Shat at 720p at 60fps.
The camera has, as one might expect, somewhat underexposed the footage, but that's pretty common with snowy situations. I could have fixed most of that in iMovie, but I decided not to, for testing purposes. The camera shake isn't too bad, given that the footage is hand-held in cold conditions, and could be stabilised even more in iMovie, if I'd wanted.
That all said, I'm reasonably pleased with the results. It's that bit more complex than the Flip HD models, and that does slow you down on occasions, but the results are usually worth it.
I need to give it a test run with an external microphone next.
Rachel Armstrong is talking about the future of architecture
It's just possible that iTunes is a bit fuzzy on the difference between "Metal", "Comedy" and possibly "Scrumpy & Western".
Hi everyone, I'm Stuart Clarke (or Disco Stu or Maverick depending on where you meet me), Community Editor at Flightglobal.com, and I'm here to convince you that this is the most exciting time to work in journalism. 
The UK is a nation of net-addicts, with 76 percent of Brits admitting they can't live without the web.
OK. It's small and it's petty, but there's something irritating me about the software I use to dial up with that 3 mobile broadband dongle. 
Finally, I have a little taste of WiFi. I'm sat in the Big C, a cancer support centre attached to the Norfolk & Norwich hospital, and I'm picking up the Norwich Openlink WiFi. I'm having a frustrating evening. I've stacked up a series of blog posts for my various blogs, and I can't publish them. There isn't even a sniff of the cafe WiFi that we're meant to have access to in this apartment, so I'm left with the unpleasant choice of venturing out into a blustery Norwich night in search of some WiFi, or tapping out an entry of two on the Movable Type iPhone interface.
And you know what? The iPhone interface is pretty good. You can forget putting any links in, of course, but that's as much to do with the iPhone's lack of cut and paste than a failing of Six Apart's work with the interface.
It occurs to me that I should actually invest some time in experimenting seriously with the iPhone as a mobile blogging tool. Expect a few more experimental posts over the remainder of my stay here in Norfolk.
The other day, Nick Sergeant was messing around with Yahoo! Pipes. He discovered that by ingesting content from one of our newspaper sites, and comparing those stories to the content in a specific story, he could automatically create related links to other stories on that site.And that's a really neat little trick for getting those handy little "related articles" links on the bottom of your posts. Now, doing this sort of thing on a commercial sitre is not without its risks. Relying on free web services can come back to bite you if those free services suddenly close up or change massively. And, as a non-paying customer, you get exactly the customer service you paid for.Â
Note: There are vendors who provide this service for thousands of dollars. Thanks for one smart developer playing around with the latest, cool open-network tools, GateHouse Media can now make it available on our sites for free.Big publishing companies tend to seek big publishing solutions. The problem is that the web favours small, agile solutions. Squaring that circle is a huge challenge, and one that's as much a social one as a technical one.
One of our blogging journalists has discovered that you shouldn't be rude about IBM, unless you're on very certain ground.
The only way I've been able to get internet access for much of the past week:
The apartment where Mum & I have been staying in Norwich while she undergoes chemotherapy has WiFi, via the coffee shop nearby. Sadly, the only place I could get a reliable, regular signal was the cupboard in her room.
Ah, well. Another five hours here at the hospital, and then back to her blissfully broadband and WiFi-enabled house…
And James Garner, the web editor of Computer Weekly, has posted a list of the top 10 most popular posts on the IT mag's stable of blogs. It's no surprise to me that cheap technology and IT security issues top the list...
When I got into work this morning, there were a number of e-mails in my in-box about our Movable Type server being down. Luckily, it had been that way for just a few hours, only the posting interface was affected (ie pages were still readable) and the Web Services guys had already solved the problem. However, it brings me some comfort to know that we're not the only ones who hit these sorts of issues. I've been getting the above message from all of The Telegraph's blogs for the last hours or so…
OK, so the 18 month lock-in ain't great. And only having one network isn't making me happy. But there are lots and lots of reasons why this wee iPhone is changing my thinking. Post in progress…
1. We really need some way to incorporate comments directly into the RSS feed (and no, doing it separately Wordpress-style doesn't cut it).
2. If you have a large number of RSS feeds in your aggregator, they really need to be tended like a garden. The dead wood and decaying flowers need to be trimmed away to let new shoots flourish, and you need to mow the lawn regularly. 1909 items unread does not count as a well-mown RSS lawn.
Something strange and wonderful has occurred:
Those of you familiar with the Mac and NetNewsWire will know what this screengrab means: for the first time in many long months, I'm finally on top of all my RSS feed subscriptions. I have none unread.
This feels great.
So, what would be the sensible government approach to repeated revelations that IT projects have gone wrong? An internal investigation? Some changes of management? How about bringing in outside experts to manage the mess?
No.
They order civil servants to shred documents.
Some fine reporting from Tony Collins on Computer Weekly, there.
The Washington Post has published an interesting article by a law professor about students attending classes with laptops open. It calls into question the idea that the younger generation are as able to multi-task and process as many information sources as we think they can.
Is he being reactionary, or is this going to be a genuine problem?
Ironically, I'm typing this in an internal meeting with my attention on 50% on the proceedings.
[Via a comment on Anil's Vox.]
And now to the heart of this trip to New York. Six Apart held a Movable Type Summit in the Affinia Hotel Manhattan yesterday, and they'd asked me to be one of the speakers. It was a summit of two halves, with the first devoted to the technical issues and the second to use cases and the business of blogging.
I've got a fair investment in Movable Type. I've been using it for this blog for well over three years, and we've selected the Enterprise version of the tool as our blogging platform at work. I came seeking some reassurance that we made the right choice. And got it. In spades.
In many ways, the first, technical section of the day was as reassuring as anything. There are a core of good people here, doing some serious work around high-traffic sites - and willing to share the experiences they've had. I know some people believe that MT doesn't scale, but David Jacobs was able to give some solid evidence and advice about exactly how it can (and does) scale.
The afternoon sessions were more a case of bonding over common experiences. There's no doubt that any organisation that starts blogging internally or externally starts to experience some major cultural shifts - but most start from a position of fear. Again and again I hear people not liking the idea of readers being able to comment, and their position quickly changing as their experience of reader interaction grows.
Indeed, on both the technical and content front there was plenty of discussion about the best ways of taking regular commenters and giving them a bigger say with blogs.
I'm not going to blow-by-blow the issues raised in the summit, but I will go through some of them in future posts. I have a seven hour flight on Saturday. I need something to keep me busy…
Closing off the day, Michael Sippey took us through the future of Movable Type through until the end of the year. Movable Type 4 hits by the summer, with the roadmap showing two .1 releases before the end of 2007. Much of the focus of MT4 is going to be on re-engineering the platform to use the key technologies behind Vox and Typepad to make the application faster, and much better at handling non-text assets. There will be a series of add on packs that add elements that aren't needed by everybody in the core product, but which will allow people to customise the app they way their (business-mainly) environment needs. A nice concept, and one that breaks down the current distinction between Movable Type and Movable Type Enterprise.
There's no guarantee that we'll stay a Six Apart customer for our blogs for ever and I'm most certainly not going to start taking sides in the tiresome Wordpress versus Movable Type war (I'm glad there are other tools out there should we ever wish to switch). MT looks like its going to be the right tool for us for a while to come.
I've not been having a good technology day. We've had a couple of issues with both our internal and external blog servers that have sent my blood pressure in what could be described as "a non-positive direction". The "split bill" service for my corporate mobile phone (no, I still don't have a Blackberry) was refusing to work in Firefox. My work PC laptop was crashing repeatedly. I was, in short, having a bad IT day.
In fact, I found myself wondering how my job became so technology-centric. And then it hit me, my job has always been technology-centric. After all, magazine publishing is based around the twin pillars of Desktop Publishing and Printing Presses. But they don't really register as technology to most people, and that's because we tend to use the word "technology" as a shorthand for "new technology" - which is technology which has come to prominence within our adult lifetime.
What will this industry look like when the digital natives enter the workplace? What will journalists who don't remember an age before the internet create with the tools that people are building already?
And it's thoughts like that which allow me to keep wading through the technological morass of corporate life towards whatever it is that's coming next.
(This post might be taken as evidence that I need to cut down on the coffee)
There's no doubt that Steve Jobs and Apple know how to build excitement. People do not set up “Keynote Bingo” for Gates's keynotes at CES. Microsoft does not shroud its booth in black cloth to build up expectations about the goodies hidden underneath.
It also, I suspect, creates a sense of shared experience amongst the Mac loyalists, a bonding of identity much the way that the Queen's Speech on Christmas Day used to do for us Brits.
Whatever. It's fun to see what goodies Uncle Steve has lined up for us. Let's see if he can live up to this year's greater-than-normal hype.
Accustomed brilliance from Brian Micklethwait:
It has taken me quite a while to get used to the idea that, in the Age of Google, if you have a question, you can quickly find an answer. It’s like being a small boy again, only this time when you shout “Why?!?!?!” (or whatever) at your mother, your mother is the Internet, and it knows, and it can tell you in seconds.
However, it's a lot less likely to cook your dinner and iron your shirts for you…
Busy work day today. I'm off on a conference that took up the whole of this evening and will eat up pretty much all of tomorrow. And I'm looking forward to every minute of it. When did that happen?
However, the really cool thing is that both the conference venue and the hotel I'm staying in tonight have completely free internet access. Free WiFi at Sandown Park and free wired broadband in the room at Oatlands Park.
So, I'm keeping up with e-mail, IMing family and friends, listening to podcasts and even getting some blogging done, without it costing me a penny extra. That's customer service. That's what will bring me back to places like this.
Technorati Tags: business, business travel, conference centres, hotels, internet access, mobile working, wifi
Lorna, my wife, has a theory that we're in a very tight window of opportunity where computer and web familiarity is an advantage to you in the workplace. From there we'll rapidly move to a situation where lack of it is a crippling disadvantage (if we're not there already) and finally to a phase when it's just the norm.
After that, we swing back to real world social skills being a major competitive advantage.
This is all interesting in the context of the campaign launched by The Daily Telegraph this week— Hold on to Childhood — calling on us to protect our offspring's time as children, which is being eroded by the way we're structuring society. Daniel Finkelstein of The Times had a fairly predictable pop at the idea on Comment Central, and The Telegraph's Ben Fenton mounted a decent defence of the paper's forward-looking approach to technology on his blog.
I can't help feeling that the ideas expressed here are backing up Dr Tinworth's theory rather nicely. Certainly, as Finkelstein argues, electronic toys are, on balance, good for children. But, unless kids get a more rounded experience of childhood, and the social education that comes with it, they're destined to a second-class position in the workplace and, quite possibly, in life.
Technorati Tags: children, education, hold on to childhood, learning, technology
Web Worker Daily is an interesting new blog from the GigaOm stable, aimed squarely at people for whom their laptop and mobile phone are more the office than the physical building with that name.
I'm a great fan of the concept of mobile working (as opposed to home working) because it suits me right down to the ground. I've done some of my best work in coffee shops, hotels and trains. Offices can be great places for human contact, but they can also be stifling to creativity.
Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, mobile working, office, workstyle
I notice, via Anil Dash, that Google has shifted Gmail for your domain to become Google Apps for your domain.
The more I look at this, the more I think we're only a couple of steps away from something that will be perfect for the roving reporter. All they need to do is add Writely, the online word processor, and you've got something much more efficient that VPNing into the company network and accessing your files and data that way, using applications on your laptop. You can work anywhere there's an internet connection and a web browser, and access your key files.
It'll be a while in coming, and it might not be Google that does it, but I think I just saw the future of journalism flash before my eyes.
More and more publishers of all stripes, it seems, are growing slightly uncomfortable with the growing power of Google over what gets read and what doesn't. Two very different takes on the situation flowed into my RSS reader this morning:
Google, for all its coolness and “don't be evil” ethos, is becoming as secretive and closed as that cooler tech firm, Apple. However, Apple is pretty much just a minor player in the PC market, while Google rules the web.
Technorati Tags: google, google news, landing pages, travoloution
11 Suggestions For Not Being a Dot-Bomb 2.0
A nice hype-pricking guide to the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Most of it comes down to “how are you gonna make money, buddy?”, though, and I remain amazed at how the internet blinds certain people to the need to get paid, pay the rent and buy food.
[via Loïc Le Meur]
Technorati Tags: web 2.0
I'm back in the office today, after a week working remotely.
Much as I enjoy working from home, or other locations, I am glad to be back in EG's Procter Street hub. Working from home is an excellent way of concentrating on particualr tasks, getting copy edited and sent to the sub-editing desks and clearing e-mail.
But the social buzz of the office is still the best way of generating ideas. If we do, as a culture, shift towards a more mobile working paradigim, then our office spaces are going to have to develop to reflect their primarily social role.
Well, I have broadband at home again. It turns out that BT have, over the years, changed the way you need to set up your modem to connect to their broadband service. And they never told their old users about this.
So, suddenly, over the weekend the old scheme stopped working and we lost broadband access, which drove Lorna up the wall while I was away. Support was able to tell me what to do and, after an hour's hunting for the modem configuration instructions ("Can't you just download them?" aked Lorna. Uuuuh, no...), I got everything up an running.
It's quite an achievement from BT, though. This an issue designed to irritate its most loyal customers. Very clever, that.
Scrapbooking is one of those things people call “crafts”, but which I'm sure are just hobbies wearing a slightly more trendy outfit. It is basically creating photograph albums that contain all sorts of other items, such as other memorabilia collected on the day the photos were taken or decorative material, to create a more aesthetically pleasing album. It's also immensely popular.
In what might be another step for blogging towards the mainstream, Scrapblog brings us a sort of upscale photoblogging. When I have some time I'll play with the site and see what it can do.
[via Lifehacker]
Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, publishing, scrapbooking
Meme floating around the IT-analyst-o-sphere: “bring
your own laptop.” Basically treat the employee's
laptop as you would treat the employees's pants:
require it, pay the employee enough to buy it,
and provide the infrastructure that works with it,
but that's all.
About bloomin' time. I use my personal iBook for work purposes all the time, but IT policies at work prevent me from being able to link in any meaningful way with the work servers while I'm out of the office. The only solution would be to carry two laptops with me, one for work stuff and one for home stuff*.
The sort of approach suggested above would bring businesses' IT policies into line with the realities of life in the early 21st century and would really make life much, much easier.
Technorati Tags: it, mobile working, technology, work, workplace
Compare and contrast:
The iPod is dying and will die in 2006
While there's much to quibble with in the second article*, it's still an interesting exercise in perspective, and looking outside a niche.
*For instance, just because a phone ships with MP3 playing capacity, doesn't mean it'll be used, whereas an MP3 player is going to be used to play audio files, by default. Thus, the comparison isn't like-with-like. There may be 90m musicphones out there, but how many are being used for music?
Technorati Tags: ipod, mobile phones, music, technology
I'm having a confusing day. I can't pronounce scion, and now I discover I don't know how to pronounce Skype. Is it "sky-pee" or "sky-puh?".
Dilemmas, dilemmas.
Technorati Tags: english, pronunciation, skype
This is why I like the new version of iPhoto:
It's full screen editing environment is such a pleasant way to work. You can click on the picture to see it larger, if you wish.
I've just been having an intial play around on MySpace for (believe it or not) work-related reasons.
My profile is here, if any of you out there are users.
In any modern version of Dante's Inferno, there should be a special portion of hell reserved for those who use mobile phones while in the toilet. It's just so wrong on so many levels.
Well, look at this. One of Lewisham's councillors has taken advantage of the new features in iLife '06 to launch his own podcast.
Check out Andrew Milton's Podcast.
Now, will the other Andrew step up to the mike?
The Guardian has occasional moments of confusion. Despite being one of the leading big media proponents of podcasting in the UK, it's just published a piece mocking the whole idea. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Newspapers should have room for different ideas and positions within the covers. It's just that, well, it's so predictable. You could have picked out some of the 'jokes' in advance. For example:
The term podcast - coined and first used, according to most sources, by the writer Ben Hammersley in this very newspaper in February 2004 - distinguishes a certain sort of internet-borne audio (or, increasingly, video) content from all the other sorts, and specifically denotes an MP3 file that can be downloaded to one's computer automatically via RSS subscription technology and thence transferred to one's personal MP3 device for later listening. In short, it's like a radio programme that you listen to on your iPod. A podcast is not to be confused with a webcast, which uses real-time streaming to allow you to listen at your leisure, but not on the hoof, as it were. (You are free to regard this distinction as largely semantic or, if you prefer, wholly incomprehensible.)
The emphasis is mine. So, Mr Dowling, are you suggesting that the readers are free to regard your journalism as inferior, because you can't comprehensibly explain the the theory and technology behind it? Surely the distinction between something you have to sit and listen to at your computer or something you can listen to anywhere you take your iPod isn't that hard to express or understand?
Other podcasts make use of "podsafe" music, that is, music wholly owned and controlled by the artist, who has uploaded it on to something like the Podsafe Musical Network in order to make it available, for free, to registered podcasters. ("Podsafe", therefore, is well on its way to becoming a synonym for "homemade and/or of necessarily limited appeal".)
That's Podsafe Music Network, and do you really believe that "not picked up by the mainstream music industry" really equals "rubbish"?
Though the technology probably exists, my iPod has no means of fast-forwarding through a boring rant or a dreadful podsafe tune
And that's a pretty clear example of what IT support types call "user error". Mine can do that Mr Dowling. All iPods can do that.
There's a funny article to be written about this stuff, but it'll rise above "isn't technology so geeky?" and "all amateur material is laughable".
So nyah, nyah, nyah.
Oh, look. Channel 4 News is podcasting.
Interesting.
This is an impromptu test of Kablog, a blog client for my mobile phone. I'm sat in the car, waiting for mum to return from her doctor's appointment. The photo opportunities are a touch lacking, so I've turned to writing instead.
Update: Hmmm. Not sure I'm very impressed so far. I had to knock the photo out, because the whole thing looked so horrible.
I was in a distinctly odd, tired mood tonight, so I ended up just fiddling around in iTunes, listening to some old tracks.
With the new version of the software, Apple has introduced a MiniStore, a small window at the bottom of your music library, that shows you related tracks. This has been less than warmly received in some quarters, because it involves your computer sending information about your listening habits to Apple.
I'm finding it strangely fascinating, though, as it provides plenty of glimpses into the musical careers of some of your favourite artists of yesteryear. We're remarkably fickle with our listening habits, sometimes, following an artist for an album or two, and then forgetting about them. Tonight felt like a chance to reconnect with old friends. And I enjoyed that.
I'm sitting in the office, after hours, watching the details of the Steve Jobs keynote over at MacWorld in the US appear on my screen. At the moment, he's talking about iPhoto, the image management app you get free with your Macs. They're adding RSS support to it, which means people can subscribe you one of your virtual albums in their RSS readers or, more significantly for the non-technical type, in their own copy of iPhoto.
Another nail in the coffin of the print photo, I suspect.
Re-Introducing the Real Windows Vista: [Link Dead]
As I watched Bill demonstrate the features of Vista a sense of deja vu washed over me. It was like I've seen it all somewhere before...
Nice idea, well executed and amusing, too.
We in the Hellhole (our affectionate name for the flat we're refurbishing) are firm believers in digital music - we just don't buy CDs any more. In my case, it's the combination of convenience and price, for my wife, it's all about having fewer things cluttering up her living space.
So, I am hugely annoyed that the new Kate Bush album has yet to appear on iTunes. Each (New Music) Tuesday, I check in the hope that the album has appeared, but it doesn't. Now, Charles Arthur has found a plausible reason why. It's enough to drive me over to the Podsafe Music Network.
Just found on the iTunes Music Store:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Blogging
As narrated by Stephen Fry as the voice of the Book.
I'm in the process of playing around with the beta of a neat little phone application called ShoZu, which allows you to post pictures straight from your mobile phone to Flickr. So far. I'm impressed.
The picture is of workmen erecting a new fascia on the building that houses Lewisham's new TK Maxx. I think it proves that just adding a plastic facade to an ugly building gives you an ugly building with a plastic facade.
I know BA have had the odd problem of late (choose your contractors with more care, my friends), but their online check-in system is a wonderful thing.
Yesterday afternoon, in my Mum's front room in Suffolk, I checked myself in for today's flight to Madrid. No queuing when I arrived at the airport: I was straight up to the fast bag drop desk, and off through security. Very impressive, and a nice example of the virtual and the physical working in perfect harmony.
Now, I'm busy checking my e-mail and waiting for my flight's gate number to be announced.
Next stop: Spain and a conference. What ho!
Technorati Tags: airports, technology, travel
I confess. I'm one of the few people left on earth who thinks that a video iPod is a pretty stupid idea. Today made me happy. You see, today, the rumours said, we'd get a phone with iTunes (and we did), and maybe, just maybe a video iPod. Instead, we got this:
It's got the same capacity as the original iPod or the recent iPod Minis, but it's tiny. It's got a colour screen. It's called the iPod nano.
And it doesn't play videos.
Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, ipod nano, music, technology
Sometimes, being a Mac user feels like being trapped in a strange, distorted time warp. In some ways, we're well behind. Games are the classic example of this: many games reach the Macintosh platform at just about the time the PC version hits the budget ranges. At other times, you feel well ahead of the PC pack - I was wearing those distinctive white iPod earbuds long before the little white music player became a mass-marlet phenomenon, and almost a generic name for MP3 players.
I was struck by this feeling again, as I read this article, linked by Brian:
Andrew Teh was tired of nobody ever watching his home movies. “Even my own wife wouldn’t sit through my videos, and she was in half of them,” he recalls. So, when his daughter Cynthia’s wedding loomed last January, he vowed to create a show that people would sit through without being emotionally blackmailed.
The key, Teh realised, was editing his amateur footage into something friends might find more appetising. “If the material was cut down to the best bits, arranged to tell a story, dressed up with a few eye-catching effects, explanatory titles and backing music, I thought people might even ask to see it.”
This is sold as news. Silly season news, sure, but news. Now, I was doing all this nearly five years ago. The circumstances were less than ideal: my Dad was dying, my brother bought a video camera so we could capture some of his reminiscences of his life before he went, and I picked up a new iBook so I could edit the footage in iMovie. All the stuff that's proclaimed as revolutionary in the article was available to me, hardly an enthusiast or hobbyist, nearly half a decade ago.
However, there is a reason behind this hitting the papers about now: the launch of Windows XP Service Pack 2 last year.
“Best of all, the Windows XP Service Pack 2 update came with this great editing application called Windows Movie Maker 2, which is far more powerful than the original version, letting you add titles, apply filters to give your video a special look or change scenes with good-looking transitions.”
But then, perhaps that's the point. Most Mac users are early adopters, of a sort. They tend to be more willing to mess around with things in a creative way. That's why the Mac ethos, its look and feel, appeal to them. What this article is marking is the passing of the idea that originated with Apple passing into the mainstream. And the mainstream is, most definitely, Windows.
I like digital music. I can find digital music. I was hopeless with CDs. I couldn't file them to save my life, and so I could never find the tune I wanted. With iTunes, that's just not a problem.
Which is all a rather long-winded way of pointing out that The Times is giving away five free iTunes tracks a week for the next eight weeks. The first week's give-away is here. Enjoy. (UK and Ireland only, I'm afraid.)
Technorati Tags: digital music, downloads, ipod, itunes, music
Technorati Tags: blogging
I'm in an airport departure lounge again. (What a jet-setting journalist I am!) No free WiFi. In fact, they want £5 for an hour. These prices have to come down.
Technorati Tags: airports, technology, wifi
WiFi in airport departure lines is the mark of civilised countries. Free WiFi is the mark of truly civilised countries. Based on my experiences in Edinburgh and Washington, the UK is civilised and the USA is truly civilised.
In other news, I was reminded again today of the fact that pretty much the first thing people do when going for a meeting with someone new is Google them. If you Google me, you get this site. More and more people I'm meeting through magazine work have read this site before I meet them. I'd better be on my best behaviour, hadn't I?
Technorati Tags: airports, blogging, blogs, google, technology, wifi
This is an insanely good idea:
Fraser Speirs - Neutrino XML - all your feeds in one file.:
What is Neutrino?A Neutrino feed is a collection of pointers to other syndication feeds - say, a blog, Flickr and Del.icio.us - all of which belong to one individual. It's essentially indirection for feeds - point someone at your Neutrino feed and they can then discover your blog feed, your Flickr feed, your Del.icio.us feed, and anything else you care to include which you publish and can be syndicated.
I have a blog, a Livejournal, a Flickr account and a (rarely-used) del.icio.us account. All of them are chucking out feeds. To combine them all in one feed so people can get streaming Adam goodness in a single place would just be a fantastic step forward.
Bravo!
(Now, if you can find a way to pull each person's contributions to a group blog into their Neutrino stream, all the better.
Technorati Tags: flickr, xml, rss, atom, aggregation, blogging, blogs, syndication, neutrino, review
Tom Coates has posted an essay based on a speech he gave at a recent Six Apart event. It's entitled The Horseless Carriage...:
This is a slightly rewritten and polished up version of a talk I gave to a Six Apart event (cf. On being on the panel at Blogs in Action) at London's Polish Club a few weeks ago. It's kind of a personal history of and exposition around weblogs and webloggery. This version has had some of the more colourful language removed.
What it also is, beyond the above, is well worth a read. Go to it.
The observant will have noticed the sudden appearance of Technorati tags at the bottom of the last post. That's because I've just switched to the latest version of ecto, my blogging tool of choice, which not only makes using them very, very easy, it also has a spiffy new interface.
If you're blogging on a Mac, give it a try. Oh, and there's a Windows version, too.
Technorati Tags: mac, ecto, technology, apple, software, blogging, OS X, technorati, tags
Islington Borough Council has WiFi enabled a whole street, as part of a regeneration idea.
So, Lewisham Council, how about it? The centre of Lewisham? Deptford High Street? Sounds good to me.
Google has launched its map service in the UK. And it's rather good.
It has the clarity of design and ease of searching that are Google hallmarks. A quick search of a few locations I'm very familiar with proves that the maps are good. Let's see how they pan out in regular use.
There is a group of classical music fans out there that are currently the bane of my life. These people, despite having a fine ear for music, are morons. They are completely incapable of differentiating between “artist”, “composer” and “track”. For example, Beethoven is not a “track”, he's a composer. So, when entering the details of one of his symphonies into your music software, you should put his name in the “composer” slot, not the “track” slot. Equally, putting the track name into the “artist” slot just confuses things further.
Now, to be charitable, you could assume they have a quirky, idiosyncratic labeling system for their MP3s, that makes sense to them. That's as may be. But, even allowing for that, why upload your quirky, idiosyncratic and just plain wrong information to Gracenote so that every other poor blighter who sucks down your information from the CDDB is forced to spend 10 minutes correcting your idiotic work?
Following the dominant computer firm's helpful guide to not buying an iPod Shuffle, Crazy Apple Rumors gives us some future Microsoft Advice:
# Under no circumstances should your MP3 player be stylish. You don't want to be taken for a dandy. After all, you never know when you may find yourself incarcerated through an unfortunate series of events that are no fault of your own. And you know what they do to dandies in prison. Yikes.
# When picking an operating system or office suite, it's a great idea to go with the one with the highest market share, because you're guaranteed a quality product that will be around for years to come. But not with flash-based MP3 players. It's a completely different situation. Completely.
At work, I subscribe to the Microsoft Executive E-mails, which see yous getting occasional mail from Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer, telling you how wonderful they are.
My copy of Outlook automatically filed the latest missive from Mr Gates as Junk Mail. This amuses me no end.
It looks like there may be a solution for comment spam on the horizon. The search engines are adding support for an attribute that, in effect, tells the search engine spiders to ignore certain links. The hope is that this will destroy the utility of comment spam, but only is as many people as possible implement it
Six Log: Support for nofollow:
The search team at Google approached us with the idea of flagging hyperlinks with a rel=“nofollow” link attribute in order to alert their search spider that a particular link shouldn’t be factored into their PageRank calculations. The Yahoo and MSN search teams have also indicated they’d support this new spec, and we’ll be implementing and deploying this specification as quickly as possible across all of our platforms around the world.
It sounds like a good idea to me. You can download a plugin for Movable Type, Typepad and LiveJournal will have support shortly. I imagine the other blogging tools will be following shortly.
Full technical details here and a layman's explanation here.
This is a great story:
Wired News: Monster Fueled by Caffeine:
SAN FRANCISCO -- Delicious Monster is the Mac software company behind the hit Delicious Library, a program for cataloging collections of books, movies and games. The software is selling like hot cakes and has garnered rave reviews and awards, yet the company's headquarters is a Seattle coffee house.
I ran a piece in the magazine about a year back looking at coffee houses coming full circle back to their 18th century roots as business places. It's satisfying to see the prediction becoming so true.
its four main employees meet every day at the popular Zoka coffee shop in Seattle's university district.
“It's cheap rent and a fun environment,” said Matas. “We go down there every day with our laptops and work. It's an incredible place. They have two or three of the top baristas in the country (the awards are on the wall). We pay our rent by buying coffee.... They love us. We're some of their best customers.”
As well as creamy lattes, the coffee shop offers wireless internet access and big, bench-like tables that several people can gather around. Often, Delicious Monster's entire seven-person staff will work there.
We'll see more and more of this for small, agile and young companies.
So, another Stevenote has come and gone. Steve Jobs has unleased another wave of products on the world. Some people are breathless about the cheap and tiny iPod Shuffle. Some are running around in excited circles about the Mac Mini. They're both cool products.
However, I'm most excited about the new version of iPhoto, which will make a palpable difference to my life. RAW import from my Canon EOS300D? Check. More editing operations, so I don't need to open Photoshop so much? Check? More book options? Check? Nested filing systems? Check.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a good round-up of the new features.
For those eagerly awaiting this afternoon's Stevenote:
Image via CrunchBase
Well, what do you know? Blogging is proving to be like any other business. Consolidation is bringing us down to three major providers of blog tools and a number of smaller, niche providers. The proof of this was announced last night after 48 hours of rumours.
The rumours were true. Om Malik got his exclusive. Six Apart is buying Livejournal. Livejournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick posted this. I think this is good news. I've been dealing with Six Apart for 18 months as a user of both Movable Type for my blog and Typepad for a password protected church site. In that time, they've grown from a group of three or four people to a small company, without losing their friendliness, enthusiasm and accessibility. Moreover, I think that the two sets of offerings are quite compatible. As Brad puts it:
We have experience with making "inward-facing" community sites, whereas their sites/products tend to be "outward-facing". They want some of that inward-facing action.
The reason I have both an LJ and a blog is just that: my blog is outward-facing, talking to anyone who comes along, while my LJ is inward-facing, talking to my circle of friends, in both senses of the word. Indeed, the LJ friends mechanism is what makes it so unique, I think. Six Apart co-founder Mena Trott has written a long post on the subject here. She highlights the friends aspect as something that makes LJ unique:
We started Six Apart because of Movable Type and Movable Type started because I wanted a blogging tool that would make it easy for me to have a creative outlet to publish to the world. But, it turns out, I didn't want to publish to the world -- I wanted to publish to the people who I had been reading for years and respected, who, in turn became my friends in the offline world. I made friends through my weblog and realized that I was more comfortable writing to this subset. That isn't to say I didn't still like writing to the world at large. Mena's Corner is meant to reach as many people as possible. And, I'm comfortable with that. What I'm not comfortable with is posting pictures of my best friend's baby on my public weblog.
So, now Six Apart has a whole range of product: Livejournal for small, focused publishing to a targeted group, Typepad for personal blogging and Movable Type for more corporate and large-scale blogging. What's more, this is good for both companies in the long term. The two other major blogging players right now are Microsoft with MSN Spaces and Google with Blogger. MSN Spaces has, in particular, friends-like features based around your MSN Messenger contacts list. The big boys are in the field and looking to pick a fight. The small guys (financially speaking) need to band together to survive. At the moment, the precious few paid users of Livejournal are subsidising the mass of the free users, and SIx Apart doesn't look set to change that. What they will do, if they have any sense, is give more and more compelling reasons for the free users to switch, without undermining the existing free service. And just to put a few of the most commonly-expressed worries to rest, read this quote from the Six Apart FAQ on the acquisition.
Q. What is going to happen to LiveJournal and its current users? A. We acquired LiveJournal because we like LiveJournal just the way it is -- it's an awesome product. We will invest in the further development of LiveJournal and help it expand its reach around the globe but our plans do not include removing the free level, plastering the sites with ads, owning user content, etc...
Based on my recent Livejournal post, with added context.
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According to a report on Macminute, some online music providers are claiming that subscriptions are the way forwards:
Napster, Yahoo say iTunes is doomed | MacMinute News: Apple rivals say the iTunes Music Store's 99-cent pricing is the wrong formula for digital music, and that subscription-based models are the future. With the top-of-the-line iPod, "You can fit 10,000 songs on it," Napster CEO Chris Gorog says. But "to do that would cost you $10,000 if you bought the songs from Apple. With our plan, customers can get 10,000 songs on their device for $180 a year. It's an enormous value."
I see two problems with this idea.
Firstly, I want to be able to keep my music, not see it all disappear if I have to drop the subscription for any reason. If you spend $180 on albums, you've got around one a month. That's a good number and you've got them for life. You spend $180 on a subscription, then you may have many more songs, but if you pay nothing the following year, you've nothing to show for it.
Secondly, people aspire to own, not rent. People move from renting to buying property. When I was a kid people rented their TVs. Now, I don't know anyone with rental goods. The technology business has a terrible blind spot to models that have been tried and failed in other industries. Music rental will be another example of it.
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I found this a little late. Those canny people over at the Big Blog Company are running some seminars about blogging for journalists.
the Big Blog Company | Blogging boot camps for journalists:
It seemed a good idea to us to gather a few journalists who may want to learn about blogs and show them how they work and why perhaps they should care. As things move fast in the blogosphere, we would like to do a few practical hour-long blogging sessions before Christmas, starting Friday 17th, then Monday 20th December and Tuesday 21st December.
The lack of awareness of blogging in my profession continues to amaze me. Of the 30 or so journalists employed by EG, I'm the only one with a blog that I'm aware of, and only a handful of my colleagues seem to be even aware of their existence. This is from a magazine that was one of the first to have a comprehensive, profitable online service.
At the very least, understanding a new publishing outlet would seem like a good idea for all journalists. That's certainly one of the reasons I started blogging.
Ecto has been my blogging software of choice for a little while now. While it lacks the superb user interface of, say, Xjournal, it's certainly my favored way of getting copy onto this blog. Part of that is its excellent picture handling options. As a blogger that like photos, that's a great boon.
However, I can also empathize with some of the complaints about it.
MacMove.com:
The new Mac version of this once excellent blog posting program is much more complicated now and much more time consuming to use. By offering too many formatting options it adds several steps to what used to be a blazingly fast and simple tool.
I think that misses the point a little. It's not adding new features per se that causes the problem - it's that the UI of the applications needs a serious revamp to make it all seem much more intuitive. Let's hope that it's on the way.
As has just been pointed out to me in comments below, iTunes is now selling the new Band Aid single for 79p, and Apple is donating an extra 70p to round up the donation.
A good call, but one that makes it harder to follow through with this amusing idea.
A different take on the Windows-only Band Aid download situation:
Dial-up must be banished from this land and replaced universally with broadband. Dial-up is useless for the modern internet user.
Aaargh.
Ah, well, it's only for 24 hours.
One more Apple Store link: Beth's report on Metroblogging. I like the detail about the local coffee shops being persuaded to open early.
You know what? I've been using Apple Computers since the early 90s, when I laid out the student rag on an old Mac Classic, and I still can't figure out what it is about the company that inspires this devotion. On the other hand, I wouldn't buy a PC willingly. Personally, I think Steve Jobs is a wizard. It's the only rational explanation.
Incidentally, today's blogging so far come to you from the British Library. I'm covering a conference here, and the whole site has wireless access. An outfit called Building Zones is providing free wireless access all day. Hurrah.
The conference is great, but you'll have to be an Estates Gazette reader to read about it, because I'm here on their shilling.
However, it's been mentioned that the wireless hotspot here is one of the busiest in London. People use the Library both for research and as something approximating to a serviced office. The Library's proximity to both Euston and King's Cross makes it an ideal business location, and the WiFi fees are providing the place with an extra income stream. So, modern WiFi and laptops are helping pay for old, old books. The bibliophile in me loves that.
Last post on the weekend's shop opening, promise. Macworld has some great pics of the overnight sleepers:
Following on from yesterday's post, here's a blog by the guy who slept on Regent Street to be the first into the new Apple Store:
I popped into the opening of the new Apple Store on Regent Street yesterday, the first in the UK. Much to my surprise, I had to queue for 20 minutes to get in, and this was mid-afternoon. Goodness only knows what it was like that morning.
Still, the store has a pleasing aesthetic, there was a nice atmosphere in the queue, despite the rain, and I got the goods I wanted, despite the crowds.
You can see all my pics here.
So, the Band Aid 20 single is available for download. Uh, unless you're on a Mac that is.
"Give to charity - unless you're a Mac user. We don't want your money."
Given how appalling the reviews of the track have been, unless it turns up on iTunes next week, I might just skip buying it entirely and donate a couple of quid to charity instead.
I'm throughly enjoying the new perspective that recent recruit Bobbie Johnson is bringing to the Guardian's Online Blog. Frankly, you should be, too.
Case in point: his dissection of the broadband promises in Tony Blair's speech to the Labour conference yesterday. Nicely done.
You pop over to the Apple Store, and find it closed for updating. And then you sit there, clicking refresh, waiting to see what new stuff they've put up for you to buy.
I'm such a tragic case.
The Independent runs the experience of a Windows to Mac switcher:
It doesn't have to be this way:
"Windows thinks it's a surprise worth telling you about when something works. Apple doesn't."
[via Charles Arthur]
Macworld UK - Oz iPod-owners could face jail
Ah, don't you love it when politicians legislate without fully understanding the subject?
Technology usually used to study sub-atomic particles is being applied to the task of restoring recordings now too delicate to play.
For all the scare stories about the transitory nature of digital media, this reminds us just how transitory hard media can be, too.
I just submitted my first iMix to iTunes.
Do you remember the early 90s Steve Martin comedy L.A. Story? It's one of my favourite films, and I've always been annoyed that they never released a soundtrack for it. Now, I've been able to assemble my own:
Feel free to vote for it. :-)
I'm busy downloading a couple of albums I've only ever owned as cassettes. Less space, better sound quality. It's like digitally remastering my youth...
Cory Doctorow outlines the most persuasive argument against Digital Rights Management I've yet seen. Well worth a read.
Apple's new iTunes Music Store in the UK is rocking my world. "I've been waiting for something like iTunes and iPod all my life," said One Woman. "I just didn't know what it looked like until now."
One Woman is something of a minimalist, you see. She finds the conflict between her love of music and her desire not to own a metric tonne of plastic discs containing said music to be troublesome. However, now she can have all the music she wants on her slick, minimalist white iMac and her sleek, minimalist white iPod, without the horrible clutters of CDs. Oh, and the music's a lot cheaper, too (£7.99 an album, 79p for a track).
So, just before we headed out last night, she found and downloaded The Cure's singles collection Staring at the Sea, and we had a great journey to the dulcet tones of Mr Rob Smith.
The future is here, at 79p a pop.
Looks like my confidence in Six Apart's ability to listen to their customers was well-placed. I'll be purchasing the licenses I need and migrating the blogs I run over to MT3 in the coming weeks. Hurrah!
I just love it when those software guys do clever things behind the scenes to make my life better. Take the forthcoming integration of my two most frequently-used blog apps, ecto for writing and NetNewsWire for reading. Good on both the developers for making their respective babies play so nicely together.
I just realised, while doing my evening bloground, that I now have three major identity services I use when commenting on blogs: my Blogger account to comment on the new Blogger blogs, my Typekey identity to comment on MT3 (and Typepad soon, presumably) blogs and my Livejournal ID to comment on most Livejournals. All three are free to obtain and use.
The problem is that I now have a Blogger user page, a Typekey user page and an LJ user page. All of these need to be kept up-to-date.
Blimey. Any chance of standardising on one of these?
...or at least articulate your practical issues with the MT3 licensing in a cogent post. But that doesn't sound so good as a headline, does it?
Mena has asked for people to Trackback problems with the current MT licensing structure to the Six Apart company blog. I'd just like to reiterate my earlier point about a company being judged by the way it handles problems, not by problems cropping up. I still think Six Apart is doing a fine job.
So, although I'm broadly in favour of the new licensing, I do have an issue. I'm running three blogs at the moment:
My personal blog, which has one author and may expand up to about three weblogs over time. Non-commerical, although it does serve to promote me as a writer.
Kingdom Come, a multi-author blog, with up to 10 authors and another two blogs due to spin off out of it, from the same author pool. Non-commercial.
There will soon be a Tinworth family blog, with up to five people posting on the main blog, and two to five others on a family genealogy forum. Each of the individual posters on the first blog would have the option to run their own blogs on the same server. Non-commercial.
Major concern: do I have to licence all three installations separately? If so, that obviously significantly raises the cost bar for me. I could do my personal blog within the terms of the free license, but both the other installations would require a pay license. Ideally, I'd like to be able to do this with a single pay license, buying additional weblogs and authors as needed. As the various blogs are behind different domains, it's proved easier for me to host them separately up until now, but if necessary I could look at moving them all to one server with the domain name mapping appropriately.
For those still paying attention, Six Apart has clarified and modified some of its licensing conditions on MT3 based on the feedback the firm has received.
Of course, some people will characterise this as back-pedalling or panic, but I've always thought a company should be judged by how well it responds to negative feedback. This strikes me as a pretty fair response.
Dean of Heal Your Church Web Site offers a solution to the criticisms level at the MT3 licensing structure.
Ian Betteridge joins the small, but thoughtful, band of people defending Six Apart's strategy on MT3. He makes some pretty good points about sticking with 2.61 if you don't like the terms of 3.0D.
I find it interesting that a significant proportion of the people defending 6A's move are people who write for a living, one way or another. Perhaps that suggests something about the hobbyist mentality of many bloggers, and their subsequent disgust when a company - which they saw as run by fellow hobbyists - goes pro.
Timothy Appnel takes a measured and favourable look at the mew MT licensing terms. It could still be argued that Six Apart have gone from one extreme to another (from 50c to $lots revenue per copy of MT downloaded), but he also makes a number of interesting points.
I suspect much will count on how 6A respond (or not) in the coming weeks to some of the obvious problems that have cropped up.
[via Population One]
So, MT3 is out there. For very light users (1 author and 3 blogs), it's free. For everyone else, it's now pay software. Six Apart's rationale is here.
Not surprisingly, the internet first reacters are howling with the predictable outrage at actually having to pay for something. Others are pointing out significant problems with the pay structure more thoughtfully.
Personally, I'm not terribly shocked by any of this yet, but I'll be watching the fall-out with interest. And yes, I'll probably be paying.
(It's worth noting that at least one man predicted some protesting, even if he didn't mention price.)
Today, I went hunting. You see, I've been following Mr Micklethwait's Billion Monkeys Project closely, and a very fine idea it is, too. As I was looking at his latest image, though, something struck me. There was something missing from his images, something utterly redolent of the digital age.
And so, I took myself off to the prime hunting ground for digital monkey, Trafalgar Square, found myself a good vantage point and prepared my weapon. Hunting was good, as the images below show you:
However, I still hadn't found the monkey I was looking for. Oh, I saw one in the distance, but it was far out of range, alas.
Finally, though, just as I was about to give the whole expedition up as a bad job, and head for Charing Cross, I found her. The lady that represents the modern digital monkey, adopting the Digital Monkey Method of picture taking:
My hunt was over. My trophies are here.
Blogbinders - making a book of your blog without all that nasty "getting a publishing deal" business.
I have left the white earbud brigade. For the last two years, I have proudly worn my white iPod headphones, giving me that distinctive look that my wife describes as "looking like you've got some medical equipment attached to you". I've shared that knowing look with fellow iPod users on trains, tubes and on the street. I've felt like one of the elite.
And now, it's over.
When I walked to work today, a plain black cord sneaked out from my jacket pocket and into my ears. The music still came from the iPod, but any external signs of my membership of that proud band have gone. Why? Well, for one, the cachet has gone. Everyone has one, and as soon as the iPod Mini hits London's streets, so will Everyone's Wife. More to the point though, I really, really don't want to get mugged for my iPod. So, sweet musical anonymity is now my watch word.
You know what? I never realised just how crappy those white headphones were. Hurrah for improved sound quality and (relative) safety.
 | Yeah, I know it's a bit of a crappy picture, but I grabbed it in a hurry on the way into work yesterday morning. It really struck me just how much people are using the WiFi hotspots in the two Starbuck's on Wardour Street. It's a pretty rare day when I walk past and there isn't somebody in there using a laptop (an iBook in this case - this is trendy, Apple-using Soho, after all) and catching up on e-mail or the web.
I know we all have a healthy dose of scepticism about new technology, thanks to the claims of the dotcom boom, but this shift to wireless working really seems to be coming true. How do I know? My mother-in-law wants me to show her how to surf the web in her local Starbuck's. It's mainstream, folks. |
A journalist took advantage of her press access to stars on the Oscars night to quickly moblog the event with her mobile phone. moblog the event with her mobile phone. She was pretty quickly asked to stop, but not before getting some great candids from the occasion that make a refreshing change for our visual palates, so dulled by endless rounds of PR-approved images.
The journalist discovered that uses of mobile phone or PDA cameras were banned at the event. I find the excuses on offer interesting, as they mostly rely on the security issue: "don't take pics as it might help terrorists". I'd love to hear them explain that statement, just to see their expressions as they desperately struggle for a coherent rationale.
"Uh, they could, uh, beam the pictures to, uh, Afghanistan where, uh, um, Osama Bin Laden could say somthing rude, errr, morale sapping about Nicole Kidman's dress..."
It's probably inevitable that people who are involved in security that they regard any new communication technology as an inherent risk. However, in one of the most televised events in the world, banning the use of mobile phone cameras amongst a carefully controlled press pack just seems disingenuous.
I'm sick. I depend upon my computer for entertainment and communication today, because my wife has turned into a cleaning fury. Is this why my mail is so delayed and some websites have slowed to a crawl?
Y'know, there's a danger in asking for donations to help keep your blog running. I blog I read with some regularity started plugging the PayPal tips box fairly frequently. I made my decision not to danate based on the criterion "would I really miss this site if it disappeared?". The answer was "no", so I didn't donate.
Then I got to thinking. If I wouldn't miss the site if it disappeared, why was I bothering to read it? It's gone from my list of regular visits. So, in an attempt to make some money from his blog, the writer has lost one reader.
Does it matter? Probably not, if he's more interested in the money than the readership. However, if readership is important, you do need to be really sure that what you're offering is worth money to people before you start asking for it.
Others are having problems with Ecto, although it works just fine for me. However, the support response looks good.
Just thought I'd mention it, as I plugged the software a few days ago.
The snowman of Everything Hurts is getting a little despondent about the fact that most people seem to be coming to his blog from search engines. That's no bad thing in of itself - I've gained some readers from that source.
However, I think he's missed the point which many of the commentators on that posts were quick to make: hit counts are increasingly meaningless.
My visits per day swing from single figures to 60+ in a faily unpredicatble fashion. However, I know that many people are reading this blog using aggregators (like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon), using my RSS feed. Other people are reading it in their Livejournal Friends page, by friending this account.
We're busy inventing new ways to distribute content, and to read it. Old ways of measuring readership are becoming obselete at a fair old rate and that includes measure like hit counters. Reading the One Man & his Blog webpage is just one way of getting my content. I suspect other ways will prliferate in the coming months and year. Bruce Baugh has the right idea. He doesn't measure hits to his blog, nor does he solict comments on the page. He just writes what he wants, when he wants.
Blog because you enjoy the process. Count ever visitor who swings by as a bonus, not a rationale.
It's not often a piece of software impressed me enough to pony up the shareware fee pretty much straight away. Ecto is just such an application. It's a new Mac blogging client, compatible with Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger and the like and it's really, really good.
Essentially, it's a grown-up version of Kung Log, which I used from time to time to post here. The interface is hugely improved, though, and it's matured into a decent blog- management tool. I can't recommend it highly enough.
For the Apple-challenged, apparently there's a Windows version on the way, too.
Dan knows iPod lust and well he might. I foresee one of those little beauties in Lorna's future, one way or another.
The true secret of getting loads of people to visit your blog:
There's an article in today's Independent that trumpets a new MP3 player that has a colour screen and the ability to play movie files as an iPod killer. Apparently we're all going to get bored of our iPods because they only play music. Just like, indeed, we got bored of our Walkmans over the years. Oh, hang on, we didn't. I don't think the "video iPod" is a flyer, simply because people like listening to music on the go, but just don't watch TV in the same way. If you look in most gadget shops, you can buy personal TVs, small enough to carry around with you. When did you last see someone using one in public?
The problem with gadget freaks is that they are more excited by the technology than the use that the technology gets put to. And then, idiots like the journalist behind this article make the manufacturers think they can actually make money on bits of kit like this. They're not going to, of course, The reason that the iPod is so successful is not the fact that it's a cool piece of technology, it's because its a cool and easy way to listen to 1,000s of songs whenever you want. If an iPod killer does come along, it'll be something that does the same thing, is nearly as cool and easy to use and is hugely cheaper. It won't be a clone that plays movies. Do you have any idea where you'd get movies to put on the device? No, I don't either. Do you have any idea how you'd get, say, a DVD onto the device? No, I don't either. The iPod is a simple solution which provides something people want - the ability to carry their music collection with them - while these video equivalents are merely a technology in desperate search of an application.
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This story amuses me intensely, even though I know it shouldn't:
ZDNet UK - News - Scottish hoteliers jam mobiles
I'm one of those people who thinks that insensitive use of mobile phones is one of the banes of modern life. I sit on trains, enduring the sound of people screeching inanities at people they're due to see in half an hour at a louder volume than they'd use to talk to the person sitting next to them. I walk down the street and see people paying more attention to their friends elsewhere than those they are actually with. I sit, doing interviews for the magazine, and ponder how rude it is to take a call on a mobile in the middle of a meeting. As for those who use their mobiles in public toilets... How I long for a pocket mobile hone jammer with which I could bring their anti-social socialising to an abrupt end.
However, what these hoteliers are doing is wrong and illegal. They have been milking travellers with extortionate phone charges for decades and are panicking now that the easy revenue stream this offered is drying up. Mobile phone are great boons to people who have to travel, who want to stay in touch with friends and family and who have broken down by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. I very rarely condone the breaking of the law in any circumstances.
None of this changes my delight at the thought of the obsessive mobile phone user suddenly caught without his beloved toy unexpectedly.
I love it. Stave Ballmer, Microsoft's head honcho these days, is desperately trying to persuade us that Digital Rights Management is, in fact, good for the consumer. This is, of course, nonsense but a simply marvellous read:
Consumers gain the most from the efforts of these pioneering entertainment companies. Online distribution offers a convenient way for people to access their favorite content wherever they are, at any time. But digital piracy is against consumers' long-term interests; it undermines the economic incentives for artists and producers to continue creating and distributing the work we all enjoy. With rights-managed licensing, consumers can help sustain the flow of fresh creative work, confident that they have legitimately acquired rights to content that is authentic, of highest quality, and virus-free.The point he misses, of course, is that DRM tends to assume that you're going to commit a crime. The systems he's advocating are roughly equivalent to a full body search every time you leave a record store. It's not an attractive idea.
Now, if only Apple would make the store available in the UK...
The BBC reports on the best ways to dodge an in-box full of spam:
US researchers at the Center for Democracy and Technology set out to answer this question in the summer of 2002.They found that e-mail addresses posted on websites or in newsgroups attract the most spam.
Spam is estimated to account for up to 40% of global e-mail traffic and is causing a massive headache for businesses, which are losing billions in productivity.
To determine the source of spam, the researchers set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses and waited six months to see what kind of mail the addresses were attracting.
