayor Boris Johnson is planning changes to the iconic road-crossing symbol. Once, both signs and usability were very similar in a huge range of countries, and in the UK you grow up learning that ‘a little green man’ means ‘walk’, and a red man means ‘walk only if you fancy getting run over’. (Of course, some countries have alternate crossing icons, including the USA, which unfortunately often favours using English—walk/don’t walk—in favour of language-independent icons.)

In recent years, I’ve noticed a surprising and disappointing trend towards diversity. When Fleet high street (Fleet being the town in Hampshire where I live) was revamped, so were the crossings. Rather than looking across the road at the ‘icons’ to see whether it is safe to cross, you now have to look towards the symbol on the same side of the road as you. I’m sure someone somewhere surmised that this was a more logical thing to do, but convention has long been otherwise, and I’ve watched people in my town—particularly young children—struggle with this upheaval.

In London, Johnson is planning on taking things further, replacing the standard icons with a countdown timer, primarily to hurry people across the road. However, with existing iconography so ingrained and clear, there’s a massive danger that pedestrians will have to revert to assumption when it comes to safely crossing. In general design, such as icons on websites, assumption is never a good thing and can hamper usability. But in road systems, it’s downright dangerous.

I remember buying one of the original iPod shuffles, thinking it might come in handy for walking about with, rather than ‘risking’ my expensive chunky iPod photo. In the end, the iPod photo sat unloved in a drawer (and, eventually, got wired into my amp), while the shuffle laughed heartily on its victory.

Far from being bothered by the perceived restrictions of the device (no screen, basic controls), I loved the shuffle’s durability, and due to an OCD-like iTunes set-up where everything’s rated, I could fill the tiny iPod with tracks of a certain length and quality, and then set off to town knowing that I had a selection of what I considered great music with me.

When the new shuffle came out—the one that’s a tiny clip—I bought one of those, too. The old shuffle was relegated somewhat (although it’s still dug out for long flights), because the new one’s sheer tininess made it a real winner. Again, no screen, but the competition’s tiny displays didn’t seduce me in the slightest.

Today, Apple went a stage further, with the latest version of the shuffle, and, yeah, there’s going to be a third one rattling around this house soon enough.

Amazingly, the device is even smaller that its predecessor, tinier than a door key. Because of this, the controls have shifted to the headphones (the one negative, since this means you’re stuffed if they break or you want to use non-Apple headphones), and VoiceOver has made its debut, making the lack of screen a non-issue. Now, the iPod shuffle, apparently conversant in 14 languages, can tell you what you’re listening to, and which playlist you’re playing.

Again, this highlights Apple’s desire to innovate, rather than just looking at the competition and doing something similar. It also shows that giving people what they want rather than what they think they want can pay dividends, in terms of features and industrial design. Most importantly, though, it appears that without Steve Jobs at the helm, things can continue, what with unknown devices still being in the pipeline. Take note, idiot reporters.