The Root Of The Matter

This year's tech news, in brief

2011-02-17T16:23:00.001Z

This perhaps goes against the grain of this blog somewhat, but... Good grief, I'm getting bored with tech / web stories lately!

It's not that there aren't new ones to read - quite the reverse. The sheer quantity never changes much. But somehow the content doesn't change much either, at base. Almost every new story I read could be one of any number of other stories I've read before - with nothing changed except the website / company / app involved, the conclusion to the new scientific study, or the version number of the product it's going on about. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: it's just déjà vu, all over again.

So to save everyone the bother of reading the 90%+ of it that's seemingly stuck on a loop, here, in no particular order, is the coming year's tech news:

~~2009~~ ~~2010~~ 2011 will be the year of hyper-local / the semantic web / Web 3.0
Apple / Microsoft to release new product / new version of old product
New Apple / Microsoft product has minor / major fault
Feverish, mainly groundless speculation about next new Apple product starts up again [see also: Microsoft, but much less feverish]
Google wants to buy Company X
Company X resists Google's overtures
Google buys Company X
New Google product, based on code from Company X, not the Facebook-killer / Apple-competitor analysts insist Google is definitely working on; Google shrugs, says that was never the intention
X is the new y
X isn't the new y
X is brilliant, but what will happen when its venture capital runs out?
X is overvalued
Is the 'tech bubble' back?
Video games / the internet / social networking bad for us, according to latest study / book
Video games / the internet / social networking good for us, according to latest study / book
Correlation is the new causation [the Daily Mail position on tech*, and anything else]
Human behaviour / human nature never really changes, just the technology we invent to enact it [the Clay Shirky position on tech scares]
Thing that wasn't in the cloud is now in the cloud
Is our data safe in the cloud?
Established website / company is losing popularity
Established website / company does x in attempt to revive popularity
Established website / company is still losing popularity, but even more so
Facebook tweaks yet another thing / adds new service, causes outcry about compromised privacy [see also: Google, but less often]
Google is evil
Google isn't evil
Suggestion is made that tech debate shouldn't be so reductively binary, no-one listens
Social media makes political protest easier, more effective
Social media's influence on politics and protests is overstated / counter-productive
Important person at Apple / Google / Microsoft retires, leaves, or moves to Apple / Google / Microsoft
Traditional media / music industry / publishing is dying
Traditional media / music industry / publishing still isn't dead yet
Satirical zombie movie to be made about traditional media / music industry / publishing
Remark on Twitter / Facebook is mistaken for news
Remark on Twitter / Facebook is mistaken for news
Remark on Twitter / Facebook is mistaken for news

Lather, rinse, repeat - ad nauseam, ad absurdum, ad redcutio, etc. and so on. Or until 2012, at the very least. Probably.

And in other news: The Weekly Links Post will return soon. Because I'm a hypocrite.

*Not that real newspapers aren't sometimes guilty, too. Especially in pretty much any story that begins: "A new scientific study..."

The (Just After The) Weekend Links Post: No. 34

2011-01-17T22:53:00.001Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below. A little late this week, following some 24-hour live-blogging (32 hours awake, in all, but definitely worth it):

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

As smartphones get smarter, how will their innovations transform our lives and the 'social web'?

Evgeny Morozov explains his new book The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World; plus, Tom Chatfield's review.

Who can you trust on Twitter? Peer Index releases list of most authoritative journalists on Twitter.

Universal and Sony Music to make new singles available as soon as they hit the radio - only highlighting exactly how slow the big record labels have been at facing piracy and the shift to MP3s.

Clay Shirky on the birth of Wikipedia and its 10th birthday.

Social Media

Tunisia: the revolution that's being ignored by social media. More here.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The 2010 Digital Book World Publishing Innovation Awards 2010: the longlist.

Electric Literature's very literal approach to the question: "Can a book save your life?"

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Search Engine Blacklist: remove content-farms and other spam results from your Google searches [Chrome extension]. (Also see: Marco Arment of Instapaper on the problem of Google search spam.)

Music

Gogoyoko: DRM-free, ethical online music store and social network - with free album streaming.

The Recombinant DNA of the Mash-Up: an interactive timeline of the major milestones of the past 104 years.

Games & Other Distractions

But That Was Yesterday: interactive art game about moving on from painful memories (the beginning seems impossible at first, but you'll figure it out soon enough).

Miscellaneous

From a theremin wristwatch to a violin playing cockroach: a rundown of The 2010 Kickstarter Awards.

Collective buying power: a new trend in crowdsourcing?

"One need not agree with WikiLeaks' modus operandi to acknowledge its service to democracy": Twelve theses on WikiLeaks.

The Year End Links Post

2010-12-30T23:21:00.000Z

Ah, Christmas: the season of lists, predictions, and lists of predictions! By which definition, I suppose, a Links Post might not be wholly unfestive - especially one slightly more bloated than usual, and full of lists and predictions:

From Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Guardian Technology's 20 most-read articles and 10 most-viewed photo galleries of 2010.

Forecast for 2011: The Guardian asks tech and web experts to make their predictions for the coming year.

"Media is a form of design... everything is a form of design ": Justin McGuirk examines the argument behind Designing Media, a new book of interviews with major players behind the ongoing media revolution.

Merriam-Webster dictionary's Top 10 definition searches for 2010 speak volumes.

The best short films on the web: how the web is enabling a revolution in short film making and distribution.

Social Media

Facebook overtakes Yahoo as the third largest website in the world.

And it's now the most-visited too, according to Hitwise.

2010 in Twitter trending topics.

The 10 most-shared links of the year.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

"The publishing industry is in trouble - but not just because of the digital revolution": an illuminating interview with John Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century.

The 10 most popular publishing stories of 2010 on GalleyCat, month by month - and some predictions for 2011.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

300+ resources to help you master WordPress, collated by Webdesigner Depot.

2010's top new and updated apps for Windows, according to Downloadsquad.

Disconnect: "a privacy patch for the web", available as an extension for Chrome and RockMelt (Firefox and Safari to follow).

Music

Gorillaz record an album on an iPad - then give it away to fanclub members. (Or you can stream it here, in exchange for your name and email address.)

And here are the 20 iPad music apps the band used - $120 for the lot.

Rundowns of the year's top albums, from: Drowned In Sound, Pitchfork, The Silent Ballet, Fluid Radio, eMusic.

Games & Other Distractions

20 free indie games you may have missed in 2010, selected by IndieGames.com.

Miscellaneous

11 'risky' tech predictions for 2011 from TECHi.com.

2010: the year in ideas, from The New York Times.

And finally...

"Seasons Greetings and a very Happy New Year!" from all at Radix.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 32

2010-12-05T22:27:00.001Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Gawker's Nick Denton on the future of blogging.

CEO of Creative Commons Joi Ito on fair and innovation-friendly copyright tools for the web.

Google moves to stop bad customer service turning into good search rankings for online retailers.

Chromaroma game tries to achieve the impossible: making travel on the London Tube fun.

Social Media

Facebook wants to trademark the word 'Face'. (The cheek of it... etc.).

The persistence (or otherwise) of digital memories: preserving the digital self after death.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

A lengthy interview with William Gibson, cyberpunk writer and inventor of the word 'cyberspace'.

A veritable treasure trove of Samuel Beckett plays on film.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

The Top 50 free apps Lifehacker is 'most thankful for'.

AX: a free, time-saving utility for anyone who regularly has to type accents and special characters.

Music

Google Translate now speaks beatboxer... well, sort of.

Games & Other Distractions

The Infinite Ocean: an atmospheric, deeply-layered philosophical point-and-click mystery (more of an interactive narrative, than a traditional game).

Miscellaneous

Ads they'd never allow today, probably not even on Mad Men.

Virgin launches iPad-only magazine (to mixed reviews so far).

Man sells virtual asteroid for $635,000 - a $500,000 profit on his original purchase.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 31

2010-11-28T23:45:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

The internet's cyber radicals: Aleks Krotoski begins a new fortnightly column on how the internet is changing our world (reader contributions to each column are invited at the link).

Facebook 'one of several threats' to the principles of the web, says Tim Berners-Lee.

'Cloud gaming' services enabling users to play games beyond the spec of their own machines.

Earth as Art: an online gallery of US Geological Survey satellite images.

Has the Times increased profits with its paywall? The latest figures tell us nothing, says Cory Doctorow.

Social Media

Serendipity and human connections: the new sites following in the wake of Chatroulette.

The Viral Spiral: 'the most shared video ads from each of the years 2006-2010.'

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Three book industry experiments with online crowdsourced funding.

Lulu Titlescorer: find out whether your novel has the title to become a bestseller.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Feather: Aviary's superb suite of online design tools now includes an embeddable photo editor, thanks to HTML5.

Music

Spotify still planning US expansion - with or without major labels - despite £16.6m losses in 2009.

Games & Other Distractions

Entries to the latest jayisgames.com Casual Gameplay Design Competition are now available to play online.

Miscellaneous

Lessons learned by The New York Times's David Pogue in his 10 years of writing about technology.

The US embassy cables: what Washington thinks of the rest of the world, as divulged in 'the biggest intelligence leak in history'.

Bad publicity can get you top ranked in a Google search, but is it a long-term business model?

The Weekend Links Post: No. 30

2010-11-21T23:01:00.001Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Author Steven Johnson on: innovation and where good ideas come from.

The latest hype, facts and general speculation about Facebook's omni-connected uber-messaging thing.

Google Maps error leads to border dispute in Central America. (Possible consequences of Google's move into fashion as yet unknown).

Alan Rusbridger on: why media organisations shouldn't ignore Twitter (extracted from his lecture 'The splintering of the fourth estate').

Apple and Murdoch to publish new daily newspaper exclusively on tablet computers.

Social Media

Twitter begins inviting selected users to its official Analytics offering, and apologising to third-party developers.

'Facebook Messages? Erm, good luck with that', says experienced email developer.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

A year in digital publishing: The Literary Platform asks publishers for their digital highlights from 2010 and predictions for 2011.

Lifehacker rounds up some handy online tools for language geeks.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Quick tip: if your hard disk seems to be unexpectedly full, it might be worth checking that BBC iPlayer Desktop has been correctly deleting downloaded programmes from its repository. Another fix for the problem can be found here.

Music

All Day - Girl Talk: the latest release from mash-up specialist Gregg Gillis, free to download.

Games & Other Distractions

The Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast hosts a round-table discussion on storytelling in game design.

Miscellaneous

You Thought We Wouldn't Notice: a blog helping to expose art and design plagiarism.

'20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web': Google's new showcase of what we can expect from the web (and Google Chrome) post-HTML5.

What does Google know about you?

The Weekend Links Post: No. 29

2010-11-14T22:12:00.001Z

"Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better."

Facebook to launch a competitor for GMail (but it'll have to be a vast improvement on Facebook's current mail system, if it's going to get anywhere).

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Spike Magazine: The Book - a free PDF download of the online books-and-culture magazine's "finest interviews, features and reviews."

More detail on what they're up to at Electric Literature. (See also: Weekend Links No. 28).

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

RockMelt: the Facebook-friendly social browser (that isn't Flock); currently in beta.

Music

Silver Lines - Anna Rose Carter: a beautiful, mesmerising EP of solo piano compositions (free to stream at the link; or a more than reasonable £4 to download). More details and tracks at her Myspace page.

Games & Other Distractions

Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge: Alan Partridge returns to our (monitor) screens, in a new series of made-for-the-web videos.

Miscellaneous

The New York Times begins a new column rounding up the best new made-for-the-web "TV" series and movies.

Your brain on ads: the not-yet-quite-as-troubling-or-futuristic-as-it-sounds science of neuromarketing.

"[T]he online newsletter of the Tories": Clay Shirky takes a look at The Times behind its paywall. (See also: a round-up of the online responses).

The Weekend Links Post: No. 28

2010-10-31T20:52:00.001Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

UK's £100bn internet economy now "more valuable to the country than transport, construction or the utilities industries."

LimeWire shut down by US federal court; not that it probably makes much difference.

UK MPs have got it in for Google, over privacy and Street View.

MySpace becomes Myspace, and has a redesign (all of which the UK will have to wait 'til mid-November to ignore).

Social Media

What Facebook's "Top News" feed decides to show you and why.

Social games developer Zynga's estimated worth now surpasses Electronic Arts.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The real demand for pirated e-books - a re-examination of recent figures.

Struggling with writer's block? One Page Per Day presents you with a simple blank page to fill - with something, anything - every day. (And here are some glimpses of what users have written already.)

Electric Literature: a literary journal with expansive, innovative ambitions for digital literature.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Spoon: run popular desktop applications within a browser and without installation (very handy if you're away from your usual machine).

Scrivener: the formerly Mac-only award-winning program for writers is now available in a free public beta version for Windows (full release due in early 2011).

Music

Ten Tracks: download a new curated mixtape of ten tracks every month, with all artists fairly remunerated.

Games & Other Distractions

Scrabb.ly: a massively multiplayer online Scrabble game, that Hasbro hasn't had closed down yet. (Here its creator describes how the idea came about, and its development).

Miscellaneous

One for Halloween: some of the strangest tombstones in the world.

Rewritable pillows - probably best not to fall asleep on one though, if you don't want a rewritable face.

Retargeting ads aren't always retargeting the right people

2010-10-30T15:12:00.000Z

Personalised retargeting or remarketing. Ads that seem to follow you around the internet, tailored to the online retail sites you've already visited and even the specific products you've browsed there. However you want to describe them, such ads seem to be on the rise.

Some find the phenomenon sinister: like being constantly watched or stalked; an intrusion of privacy. Others click on the link purporting to explain "Why are you being shown this banner?" then, apparently reassured (or resigned), don't bother to opt out. As for retailers; more and more seem to be signing up to services like Criteo, while the likes of Google and Microsoft are now running their own behaviour tracking ads too.

So ran the gist of this New York Times article, from a couple of months ago.

Not long after reading it, I booked a short break in London, using a couple of online booking sites, and began to notice the recurring ads for myself. The question that came to mind, after just a few days, was: can this kind of advertising become counter-productive? Might it sometimes harm the brand?

Criteo's website claims its retargeting services offer "phenomenal campaign ROI", and I'm sure they do attract back plenty of visitors who originally left without purchasing, but what impression do the ads create on those of us who did actually purchase before leaving?

Having already booked my hotel with [COMPANY X], every time I visited certain popular sites I was greeted with ads for [COMPANY X], listing hotels in the area of London I'd already booked in - top of each list being the exact hotel I'd booked, and for the exact same nights. On other occasions the train ticket booking service I used was being advertised to me, over and over. Both of these companies I've used consistently over the last few years. And at present, I find a particular florist advertising at me everywhere I go (this time by Google). Again, on the few occasions I need a florist, it's the one I already use.

In short: all three companies had my trade already; when I made the visits to their sites that prompted the tracking ads I purchased the product or service I was there for; the resultant barrage of ads was utterly pointless. If anything, being frequently nagged to buy what I've already bought has made me marginally less inclined to visit the sites again - especially as the ads in question often untidily break the page layouts of the sites that carry them.

Clearly, the kind of technology that would track the fact that a visitor had actually purchased before leaving the sites, and/or had a long purchasing history with each of them, would be even more worrying to privacy campaigners than the present retargeting services (in fact, advertisers themselves are now looking to make it easier to opt out of behaviour tracking ad systems), so I have no idea what a genuine solution might be.

Maybe, though, the retrieval of lost custom more than makes up for whatever irritation is caused, so none is needed? Maybe more and more of us will opt out? And maybe we'll just grow increasingly accustomed to such ads anyway?

Whatever the case, it'll be interesting to see how this sector of the industry progresses; it has at least one small flaw that might eventually need addressing.

The Weekend(ish) Links Post: No. 27

2010-10-18T20:38:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

The Guardian's editor on the future of the fourth estate, and the launch of a new series of Comment is Free long-form blogs.

The internet is not ruining your attention span. You are.

Personal productivity apps: a help? Or another source of procrastination?

Greater Manchester police tweet their workload, to prove a funding point and show the reality behind the statistics. (The three police Twitter accounts.)

Social Media

Finally, social networks may be catching on to how we live in the real world.

Evan Williams on decentralised social networks.

Not on Facebook? Facebook still knows you.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Douglas Rushkoff on publishing, the internet and his new book Program or Be Programmed: "If you don't know anything about the software, then you are the software."

"The majority of Great Britain has yet to download an e-book and say they are unlikely to do so in the next six months," says a new survey by Book Marketing Limited.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

The Archivist: free, browser-based or stand-alone (Windows-only) utility to search, archive and analyse tweets.

Music

Soundart Radio 102.5 FM: award-winning experimental arts radio station, available online.

Games & Other Distractions

Infinite Blank: a multi-player online world, drawn by its players.

Miscellaneous

Atlas Obscura: "A compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities and esoterica"; a collaborative online cataloguing of the strange and wonderful sights and places that traditional guidebooks ignore.

Grain Edit: a design blog focused on classic design work from the 1950s-1970s and the contemporary designers it continues to inspire.

Brian Dettmer performs autopsies on old books, carving them open to artfully reveal their insides: gallery 1; gallery 2.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 26

2010-10-10T18:29:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Patent laws need reforming, says Microsoft's Chief Executive Steve Ballmer.

Facebook introduces Groups, to better reflect users' actual relationships and help increase privacy (or perhaps not).

An interview with Don Tapscott, author of Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business & The World.

Social Media

The Facebook that never was: why did Columbia's Campus Network lose out to Harvard's Facebook?

Malcolm Gladwell expresses his doubts about digital activism... and here's just some of the inevitable backlash.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The Paris Review's exemplary archive of interviews with writers is now available online - in full, and without charge.

Slate.com has been testing the conventional wisdom that long-form journalism just doesn't do well on the web - with heartening results.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

WP-Snippets: for WordPress users, a directory of handy, free code snippets to enhance your WordPress theme.

Music

Why brands are set to be the new record companies.

Fluid Radio: online radio station for fans of experimental, ambient, modern classical, post-rock etc. And an excellent source of associated news, reviews and downloads (such as this live solo performance by pianist Nils Frahm).

Games & Other Distractions

4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness: John Cage inspired video game; plus, an interview with its creator Petri Purho (also responsible for Crayon Physics Deluxe).

2010 Interactive Fiction Competition: all but a few of this year's entries are available to play online.

Miscellaneous

Hilarious Tweets to Famous People: a troubling insight into the minds of those who tweet the famous...

Boring Conference 2010: a day of interesting people talking about boring things - on 11th December 2010.

Why philosophers are fascinated by procrastination.

Super-fast broadband for Cornwall

2010-10-06T08:53:00.015Z

Cornwall’s digital geeks were celebrating last Thursday as Cornwall Council and BT officially announced the imminent rollout of ultra-fast fibre broadband across great swathes of the county and the Isles of Scilly.

The EU-funded project will make Cornwall one of the best-connected places in the world, outstripping London and other urban centres for broadband speed and availability. Maximum download speeds of between 40Mbps and 100Mbps will be available to 80-90% of premises in the county by 2014, with only the most remote locations missing out on the superfast broadband bonanza.

Half of all premises will have the option to have a fibre-optic cable installed directly into the building, making download speeds approaching 100Mbps a scarcely dreamed-of reality for some lucky Cornish homes and businesses by as early as next Spring, BT chief executive Ian Livingston told a room packed with journalists at Newquay’s Headland Hotel.

That's faster than anything currently available anywhere in the UK, putting Cornwall on a par with South Korea, the world’s most hyper-connected country.

Magnet for high-tech businesses

The rollout, which BT says is already underway, should turn the UK’s rural south-western tip into "a magnet for high-tech businesses," according to Cornwall Council Leader Alec Robertson. Not only will it provide the necessary infrastructure for media firms, digital content providers and other bandwidth-hungry companies to relocate to Cornwall, it will also provide a fertile environment for graduates of the Combined Universities in Cornwall’s digital media and animation courses to set up in business here.

Cornwall Council Leader Alec Robertson opens the press conference

And that economic transformation is the whole idea. The EU’s contribution of £80m – matched by a £54m investment by BT – is the biggest single allocation from its European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), a pot of money reserved for economic development projects in the poorest areas of Europe.

Cornwall, with an underperforming rural economy that trails the UK average by a wide margin, is the only county in England to qualify for these funds. This project is Cornwall’s biggest and most important attempt to claw its way out of the mire of low-value jobs in agriculture, retail and tourism and to create what Elizabeth Holt, head of communication and partnerships for the European Commission, described last week as a "fully innovative, knowledge-based, low-carbon economy."

An opportunity to "invent the future"

All the speakers at last week's event touted super-fast broadband as a critical investment for Cornwall, without which it could never overcome its problems of rurality and geographical peripherality. Nigel Ashcroft, director of NGA networks for Cornwall Council, said that with connection speeds that are almost unprecedented across the globe, Cornwall-based businesses will have a chance to "invent the future" by creating brand new applications and services that make full use of the bandwidth available.

An antidote to public sector job losses?

The rollout should give Cornwall a huge opportunity to create new, high-value jobs in high-tech, 21st century industries at a time when other areas of the UK are experiencing severe cutbacks in public investment in infrastructure and employment.

Cornwall Council and BT have estimated that 4,000 new jobs will be created and a further 2,000 existing jobs protected, perhaps offsetting the 2,000 public sector jobs that are due to be lost in the county as a result of the Coalition government’s spending cuts.

The world’s first rural digital cluster?

As an experiment in rural connectivity, super-fast broadband for Cornwall should provide a pioneering case study that other rural regions of the UK – and the world – are sure to study closely. It was telling that the audience at last week’s press conference included journalists from China, South Korea, Latin America and Germany alongside national news reporters from London and the local south-west media.

So could this mark the end of ‘digital clusters’ being the preserve of the world’s big cities? Could Cornwall soon boast the world’s first rural digital cluster? It’s tempting to think so, but for all its virtual connectivity, Cornwall will still remain physically remote from the world’s great urban intellectual nexuses.

That remoteness may remain a handicap when it comes to attracting big-hitters to visit the region in person. Will we see internet-era thinkers such as Steven Johnson, Clay Shirky or Cory Doctorow making the five-hour train journey from London to engage and inspire the local digerati? Will Truro join New York, San Francisco and London on the A-list lecture circuit? Can we look forward to hosting a TED conference in Penryn? It would be great to think so, but I won’t hold my breath just yet.

Remote communities to miss out

And what of those parts of the county that the fibre won’t reach? BT has promised to upgrade the county’s patchwork of ‘notspots’ using a mixture of satellite connections and copper-wire technologies such as ADSL+, but the speeds delivered will remain around 2Mbps; nothing like the service experienced in the rest of the county.

For Cornwall’s remotest farms and communities, it looks like the only super-fast option will remain the one heroically undertaken by Lancashire farmer and rural broadband campaigner Christine Conder – installing the fibre yourself.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 25

2010-09-26T20:00:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Paul Chambers' appeal against 'Twitter joke trial' verdict comes to court - the judge and magistrates have retired to consider their ruling.

Bindi Karia: the 'Queen of Startups'.

The Do Lectures 2010 - a sort of mini TED conference for those who don't mind camping.

Lengthy Facebook outage solved by... that's right, turning the whole thing off and on again.

Twitter internet worm affects thousands of users - but damage is limited thanks to its Web 2.0 foundations.

Social Media

Mashable's 29 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed.

Facebook appears to be chipping away at user privacy again with a "de facto 'Follow' feature".

Twitter to become even more useful to business with free real-time analytics dashboard, to be launched before the end of the year.

Why the editor of Wired UK is not on Facebook.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Is interactive fiction the future of books? Design agency IDEO thinks so.

The e-reads.com blog begins a weekly series of posts on e-book piracy (a short post to begin with, but plenty going on in the comments).

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Print Edit: a Firefox add-on that lets you format web pages to print only what you want to print.

Music

Love H.E.R. Madly: free mash-up album, by Figment, blending UK hip-hop tracks with samples from The Doors.

Games & Other Distractions

Find and play old DOS games: MakeUseOf.com lists its seven favourite sites.

Miscellaneous

Internet Week Europe, "celebrating Europe's thriving Internet industry and community", coming to London 8-12 November 2010.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 24

2010-09-19T20:00:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

A lesson in how not to handle social media - this time, courtesy of the Royal Opera House .

FTSE Techmark index at highest point since 2001.

Internet Explorer 9 (beta) launches - but how does it measure up?

Google to add more 'social layers' to its services, but not creating a Facebook killer.

The importance of net neutrality, according to Tim Berners-Lee.

Social Media

Twitter is now much easier to use, with a new two-pane layout.

Facebook's location publishing app 'Places' now available in the UK.

The increasing importance of 'social' to 'search'.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

FLOW: The Free Word Festival is currently in progress at the Free Word Centre, London - running 14th September to 5th October 2010.

26 Treasues at the V&A Museum showcases a collection of 62-word reflections on 26 objects within the museum - running 18-26 September 2010.

Watch as 36 authors create a novel, live and online, in six days - from 11-16 October 2010.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Q10: an excellent distraction-free and customisable full-screen text editor.

Music

MusicLink.fm: a faster, simpler way to play full albums on Grooveshark.

Games & Other Distractions

Haiku Hero: write haikus against the clock, with bonus points for meeting various rules and constraints.

Miscellaneous

Carrier pigeon better than broadband for data transfer in some parts of UK.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 23

2010-09-12T21:02:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

How will Google Instant affect SEO and Google's own AdWords system?

Steven Poole reviews Born Digital: Understanding The First Generation of Digital Natives - and rebuts Nicholas Carr's pessimism in The Shallows.

The new mapping revolution: the pros and possible cons of today's dynamic, interactive maps.

Whatever happened to Dopplr?

Social Media

How a link spreads through the Twittersphere: depicted in visualisations oddly reminiscent of the creatures in flOw.

Experiments in selling virtual goods to build real world brand awareness.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The first interactive audio novel on Spotify: just open the application and search for "A5M4". Don't Let Go is written by Joe Stretch, and read by Anna Friel with music by Hurts.

Mortal Kiss: the first interactive novel Random House has published on a social network.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Reading Glasses: a Chrome extension that dims everything but the text, for distraction-free online reading.

Can't get a tune out of your head? Replace it with another one at unhearit.

Music

On Friday, the panel of BBC2's The Review Show discussed the future of music - well worth a watch, for those interested.

Games & Other Distractions

Solipskier: draw slopes beneath a stick-man to keep him skiing, speed him up and execute tricks.

The New York Times Magazine investigates the ethics of depicting contemporary conflicts in video games.

Miscellaneous

How to choose the right CMS - including a Top 5, three to watch and one to avoid.

Why 'content farming' sites will prosper only in the short-term.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 22

2010-09-05T19:57:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Ping: does Apple have designs on social networking?

Can the technologies killing long-form journalism, instead, help to promote it?

Web ads have only a quarter of the worth of print ads, according to Enders Analysis (N.B. a proper company, not the research wing of Inside Soap).

Google lays out its new display advertising strategies.

Digg's redesign prompts user protests.

Social Media

MySpace announces Facebook sync, prior to an Autumn redesign.

The success rate of Facebook spam.

YouTube is finally beginning to make money, thanks to ads and profitable partnerships with content creators.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The future of book reviewing? 60-second reviews on YouTube, according to Washington Post's fiction editor.

Mashable profiles Fictionaut, an online writing community / crowd-sourced literary magazine.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

MIT OpenCourseWare: "a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content," free and available to all.

Google Reader has been updated: now, simply hit 'f' for a full-screen view; plus, various other new features and shortcuts.

Music

The Wilderness Downtown by Arcade Fire: not your average music video. An impressive mash-up of HTML5 trickery, interactive drawing and personalised footage from Google Maps and Street View. (If Chrome starts doing odd things, don't worry, that's supposed to happen.)

Games & Other Distractions

Enjoyed the Arcade Fire video? More Chrome experiments, games and toys to play with here.

Miscellaneous

Snoop Dogg and Norton join together to fight cybercrime. (Zock! Pow! Take that, incongruity!)

Sigh.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 21

2010-08-29T21:54:00.001Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Why the internet isn't as important as we think it is, according to economist Ha-Joon Chang.

The interactive datamap that investigates and charts the growth of Twitter.

Social Innovation Camp: hacking to make the world a better place.

Guardian Tech is a newspaper supplement, again - online.

Social Media

We are all bloggers now, blogging has taken over the world, according to The Independent.

Diaspora - an open-source, privacy-aware alternative to Facebook - to launch on 15th September.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

JotSpeak: audio networking for writers. (More info at The Compulsive Reader.)

3-Day Novel Contest: for those who think a month is just too long, presumably?

Wylie Agency and Random House reach ebook truce; Wylie now in negotiations with Penguin.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Jolicloud: the free, cloud-based netbook operating system is now in version 1.0 and available to all.

The Polyglot Project: improve your language skills, read foreign literature online with a built-in translation tool. (Has a few flaws, at this early stage, but worth keeping an eye on).

Music

Pitchfork's Top 50 Music Videos of the 1990s - and, over the coming week, a countdown of the Top 200 Tracks.

Games & Other Distractions

YouTube UK now has free full-length movies - er, quite a mixed bag at present, though, I think it's fair to say...

Miscellaneous

TIME Magazine's '50 Best Websites 2010'.

The Future of the Internet, as predicted by Smashing Magazine.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 20

2010-08-22T14:46:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below (well, when I'm not moving house anyway):

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

The future for virtual worlds - and their not-so-virtual economies.

The internet: is it changing the way we think? (Oddly, no mention of edge.org asking much the same question not that long ago).

Social Media

Social marketing, or socially-reactive marketing? Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk takes a look at the potential of reputation-tracking tools like Revinate and ScanBuzz.

Facebook adds location awareness feature Places - but so far just in the US.

And why Facebook Places might not be entirely 'a good thing'.

Rounds: a video-chat social network - think Chatroulette with elements of Facebook.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The Bat Segundo Show: excellent literature/culture podcast, hosted by litblogger Ed Champion and named after the radio show at the end of David Mitchell's Ghostwritten. (Link to show archive here.)

'I've decided not publish any more books in the traditional way,' says Seth Godin. 'I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically.'

Looking For Truth With A Pin: a 2005 BBC4 documentary on deadpan melancomic poet/musician/writer Ivor Cutler; which someone's helpfully uploaded to YouTube (link goes to Part 1 of 6).

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Matrix: the flight price-comparison engine behind services like Kayak - but ad-free.

Music

Shuffler: a new streaming radio service powered by music blogs (imagine Pandora fed by Hype Machine, but with stations organised by genre and each new track accompanied by the blog post where it was posted).

Sad Steve: simple, ad-free MP3 search engine.

Games & Other Distractions

Violet: defeat procrastination, or lose your girlfriend; an award-winning interactive fiction rom-com.

Miscellaneous

Is the World Wide Web dead?: Wired asks whether apps and mobile devices are fundamentally changing our internet use; also featuring a three-way e-mail debate between Chris Anderson, Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle.

Unsuck It: cynical and irreverent online translations of common (and hopefullly not-so-common) business jargon.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 19

2010-08-08T20:56:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Crowdsourcing doesn't work, says UK government (or actions to that effect).

Carphone Warehouse launches 'infinite MP3 player' cloud music service.

On being young and lonely in the age of social networking.

The tablets are working, says Murdoch, tablets are our future. (Meaning the iPad, etc. Obviously.)

Social Media

Ian Bogost explains the mechanics of social games (e.g. Farmville) and why he created Cow Clicker: "a Facebook game about Facebook games".

Google buys social games site Slide for $182m, adding yet more fuel to rumours of a future Google answer to Facebook.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The Marketplace of Ideas: "a radio show and podcast about books, culture, commerce and fascinating concepts." (The show archive on iTunes is well worth a look.)

The author who paid actresses to read her book - prominently, in public places around New York.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Marklets.com: "the internet's largest" library of bookmarklets - all of which can be easily accessed from your browser with the site's über-bookmarklet.

Music

Film footage from the Alan Lomax archive of American traditional music is gradually accumulating at the Alan Lomax Archive YouTube channel.

Spotify now has a Google Chrome extension - use it to search for and preview music from within the browser.

Games & Other Distractions

BattleCell: a free massively multiplayer online role-playing game based on Google Maps.

Miscellaneous

Google Wave is dead. Long live Novell Pulse?

Remember Mouse Trap (the Heath-Robinson-esque board game)? Now it's lifesize.

Errotica: the joys (or otherwise) of being wrong.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 18

2010-07-31T12:41:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 16 links (I miscounted this week), humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

"Old media and new each has its place in the media ecosystem": why WikiLeaks turned to the press.

Datajournalism in action: making sense of WikiLeaks' Afghanistan war logs.

Cory Doctorow: is the iPad/Kindle/similar "curated" computing or "monopoly" computing?

More rumours about a forthcoming Google social network: Google is talking to games firms.

Social Media

Why Ron Bowes uploaded personal details of 100 million Facebook users to Pirate Bay.

Facebook now testing out permanent account deletion.

Will photos and videos soon be part of your Twitter stream?

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Anatomy of a marketing campaign: a fascinating series of blog posts - which has itself become part of the marketing campaign - detailing Melville House's efforts to "get Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone on the bestseller lists".

The five best book recommendation services, according to Lifehacker readers.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Start!: a customisable alternative home page for Chrome users.

Lesser-known features of the Google search box.

Music

8bitcollective: extensive online catalogue of chiptunes music (i.e. music made using the sound processing chips from old 8-bit games consoles).

URLs will replace MP3s, says Spotify's Daniel Ek.

Games & Other Distractions

How Channel 4 is re-inventing interactive education - with video games about sex, death and government oppression.

Miscellaneous

US judge rules that bypassing DRM is legal - if it's for fair use, rather than piracy. (Meanwhile, in the UK: much the opposite story.)

For those who think Nicholas Carr might have a point: how to rebuild your attention span.

Publishers are living in interesting times...

2010-07-30T19:59:00.000Z

Yesterday, Amazon announced its new Kindle e-reader models - available in the UK from August 27th - and the launch of a UK Kindle Store. "Our vision," says Jeff Bezos (sounding not unlike Google), "is to have every book ever written, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds."

Which sounds great (to a customer), until you start thinking about DRM, proprietary formats, monopolies and the like. Just as uber-literary-agent Andrew Wylie's threat to get all his clients' e-books published directly via Amazon (if publishers don't start paying better e-book royalties) sounds great until you start thinking about... etc.

Because when you first read that story, that is what you tend to think (or I did): "Actually, why don't authors just publish their e-books direct to Amazon?"

And then of course you remember (or I did) Cory Doctorow blogging about the true practicalities and logistics of self-publishing. And that those album release experiments by Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, etc. succeeded in large part because they already had their audiences. And indeed that Andrew Wylie can so easily sell Odyssey Editions to Amazon because the e-editions in question are by the likes of Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike.

As Wylie has more or less admitted, the deal with Amazon is basically a clever short-term money-spinner designed to make a wider point and perhaps force publishers' hands a little - or at the very least force them to think a bit more urgently about the future. Which is precisely what both these stories should do: because they raise very interesting questions about the shape of the book market in the years to come, and about publishers' roles therein.

If the e-book market does in fact come to outstrip the physical book market, as Kindle vice president Steve Kessel is predicting (Amazon's e-books are already outstripping its hardback sales); if Andrew Wylie's experiment with Amazon proves as profitable as might be expected; where exactly will that leave traditional publishing houses?

Perhaps big literary agencies will be tomorrow's big publishers? Perhaps Amazon will? And Apple? (At least for established authors.)

But perhaps traditional publishing houses will then become primarily breeding grounds for new talent - and begin to rise again? And, perhaps just as likely, according to some, the more nimble and adaptable of today's small presses will be the publishers to adapt themselves most sucessfully to the new environment?

In any case, for publishers these are definitely interesting times: whether that proves a blessing or a curse is up to them.

Incidentally, for one of the most even-handed and comprehensive analyses of the Wylie/Amazon deal: head over to Open Letter Books' ever-excellent Three Percent blog.

And for the funniest coverage of the Wylie/Random House fallout: see Twitter (via the two preceding links).

The Weekend Links Post: No. 17

2010-07-25T20:48:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Prominent authors to publish e-books directly via Amazon - and what this might mean for the conventional publishers they've bypassed.

Another week, another tabloid failure to fact check stuff on the net. (Well, let's assume it was something The Daily Star found online, rather than completely made-up. More here and here.)

India develops world's cheapest laptop - just £23.

Samsung tries to capitalise on iPhone 4 reception problems - by handing out free phones. (Check out the cheeky ad at the bottom of the page.)

Social Media

Facebook reaches half-billion users mark, celebrates by asking users to tell it how special it is.

And Tumblr's growing at a pretty startling rate too...

Books, Writing & Storytelling

How publishers are responding to Twitter's #dearpublisher hashtag.

What's this Google Editions thing? Er, no-one's exactly sure yet... but here are some educated guesses.

Readernaut: a new social network for books (currently in beta).

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Rebtel releases Android app enabling free calls to other Android users - even in other countries.

SpareRoom.co.uk: "the UK's #1 flat and houseshare website". And very handy it is too - whether you need a room or a tenant.

Music

Tastemaking music venture RCRD LBL hosts hundreds of free MP3s - and sends out an MP3 Of The Day newsletter (featuring two MP3s).

Kristin Hersh 'did a Radiohead' long before Radiohead, now she's released an album as a book.

Games & Other Distractions

Make It Good: superb (but fiendishly difficult) interactive fiction detective mystery that isn't at all what it at first appears. (Walkthroughs to be found here and here/here.)

Miscellaneous

An art project to send everyone in the world a handwritten letter - bafflement has thus far been (benignly) visited upon a small Irish village and a Pittsburgh neighbourhood.

The Weekend Links Post: No. 16

2010-07-17T19:35:00.000Z

The Weekend Links Post: No. 15

2010-07-04T20:48:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

How seven British iPhone app developers found success.

Surely you've already heard of TED? Anyway, now TED's coming to Oxford.

Why Clay Shirky should give TV a break. (Interesting comments thread too).

Finns now have a legal right to broadband internet access. We have the Digital Economy Act. Sigh.

Daily Mail fails to notice parody Steve Jobs Twitter account is a parody. (Fool me once... etc.)

Social Media

Is Google working on a rival to Facebook?

700,000 Facebook declare themselves fans of an Israeli speechwriter's memoir - most of them inadvertently.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Marcus du Sautoy looks at the interactive future of books - iPhone apps offering additional material, for instance.

Your book as a relational database: a new perspective on e-publishing.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

How to increase your virtual RAM with a spare USB flash drive.

Onbile: an online utility for making your website mobile-friendly.

Music

A free mixtape of the songs that influenced the soundtrack for Alan Moore's new audiobook project Unearthing.

The Hood Internet's mash-up mixtapes are probably old news by now... but The Hood Internet vs. Lykke Li, in particular, is well worth a download.

Games & Other Distractions

ImmorTall: the tiny alien only wanted to help...

Miscellaneous

Edge.org's annual question 2010: "How is the internet changing the way you think?"

Canaries in the coal mine?

2010-06-29T19:00:00.000Z

A question: are the internet naysayers* right?

A more useful question: what can be learned from their criticisms?

Last month, I wondered about the internet's strengths also being its weaknesses, and what could be achieved by addressing these weaknesses, rather than always playing to its strengths. I didn't realise at the time that the post, in places, was also touching on issues highlighted in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, namely: how much we actually absorb of what we read online; and the feeling that the internet doesn't encourage a reader to stop and reflect (there's always another link, widget, text, etc. beckoning us on).

Regarding The Shallows, I'm more in the Clay Shirky / Steven Johnson camp - i.e. on balance, the benefits of the internet significantly outweigh the drawbacks - but there does seem to be a lot of this going about at the moment; Carr is far from the only one waxing gloomy about what the internet might be doing to us. To name just the first two that spring to mind:

Andrew Keen has decried "the cult of the amateur" - the internet's user-generated assault on professionalism and factual authority. And Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto seeks to re-emphasise individual creativity, expertise, and the human above machines and the crowd.

I come from a philosophy background. What many philosophers will tell you is that philosophy isn't so much about answering life's big questions as framing those questions in a useful and productive way. What interests me in all the current internet naysaying, then, is precisely the questions: these are the crucial parts of the arguments. Whether we want to call the conclusions of Carr, Keen et al overly-pessimistic, or indeed wrong, or question certain of their interpretations of scientific evidence, still their original questions tend to persist - so if not their answers, then which?

Take a recent article in Prospect Magazine. Evgeny Morozov, in his critique of The Shallows, largely upholds the questions Carr raises - indeed he adds a number of his own that he believes even more pressing, regarding the wider societal effects being exerted by social networking - but instead argues that the internet will self-correct many of its shallowing tendencies. Companies, he says, will increasingly offer products and services to help those who want to counterbalance the shallowing effect, individuals will seek to positively alter their habits. Already, for example, there's Instapaper to make online reading distraction-free.

Rather than dismiss Carr's questions, Morozov simply takes a different approach, brings a different perspective to bear on them, leading to - for the most part - more encouraging results.

Our challenge, then, if we disagree with Carr's gloomier conclusions - or for that matter Morozov's re. social networking - is to create the conditions and constructs that will prevent those conclusions from becoming correct. To take his questions and answer them positively, rather than simply dismiss them. To evaluate how well he has asked his questions, and address them another way.

In short, however optimistic we are about the internet, we shouldn't dismiss the naysayers - even those with whom we disagree. We need them. Whatever else they might have to say, it may not be the questions they ask that are wrong.

*Or in some cases 'hmm'-sayers.

The Weekly Links Post: No. 14

2010-06-26T17:10:00.000Z

"My 318,000 word novel may seem like it starts a little slow, but after the first 100 pages or so it really picks up steam."

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Lifehacker explains how to silence the vuvuzelas (Clarice...).

Music

EMI is no longer a record label, now it's a "comprehensive rights management company". Which is nice.

Playdio: listen to and broadcast radio shows on Spotify.

Games & Other Distractions

Crush The Castle 2: destroy castles, with a trebuchet. Again. This time with added electric eels.

Miscellaneous

"Sanatogen Tonic Wine: because kids are murder!" - just one of many old magazine adverts posted and commented on by the Gypsy Creams blog.

The Weekly Links Post: No. 13

2010-06-12T14:19:00.001Z

The Weekly Links Post: No. 12

2010-06-05T20:47:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

David Cameron calls for government departments to open up their datasets; the Treasury opens up its spending database (Coins) for the first time.

Generation Y is just a marketing concept: why generational labels are meaningless.

When crowdsourcing works.

If Google is a parasite on news sites, what about Facebook?

Some alternative ideas for monetising online print media. (Follow up to a previous article, Newspapers: the future.)

Social Media

RIP Digg. Cause of death: "social fatigue".

A Top 10 of infographics about social media.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The Faster Times: "a new type of newspaper for a new type of world"; an experiment in professional, collective online journalism.

The Paris Review has launched a new daily blog.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

DuckDuckGo: a search engine for those who favour the keyboard over the mouse. (Not sure what ducks have to do with it.)

The biggest online security risk? Installing Flash, says hacking contest winner.

Music

Better Pop Music: a free compilation album, featuring 19 tracks from blog-friendly acts like Caribou, Air France, Memory Tapes and The Silent League; courtesy of NME and London's Something In Construction record label.

Games & Other Distractions

Mamono Sweeper: Minesweeper crossed with a basic RPG - think hit points, experience points, and monsters instead of mines.

Miscellaneous

The 1000 most visited sites worldwide, according to DoubleClick Ad Planner.

Time travelling: Museum of London's new augmented reality iPhone app combines a walk around London with a Look Into The Past.

What does the internet do well? How about doing the opposite?

2010-05-31T03:49:00.000Z

There now follows some space:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Make of it what you will.

My point? Simply, that online there's not much of it to be found. Some other things largely missing: slowness, stillness, silence, length, permanence, distance, boredom. In short, the room to stop and think and absorb - or even just to stop - and the promptings so to do.

What do I mean?

Sites and information don't always stick around; news stories remain hot for at most a few days; emails/tweets/status updates/RSS-feeds can be checked again and again; pages auto-refresh; and even as you read, almost every site (including this one) constantly invites you elsewhere with hyperlinks, while nagging from the periphery with its widgets, lists and further options. In short, distraction is ever-present. So too the feeling of things rushing past. Always the urge to move on to something else. To catch up. To find out. To keep up.

And so we do. But how much do we absorb?

Some while ago, I got rid of my television. I was fed up with endlessly watching stuff I could hardly remember the day after. Now, I spend hours on the internet endlessly reading stuff I hardly remember after even half-an-hour - assuming that retaining just enough to successfully Google the rest some other time counts as remembering; which it doesn't. (Progress, they call it, mutters the grumpy old man who lives inside my spleen.)

Dr Paul Kelley, neuroscience-literate headmaster, and author of Making Minds: What's Wrong With Education?, advocates what he calls 'spaced learning': a teaching method that aims to create long-term memories through short bursts of intensive learning, followed by breaks, often physically active, during which the brain cells get to do whatever it is brain cells are supposed to do when there's something new to assimilate. On the web, unless we've happened across something startlingly new or revelatory, usually we just move straight on, to yet more information.

And even as we're reading we're distracted. Some research into multi-tasking - and I suppose that's what reading while trying to ignore/attend to distractions is - has found that rather than being super-efficient, multi-tasking often just equates to doing lots of different things concurrently slightly less well than if we'd spent the same time doing each one separately. (Or something like that, I forget.) Maybe that's another reason why many people still prefer to read anything of length offline, in printed medium, just the words, quietly framed by space?

But, of course, that's just how the internet is: lots of information, served up quick, in bitesize chunks - often paid for by ads, which thus have to go somewhere. So, maybe, I should just use a little self-discipline and just not move on so quickly, if I want to be sure of absorbing what I read?

True. I should. But that still doesn't alter that distraction is inherent in the internet. Even if you don't succumb to it, there's still the constant background distraction of trying not to. (Quick, stop thinking about polar bears! Now, what are you thinking about?)

I mentioned boredom, earlier. The internet is perhaps its ultimate antidote, and I love it for that, but we also need boredom: it's the very thing from which much worthwhile thought, creativity and invention arises in the first place - in rebellion against it, or just out of being forced to stop, imagine, reflect, think. (And now a couple of interesting boredom links, inserted by the hypocrite that lives inside my mouse). Boredom has value, purpose, qualities all its own, when you get to know it well.

But this isn't intended to be some reactionary screed - as I've already said, I like the internet. My intention is to suggest that what constitute the internet's strengths are also very much its weaknesses: in being quick, it lacks slowness; in being content-packed, it lacks space; in being ever-changing, it lacks stillness; in never ceasing, it lacks somewhere to stop. These are human needs too - for respite, peace, and the space to reflect and then act - but ones that are rarely met online. (EDIT: Will start searching out examples, over the next couple of weeks, for hopefully another blogpost.)

For those whose work involves the web, then: when you want to be noticed, to get a message across, to make your work stick in the memory, don't just look to the internet's strengths, maybe try - as well, or instead - to supply what it lacks. Make room for your audience: to stop, think, imagine, and look around. Give them somewhere to breathe. Somewhere refreshing. Space to unwind. The internet is always changing, but...

Maybe, sometimes, it should?
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.
.

The Weekly Links Post: No. 11

2010-05-29T16:52:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Following her libel case win against the Independent on Sunday, blogger Zoe Margolis (Girl With A One Track Mind) examines the need for libel reform.

The problem with twenty-somethings in the workplace - or is the problem with their employers?

Hands-on with the iPad on UK launch-day: Charlie Brooker and Stephen Fry (speaking in a Flash video that the iPad won't play).

For musicians, the money's in the touring, nowadays - right? Not anymore, says Imogen Heap.

Cory Doctorow explains why offering free e-books can increase hard-copy sales.

Social Media

New Media, Old Media: how blogs and social media agendas relate and differ from the traditional press - a report by Pew Research.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Rob Self-Pierson has had a big idea: Copy Is Art - soon to be an exhibition, called 26 Treasures, at the V&A.

And on another text as art tangent: Tim Etchells recently exhibited City Changes, "a description of a city in which nothing ever changes... rewritten 19 times to produce a sequence of increasingly preposterous variations, mutations and exaggerations of this imaginary place." More details on the Gasworks Gallery website.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

At last: browse the internet without seeing even a single mention of Justin Bieber.

Encrypted Google searches are now available: as simple as changing 'http://' to 'https://'.

Music

A free Jamaica-inspired mixtape compiled by Major Lazer, and featuring La Roux. (EDIT: Some lyrics definitely NSFW.)

You Go On Without Me: a beautifully unassuming and understated track by Amy Duncan and Wynand Huizinga. (Found on SoundCloud.)

Games & Other Distractions

Smashing Magazine's favourite bizarre and beautiful time-killer websites.

Neave.com is especially recommended - in particular, the brilliantly bewildering television without context application (although it doesn't seem to be working properly tonight...).

Miscellaneous

Warner Bros. are being sued - for pirating anti-piracy technology, says MPV.

The Weekly Links Post: No. 10

2010-05-22T19:51:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my week's online reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Cory Doctorow on the dangers of claiming 'Information wants to be free'.

James Murdoch unhappy with British Library's plan to digitise its newspaper archive; News Corp in talks with Google.

Google has its eyes on TV now; and on showing up Apple.

While The Times is putting up its paywalls, The Guardian is opening things up with Open Platform.

Social Media

Yet another prominent music blog closed by Google, apparently unfairly and with little right of appeal.

Youropenbook: see Facebook status updates that probably shouldn't be seen. (The aim of the site is to highlight the need for simpler Facebook privacy settings.)

Check and alter your own Facebook privacy settings with a simple bookmarklet from ReclaimPrivacy.org.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

An interesting experiment over on the Everyday Genius blog: a short story written live, online and in public using collaborative editing software.

Exploring the possibilities of using WordPress as a book publishing platform.

7 add-ons for turning Firefox into the ultimate writers' suite.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

Learn a foreign language with public domain textbooks and audio from the US government's Foreign Service Institute.

Keep up to date with the latest, most useful Firefox tips, news and add-ons at the Firefox Facts blog.

Music

Playlistify: create Spotify playlists from iTunes, YouTube, Last.fm and WinAmp playlists, share them, and discover other people's.

Games & Other Distractions

Cluesweeper: a diverting cross between Cluedo and Minesweeper.

Miscellaneous

Come to Cornwall for sun, sea and... er... solar panels, apparently.

The Weekly Links Post: No. 9

2010-05-15T15:52:00.000Z

Apologies for last week's illness-enforced break in transmissions. Health and verticality have been restored. We now return you to Episode 9 of our scheduled programme:

Selected Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Twitter predicts the election results. Or at least does somewhat better than most of the established polls.

Why some of the best election data came from amateurs.

Paul Chambers on the Twitter joke that got him a criminal record. (For the full story, see Social Media links below).

Apparently, it's not just me who's irritated by Facebook's ever-changing privacy settings.

Social Media

Careful what you write on Twitter - and pretty much anywhere online.

Jack of Kent explains why he believes the legislation used to convict Paul Chambers is flawed, illiberal and dangerously open to misuse.

Paul Chambers' partner tells her half of the story.

Wired calls for an open source alternative to Facebook.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Only 3% of all books published in the US (and UK) are works in translation - hence the excellent Three Percent blog, which aims to highlight the best in translated fiction and poetry published in America. It's also home to the Best Translated Book Award.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

SeeSaw.com: a new TV catch-up site, offering BBC, 4oD and Five all in one place.

Not keen on the recent changes to Google? You can still go back to the old search page - for now.

Music

CODEORGAN: find out what any website sounds like as music - even this blogpost.

Games & Other Distractions

"When a certain Kafka story, named Before The Law, awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, it found itself transformed... into a short browser-based interactive Flash thing."

Miscellaneous

Scientific study finds that maybe we just shouldn't be giving knives to robots.

BBC Radio 4's archive of In Our Time is now available online - as well as over 500 radio documentaries from the World Service, ranging from Afghan Bloggers to Mexico's Missing Island to The Virtual Revolution.

The Weekly Links Post: No. 8

2010-04-30T19:56:00.000Z

Welcome, again, to another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, humanely culled from my weekly reading and roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

The inevitable question: will Foursquare be the new Twitter?

UK recorded music sales rise for first time in six years; BPI still championing the CD.

Cloud computing: bad for the environment?

Ad-funded music streaming works: We7 is now making money and paying musicians proper royalties.

Social Media

Advertising on Facebook isn't pointless after all - so long as you make the most of the medium.

How private are your Facebook settings? Find out with this online privacy checker. (Don't worry, it doesn't ask for your account password.)

Beware the Twitter grammar vigilantes!

Books, Writing & Storytelling

What's new at the intersection between technology and literature: The Literary Platform.

Useful Apps, Utilities & Downloads

FutureMessage: lets you send emails, tweets and text messages at any specified time. (Via MakeUseOf.com)

Music

Spotify has made some major changes this week; read the full announcement on the Spotify blog.

How will the election affect music? BBC 6Music hosts a debate between the three main parties, plus the Head of UK Music, Feargal Sharkey, and contributions from musicians and promoters.

Games & Other Distractions

Poto & Cabenga: odd split-screen thingy in which you control two characters at once, with only one button. Possibly just maddening, possibly just a matter of practice.

Miscellaneous

'Kitchen designs inspired by our would-be PMs': the 2010 General Election contest, as reimagined by IKEA. (Via @patroclus)

Find out how your baby sees the world, across various ages. No wonder they're always crying. (Via MakeUseOf.com)

Microsoft offers some advice on "humor". Coming soon: the Calista Flockhart Guide to Competitive Eating. Probably.
(Via @wonderlandblog and @james_blue_cat)

Not a chain of station bookshops: The Literary Platform

2010-04-27T14:21:00.000Z

(Image by Salvatore Vuono)

You don't have to turn it off, turn it on, keep it charged or plug it in.
It doesn't matter if you drop it.
It can be read in most lights.
It never tells you that you have unread tweets or emails.
It never crashes.
It never makes alarming noises.
Most are very portable.
No-one's likely to mug you for it.

I'm talking about the book, of course, and at the same time listing some of the many reasons why most of my reading for pleasure is still done offline and away from a screen of any kind.

Don't get me wrong, I can see some of the benefits of an e-reader: instant access to a dictionary (and foreign language dictionaries?) while reading; fewer and lighter boxes when moving house; keeping within your holiday luggage allowance; not procrastinating away an afternoon by rearranging your bookcases. And of reading on a mobile phone: it's already in your pocket; you can read it in the dark. But as yet, for me, it's still to a book I turn when I want to relax.

And that's the key phrase: 'when I want to relax'. Because reading isn't relaxing when you read on the same screen you use for work, emailing and some of your social life: to really concentrate and lose yourself, you want to be somehow cut off from everything else, to be somehow somewhere else. Or I do. Even an e-reader would feel a little too inorganic and distancing to me; too much separation between me and the words.

And yet, I know there must be some way of fruitfully combining technology and what's usually found between the covers of a book - some hybrid that uses the best of both, to some artistic and/or entertaining end. And as a writer, facing an increasingly difficult publishing market (should I eventually get around to it), I'm eager to see them.

One such experiment which has caught my eye is Locus Novus, which combines short stories with visuals, soundtracks and sound effects, as well as controlling the speed at which you read, so as to (often very successfully) alter and enhance your experience and expectations of what you're reading. (But it doesn't seem to have really caught on.)

Then there's the enhanced version of Nick Cave's novel The Death of Bunny Munro, read and soundtracked by the author himself, with 3-D sound and effects, all synchronised to the text, to make a sort of audio movie - potentially a new and distinct experience from either traditional books or audiobooks, and very much suited to that particular novel (especially the more hallucinogenic passages).

Happily, it's just these kinds of experiment, these kinds of meeting between technology and books, that a new website called The Literary Platform is now seeking to highlight:

The Literary Platform is dedicated to showcasing projects experimenting with literature and technology. It brings together comment from industry figures and key thinkers, and encourages debate.

The showcase will demonstrate how traditional publishers and developers are experimenting with multimedia formats, how established authors are going it alone, how first-time novelists are bypassing publishers and how niche literary magazines are finding wider audiences.

If you're interested in the future of books and the future of writing - as a reader seeking new experiences, a publisher trying not to go bust, or a writer seeking inspiration and new outlets - The Literary Platform sounds exactly the place to be.

(And as yet no mention whatsoever of a replacement bus service; which can only be a good thing.)

The Weekly Links Post: No. 7

2010-04-23T21:55:00.000Z

Following a couple of minor dramas at inopportune moments last week (#nickcleggsfault), normal service is now resumed...

So, here we go, with yet another entirely subjective selection of 15 links, roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

Playing brain training games improves only your ability to play brain training games, according to recent research.

What if we applied a spam filter to life as well as our emails?

Has Google killed the satnav? Google Maps Navigation launches in the UK.

Games will never be art, says Roger Ebert. Again.

We've heard from (and Twittered on) Clegg, Cameron and Brown, but what about the people who wrote their policies? Here's the manifesto writers' debate (with questions decided on by Guardian readers, Twitterers and members of online campaign group 38Degrees).

Social Media

Election 2.0? Maybe not, says report by Apex Communications.

How to protect yourself against Facebook's latest privacy compromising changes. Or try to.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Historian admits to anonymously trashing rivals on Amazon, and praising his own publications.

Poet attempting to encode self-perpetuating and mutating poetry into DNA.

Prize for New Media Writing established by Poole Literary Festival and Bournemouth University.

Useful Apps & Downloads

Calibre: a free and open source e-book library manager and converter.

Music

Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon gets an 8-bit chiptunes makeover.

Games & Other Distractions

Viricide: another engagingly melancholy creation from Eli Piilonen, maker of the excellent indie game The Company Of Myself (described in this previous post).

Miscellaneous

Why the US Library of Congress is archiving Twitter. (Not an attempt to create the world's largest repository of sarcasm, as it turns out.)

"Will Nick Clegg give house prices cancer?" The online random Daily Mail headline generator has had an update.

The Weekly Links Post: No. 6

2010-04-10T19:22:00.000Z

And here we go again...

Another entirely subjective weekly selection of 15 links, roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now it's no longer in the print edition).

TalkTalk vows to defy "draconian" anti-file-sharing measures introduced by the Digital Economy Bill. See also: the TalkTalk company blog.

More reaction and fall-out from Wednesday's washing-up of the Digital Economy Bill; plus, who voted which way.

Murdoch defends paywalls, again; commenter raises possibility of samizdat versions of The Sun.

WikiLeaks' influence is growing, but who will watch WikiLeaks?

Social Media

"The biggest [election] gaffes will likely be made... on Twitter - what are the odds it'll be me?" predicted Labour candidate Stuart MacLennan. Then proved himself right.

Chat Roulette's social media, right? It even has spam now.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Authors who blog need your votes for the Author Blog Awards. You might even win a book for your trouble.

Mojo, Q and Kerrang! publisher tries to impose new "copyright-grabbing" freelance contracts, upsets its freelance writers (via @laurasnapes, @alex_hoban).

Useful Apps & Downloads

A Twitter client for those of us with Nokias. Pretty useable even in the free version.

Firefox blog editor ScribeFire is now available for Chrome; but just in an alpha version at present (via DownloadSquad).

Music

The latest much talked about mash-up album: Notorious BIG vs the xx... Oh. It's already gone. Sigh.

Games & Other Distractions

The Guardian's regularly updated list of the greatest internet sports games of all time.

Miscellaneous

"The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again," says Jeff Jarvis.

Search, find and watch the politics that affects you at the BBC's Democracy Live site.

Then find out how powerful your vote might be at the Voter Power Index.

The Digital Economy Bill and Cornwall's Tourist Industry

2010-04-08T06:23:00.006Z

Here is the text of an email I posted earlier on Network Cornwall, a county-wide mailing list for businesswomen in Cornwall.

It's about how tourism businesses such as B&Bs, guesthouses and cafés are affected by the 'unintended consequences' of the the new Digital Economy Bill, a hastily rushed-through piece of legislation that will pass into UK law today.

Free Wi-Fi in Cornwall's hotels: could become a thing of the past due to the Digital Economy Act

Hi all,

Do you run a B&B, guesthouse, hotel, cafe or bar in Cornwall that offers Wi-Fi or other internet access to guests as part of your service? If so, please read on about new UK legislation that will affect you.

(If you don't offer internet access to guests, or have no plans to do so, there's no need to read this email.)

Last night Parliament rushed through a new law, the Digital Economy Bill, ahead of the general election. The aim of the law is to clamp down on digital piracy in the UK - which means people who download or share copyrighted material like music, films and TV programmes without paying for them.

Although it has good intentions, the Bill looks set to cause massive problems for people who share their internet connection with others - such as B&Bs and cafes who offer free Wi-Fi to guests.

It obliges your internet service provider to monitor activity on your internet connection and send you warning letters if it looks like copyrighted material has been downloaded or shared on your network.

If you receive three such letters from your ISP, your connection may be slowed down ('throttled') or even suspended temporarily. There is no definition in the law of how long 'temporarily' might be.

This has clear implications for people in the tourist industry who share an internet connection with guests as part of the 'package' offered.

If you allow your guests to use an internet connection that you pay for, and your guests use that connection to download or share copyrighted material (which thousands of people do nowadays, often without even realising it), it is YOU who will be assumed to be the guilty party, YOU who will receive warning letters from your internet service provider, and YOU who may eventually have your internet connection 'temporarily' cut off.

If you want to appeal against the letters, or against the threat of having your connection suspended, as the law stands currently you will have to pay your own court costs to do so.

This is a very ill thought-out piece of legislation that has been rushed through Parliament ahead of the election without proper debate or consideration of the wider implications. You can read more about it, and about how it affects people who share an internet connection with others, here in the Daily Telegraph.

If you have any thoughts about this I would love to hear from you, as I am thinking of writing an article to raise awareness of this issue for Cornwall's tourism industry.

Kind regards,

Fiona

The Weekly Links Post: No. 5

2010-04-03T22:48:00.000Z

An entirely subjective weekly selection of 15 links, roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now that it's no longer in the print edition).

With tax breaks for the videogames industry announced, is gaming becoming culturally acceptable?

In the US, algorithms are already reporting the news. Scary... but not as scary as Glenn Beck.

Ever read spam? What if they paid you?

Aren't those who buy music frequently the same ones who pirate it? Another reason why the Digital Economy bill might need more thought.

Murdoch's paywall: pathetic, or maybe not such a bad idea after all?

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Jeff Howe at Wired has an idea: What if everyone on Twitter read the same book?

For all your cultural avant-garde needs: UbuWeb.

A site for designers seeking inspiration, book geeks, or just those who like to judge a book by its cover: Cover Browser. (via DownloadSquad)

Social Media

Making drama out of tweets, IMs and other social media postings: Inst Msgs.

Yet another Facebook privacy change...

Useful Apps & Downloads

Download 82 of the most essential free / open source apps from one dashboard: ZeuApp. See also: Ninite. (via Lifehacker)

Superb open source cross-platform video and internet TV player Miro has upgraded to version 3 - and added a video converter.

Games & Other Distractions

Could this be the UK Hulu? SeeSaw streams live and archive UK TV.

Music

Blip.fm + payment mechanism = mflow?

Miscellaneous

What's inside the iPad (as if you hadn't guessed already). (via @MattMason)

ExtensionFM: a (p)review

2010-03-29T15:52:00.000Z

At present ExtensionFM is still in pre-release*, so whether what follows constitutes a review, a preview, or a preview with a silent 'p', I'm not wholly sure. On the other hand, let's leave ontology to philosophers, it's just a blogpost.

ExtensionFM, as you might guess from the name, a) plays music, and b) is a widget you can add to the Chrome browser. What makes it different is the way it builds its library: whenever you visit sites hosting audio files ExtensionFM instantly adds the songs (and their locations) to its library - meaning, first of all, that you can try out any track on the page immediately, but second, that even when you've left the site, you can still stream any of the tracks whenever you like.

Or to put it all a little more visually:

And how well does it work?

Very nicely, for the most part. There's a small drop-down player, accessible from an icon on Chrome's main menu bar, as well as a full player (with more information) that opens in a tab - both are quick, responsive, easy to navigate, and add album artwork almost instantly. Anyone who uses Songbird or iTunes should feel instantly at home. There aren't any playlists yet, however, but tracks can be queued (though once queued the order can't be changed, aside from removing tracks).

On web sites, you'll find that ExtensionFM has handily overlaid any embedded audio links with a play button; and in a particularly neat touch, to keep its library fresh and well stocked, ExtensionFM will keep updating itself with new tracks from the sites you've visited (you can turn this off on a site by site basis, though, if you prefer). Last.fm users are catered for with an option to integrate audio-scrobbling; plus, there's some kind of integration with Tumblr (but I don't have a Tumblr blog, so I'm not quite sure what that achieves).

However, being pre-release, there are - understandably - a few glitches and limitations (though just a few):

- As yet, there's no shuffle button - imagine being able to go to an MP3 blog, click shuffle and see what comes up - wouldn't that be a pretty handy music discovery tool? Happily, the developer agrees: looking at ExtensionFM's Google Groups forum, shuffle's very much in the pipeline.

- The occasional track will cause ExtensionFM to crash; but in pre-release you'd expect the odd compatibility issue. And, this being the Chrome browser, a crashed extension at least doesn't crash the whole browser; in fact, Chrome even lets you reload crashed extensions (though that doesn't always work).

- More playlist making/altering options would be useful; but, again, that's already being worked on.

- At present, tracks in the ExtensionFM library remain playable only for as long as they remain on the sites where they're hosted. The developer looks to be trying to find a workable way around this.

- It's impossible to download tracks from within the main player - for now. (The player does, however, link to the site where each track is hosted; and right-clicking within the player gives you an option to buy from Amazon).

So, while there are a few faults to be ironed out, and some useful features still to be added - all of which the developer seems to have well in hand - even at this early stage ExtensionFM's core functionality still offers the music loving Chrome user something unique** and worthwhile: visit a site, get an instant, self-refreshing music library. If it lives up to its potential, the full release could even make a switch to Chrome essential.

*Visit the site to request an invitation to try it out. Each invitation allows five separate installations.

**As far as I'm aware - anyone know different? (I know Firefox has Twones, but that seems more focused on bookmarking individual tracks, and certainly doesn't let you make an instant library just by visiting a site).

The Weekly Links Post: No. 4

2010-03-27T21:10:00.001Z

An entirely subjective weekly selection of 15 links, roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below:

Highlights from Guardian Technology (Because otherwise I just don't get around to reading it now that it's no longer in the print edition).

Wednesday was Ada Lovelace Day; Guardian Tech columnists Mercedes Bunz and Jemima Kiss offer their personal tributes to women in technology here and here.

Could games become a force for more than just entertainment? Jane McGonigal believes so. (And here's her TED talk).

Facebook causes syphilis... if you misquote unsupported speculation and have newspapers to sell.

What you need to know about the Digital Economy Bill. Probably.

Apparently there's an etiquette to posting on Comment is Free. (Well, that's what the article says).

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Overcoming creative block, the ISO50 blog way. (Link courtesy of @nibus).

Writers talking about writing: useful and inspiring quotes selected from The Paris Review Interviews Vols. 1 - 4 by the Inkslinger blog.

Social Media

Facebook threatens to sue The Daily Mail, over claims of misrepresentation and damage to its reputation. (No word yet whether Zuckerberg's engaging anyone re. the syphilis stories).

Useful Apps & Downloads

For the Chrome browser: ExtensionFM, in effect, creates a music library from the music sites you visit. It's still pre-release, and invitation only, but you can sign up for invitations. (I've been using it for a few days now; a full review will follow in the next couple of days...)

For Firefox: Twones does much the same job, but with more social features. Plus, it's at a more advanced stage of the development process.

Games & Other Distractions

It's a game, it's a maze, it's a story. It's a spiralling deconstruction of all three. It's Ergon / Logos.

Music

Beautiful and idiosyncratic MP3 blog Motel de Moka is posting its Top 200 Tracks of the 2000s - the first 180 tracks are already available for download, the final 20 are due any day now...

Audiotool.com lets you make or remix music in your browser. (Can also serve as a handy reminder that you're just not that musical... Sigh).

Miscellaneous

Dweeb? Nerd? Dork? Geek? What's the difference? Here's a Venn diagram to clear up the matter once and for all. (Link courtesy of @patroclus).

Ever found yourself registering at temp agency after temp agency after temp agency, desperate for just one more hit of that MS Word competency test? No, me neither; but apparently that hasn't stopped Microsoft from creating Ribbon Hero.

The Weekly Links Post: No. 3

2010-03-20T23:55:00.000Z

Now that I'm once again neither elsewhere nor internetless, it's high time the Weekly Links Post returned. So, without further ado: an entirely subjective selection of 15 links, roughly collated under the seven broad categories seen below.

Highlights from Guardian Technology

Will 2010 be the year of Britain's first e-election? Spoof election posters, Mumsnet, online campaigning, and all the rest.

She of the wonderfully improbable name, Mercedes Bunz, takes a look at The New York Times' and CNN's successful yet contrasting technology strategies.

Why online anonymity is still important, despite comment trolls, flaming, and so much other online anonymosity.

Microsoft forced to point out 'other browsers are also available', Opera downloads increase.

Why an article dated 8 September 2003 is Guardian Tech's most read story of the past 24 hours I have no idea; still, I doubt I'm the only person who's never heard of Project Cybersyn, 1970s Chile's 'socialist internet'.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

For those in or around London, London Word Festival will be running various events daily until 1st April.

BooksShouldBeFree.com is offering thousands of audiobooks to download, for no more than the price of (free) registration.

Presumably in preparation for the iPad, Apple's iPhone App Store now has more books available than games.

Social Media

William Shatner has launched his own social network, or something, Myouterspace.com. (Myinnerspace.com, alas, seems to have nothing whatever to do with Dennis Quaid).

Well, I suppose it had to happen eventually: LoKast, the first disposable social network.

Useful Apps & Downloads

The most popular URL shortening services listed and rated for uptime and speed. (No mention, though, of either of the shortest ones I've found, z.pe and u.nu).

Games & Other Distractions

For all those bored office-bound gamers: games that look like work, courtesy of cantyouseeimbusy.com.

Music

Is it that time of year again? Time to download some free SXSW festival MP3s... and here's the easy way.

Miscellaneous

The government is apparently determined to push through its controversial Digital Economy Bill before the general election; for those with doubts about its content, 38Degrees.org.uk has made e-mailing your local MP about as easy as it could possibly be.

137 years of Popular Science magazine, now fully searchable and browsable on Google Books. Even if you're not bothered about the science stuff, just going back and looking at the vintage ads is a joy in itself.

Hell is other cyborgs

2010-02-27T23:44:00.001Z

I am a cyborg. You are a cyborg. We are all cyborgs. Try to stay out of the rain.

Who was it that first said that we are all cyborgs now? And when?

I have no idea. Because as I write this I'm not actually connected to the internet* – and whatever bit of me that might have known the answer was long since outsourced to Wikipedia or Google or some other bit of cyberspace. (I could check on my phone, I suppose, but that would mean getting up and finding it and then writing a whole new opening).

But it's not just my memory of who it was that said 'we are all cyborgs now' that resides online: I have countless other memories stored there (and on my phone): facts, photos, notes, pieces of writing, online identities, contact details for friends and acquaintances, even some of the conversations I've had with them. Inasmuch as I am my memories – as well as the memories others have of me – a part of me now irretrievably is the internet, is my mobile phone, is my laptop, is 'the cloud' – is perhaps now even you, if you've read this far (you didn't count on being me when you started, did you?).

At present, though, following a house move, I find myself in the nowadays disorientating state of 'being between permanent internet connections'. And since I'm prone to pointlessly overthinking simple things even at the best of times, on top of this cyborg stuff I'm going to get all existential on you. Well, as you'll see, they're perhaps not unrelated.

Broadly speaking, for those that don't already know, existentialism (or at least the phenomenology bit of it) has it that each of us exists fundamentally in three simultaneous aspects: as a discrete physical object (one's body: being-in-itself); as a consciousness conscious of itself (the mind: being-for-itself); and as an object of which others are conscious (the social side of one's self: being-for-others). Where we go from there, what we become, is very much up to us – existentialism is nothing if not big on choice, and how we define ourselves by our actions – but to realise one's full potential, to lead a full existence, perhaps entails fully embracing and integrating each of these aspects of the self. (See also: existential psychology/psychotherapy).

So what happens, then, existentially speaking, when we cyborgs become temporarily disconnected from the bits of our selves we've unthinkingly stored elsewhere?

Yes, that's right. We find that lumpy, fleshy bit that still remains asking another fully grown human being in all bloody seriousness if he has a 'dongle' – and he has to ask whether we might prefer it in pink, white or blue... Because that's his job. Whither human dignity? Whither Sid James? Whither Carry On?

Well, anyway, existentialism has the Absurd well covered.

But what I find myself still pondering (though mostly offline, to save data allowance) is: what would Sartre, Kierkegaard, Camus, et al, have had to say about the way we now so routinely outsource parts of our very selves? The way we experience, express and even store (parts of) our selves external to our own body?** About a decentralised self? About a partly-virtual self? In short: about cyborgs and being-outside-of-itself?

Yes. I know. Being-without-the-internet has left me with too much time on my hands. But doubtless I'll soon find someone who's tried to answer. That's the beauty of the internet: all human life is here...

Even cyborg Luddites. (Lucky guess, but true).

*Other links filled in later, prior to posting.

**External to our own minds too? (Are we literally going out of our minds?) Or are our minds now something bigger, more diffuse, more collective? Maybe Jung and Durkheim should be part of the discussion too?

The Weekly Links Post: No. 2

2010-02-13T14:30:00.001Z

Another entirely subjective weekly selection of 15 links, collated under the ~~six~~ seven broad categories you see below (I forgot music last week).

Highlights from Guardian Technology

Aleks Krotoski on the filming of the BBC's The Virtual Revolution, a must watch for anyone interested in the history and future of the internet. Plenty to see on the website, too.

Google shuts down music blogs without warning. And only issues notices to their owners after deleting them.

Google Buzz's open approach leads to stalking threat. Concerns over Google's new social widget's privacy settings.

According to research, newspapers' share of total UK ad spending fell in 2009 by exactly the same amount as the internet's share rose.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

The running order for The Story 2010, a one-day conference about stories and storytelling, has been announced - including Cory Doctorow, Tim Etchells and Aleks Krotoski. Only two tickets still available, but for those not attending on the 19th February, look out for podcasts on The Story's website.

Who is pirating books? How? And why? An excellent article on The Millions looking at the motivations of book pirates (those illegally uploading and downloading books, not Long John Silver).

Social Media

Paperchase is chased by Twitterers and bloggers over copyright infringement allegations. Unable to get a response or apology from Paperchase, Hidden Eloise, the artist in question, posted evidence of plagiarism on her blog (where you can see the whole story unfold). The news hit Twitter, Twitter users self-organised to help force an admission (or at least an acknowledgement and some buck-passing).

You thought we wouldn't notice: a blog dedicated to exposing instances where two things look suspiciously similar...

How to confuse a Facebook user. A post on ReadWriteWeb recently became Google's top result for 'Facebook login', cue lots of confused comments from Facebook users attempting to log in to the blog post.

Useful Apps & Downloads

Not so much an app or download as a tip for any desktop iPlayer users getting the message "programme temporarily unavailable" when trying to play already downloaded content. Basically, it's a case of deleting the contents of the 'Cache' folder in your iPlayer installation (though not the 'Cache' folder itself) - the BBC recommend reinstalling, but that means losing what you've already downloaded. Just following the instructions at the link worked fine for me.

Games & Other Distractions

"There is too much noise..." So begins the gorgeous, melancholic Small Worlds, and your quest to explore five beautifully drawn (and soundtracked) worlds - and perhaps discover what happened to everyone.

Naomi Alderman on 'art games'.

Music

Warner retreats from free music streaming - and what does the future have in store for the likes of Spotify?

Miscellaneous

Poacher turning gamekeeper? Pirate Bay's spokesperson, Peter Sunde, starts a money sharing site aimed at rewarding artists and content creators who share their work.

Some excellent YouTube interviews with stand-up comedians - including Stewart Lee, Robin Ince, Reginald D Hunter and various others - courtesy of I'm Jack Cooper.

IN OTHER NEWS: I've recently moved house, so will be in the internet wilderness as of tomorrow, pending connection to a new provider. Unless they mess it up again.

In other words, there may or may not be a links post next week. Who knows.

The Weekly Links Post (Revived and Slightly Revised)

2010-02-06T16:56:00.001Z

An entirely subjective weekly selection of 15 links, collated under the six broad categories you see below.

Highlights from Guardian Technology

How to become an indie games developer in eight steps. Some of them are quite big steps; but you'll still find plenty of links to interesting indie games.

Gordon Brown's smile won't crash your computer. Honestly.

Small businesses are the new mass market. The first results from The Guardian's crowd-sourced research project into the latest trends in technology start-ups.

What if you got all your news from Twitter and Facebook? Some journalists spend five days with social media as their only news source.

Books, Writing & Storytelling

Mapping a parallel world and history onto our own, Kcymaerxthaere: a global work of three dimensional storytelling. Here's The Believer's article on the physical monuments, and even a museum, that have been placed around America (and the world) by the grandson of Charles and Ray Eames.

Vintage Books has started an online reading group, to discuss Vintage titles and deliver extra content (and presumably attract readers).

IndieBooks is a new online store to highlight independent publishers. Each month 50 titles are selected: 25 new ones, plus the previous month's 25 bestsellers.

Social Media

Lamebook: a collection of funny and worrying status updates and photos culled from Facebook.

A top 5 of Twitter gaffes.

Useful Apps & Downloads

After I wrote about Panda Cloud Antivirus recently, a commenter highlighted Immunet Protect, another free antivirus which draws on the processing power of the cloud. Here's a Tech Herald review. At present, though, it looks like it's best run alongside something else as additional protection (as the commenter suggested).

Games & Other Distractions

The Asylum: you are a psychiatrist at a hospital for psychologically damaged cuddly toys; you have to work out how to cure them. Dark, funny, oddly moving, wonderful cut-scenes of their repressed memories, excellent characterisation. Probably one of the best free games I've seen. [Walkthroughs here and here, if needed].

Openfilm: a new platform for discovering, distributing and watching independent films.

Miscellaneous

Are paywalls a bad idea, or has this one just been implemented badly? "Only 35 people will pay to get past Newsday's paywall." And now: the other side of that story.

Stylus magazine, the sadly defunct online music magazine, makes a slight return, to round up the best albums and singles of the last ten years: The Stylus Decade.

Having funded a story, but then had commissions fall through, a journalist attempts to get paid, by hosting and publicising the story herself and asking for micropayments.

Return of the links

2010-01-31T23:08:00.000Z

For a while, every Friday I used to post a collection of links here - just fun stuff really, procrastinatory bits and pieces that might help pass the time on a boring Friday afternoon while waiting for the weekend. I think an especially busy few months put paid to that routine, though.

Later, posting a weekly round-up of interesting Twitter stories seemed like a good idea. It wasn't. It took only a couple of weeks to discover that reading numerous stories about Twitter every week, most of which you've in fact found on Twitter, very quickly starts to feel like voluntarily subjecting oneself to an especially noisy echo-chamber; i.e. not an entirely rational thing to commit to.

But ideally there would be at least one post on here each week, and finding something to write about on a weekly basis can be difficult. It's not that there aren't all kinds of things going on in the world of social media, the internet, technology, etc. - if anything, there's too much to keep track of. The real problem is finding an item that either hasn't already been covered by those big blogs that everyone already reads, or has been covered but to which I can still add a new angle (or at least an angle that I haven't already read somewhere else).

I suppose, I could just summarise whatever seems most important or interesting that week, but frankly that would just feel redundant - not a great motivation to write; or to read.

There's no reason, however, why I shouldn't do something more curatorial. So, the solution, revive the Friday links post, but in a slightly more structured and focussed form - and make it a Friday or Saturday post, to allow for any busy Fridays. There'll still be other posts too, of course.

One final reason to revive it: I don't know about anyone else, but I haven't been keeping up with The Guardian's Technology section now that it's no longer part of the print edition: what if part of this proposed Friday/Saturday links post were to be devoted to highlighting some of its more interesting or surprising stories each week? Problem solved.

As for what the rest of the links might be devoted to; well, I'm sure I'll have finalised the categories by Friday.

Or Saturday. But definitely one of the two.

How to waste time. And influence people?

2010-01-30T23:46:00.000Z

If anyone was wondering, it's actually surprisingly easy to find yourself responsible for wasting the time of hundreds of people you don't even know.

Or at least that's my excuse anyway.

Here's what happened.

It's early Thursday evening, I'm in a Tesco Express, as usual deeply dissatisfied with what's on offer. I've already wandered around the place at least three times without anything taking my fancy, and as a result am getting mildly exasperated with myself as well as at the store. 'Well,' I find myself snapping (not out loud), 'what actually do you want?' At which point, I can only assume that I object to the question's tone, because I start to sarcastically suggest crisp flavours, such as Salt & Vertigo, Cheese & Umbrage, or Soured Dreams & Chive. Ultimately, this proves quite diverting, I cheer up, and probably just buy some hummus or something. Who knows.

Anyway, a few more flavours come to mind on the way home, so I decide to tweet them, explained by the hashtag #rejectedcrispflavours.

And that's where the trouble starts.

A couple of people who follow my account, it turns out, are amused enough to suggest flavours themselves. One of them starts retweeting flavours suggested by some of his followers too. Soon enough, though, he's moved on to another game involving punnily combining soap operas with song titles, so I assume that's probably the end of that then, and get on with something else. Eating hummus, probably. Yet, unknown to me, it's not; it's not the end at all. The hashtag has begun to spread.

A couple of hours pass and it finally occurs to me to search Twitter for #rejectedcrispflavours. Not having expected it to be used by anyone else in the first place, and not even to the extent that it was, I'm curious to see how far it might have travelled during its brief moment. I'm certainly not expecting #rejectedcrispflavours to have turned into a Twitter meme...

Yet no, not only are there now hundreds of tweets appended with #rejectedcrispflavours, but people are still continuing to tweet new flavours!

Stomach-turning new flavours.

Frankly, for the most part, the whole thing's moved on a bit from my whimsical semi-puns: Godwin's law - "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1" - should have an addendum in which the phrases "online discussion" and "comparison involving Nazis or Hitler" are replaced by "Twitter hashtag game" and "references to genitalia or bodily substances". Two hours later, and #rejectedcrispflavours, it seems, has turned into a Twitter gross-out contest.

While not exactly what I had in mind, to the extent that I had anything in mind, I can't say that it's not exciting to see it take on a life of its own.

I monitor for a little while longer, but am just about to leave it be, when I spot another tweet: someone is expressing bemusement that #rejectedcrispflavours is a UK trending topic! Surely not? J D Salinger's just died, Blair's due at the Chilcot inquiry tomorrow, the iPad was released just yesterday. And what do people in the UK want to tweet about? (Or, more accurately, try to disgust each other with?)

Yes. Crisps. (They are one of the few things the UK's good at, though, I suppose).

Over the next hour or two #rejectedcrispflavours, in fact, goes on to become the top UK trending topic: 'So this is what it's like to have power,' I think. 'And abuse it.' I feel proud, bemused, and ashamed, all at the same time. 'I've created a top UK trending topic! Wow...

'But it's this one. Sigh.'

So, yes, if anyone saw #rejectedcrispflavours in the UK trending topics, and wondered why, or perhaps despaired, well, this isn't so much me claiming credit as accepting the blame. Apparently this is the kind of thing that can happen if you have an argument with yourself in a supermarket. Be warned. (Or possibly encouraged, depending on your point of view).

Regardless of what the #rejectedcrispflavours hashtag eventually turned into, though, the whole thing was certainly a thoroughly fascinating first-hand lesson in exactly how easily something can (accidentally) go viral: all it took was having one follower* with the right kind of followers to propagate the idea (in this case, followers with a shared interest in hashtag games). That simple. Even knowing why marketers spend so much time and energy trying to identify and woo influential, connected voices online, I still couldn't help but be surprised. It really is, it seems, who you know.

*Of the two people who initially joined in; as far as I can tell, followers of only one of them went on to use the hashtag.

Panda Cloud - the hassle-free antivirus?

2010-01-26T23:18:00.000Z

I think I may have already mentioned my opinion that the average antivirus program can be almost as annoying and intrusive as having an actual virus. The slow downs, the updating, the increased boot times, the panicky messages popping up for no good reason, all of them just add yet another layer of potential irritation to everyday computer use.

But, of course, an antivirus is a necessary evil, so at some point I settled on AVG as the least irritating of the bunch and resigned myself to trying to get along with it.

Then it started asking for money - to update the licence (I can only assume I unwittingly upgraded from the free version, though I have no idea when or how). I tried upgrading even further, to the latest version, 9.0 - the counter-intutive option so often seems to work with computer problems. No luck, of course - and on top of that, AVG, mystifyingly, now wanted to query every single action I made in Spotify, even after setting it as an exception.

So. Enough. Time for an antivirus option I've long been hoping wouldn't turn out to be too-good-to-be-true, Panda Cloud - recently out of beta, still free and, encouragingly, getting some excellent reviews.

Panda Cloud's aim is to be simple and hassle-free; analysing threats and updating itself in the cloud (hence the name), not taking over your entire system, using a minimum of bandwidth and system resources, and mostly just sitting there in your system tray keeping a sharp eye out for anything nasty. Moreover, because its virus signature database is in the cloud: a) it can be dowloaded and installed quickly; b) after installation, it doesn't have to do that initial update thing that can take forever; c) the database can be huge (currently terabyte-sized) - and can grow - without causing you storage problems; and d) it will always be up to date.

And how does it measure up in everyday use? Wonderfully.

Pros: Installation is extremely quick and easy, and on first scan it found and removed a trojan - an excellent start. It hasn't once slowed the system down, or queried a program or process it really ought to recognise; nor does the cloud itself seem to have suffered downtime. The interface is pleasingly simple and streamlined - possibly unnervingly so for control freaks and those used to the likes of Norton and McAfee - but does, however, reveal additional options as the need arises, such as letting you reinstate anything it may have neutralised.

Possible cons: according to the PCMag.com review, not the best option for cleaning up an already infected machine (stops malware getting on to the machine in the first place brilliantly, though: "the best free antivirus software available"); according to PC World, not the quickest at on-demand scanning (however, the review was pre- the full release, and even a full system scan was quick enough and unobtrusive enough for me).

Overall, then, exactly what I've always wanted from an antivirus: it does its job, it keeps to itself, and it's never the slightest bother. In fact, it's a shame Panda don't make housemates too.

In two minds about newspaper paywalls

2010-01-20T21:58:00.001Z

Fabulous news, in 2011 The New York Times will start charging for its website! All we need now is for every other newspaper, magazine, the BBC and YouTube to join the Murdoch titles, the FT, Wall Street Journal, and so on, and we might all actually get some work done for once - instead of scrolling through Google Reader, opening links on Twitter, and searching in vain for stuff on iPlayer that we haven't already seen/heard once this week, before repeating it all again for no good reason other than it's been another twenty minutes.

Or maybe that's just me.

Anyway. Bliss. I almost can't wait.

(For one thing, I've always wondered what time travel might be like - this alone would be like going back five years).

But of course there's a much wider point here than a possible (but doubtless only temporary) boon to my personal productivity: mightn't widespread moves to paid and limited free content, effectively, ration news only to those who can afford it? And what of our present ability to compare sources and obtain a more rounded perspective on events? I mean, imagine a world where the current most popular news sources have even stronger voices - The Daily Mail? ITV? FOX News?

Brrrr...

Worse than 'Brrrr...'

But that assumes that most of us don't already rely, for the most part, on just one or two sources, usually supplemented only now and again when something especially interests or concerns us. Most of us do, I think. And most of the proposed paywalls will at least make a certain amount of articles free to non-regular readers, over certain time periods. (Even if such systems do, though, have the effect of penalising the site's most loyal readers).

The major concern, then, looks to be whether paywalls will be sufficiently open that there is enough news still freely available - to encourage diversity of opinions, democracy, free speech, or any of the other benefits suggested by commentators like Jeff Jarvis. Whether or not information really does want to be free, it would be terrible to lose any of these benefits, essentially, just for the sake of some adverts.

Sigh, and yet I really do quite like the idea of fewer distractions...

Well. You know. It's just such hard work using will power.

Well, that's Christmas done, now for the Easter eggs

2009-12-31T22:30:00.000Z

Shortly before Christmas, regular users of the VLC media player will have noticed that the program's little orange traffic cone icon sprouted a tiny Santa hat - indeed, it still has one.

The original image can be found here.

What I've found myself wondering since is, firstly, why exactly did this little touch make me smile so much, and, secondly, why don't more of the (non-entertainment) programs and web applications we use every day contain more of these kind of hidden surprises, or Easter eggs? I mean, let's face it, we need all the smiles we can get in life.

An initial answer to the first question, of course, is that it was an especially incongruous and unexpected addition - when a program's noted for being so stripped-back and basic in appearance, the sudden whimsical appearance of a Santa hat is about the last thing you'd expect. It can't help but be a pleasant surprise.

More than that, though, there's something genuinely cheering about happening upon a sudden little touch of warmth and humanity in the often sterile digital world of computers, about seeing that a program's creator genuinely has in mind those who use it, and about them being bothered to offer an otherwise totally pointless and unnecessary little something extra to raise a smile.

As for the second question; well, doesn't all this remind you of another organisation?

VLC might have its Santa hat, but Google is a company that gives out all manner of Easter eggs and surprises - from its logo doodles to its April Fool's pranks, to iGoogle wallpaper surprises, to all those bizarre autocomplete suggestions, and more besides. On one level, it could arguably get away without doing any of these things - they're not practical, integral parts of its services; they're mere fripperies. But on an another level, it's those very moments of unpredictability, playfulness and creativity that humanise the organisation, make it seem accessible, benign, exciting, and add to the sense of discovery. They build goodwill - and not just of a seasonal kind. If Google offer Easter eggs, and benefit from them, shouldn't other companies consider it?

By way of contrast, let's take Microsoft; which formally stopped including Easter eggs in its software in 2002.

If you read the Wikipedia entry, admittedly you can see, to an extent, the reasoning behind such a policy; but what the decision seems to mean in practice is that Microsoft programs no longer contain much that will (pleasantly) surprise, little that joyously rewards or positively encourages discovery and doing the unexpected, no real suggestions of humanity, humility, fallibility, play, exploration or openness - and if Google, or Apple, is far more strongly associated with discovery and creativity than Microsoft, if people see truth in those Mac vs. PC ads, and indeed if the Windows strapline "Where do you want to go today?" tends to ring hollow, maybe a lack of Easter eggs is at least a small part of the reason why?

The human touch, of course, extends even further with Google, into the somewhat quirky way it routinely chooses to release its products and services. Calling them betas or experimental Labs features, despite their often being perfectly useful and usable already, admits fallibility, suggests humility, invites input, gives Google valuable leeway to get things wrong without overly alienating its users. Microsoft, on the other hand, by taking its more formal approach, gives the impression of offering a finished article, so that any updates feel (perhaps misleadingly) less like improvements, more like tacit admissions that the original release was rushed and incomplete, flawed rather than evolving.

Adopting a more human touch and the inclusion of Easter eggs isn't without pitfalls, of course: if there's one thing humans are good at, it's disagreeing with other humans, and if there's another, it's being offended. Even VLC's Santa hat initially led to a complaint (later partially rescinded) - never mind that a Santa hat is hardly a religious symbol, or that it didn't even seem to be the commercialisation/secularisation of Christmas the user was at odds with!

On the upside, though, by being human and open, at least any offence, or actual misjudgements, can perhaps be more easily and reasonably addressed, should they occur - as above. And wouldn't a few people being offended be more than compensated for?

Whatever the case, though, there are surely plenty of companies, not just Microsoft, that might see their image benefit from a less staid approach; from every now and then doing tiny unexpected things to brighten our day; and generally, from seeing users of their products as fellow human beings, rather than captive consumers. Handing out Easter eggs at Christmas might seem an odd way of going about it, but it could be one of the easiest ways to start trying.

More than words?

2009-12-28T23:13:00.001Z

When you earn your living from words it's always interesting to find new lights in which to view them - new ways of responding to words, putting them together, or even reading them - which is at least one reason why I've found myself, over the last week or two, digging into the world of independent video games (the other: it's Christmas; anyone who isn't feeling too lazy and bloated to do anything even remotely productive really hasn't got the hang of it) - and specifically, I mean the kind of independent games that, in one way or another, depend to a significant degree upon words.

Some of you (i.e. those that still remember such computers as the BBC Micro) will probably be thinking of text adventures right about now - or interactive fiction as the overall genre tends to be called now. We'll get to those a little later.

However, the games I've happened upon lately, and which I most want to highlight here, are more what might be termed 'art games', which is to say games created with the intention that playing them might evoke the same kind of effects and emotions that viewing a piece of art, or reading a poem, say, might evoke. To generalise even further: these are games that perhaps seek to move, more than to entertain. These are games like The Company of Myself.

On the surface, The Company of Myself is a simple platformer, but with the twist that in order to solve a puzzle and reach the green door to the next level you often have to co-operate with echoes of your own playing character - and on that level alone, it's an interestingly different way to while away some time. But reading the overall story of love and loss (and something altogether darker) that appears at the beginning and between levels - and which, you realise, you are playing out as you play those levels - is what gives it a strong and unexpected emotional hit, the strongest part of which is only clear once you have reached the end, heard the full story, and understood the implications of some of the actions that you've had to perform to progress. It's the quality of the writing as much as the game mechanics - and in combination with the game mechanics - that make this such a poignant experience. (A walkthrough can be found here, should you need it).

Another game that might be of interest to anyone with a professional interest in words is Today I Die, a sort of interactive poem of a game. A main character is controlled with the arrow keys, but at the same time in order to complete the game a poem must also be manipulated (changing its mood and meaning with each alteration to its words), with your character's final action also determining the final line and ultimate meaning of the poem. Again, it's a very satisfying example of interactive storytelling, and for me at least sparked off a new way of looking at words. (Again, hints are here, should you need them).

A rather more literal (and very literary) take on games that rely on words is Silent Conversation, by Gregory Weir, a platformer in which the landscape of each level is composed entirely from the text of a famous poem or short story, through and over which you must try to safely manoeuvre a letter 'I', even as you read the words themselves. In the background, sandstorms of the word 'sand' might fly past; or you'll find yourself leaping off the words 'ledge' or 'leap'; or the text will sometimes mirror its content, by forming a tunnel, for instance. Also, particularly poignant or affecting words are highlighted in red, the resonances of which you have to avoid and neutralise if you want to achieve the full score for each level.

How successful it is as a game may be open for debate - during longer levels things can get a bit repetitive, sometimes you'd rather just get on with the story, rather than going back or stopping to complete a particularly difficult section, you could find yourself wanting to argue whether some words really are the most powerful in any given text - but it definitely hints at what might be achieved, and at times it does genuinely seem to add something to your experience of reading the stories themselves (in fact, an involving new way of reading might ultimately be the best way to take the idea).

(Another wordy Gregory Weir title worth a look is The Majesty of Colours, by the way).

As for interactive fiction; I haven't investigated nearly enough yet to confidently recommend standout titles, but nonetheless the highly ambitious Blue Lacuna, especially, seems to go far, far beyond those frustrating Tolkien-esque things in which, as a kid, I always seemed to just blunder around getting hopelessly lost typing 'GO SOUTH', 'HELP' and 'WHERE AM I?' over and over again. Of the very few I have played, Aisle's been the most inspiring so far - essentially it's a very short story, with numerous potential endings, suggesting larger, more complicated stories, mostly reflective of the sanity or lack thereof of the actions you type.

As yet, I haven't enough experience of the genre to say exactly what I think there is to be learned from playing interactive fictions, but it's definitely a different way of writing - one that's very much about involving and immersing the reader - and one that excites me with its possibilities.

So here's an early New Year's resolution: to write an IF title myself. That should keep me busy...

N.B. For more IF game recommendations, the Interactive Fiction Database is a great place for short reviews and downloads. (Most interactive fictions come in story files, but an interpreter like Gargoyle will run most of them).

And on another note entirely...

A belated Merry Christmas and an early-ish Happy New Year from all at Radix!

Radix appoints new account manager

2009-12-14T10:55:00.003Z

A press release we have issued today announcing that Matt Godfrey has joined the Radix team:

Penryn-based communications company Radix Communications has appointed a new account manager.

Matt Godfrey joins the company after a successful 15 year career in retail. Godfrey said, "Radix is a rapidly expanding business and is perfectly positioned for further success in a highly competitive industry. I am delighted to be given the opportunity to be part of that success."

Radix Communications provides copywriting, editing, design and translation services to a range of clients in the technology industry, placing a strong emphasis on clear, consistent and compelling written communications. Founded in 2007, it saw annual turnover grow by 14% in 2009 despite the economic downturn, and is on course to exceed this rate of growth in 2010.

"I am thrilled to welcome Matt to the team," said Radix managing director Fiona Campbell-Howes. "His management experience and exceptional commercial awareness will make him a tremendous asset to Radix as it continues to grow."

UPDATE: Here's the story on Business Cornwall - thanks Jay!

Advertising on Facebook - is it really pointless?

2009-12-13T01:20:00.001Z

"Facebook now has 350m users - and there's no point advertising to them," said John Naughton in last Sunday's Observer (or possibly that's what his sub-editor said, but in any case it's a pretty accurate summation). What's more, he had some numbers to back him up:

In 2007, the market research firm ComScore reported that 32% of internet users clicked on banner ads in a given month. By 2009, that number had fallen to 16%. ComScore also concluded that a hard core of 8% of all internet users – christened "Natural Born Clickers" – are responsible for 85% of all banner clicks on the web.

His basic argument: that because we are all now so adept at ignoring online advertising, Facebook and Twitter are deluded if they think that selling advertising can keep them afloat in anything but the short term; Twitter and Facebook are not effective advertising spaces.

Really?

Leaving aside that 16% - or even 8% - of 350 million is still a considerable audience*, and also leaving Twitter to one side (for now), since details on how it will eventually incorporate advertising are still thin on the ground, do the figures above prove that Facebook is necessarily any less effective a medium for advertising than any of the more traditional media, such as TV or print?

I would argue that they don't: all they show is that the majority of internet users aren't clicking on ads - and why would they?

I mean, if you could click on a TV ad, or a newspaper ad, would you? I certainly wouldn't very often. Just as with online ads, there would first need to be a fairly real chance that I might gain in some way, or the product being advertised would have to be in an area in which I'm particularly interested (for instance, a new model of mobile phone when I happen to be due an upgrade).

Moreover, why assume that clicks are the sole measure of whether an online ad is effective?

Many of us routinely try to ignore any kind of advertising, wherever it appears. But even offline it's everywhere, and at least some of what we see still lodges itself in the brain - either by being very entertaining, highly unusual, very annoying, or just unavoidably prevalent. That its effect isn't instantly measurable in the form of a click doesn't, though, lead us to assume it hasn't fulfilled some purpose - improving brand recognition, for instance. So why should we assume this of online advertising?

Is Naughton, then, perhaps confusing what an online ad can do with what it should do? (And no doubt some advertisers too).

What do I mean? Well, just because an ad is online, and clickable, does that mean that it has to be clicked on to be effective? Has it totally failed if it hasn't taken its viewer to a virtual cash register or to more information? This seems to be his assumption.

If this were true, though, there would be little point advertising anywhere - offline, or on Facebook. That online advertising can be clicked on, and linked directly to online stores, is surely a bonus over offline advertising, not necessarily its be-all and end-all. (Or perhaps that's how it should be seen).

What the apparent reluctance to click shown by the ComScore figures suggests to me, then, is: either a) a lot of online advertising could be much, much better; or b) most internet users simply don't want to click on ads - and if so, then perhaps advertisers need to find out why, or just accept it and reassess their expectations, their methods, and their measures of effectiveness. In fact, whatever the case, perhaps a lot of marketing departments simply haven't yet figured out the best ways to utilise Facebook, or the online space in general?

Any of them wondering where to start might want to study Dell's use of Twitter: according to Monday's Guardian, Dell has "made $6.5m in revenues through links on the micro-messaging site" and "its aggregated followers on social media... now number 3.5 million." Dell's senior manager for corporate affairs also points out that this kind of engagement with its customers delivers other benefits too, such as helping Dell improve its products and respond quickly to problems.

Agreed, this is marketing, rather than advertising, as such, but surely there are still lessons to be learned here - primarily that consumers aren't going to click on just anything without a very good reason.

So maybe the Observer headline should have read: "Facebook has 350m users - and there's no point advertising to them badly. Same as any other medium, really..." It wouldn't have been as snappy, I grant you, but it at least might have been the more accurate and workable conclusion.

To an extent, I've been playing devil's advocate in this post. Your opinions welcomed in the usual box...

*because, for the most part, that's probably an over-simplification: with one of the main advantages of advertising on Facebook being that ads can be more specifically targeted, many ads won't be seen by anything like 350m subscribers.

Lunch & copy

2009-11-30T22:49:00.001Z

You never know quite what attending a Cornwall Social Media Café meeting might lead to. For instance, at last week's event Fiona and I found ourselves being invited to Truro College to speak to their FdA Media Advertising course: we write direct mail, they happen to be covering it in tomorrow's session. So, tomorrow, we shall head up there to dispense our wisdom...

Or something. At least I think that's the idea.

Anyway, it all sounded pretty informal and I'm fairly sure we get free lunch, so it should be great.

The students? Oh, I don't know, I'm sure they'll be fine. And anyway, if a little hunger and the knowledge that hard work can lead to a free lunch doesn't inspire them, nothing will.

(Actually the back-up plan is suggesting they watch this:

But what we'll do with the rest of the hour, God only knows).

I'm kidding. Of course we'll have advice for them. Plenty. I've written a handout and everything. (The advice: ignore my handout).

The synopsis for Art & Copy, for anyone that's interested:

ART & COPY is a powerful new film about advertising and inspiration. Directed by Doug Pray (SURFWISE, SCRATCH, HYPE!), it reveals the work and wisdom of some of the most influential advertising creatives of our time -- people who've profoundly impacted our culture, yet are virtually unknown outside their industry. Exploding forth from advertising's "creative revolution" of the 1960s, these artists and writers all brought a surprisingly rebellious spirit to their work in a business more often associated with mediocrity or manipulation: George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Lee Clow, Hal Riney and others featured in ART & COPY were responsible for "Just Do It," "I Love NY," "Where's the Beef?," "Got Milk," "Think Different," and brilliant campaigns for everything from cars to presidents. They managed to grab the attention of millions and truly move them. Visually interwoven with their stories, TV satellites are launched, billboards are erected, and the social and cultural impact of their ads are brought to light in this dynamic exploration of art, commerce, and human emotion.

UPDATE: Fellow copywriter, and friend of Radix, Rob Self-Pierson has actually seen the movie (he's 'up country', down here we'll probably have to wait for the DVD) - check out his Art & Copy review at the link.

A Facebook member? Or a Facebook user?

2009-11-27T23:46:00.000Z

Back in June 2007 my colleague Fiona wrote on this blog about quitting Facebook. A couple of months later, she reactivated her account*, having by then become resigned to at least having a profile on the thing, mainly due to being "in charge of social media at Prompt" at the time.

But over the last month or so, and over two years later, that first post has unexpectedly started to attract a number of commenters looking for somewhere to share their own Facebook disaffections.

Now, admittedly, when I say "a number of commenters" I mean, well, er, four (plus one in Feb). But for this blog that's still quite a few, and combined with noticing my own increasingly infrequent visits to Facebook, I can't help wondering whether something is going on?

Is there, perhaps, a particular generation of Facebook adopters now reaching a natural tailing off point in Facebook use? Might there be a natural lifespan to how long one might continue to find Facebook interesting - or any other social network? Is it all the fault of Twitter?

Certainly, four or five comments isn't exactly what you might call sufficent evidence to prove any of those theories - and perhaps it's hardly enough even to begin asking the questions. Moreover, that the commenters variously complained of starting to feel uncomfortably voyeuristic, narcissistic or addicted when using Facebook, probably rules out the possibility that they've all decamped to Twitter (although conceivably you could at least be more anonymous on Twitter, if you chose). Nevertheless, it still strikes me that perhaps after a certain point there really isn't all that much to keep Facebook users interested?

In theory, the site has a lot going for it, of course: it combines group e-mail, a photo album, event invites, birthday reminders, gaming, etc., all in one place. But even so, how many of us still find ourselves spending anywhere near as much time on it as we used to, say, a year ago? And doesn't iGoogle, or the start page on Chrome or Opera, let you do more or less all of that anyway, only you'll have selected links to more useful and fully-featured sites and online apps than many of those on Facebook?

Granted, Facebook does remain of at least some value to me, as a (more or less) permanent contact point between myself and anyone I don't see very often, or whose contact details are prone to change. But leaving aside what is basically a passive function, what is there on Facebook to make me as active a user as I was for a long while after I first joined?

Somehow, it's all just lost its novelty, or it's provided better, or less clunkily elsewhere.

Perhaps it's just me, but I wonder: might there be a lot of others now who would more accurately call themselves Facebook members, and not Facebook users?

Anyone?

*Facebook is basically the Hotel California of social networking, you can check out, but you can never leave.

Blogposts found abandoned on Tube

2009-11-25T21:20:00.001Z

While Rupert Murdoch might be having second thoughts about content from his newspapers being freely available on the net (even if his papers do sometimes "borrow" content from it, and his news organisations perhaps even encourage Google to index their contents), one group of people in London seem to have decided that not only is free web content the way to go, but why not create an entire publication out of it.

Currently in Beta, The Blogpaper aims to be a free weekly London newspaper made up of articles, photos and reviews nominated and voted for by an online community of readers and contributors. Presumably, once a strong audience has been established, and any early production and distribution kinks ironed out, the publication will support itself through online and off-line advertising, but as yet I haven't found any details on that (UPDATE: there are ads in the most recent edition). Already, though, it's looking like a pretty interesting project.

Some short standfirsts to introduce each article might be a nice addition to the mix* - headlines maybe aren't always enough - but otherwise, from first view: it looks fresh and colourful; simple, clear layout; commuter-friendly (and indeed web-friendly) article lengths; a nice eclectic blend of subjects (with the art and design coverage particularly catching my eye); and it certainly highlights some interesting items I mightn't otherwise have noticed, which ultimately might be the best test of a publication like this. All in all, then, a pretty handy way to catch up on and digest the week's
on- and off-line goings-on, even for those of us who aren't obliged to spend time hurtling around underground (or sitting around gloomily wondering why the hurtling's stopped).

I'll be very interested to see how the project progresses - and deals with any attempts to skew the voting that might come along as it grows - because so far (and, I'll admit, a little to my surprise**) it seems to be producing a genuinely worthwhile hybrid of print and digital media.

Now to just find out whether it's an idea that can also support itself...

*On the other hand, the space is fairly limited...

**I've seen some awful, cluttered and dull user-generated sites (as well as plenty of good ones), so when I heard about this I did wonder quite which way it would go.

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T23:59:00.000Z

Or is Halloween supposed to be happy? I'm never too sure. Anyway, whatever it's supposed to be, here are some Halloween-themed links:

Nightmare pop

First up, a Halloween soundtrack: a podcast of Halloween music selected by the already gloriously spooky Fever Ray (registration required, to download). And as a bonus, here's their recent cover of Nick Cave's 'Stranger Than Kindness':

In much the same nightmare pop vein, Esben & The Witch's EP '33' is currently available as a free download from Soundcloud. Wonderfully creepy stuff.

But saving the most unsettling for last, here's a blood-soaked video by the Finnish band Eleanoora Rosenholm (I guess you could describe their music as murder disco; or at least I gather that the album's all about a serial killer, or something like that):

Eleanoora Rosenholm: Maailmanloppu from Sami Sänpäkkilä on Vimeo.

More Eleanoora Rosenholm videos here.

The obligatory pumpkins

If it's Halloween, then it's time once again for Wired magazine's annual gallery of elaborate (and generally quite geeky) pumpkin carvings. Last year's Star Wars efforts here.

Lego fun

Customised zombie mini-figures, Lego horror films, a short remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a shot-for-shot Lego recreation of Thriller, and various other Lego horror: all linked to by 365Halloween.com.

Here's the Thriller one:

If you have a surfeit of orange bricks (and time), how about building a 3D Lego pumpkin?

Halloween games

Or if browser-based ghosts and gore sound more like your cup of time wasting, Jay is Games has a round up of Halloween-friendly casual games to while a way a few hours.

If you'd rather escape from all the pumpkins, though, how about Escape from the Pumpkin Room? (Erm, it does involve being in a room with a pumpkin, though, and trying to escape. So maybe not, then).

Goth Zombie Monster Linkorama

The weekly Web Zen link collection is always worth a look, and this week's no different (apart from being monster/goth/zombie themed).

Real life horror

Recently, in aid of charity, one man subjected himself to 24 consecutive hours of watching rom-coms - mostly, very bad ones - with nothing stronger than chocolate and Lambrini to ease the pain. If that isn't a waking nightmare, I'm not sure what is. Read the blog of his torment, then donate here.

And just because...

Goths in hot weather. Does exactly what it says on the trenchcoat.

Selling music post-MP3: part 3

2009-10-30T23:52:00.000Z

When people began listening to music on the iPhone and (iPod Touch) a number of programmers and musicians spotted an opportunity: with its motion sensors, touch screen, microphone, and processing power, why should the iPhone be just another device for playing MP3s? Why not use its capabilities to let the listener interact with music? Perhaps even enable the listener's ambient environment to affect the listening experience?

Not only might the iPhone offer new ways of creating and listening to music - that listeners might be willing to pay for, and that could go far beyond the CD, never mind MP3s - but in the form of the App Store (and your phone contract) it even has a simple, quick payment method built in.

Just what kind of a revenue stream the iPhone might represent for artists, and to what exciting creative possibilities they might put its capabilities, I guess time will tell. But for now here are a couple of recent applications that just might point the way:

Deadmau5's remixable album

Whether Deadmau5 was actually the first artist to offer remixable exclusive tracks as an iPhone app, I have no idea, but Touch Mix was certainly the first such app I became aware of. You'll see below exactly what it can do, but basically Touch Mix is simple mixing software (though only usable with the Deadmau5 tracks), allowing phrases to be looped, effects added, mixing and cross-fading between tracks, BPM adjustment, scratching, etc. - all the usual DJ tricks and techniques:

I expect other artists will have since done similar, and probably offered more options and innovations, but even so, you can see from the above how this kind of release might appeal - especially to fans of electronica artists, like Deadmau5, or to fans of any other genre where remixing is prevalent. And with that in mind, let's now have a look at just how elaborate things can get...

RjDj: reactive, augmented listening

According to the website, RjDj is a music application for the iPhone that "uses sensory input to generate and control the music you are listening to." Shaking the phone, tapping it, stroking its screen, letting it pick up noises around you, speaking into its microphone, or any combination of the preceeding, can be used to randomly and/or intentionally alter the music that you're hearing. Moreover, RjDj users can record what they're hearing and share their favourite tracks with other listeners.

As for the artists; RjDj enables them to create "reactive music", "music as software", music that can be "updated, upgraded, or extended" - and which can either be sent straight to the phones of fans, or distributed as stand-alone apps. As a format, RjDj, allows artists, firstly, to take music and their own creativity in new directions, but also it enables them to reach listeners on a more personal and involving level - and if the key to persuading music fans to pay for your music is to offer them something more than they would get by simply downloading an MP3, then for artists and labels something like RjDj might well be a distribution avenue that's more interesting to explore even than the remixable album.

Selling music post-MP3: part 2

2009-10-25T23:31:00.000Z

FM3's Buddha Machine

There are two very good reasons why vinyl records haven't died out: 1) that particular vinyl sound; and 2) turntablism. Value is to be found not just in the music the physical format contains, but also in the format itself: not only do records give a different, some would say warmer listening experience, but in skilled hands they can also be used creatively. If musicians want to make money from their recorded output, then, perhaps one way might be to find intrinsically useful, desirable, even unique physical formats on which to distribute it.

FM3, a China-based electronica duo, have done just this. Based on a popular Buddhist temple souvenir designed to aid meditation, FM3's Buddha Machine is a small plastic box with a speaker that allows you to play and switch between any of nine ambient music loops specially composed by FM3 (rather than the Buddhist chants played by the original gadget). Looped, the contemplative music that FM3 have created, as well as the nostalgic lo-fi crackle of the speaker, somehow combine to be at least as meditative and relaxing as the souvenir which inspired their creation. Here, format complements music - is almost indivisible from it.

The Buddha Machine, much like vinyl, also represents a creative medium: FM3 positively encourage other artists to use the loops in their own compositions (such as Light and All These Accidents by Track A Tiger), but moreover, the machines have given rise to live performances called Buddha Boxing. As the video below will illustrate, this essentially involves people taking a number of Buddha Machines and placing them, one at a time, onto a table to create a semi-random musical composition, then removing them one at a time until none are left (and the piece ends):

Recently, someone clever has even created a website that lets you play with a wall of 21 virtual Buddha Machines (well worth a try, if you're ever looking for a relaxing way of passing some time); the main difference here from actual Buddha Boxing being that the virtual Buddha Machines have no volume control, so unfortunately loops can only be stopped dead, rather than faded out.

But FM3 didn't just stop there. Last year, saw the release of a Buddha Machine 2.0, with a different set of loops and an additional pitch control wheel; an iPhone app version was released this summer; and, following collaboration with Christiaan Virant of FM3, next month Throbbing Gristle will release Gristleism, their own version of the Buddha Machine, containing twice the number of loops and a doubled frequency range.

But back to the loop player as a physical format. While the music can, of course, be lifted from a Buddha Machine (it has a line-out/headphones socket), even so, and even more than vinyl, this is a format that plays an integral part in the music's effectiveness. Not only is it the best way to play the music (unless you happen to own software that will play the music as loops and don't mind only listening via your computer), but it also allows the listener some input into his/her listening experience, and even provides musically-minded listeners with sounds they can create their own songs around. For the right bands, then, a loop player could be both a very interesting way of spreading their music and of getting paid for it.

NEXT TIME: Innovative iPhone apps...

Selling music post-MP3: part 1

2009-10-01T06:47:00.000Z

I expect everyone's seen what Lily Allen had to say about illegal downloading recently - and indeed what everyone then had to say about Lily Allen. So rather than rehashing the whole debate about pirating music, I thought this blog might instead take a look at a related matter: the various clever and intriguing ways that musicians and allied techie people have been inventing to persuade people to actually pay for music. Whether that be remixable iPhone apps, new music formats, or innovative distribution methods, for the next however long (i.e. until I run out of links) this blog will semi-regularly highlight as many of them as I can dig out of my bookmarks folder. Or at least the ones you might not have heard of.

Today, then, let's kick things off with a look at Kristin Hersh's Strange Angels subscriber project.

An introduction

As part of Throwing Muses, solo, and most recently as one-third of 50 Foot Wave, Kristin has been releasing music for over 20 years now, notably through 4AD; however, in October 2007 she took the decision to opt out of all her recording contracts and try things her own way. Her plan? To release a new song every month, as a free download - in both high quality MP3 and lossless FLAC format, complete with the raw recording files as "stems" for remixing, the lyrics and an accompanying essay - and for financial support rely primarily on optional payments, touring, merchandise and various levels of fan subscriptions.

Named Strange Angels, after a previous album - and presumably also in reference to angel investors - her subscribers, in addition, receive various levels of exclusive items and access to recording sessions and gigs, depending upon which level of subscription they buy. Furthermore, a non-profit organisation called CASH Music (Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders) was set up to facilitate the project, and now also provides a platform for a number of other artists.

As a model, though, this perhaps isn't anything particularly new - Einstürzende Neubauten, for instance, initiated a not entirely dissimilar series of supporters projects and internet community in 2002. So why highlight Kristin Hersh's version?

A social media natural

In terms of the success of a subscriptions and micropayments/free tracks financial model, it of course can't hurt that Kristin is already an established artist, and indeed that model might not even be an option for many newer bands, but where her project differs, and indeed where it excels, is that she is just an absolute natural with social media - an engaging and distinctive writer anyway, she also seems genuinely interested in the creative and artistic possibilities of an active and lively dialogue with her fans; notably, via her Twitter account.

Just click on that link, though, and you might assume that she ignores followers - she only follows two other accounts and rarely makes an @reply - but, in fact, you soon realise she just has her own way of using Twitter: rather than follow all the tweets of 5,000+ people, she takes the more practical and personal approach of Direct Messaging followers personally when they reply to her tweets, or from time to time using the account to (in effect) chair and participate in often very interesting discussions about the future of music, or where to take her own. Moreover, unlike so many bands who just tweet tour dates and the latest download release, Kristin actually gets Twitter - she has her own distinctive voice on it, with her tweets genuinely funny, persona(b)l(e) and worth the read.

Twitter, you feel, is simply another string to her bow, an extension of who she is and how she does things, rather than only a form of marketing. Ditto the essays and daily photoblog on her website. Without it ever coming across as forced or cynical she just involves people.

And that's why I highlight the Strange Angels project rather than another similar endeavour: because if selling music post the invention of the MP3 is about giving listeners something more than the music, Kristin Hersh does so in an unusually open, self-deprecating and involving way, without the slightest hint of contrivance. She understands and embraces that music is a two-way relationship. In fact, she seems to thrive on it. And as a result, two years down the line, her music making is now completely independent - giving her the freedom to just do what she does best, and what she does so engagingly: being Kristin Hersh. Which surely is the point.

NEXT TIME: something shorter.

It offendeth mine eyes! (And pretty much everything else)

2009-09-29T16:58:00.000Z

I suspect the following video will either make you laugh until it hurts, or make you want to punch your own eyeballs for so carelessly allowing you to view such highly concentrated awfulness in the first place. In other words, yes, that's right, it's new Microsoft advert time:

If you watch hard enough you can almost see them desperately, popping their happy pills.* But you do wonder if that's part of the strategy: make such throat-burningly sickly and preposterous ads that sheer incredulity alone will drive it viral. It's not as if this a first offence. Witness, for example, the ad for Microsoft Songsmith:

They can't have thought that was a good idea. Surely? The little girl's laptop is even a Mac.

But if people like me are posting these dreadful things, however disparagingly, is it actually a brilliant strategy? Or are so many of us just so tied into Microsoft products that their marketing can produce any old glossy dreck and still sell the product? I wish I knew. Either way, though, if anyone knows a good cult deprogrammer, you know where to send them.

In other Microsoft news

Microsoft's free anti-virus software is available to download, as of today.

So that's good. A few security gaps will be filled, for some. And best of all every copy comes with a free soundtrack: the distant gleeful cackling of the world's virus makers.

Because that's what's going to happen, isn't it? Surely, every malicious hacker worth the name will be competing to crack Microsoft Security Essentials first - and indeed the one to crack it the most conspicuously. It might be brilliant against present threats, but who knows what attacks will be coming its way?

Frankly, I'd rather not find out.

On which note, if it's free you're after, and you hate all those pop-ups and slowdowns that seem to come with every other anti-virus - in some ways an anti-virus can be almost as annoying and controlling as an actual virus - this Panda Cloud thing sounds an unusually hassle-free and uninvasive solution - and better still, it's starting to get some very good reviews...

*Pause at 3:38 to see their true inner terror (you have to catch just the right frame, though, just a fraction before it hits 3:39).

Appendices omitted: it's all on Google

2009-09-27T03:03:00.000Z

The video below is a review of 'Brecht At Night' by Mati Unt, a 'documentary novel' recently published by the ever-adventurous Dalkey Archive Press. I happened to find the review on the site of a promising new monthly literary journal, The Collagist. But this post isn't here to recommend the output of the Dalkey Archive Press (although I do, very highly), or to note that it might be worth keeping an eye on The Collagist (which it might), or even to highlight the book itself (pretty intriguing though it sounds), the moment where this video becomes relevant to this particular blog occurs at the 06:30 mark (click here if you prefer to watch only from that moment).

Apparently, the translator has decided to omit a bibliography and other appendices because, to quote the translator's note, "the internet, still in its infancy when the book was first published, has rendered [them] redundant. Nowadays you can find a great deal of the information included there by using a search engine" - in other words, they've been omitted because nowadays you can just 'google stuff'; a rationale which, for me, utterly misses the point.

Firstly, I generally don't read whilst next to an open laptop - that, of course, being the big advantage of books, that they don't have to be plugged in or connected to wi-fi, you can read them anywhere - but even more than that, often I've simply had enough of staring at a computer screen - books are a wonderful break from all that work and idle clicking. Therefore, if there's some additional information that might enhance my experience of a book, I'd much rather read it within that book - and indeed I'm much more likely to read it if that's where it's to be found. Even if you have got a phone or laptop beside you, it's still much quicker to just flick to the back of the book.

Secondly, omitting these appendices ignores the work done by the author in compiling them - sifting out the illuminating sources from the dull, the reliable from the less reliable. Why make the readers do this all over again for themselves? Moreover, much of the history that seems to be an integral - though also in some ways fictionalised - part of 'Brecht At Night' will be unfamiliar to the majority outside of Estonia, and while the novel itself is probably a very useful starting source for further research into that history, I'd be much more interested in the additional context the author himself had judged worth pointing us towards.

I suppose it's possible that omitting appendices may make a book cheaper to publish, perhaps cheaper to buy, and in turn perhaps more likely to reach a wider audience. But even if that was the case here, why not include a web address in the book and instead publish the appendices on the Dalkey Archive Press site? Hosting the information may even have helped drive a few potential customers to the site - via a search engine, in fact.

Ultimately, what concerns me most about the decision to omit information from 'Brecht At Night' is that in a world where almost everything can be googled there is huge value to having a reliable route through it all - a curator, a guide, an editor, someone to point you in interesting and reliable directions. Sure, cut costs by posting appendices online, if you must, but please, publishers, don't leave them out altogether. Navigating a world of near infinite knowledge can be hard enough at the best of times without some of the signposts being removed as well.

N.B. More usually, books from Dalkey Archive Press include useful additional information, such as critical essays or author interviews, rather than omitting it. And long may that continue. [ADDITIONAL NOTE] 'Brecht At Night' does in fact include a substantial context-setting introductory essay as additional content.

UPDATE: Eric Dickens, the translator of 'Brecht At Night', has responded in the comments - many thanks to him for taking the time and for clearing up the matter.

Just in case anyone should only see this page, however, I should just like to make clear that the book is in fact prefaced by an introductory essay in which Eric Dickens very much sets the work in its historical/literary context - as you'll see for yourself at Google Books - and that the decision to omit the appendices was not the publisher's decision. Also, from Mr Dickens' descriptions, and he should know, what has been left out does indeed sound substantially less interesting and extensive than the reviewer in the above video perhaps suggests.

A possibility that publishers could begin to omit appendices in favour of an assumption that an interested reader should resort to Google, does (or did) concern me; but, all in all, these particular appendices don't sound any great loss. My apologies for commenting solely on the basis of a review!

Losing Ada

2009-09-14T18:25:00.007Z

Remember I blogged a few weeks ago about how the Early Learning Centre is doing its bit to write women out of the world of IT?

Well, yesterday it happened again. Nothing to do with wooden toy vendors this time, but I still got the same uncomfortable feeling that for whatever reason, women in IT are being quietly obscured.

This time I was reading John Naughton's column in the Observer, in which he pays tribute to Blogger - the blogging platform that brings you this very blog - on its tenth anniversary.

Here's what John has to say about Blogger's anniversary bash:

On 1 September, there was a party in San Francisco to mark the moment, attended by - among others - Blogger's founder, Evan Williams (who later founded Twitter), and the journalist Scott Rosenberg, who has just published "Say Everything" (sayeverything.com), an absorbing book on the phenomenon that Blogger enabled.

Sounds accurate enough, doesn't it? But Blogger didn't have just one founder, it had two: Evan Williams, now CEO of Twitter, and Meg Hourihan, now...well, according to Wikipedia, now a wife and mother.

I don't know if Meg was at the party, but John's article certainly doesn't mention her. Instead, he chooses to credit Evan Williams alone with creating the application that led to the mass worldwide democratisation of the internet:

Blogging has revived - and begun to expand - the public sphere, and in the process may revitalise our democracies. If it does, then we will have Evan Williams largely to thank for it.

I don't know why Meg isn't mentioned. I sent a tweet to John Naughton to ask him, but no reply has come back. The feminist in me sees a worrying tendency to ignore women in technology, the realist wonders if Meg was mentioned but got edited out due to space constraints.

But at least, thanks to the very software they created, I can take the opportunity to correct the omission here and to congratulate Evan *and* Meg on Blogger's 10th anniversary. I've been using it since 2002 and can honestly say it changed my life for the infinitely better. Thanks to both of you for that.

More from the junction between Twitter and bad journalism

2009-09-14T13:33:00.000Z

If Uri Geller is the world's leading spoon-bender, then Derren Brown is surely its leading mind-bender; Britain's best answer to David Blaine, that doesn't end in a preposition.

Last week the spookily self-assured brain tamperer, who once took a good couple of hours of TV viewers' lives to conspicuously and lengthily fail to take his own, decided to have a go at a less bullety game of chance, the National Lottery. First he correctly predicted the numbers live on telly, simultaneously with the actual draw itself, then, later in the week followed up with an hour-long show purporting to explain how he did it.

The first I heard about this was on Twitter, ditto the somewhat dissatisfied reaction to what passed for his explanation – not least from mathematicians. But this being news (or something like it) a story was also to be found on the BBC website, under the headline “Brown Lotto trick 'confuses' fans”. Clearly it wasn't about Gordon Brown, since it contained the word fans, so I took a look and near the beginning found this sentence:

And on blogging site Twitter one fan said he was "still confused", while another called it a "massive letdown".

Later came these paragraphs:

Twitter critics of the explanation show include Markpirie, who said: "I'm still confused about what way he did it to be honest."

Awwchristy called the 38-year-old a "massive letdown" and KimGVille said: "Is it just me or was Derren Brown's explanation last night very disappointing?"

But some fans enjoyed Brown's stunt.

Michaelvjjones posted on his Twitter page that the show had been "very interesting & entertaining".

Xolani1990 added: "Derren Brown is pretty cool... I can see why people are so skeptical [sic] about him, but I think he's on to something here."

Never mind that 'skeptical' is a legitimate spelling so doesn't really need a '[sic]' next to it, what bothers me here isn't the use of Twitter as a source, but the article's apparent assumption that just a few tweets is enough to demonstrate the writer's assertion that viewers as a whole – and presumably Brown had rather more than four of them – were a bit confused and letdown by the supposed explanation of his methods.

Certainly, quoting opinions from Twitter is not too much different to conducting a vox pop – though with the added advantage of not having to actually talk to people or subtly prompt them into succinctly saying whatever it was that you wanted them to say. Nor do I have strong objections to stories quoting individual Twitterers to illustrate a wider opinion.

But here that's not quite what's going on: the opinions of a few Twitterers seem to have taken the place of the show's entire viewing public – at best it's rushed journalism, at worst lazy. FIRST, establish the claim you're making with some kind of convincing quantitative source, THEN add the colour of individual opinions.

I mean, I don't really have any doubt that there was widespread dissatisfaction, and I couldn't really care much less about the story itself, but the point is, making a bald statement then dressing it up with a few unsupported quotes from Twitter is just bad journalism.

And now, if I could find the right stories to support the following statement, I'd like to say that I've seen this done too many times already...

But I can't, so I won't.

(But I have).

Video game publisher experiments with Radiohead release model

2009-08-31T17:33:00.000Z

For once, some news that makes me entirely grateful that I don't have a top of the range computer: the developers of hellishly addictive football management simulation Championship Manager have made the latest edition downloadable for as little as 1p (+ £2.50 transaction charge) until its full release on 10th September.

Now, already I've wasted countless hours of my life on past incarnations of the wretched thing, and with Eidos seemingly going down the Radiohead release route this time around, I doubt the part of my brain that apparently hates me and wishes me ill would have kept quiet for long - "No harm in just giving it a quick try..." I can hear it whispering. "I mean, it's only one pence - how can you not? What? Oh, shush - having a life is so overrated..."

Saved, for once, by a rubbish graphics card.

But what that sorry scenario goes to prove, besides that I'm pathetically lacking in self discipline, is that with this new release model they're probably on to something.

Firstly, the price might tempt recovering users, like myself, into a relapse. But more than that, I'd be surprised if it doesn't actually improve profits, rather than see Eidos lose money.

Like Radiohead, Championship Manager already enjoys huge acclaim within its own particular field, not to mention an army of loyal obsessives who'll buy pretty much any release. And with this latest move Eidos can at the very least appear to be giving something back to them, for their years of support. However, factor in the publicity they'll have generated by becoming the first publisher to attempt a pay-what-you-like option, plus the later switch to a full price release, and the introduction of a new gameplay feature which requires a £5 payment to receive data updates at six intervals during the present football season (and the next one? and the next one? etc.), and it's not hard to see the commercial sense.

Most importantly, though, in trying this new release model Championship Manager could well steal a march on its closest rival, Football Manager - the game which many diehard Championship Manager fans still regard as the true Championship Manager (a few years back, the original creators split with Eidos, retaining the original base code and database of the game, but not the brand name or its interface) - and also perhaps grab back some of the original audience.

What might be most interesting, though, is to see a) how many other established video game brands try the Radiohead experiment, but also b) what potential it might have in combating piracy. As a distribution model, it's almost directly competitive on price, similarly convenient, arguably builds goodwill and loyalty, and may prove an effective loss-leader/trojan horse for selling later add-ons and updates. But as has been argued of In Rainbows, perhaps this is an option that's only viable for the already popular?

Being Oprah Winfrey. Or Patrick Bateman. Or just a bit grumpy, really.

2009-08-25T18:10:00.000Z

Have you ever wondered what it's like to be Oprah Winfrey? Or Stephen Fry? Or even the estimable Dr Samuel Johnson? Well, tough. You'll probably never find out. What with not actually being them and all. But still, thanks to a new site called cTwittLike it's not impossible to get at least a tiny glimpse of life through their eyes. Or at least a glimpse of the feed on their Twitter homepage.

Cheerfully blurring the line between stalker and follower ever further, cTwittLike lets anyone type in a celeb Twitterer and see what all their followers are saying - almost as if you're IN THEIR HEAD! Seeing everything their ghost-Twitterer's seeing! RIGHT NOW!

Probably.

Frankly, it sounds horrific. Like some kind of portal to bleak lonely psychotic delusion - which reminds me, I passed through Luton once.

But you don't have to use cTwittLike to look at the Twitter feeds of celebs, and feel all inadequate at the exciting and accomplished lives of their exciting and accomplished friends. If you're a star, you could always use it to see what it's like to be a copywriter complaining about having to think of yet another way to say "In the present economic climate" for the umpteenth time...

But that's never going to happen.

Anyway, back on the theme of voyeurism and inadequacy in the face of the accomplished, apparently there's now a site for exhibitionist job seekers, called Resume Race. Yes, that's right, people can now read, rate and comment on the CVs of others - or submit their own for judgement. It's basically competitive joblessness.

Well, OK, it's probably not like that at all; it's probably a perfectly useful place for getting crowd-sourced feedback on your CV, whether you're employed or otherwise...

But just why call it Resume Race?

It sounds like somewhere a latterday Patrick Bateman might go to brag about the fabulous career that's slowly eaten away his soul. When actually what you're really supposed to do is simply rate yourself in various categories and then see just how big of a gap other people reckon there is between your self image and your CV - and either ignore it enitrely, since you just know you're brilliant anyway, or tweak your CV to more accurately match up to your own towering ego. Which doesn't make we want to despair of humanity nearly as much, oh no. It makes me want to despair of humanity almost as much.

But anyway, let's end with something nice: PhysicsGames.net, a collection of physics-based browser games. Well, I say nice. This one only made me despair of myself, rather than the whole of humanity, and only because I'm rubbish at physics and easily addicted - a fatally time-sapping combination on sites like this, if ever there was one. Even despairing of yourself can be quite cheering sometimes, though - what with everything being relative, and all that. As Einstein actually didn't say. Not that that bit of knowledge will ever help you rescue a frozen viking.

Backing up and the trouble with short URLs

2009-08-17T18:20:00.000Z

40% of everything on Twitter is 'pointless babble', according to a new study by Pear Analytics,* with only 8.7% of tweets having 'pass-along value'. (The company neglected to comment on the possible existence of babble that has a point).

Despite these statistics, however, the existence of services such as BackUpMyTweets (among other options) suggests that at least some of those tweeting their babble (pointless or otherwise) may want to preserve it for future reference. Especially as there seems to be some doubt as to how long Twitter will store your tweets, or at the very least regarding how long tweets remain easily accessible and searchable. Indeed, you might want to back up your other online accounts too, just in case. But are these back up services capturing everything? Well, no, not quite.

The problem - as highlighted by the recent ructions over tr.im - which first died, then decided it felt a bit better, then finally dispersed into the universal consciousness (or something like that) - is with URL shorteners. What, if anything, is being done to back up their databases? Or to put it another way, is the connection between, say, http://z.pe/j1E and http://abduzeedo.com/amazing-light-paintings (or between signifier and signified, if you want to get all structuralist about it) being recorded anywhere, besides (in this case) on z.pe's servers?

Actually, I do want to get a bit structuralist about it, as it turns out. Because perhaps one way of looking at it is that URL shorteners, at present, represent a threat to the future relationship between what we are saying now and to what we are referring. A potential glitch in the language of history.

With the internet and social networks playing an increasingly significant role in current events themselves, as well as in recording them as they happen, and indeed with short URLs being employed by offline news media to reference the online world, it seems increasingly important that something is done to preserve the semantic relationships these URL services create. After all, on one level, the net is essentially a gigantic, complex, system of languages. A modern day Babel that somehow works.

Of course the net has always had to contend with broken hyperlinks. But a short URL deprived of its reference is something else again - a broken link at least hints at where it was supposed to lead, but a short URL is arbitrary. It isn't even a code that can eventually be cracked, just a random alphanumeric sequence assigned to whatever standard URL a user has fed into it.

Happily, though, a group called 301works.org now seems to be attempting to deal with the problem. As yet, all we have to view is a homepage containing slightly opaque bits of blurb, but what the group appears to be aiming at is something a bit like the Internet Archive, but for short URLs.

Already, though, the project isn't without controversy - the people behind tr.im dispute the altrusim of 301works, hence their decision to release their code and database to the open source community, rather than signing up. But at the very least it seems that the issue is now on the collective radar and might soon be addressed - and lets hope it is, or much more than 40% of Twitter might one day be pointless babble; never mind various other parts of the net.

Still, if you really want to be certain about backing up your every online utterance, maybe you could do your own shortening? (Or, then again, maybe not. Life's plenty short enough already).

*Based on a highly representative sample... of, er, 2,000 tweets. Probably mostly from people bored at work, given the times and days they were selected.

To catch a plagiarist

2009-08-04T19:15:00.000Z

When you see a story of plagiarism these days it's not so much that the act took place that surprises you, more that the person in question thought that she could get away with it - especially when it seems the work she plagiarised was sourced from the web.

Samantha Beeston is an award-winning textile designer, and recent graduate. By all accounts, she seems to be going places. Well done her.

Except... well... various images that won her her prizes, as well as quite a number that until recently were posted on her personal website, were never hers in the first place. Instead they belonged to, and indeed were created by Lauren Nassef, a Chicago-based illustrator.

Fine. This is a mash-up culture now, you might be tempted to say, and she seems to be of the generation that has grown up with such things, so has she simply repurposed Lauren Nassef's images for use within a different medium? Have they, for instance, been cleverly juxtaposed with images of her own, or even someone else's, to make some kind of political point or original art? Artistic fair use, and all that?

Well, no. If only.

Just take a look at this page, if you haven't done so already. A minor colour change here, a new combination of Lauren's images there, but that's about as close to appropriation as it gets. It's such straightforward copying that it's hard to imagine even Samantha Beeston thought she was performing some kind of mash-up; though, as yet, it doesn't appear she's commented.

But what interests this blog most is not her motivations, so much as the possibility that while making plagiarism much easier than it used to be, the internet might also, to some degree, be self-righting in these matters - thanks, in part, to the sheer number of its users, but also, in the fields of art and design at least, to the continued success and proliferation of design and inspiration blogs.

These sites make it their mission to seek out fresh images, ideas and inventions in any and every field of art or design, with the intention of inspiring other creative people, again, in whatever creative field. Thus anything new and interesting, such as textile design awards, will pretty quickly come to the attention of all manner of people - all of them with a personal and professional interest in originality and integrity.

Perhaps also the same might be true of music now, given the popularity of MP3 blogs? Or even creative writing, with all kinds of journals, magazines and writers' groups existing online?

Doubtless much plagiarism goes unnoticed - and who knows what can be done about this, since by definition it's going unnnoticed. But does that matter? Perhaps the majority of plagiarism that goes unnoticed is just not very noteworthy, not very profitable? And of the succesful plagiarism: while rectifying matters in the short term could be tortuous for the original creator, what useful attention might their work be attracting during the fallout?

That's the optimistic point of view, of course, and there's every chance someone will point me to a horror story in the comments. Nonetheless, maybe in the old maxim that 'in the stealing of what's worthwhile the succesful plagiarist shall always be unmasked' there lies at least a grain of truth?*

Thanks to @laurasnapes for tweeting the original link.

*Actually it might not be an old maxim, I might have just made it up. But since I equally well might have just remembered it from somewhere, and this is a blogpost about plagiarism, let's call it old.

Bacon and Twitter: a marriage made in heaven

2009-07-28T20:50:00.000Z

Would you be surprised to learn that the most followed British celebrity on Twitter isn't Stephen Fry? How about if I told you it was Richard Bacon?

Yes, really. He of getting sacked from Blue Peter fame. He of occasional not being the MP Richard Bacon confusion. And he of the voiceover to Blockbuster ads.

So, what is it that has made a former second or even third fiddle to a pair of annoying puppets at least two whole @wittertainments (i.e. more than 50,000 followers) more popular than all-round national treasure, Apple fanatic and cuddly uber-geek, Mr Stephen Fry?

The somewhat surprising answer would appear to be: late night national radio.

Certainly Richard Bacon has TV presence, too, but it's hardly on the scale or noticeability of Stephen Fry's, or even that of Jonathan Ross, say - much of it, for one thing, being voiceover work. Neither is he a renowned blogger and technophile, as far as I'm aware. But what he does have is a a late night national radio show - four nights a week, between 10pm and 1am, on BBC 5live - and, most crucially, the Special Half Hour.

Notorious as a time listeners switch off and go to bed, Bacon decided to make the last 30 minutes of his show into a sort of secret club or community. It isn't trailed or even mentioned during the rest of the show, but as soon as it hits 12:30am, to quote Jane Graham in The Guardian, "[w]hat changes is Richard's tone, which becomes honeyed and familial, and is used to punctuate the show with regular reminders that we are now cocooned within the Special Half Hour and we are his 'favourite listeners'", as well as - more recently - some SHH-only special features such as listeners recording Jeremy Kyle re-enactments (other listeners have to guess the show's subtitle). Supporting all this is a Facebook Group and Richard's frequently updated Twitter account.

We've probably all read about how the internet has been a boon to radio, but here what's also at play seems to be the live element of the show - listening later on iPlayer, or to the podcast of the week's highlights, you lose that sense of everyone listening together, secretly, at the same time. The internet plays an important role, certainly, but it's only a part of the SHH's success.

Ultimately, what I think Richard Bacon's overtaking of Stephen Fry on Twitter perhaps shows us most clearly, then, is an unusually good example of mutually beneficial symbiosis between "old media" and "new media" - not to mention the power of word of mouth, likability, and a flair for building community. Or on the other hand, maybe there's just a remarkable overlap in demographics between Twitter users and people who like Richard Bacon? Whatever the case, though, there's something to be learned from it all.

Talking of radio

Remember how teenagers don't listen to radio or use Twitter? Well, here's How 31 Year Olds Consume Media. As the author says, "Don't expect it to make the front page of the FT any time soon though."

Masquerade: the original alternate reality game?

2009-07-24T06:16:00.006Z

"One of my pupils lives there," my Mum said once, as we were driving past a solitary farmhouse in the north of Scotland. She then added, quite wistfully, as Mum was secretly a massive sci-fi and fantasy geek who never really got to indulge her nerdy proclivities: "He's doing Masquerade."

"What's Masquerade?," the 11-year old me immediately wanted to know.

Mum explained that it was a fantasy picture book that had been published a couple of years earlier, which contained a series of puzzles that led to a real treasure - a golden hare ornamented with jewels - that was hidden somewhere in Britain. Whoever solved the puzzle first and found the treasure would get to keep it. Thousands of people all over the world were trying to solve it.

To my eleven-year old mind, this sounded like the greatest thing ever. A proper mystery that could only be solved by the application of a brilliant mind; something I was quite convinced I was in possession of. I resolved to buy a copy of Masquerade as soon as my pocket money would let me.

Sadly, by the time this came about, the mystery had already been solved. You can find the solution - and all the paintings - on this Masquerade Page-by-Page site.

Masquerade itself was over, but elements of it thrive into the present day: most notably the use of fiction to create a multimedia puzzle (Masquerade was a mixture of written text and a set of beautiful, detailed paintings, like the one to the left) that holds clues to objects and locations in the real world.

In some ways, then, Masquerade was a primitive form of the highly sophisticated puzzle games known today as alternate reality games, or ARGs. ARGs take Masquerade's premise - that clues to real objects and places can be hidden in fictional texts for people to solve - and updates it for the internet age. In an analogue age, my mum's pupil was trying to solve Masquerade more or less on his own, but ARGs create collaborative communities of players who can work together online to exchange information and solve puzzles. In the age of print, Masquerade's story was confined to the page, but in ARGs, characters spill out across a multimedia universe, behaving like real people and interacting directly with players by phone, email and on the web.

Masquerade took two years to crack, about the same amount of time as the first season of 2005's Perplex City, one of the first proper alternate reality games. But Masquerade laid all its clues out upfront, so players had all the information they needed to solve the puzzle right from the start. Modern ARGs reveal their clues slowly over time, in order to make the game last. The existence of Google, forums and Twitter mean that if Masquerade was published today it would probably be solved by Wednesday.

The internet would have done no favours for Kit Williams's second treasure hunt book, either. Published in 1984, it was an equally gorgeous multimedia artefact, which scattered arcane clues across text, minutely detailed paintings and exquisite marquetry. But the book itself was untitled: the aim of the puzzle was to work out what it was called.

Being nameless may have seemed like a clever gimmick in the 80s, but in the age of Amazon and Google, it's commercially suicidal. Like Prince's squiggle, a book without a name is deeply search-engine unfriendly. Personally, I still think of it as 'that bee book', but Wikipedia lists it as Book Without A Name, Amazon calls it The Bee on the Comb, and on the bookworms' favourite social media site, LibraryThing, it's simply called Untitled.

If something doesn't have a name, it's not only harder to sell online, it's also much harder for a community to form around it. Search - especially the real-time search provided by the likes of Twitter - is becoming vital to the creation of online communities of interest: if you like something a lot, your default reaction these days is to go online and find other people who like it too. If you don't have a definite term to search for, you're on to a loser.

But the internet may just be amplifying an existing problem. With hundreds of thousands of players worldwide, Masquerade 'went viral' by the standards of its day - and is even now enjoying a revival, thanks to media coverage of its 30th anniversary. The bee book never captured the public imagination in the same way. And if you try looking for 'bee book' online now, Kit Williams's puzzle has to compete in the search rankings with everything from a kids' school notebook to a new Nicole Kidman film. Proof that if you don't have a name, it's very hard to make a name for yourself.

Finding Ada? Not at the Early Learning Centre, you won't

2009-07-19T15:47:00.015Z

In January this year the writer and technophile Suw Charman-Anderson launched a campaign to raise the profile of women in the technology sector.

In light of the misogyny that seems to persist in certain corners of the tech world, Suw wanted to highlight excellent work being done by women in technology and to identify strong role models to inspire women who are already working in technology or who may want to work in the sector in the future.

Suw called the campaign 'Finding Ada' after Ada Lovelace, who worked alongside the Victorian computing pioneer Charles Babbage writing technical and marketing documentation - and the world's first programming code - for the world's first computers, Babbage's Difference Engine and Analytical Engine.

Finding Ada is a global campaign now, with its own special day, countless media articles and blog posts, and a multitude of events, debates and other activities dedicated to raising awareness of outstanding technological achievements and contributions made by women.

I must confess, though, that I'm in two minds about Finding Ada and other techno-feminist initiatives. I've worked in the technology industry for the past 13 years, and I've found it to be pretty well populated with strong, articulate, intelligent, confident and authoritative women, who would doubtlessly tell you that they don't need anyone to stand up for them. In the multinational software company that I used to work for, for example, there are very many women in very senior positions, including the company's president.

So I think there's a danger that running campaigns that aim to 'empower' women in tech may in fact achieve the opposite. Portraying these women as victims of misogyny may inadvertently create the impression that they are unable to stand up for themselves; that they need protecting from their male colleagues; that technology is an unpleasant and unwelcoming industry for women. And although I've met some reprehensibly misogynistic individuals in the course of my career, I can't honestly say that I've found the technology industry as a whole to be unwelcoming to women; quite the opposite.

But on the other hand, Suw is absolutely correct that technology has very, very few female role models. Even Ada Lovelace herself essentially played second fiddle to Charles Babbage (for my money, the 18th-century French scientist and mathematician Emilie du Chatelet is perhaps an even better role model in the proto-female-geek stakes).

There must be countless women out there who are creating wonderful things with technology every day, and there shouldn't have to be a concerted campaign to bring them to light. But somehow, despite the fact that they undoubtedly exist, and with honourable exceptions like Six Apart's Mena Trott, Blogger's Meg Hourihan and Flickr's Caterina Fake, those women by and large remain invisible.

It's all part of that same curious bias in society that would have us believe that there are no female bloggers, or no female science fiction fans. Some things are just assumed to be a male preserve, despite any and all evidence to the contrary.

All of which is a very long-winded way of getting to my point, which is that yesterday, my 10 month-old daughter was given a present of a toy laptop from the Early Learning Centre.

I was very happy about this, as I'm all for introducing her to technology as soon as possible. She's already fascinated with my laptop and my digital camera and my mobile phone and the TV remote controls, and so she should be. Knowing how these things work and how they can be used is critical to getting ahead in modern life, and I'm not going to let my nostalgia for the toys of my own childhood get in the way of her technological development.

But what struck me was the way the toy laptop was packaged. Call me naive, but in 2009, I honestly just don't expect to read something like this:

Dad's laptop is nowhere near as fun as this? In 2009, what possible reason can there be for singling out Dad as the parent who has a laptop? And as if that weren't enough, there's a photo on the back of the box of a little boy using the laptop, but that's the only photo - there's no picture of a little girl using it.

You may think I'm making a fuss about nothing here. After all, the manufacturers clearly intend for the toy laptop to be used by boys and girls: the blurb on the front is deliberately - and ungrammatically - non-gender-specific. 'Watch your baby's face glow when they see and hear the magical light and music show'.

And yet it's tiny things like this, tiny, barely perceptible ways in which women are somehow made invisible when it comes to technology, that build over time into an overwhelming societal assumption that women in technology simply don't exist.

And it's because of that assumption that they actively have to be found, through initiatives like Finding Ada. I wish it weren't the case, and I can't understand why it still *is* the case, but there you have it.

Sort it out, Early Learning Centre.

In my day, we just made the tea...

2009-07-15T20:45:00.000Z

Is it the silly season already? Or has reality just gone on holiday for a bit (quite probably to recover from its recent mauling at the First Annual Michael Jackson Memorial Fest)? After all, how else to explain "dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs" tripping over themselves to find out more about a work experience kid's anecdotes about his mates?

To explain: earlier this week Morgan Stanley published a short report on the media consuming habits of teenagers, by Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old "intern"; the document generated "five or six times" more feedback than most of Morgan Stanley's usual reports, the firm said, with execs and investment bankers phoning and emailing Morgan Stanley all day. This despite the report having been published with no claims to statistical rigour, and being seemingly largely based upon - as The FT refers to him - Mr Robson's observations of his friends.

Commenting on how accurate the report might be I'll leave to people who actually know some teenagers - nothing in it seems very new, though, especially not the observation about the low number of teenage Twitter users - and turn to the Guardian, which yesterday went one better than Morgan Stanley, flexing its considerable journalistic muscle to solicit the media-related musings of, not one, but two teenagers. Yes, two. Presumably, this twice as accurate - or half as unrepresentative - account must have sent the City into spasms, not least because the two teenagers in large part disagreed with Matthew Robson, didn't live in London, and weren't male.

Happily for our baffled City, though, all three teenagers do at least seem to agree on a few key things: they and their friends ignore Twitter, quite often enjoy computer games, and wherever possible will avoid paying for more or less anything. So if anyone in the City had already formulated an investment strategy on the back of the Robson Report - as I believe no-one sane is calling it - it probably didn't take too much tweaking (said strategy, I imagine, would now read much like this: invest in anything but Twitter - and give your kids a Hell of a lot more pocket money).

But on a more serious note: how much is actually to be gained by this widespread obsession with the habits of teenagers? Granted, they're the future of media consumption, almost by definition - but when they get to that future they'll no longer actually be teenagers. Right now, they might not be avid consumers of TV or radio or Twitter or whatever, but when they're older - with different priorities and pressures, less leisure time, more need of in-depth information, the overwhelming need to relax after a long day at work, etc. - will that necessarily still be the case? Perhaps Twitter, for instance, isn't doomed by a lack of teenage interest; perhaps it just better suits the needs of an older demographic. And perhaps looking to teenagers to gauge the future of media is only marginally more useful than deciding, "Well, they're the future of medicine too, so we might as well ask them about swine flu." Who knows?

Anyway, clearly some of what we do and like as teenagers carries through into adulthood, so proper studies of teenage media consumption doubtless have more long term value than I've suggested. But to get that pathetically excited over the report of a work experience kid hardly breeds confidence - "Anything to get the City going again, just anything, please, please, please!" you can almost hear them pleading - and these are the ones that didn't lose their jobs! Sigh. Sometimes you really can't help but wonder how the City didn't collapse even sooner.

The future of a radical price is, um... Torte Elvis?

2009-07-02T15:00:00.001Z

Anyone tempted to make the obvious joke about Chris Anderson's new book, 'Free: The Future Of A Radical Price', will have to think again it seems - damn - since not only will it be available free as an e-book and abridged audiobook, for a limited period, and free as an unabridged audiobook, for an unlimited period, from 9th July, but for those of us in the UK it's already available to listen to on Spotify, as of today. [Free bonus link: the Wired article that preceded the book].

Spotify say this is a first foray into audiobooks and they'll be seeing how it goes, but what many Spotify users may not have realised is that Chris Anderson's latest is by no means its only non-musical content. Leaving aside jokes about Chris de Burgh, as well as the contradicting links in the comments section of the Spotify blog (which appear to lead to a German audiobook of Dracula and some Norwegian children's stories), see what happens when you type the following into Spotify's search box: "genre:comedy" (without the quotation marks).

Turns out there are a number of comedy albums freely available on Spotify, should you be interested in that kind of thing. The majority of it is heavily American accented, but in amongst the Chris Rock, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, etc., you'll still find the likes of Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, The Goons, Monty Python, Viv Stanshall, The Rutles, and much to my bleak delight the incomparable and unclassifiable poetic whimsies of Ivor Cutler.

Oh, and if you've ever wondered what Led Zeppelin crossed with Elvis, to a reggae beat, all fronted by an Elvis impersonator might sound like... well, you have curiously specific musical tastes, frankly. But anyway, here's Dread Zeppelin.

(To think I'd nearly forgotten about them 'til now... Even 'Free' has its drawbacks, I suppose).

UPDATE: And for the morbidly curious, here's what the above might look like:

"This is the video that made them famous", alleges the YouTube blurb. Come to think of it, though, I am half-remembering it being watched by Beavis and Butthead on MTV.

Not the Twitter revolution, the Twittered revolution

2009-06-30T19:56:00.000Z

"[T]his is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media."

So says Clay Shirky, in this timely Q&A on the TED blog.

While the protests in Iran perhaps haven't now turned into a revolution, exactly, or at least not in the sense of a government being overthrown, there is still much to be said about the role social media has played, both in drawing the world's attention to the contested election result, and in the protests themselves - as Shirky alludes to, though, it's a controversial matter. Hopefully, this post can round up a wide spread of the online analysis.

The course of events

- "#IranElection Crisis: A Social Media Timeline" is Mashable's charting of the protests from 12th - 21st June, from a social media perspective.

- Wikipedia's '2009 Iranian election protests' entry expands further, as you'd expect, with the notes and citations also representing a pretty comprehensive source of links for further reading.

- And should you want to go right back and try to understand more about Iran and its history, and perhaps how it all came to this, BBC Radio 4 yesterday began running a three part series on the making of modern Iran, titled 'Iran: A Revolutionary State'. Part 3 is tomorrow morning, but according to the programme information on the iPlayer these should remain available online until 1st January 2099 [sic].

Social Media: help or hindrance?

What more or less every analysis of the Iran protests seems to be agreed on is the significant role that social media - and Twitter in particular - played in breaking news of the protests to the rest of the world, and creating some kind of feeling of connection or commonality between 'ordinary' Iranians and their counterparts elsewhere. But where opinion diverges is around the extent to which Twitter was instrumental in the protests themselves, and around the extent to which the surge of tweets on #iranelection may have had a negative impact.

Potential negative impacts range through: the spreading of misinformation; use of certain hashtags by those outside Iran making actual Iranian tweets difficult to find for those within Iran; the public tweeting of proxy IP addresses inadvertently allowing them to be quickly found and blocked by the Iranian authorities; potential for the mass interest and involvement of the English-speaking world to be spun by the Iranian government as evidence that dissent was largely being driven by the West.

That last link references Distributed Denial of Service cyber attacks on pro-Iranian government sites, but I'd imagine the point applies also (though not quite as forcefully) to simple social media participation, and especially as this appears to be from where these attacks are in part being co-ordinated.

The Twittered revolution?

A blog post that covers pretty much every question I've seen raised, as well as linking to a host of informative articles, is this one by Gaurav Mishra. Primarily, he is rebutting the notion that what we have been seeing is a "Twitter revolution" - a term that first sprang up in April this year, in relation to protests against election results in Moldova. (Opinion on Twitter's role and on an appropriate nomenclature was divided then too: 'The Moldovan Twitter revolution is a myth'; 'No, it isn't'). One of Mishra's main arguments is that, if anything, simple mobile phone and SMS was the principal enabling technology behind the Iran protests, along with word of mouth; Twitter was primarily of information to the rest of the world.

Conclusion

Perhaps, then, the notion that we have been seeing a "Twitter revolution" has been so widely reported simply because the concept of a "Twitter revolution" is a compelling narrative: a good, zeitgeist-y story that, in the end, the media wasn't able to apply to the Moldovan situation so has found another peg to hang it on. Again, however, it seems to have fallen off - perhaps, because ultimately, as many have suggested, Twitter is too public a tool for organising a revolution? Or because the story of a "Twitter revolution" is a meme that will never quite sit comfortably on actual events.

What clearly isn't in doubt, though, is Twitter's power to report major world events. While Iran might not have experienced a Twitter revolution, the news media surely will never be the same again. For a start, they've got a new meme to flog to death, and God help us all.

A few other interesting links not referenced in the above:

- The Twazzup feed of Iran election related Twitter activity.

- Ethan Zuckerman's post on how reporting of the Iran election protests came to be disproportionately focussed on the social media angle.

- A Washington Post Q&A with Evgeny Morozov "to discuss the role of Twitter and other social-networking services and Web sites in coverage of the Iranian elections."

Fake David Miliband and the future of news

2009-06-27T19:42:00.011Z

Last week I got into a conversation on Twitter with @freecloud, aka Alan Patrick, co-founder of digital media consultancy Broadsight.

(I don’t know Alan, but the one of the great things about Twitter is that you can end up having interesting conversations with complete strangers.)

Alan was asking the kind of question that’s exercising many media types at the moment:

I replied as follows (typo and all):

To which Alan later commented:

It turned out that Alan was thinking specifically about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s recent prognosis that the media industry will never recover financially from the current recession, but at heart it was the same ‘blogging vs journalism’ debate that’s been going on ever since bloggers emerged to challenge the mainstream media’s monopoly over information dissemination.

Once a simple question of professionals vs amateurs, it’s a debate that has grown much more nuanced as the two disciplines have encroached further into each other’s territory. The maturing and thinning-out of the blogosphere has seen the credibility of blogging rise considerably, for example, while the funding crisis in the newspaper industry means that a lot of the old certainties about the superiority of professional journalism are no longer quite so certain.

Despite my belief that professional journalists are still better qualified to report hard news, their ability to do so is rapidly eroding. In an environment in which ever fewer journalists are required to churn out ever more stories at an ever increasing pace to satisfy the second-by-second information needs of an always-on audience, it’s inevitable that serious errors are going to creep in, even at the most professional organisations.

One such serious error occurred yesterday, during the frenzied reporting surrounding Michael Jackson’s untimely death. Along with Sky News and CNN, three of Britain’s quality newspapers – the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Times – quoted British foreign secretary David Miliband giving his reaction to the news:

“Never has one soared so high and yet dived so low. RIP Michael.”

An unremarkable enough tribute, but the trouble was that David Miliband never said anything of the sort. His supposed quote was lifted from a Twitter feed purporting to be his, but which was in fact created by an unknown person masquerading as the foreign secretary.

People impersonating other people online for satirical purposes is nothing new – the more accomplished parodies, such as Fake Steve Jobs and Fake Nick Cave, attract whole fanbases of their own – but it’s rare for a professional journalist, let alone a whole swathe of professional journalists, to mistake the fake for the real.

(Reading between the lines of this Guardian blog post, it would seem that the fake quote was first used in a report by the Paris-based AFP newswire, which was then picked up by a number of other news organisations. Anyone who’s read Nick Davies’s excellent book Flat Earth News will know that many journalists accept wire service reports as accurate without feeling they need to be fact-checked.)

Incidents like this make it harder for newspapers to claim factual accuracy as a point in their favour, but that doesn’t automatically mean that blogs and microblogs are more trustworthy sources of news. As the fake David Miliband profile suggests, social media sites can be a riot of misinformation. Yesterday alone, Twitter users merrily passed around made-up reports of the supposed death of Jeff Goldblum, while, in a moment of glorious postmodern silliness, a fabricated rumour about a mass moonwalk at Liverpool Street Station in Michael Jackson’s honour gained so much credence on Twitter and Facebook that it actually took place.

So where does this leave @freecloud’s question about who’s best qualified to reinvent the newspaper? I don’t know the answer, but I think that the ‘journalists or bloggers’ question is increasingly irrelevant, as both are equally good and equally bad at delivering useful information.

What matters now is not the medium by which news arrives, but the trustworthiness of the individual or organisation delivering it. In our new age of ultra-transparency, honesty, openness and a willingness to engage in debate are increasingly important to securing trust. News providers (of any stripe) that publish false information without correcting it risk losing the trust of an audience that can readily find more accurate accounts elsewhere.

The Telegraph and the Guardian’s respective approaches to correcting their fake-Miliband stories may therefore contain clues about the future direction of news. The Telegraph elected to remove the offending article from its website and carry on as though it had never existed – despite it being captured for posterity in screengrabs like this one:

The Guardian, meanwhile, excised the fake-Miliband quote from its article, added a note about why it had been removed, and followed up with a blog post about how several news organisations – including itself – had been duped by the Miliband impersonator.

In doing so, the Guardian has behaved more like a blog than a traditional newspaper. Bloggers tend to make visible corrections to their posts if they discover a factual error after a post has been published, or if a reader points one out. Newspapers, culturally rooted in an age in which an article couldn’t be changed once it had been published, are less inclined to make visible, post-hoc edits to online articles.

I’m not for a minute suggesting that the Guardian will endure while the Telegraph will fade into history; just that the transparency shown by the Guardian in this case is another indicator of how newspapers are borrowing techniques from blogs as they adjust to life in a more democratic media age.

The question is not whether we’ll receive news in the future from professionals or amateurs (it’s likely to remain a combination of both), but what techniques and behaviours our future news providers will have to adopt in order to secure the trust of enough people to make their efforts financially viable.

The Twitter Revolution?

2009-06-21T16:53:00.000Z

When it comes to the intersection between social media and the Iranian election protests, green-tinted Twitter avatars are but a tiny side-alley (see previous post). What is truly remarkable is the huge role Twitter, YouTube videos, Facebook accounts and even the status line in Gmail's Chat box appear to have played in the unfolding of events and the near-instant breaking of news. In the next couple of days I'll look to post something more to that effect here, even if it's only a collection of links to people with far more useful things to say than I have. For now, though - and I never thought I'd write this - The Sunday Times has a good piece on just that subject. And all credit to Andrew Sullivan for eating his words:

Twitter ripped the veil off 'the other' – and we saw ourselves

New media allowed the world to connect with the Tehran rebels

Andrew Sullivan

It was not, to put it mildly, a new technology I found impressive. Twitter, the social networking website, allows for only a tiny number of characters to be broadcast in each "tweet", or message, and much of the early tweeting was being done by bored teens or Hollywood celebrities: the illiterate speaking to the impatient.

[...]

Well, the last laugh is on me. As I have spent the past week hunched over a laptop, channelling and broadcasting as much information, video and debate about the momentous events in Iran, nothing quite captured the mood and pace of events like the tweets coming from the people of Iran.

With internet speed deliberately slowed to a crawl by the Iranian authorities, brevity and simplicity were essential. To communicate, they tweeted. Within hours of the farcical election result, I tracked down a bunch of live Twitter feeds and started to edit and rebroadcast them as a stream of human consciousness on the verge of revolution.

To go to the full article click here.

[Link included above - to Andrew Sullivan's extensive blogging on Iran, for The Atlantic - not included in original piece].

A couple of other sources:

- As you would expect, Mashable, 'The Social Media Guide', has been providing coverage of the social media angle on Iran's 'Twitter Revolution' and their posts can be found here (the first link in that sentence goes to a New York Times analysis of Twitter's potential as a revolutionary tool).

- A number of the major stories have been covered by the BoingBoing blog, under their CIVLIB, INTERNATIONAL, and POLITICS tags; most of the posts also carry links to previous BoingBoing posts.

N.B. Thanks to @HeidiHigh for most of these links.

The Twitter green-out

2009-06-20T17:58:00.000Z

Anyone stumbling across Twitter for the first time right now could be forgiven for wondering what exactly is wrong: Are people ill? Are they collectively envious of something? Perhaps there's been an outbreak of Incredible-Hulkism? Or maybe everyone's just getting a bit jaded with it all at last?

Actually, Incredible-Hulkism might be the best answer: people got angry and turned green, or at least their Twitter avatars did, in symbolic support of those protesting what is widely being seen as a rigged election in Iran. But, as a number of people have asked, what exactly does this achieve? Anything?

The cynical answers first (since it's always nicer to end on a high): it makes us in the West feel better; it makes us feel like we're doing something; it is (quite literally) the least we can do. Perhaps too it's something along the lines of the theories ventured at the time of the death of Princess Diana: people want to feel connected to something more dramatic, important, or meaningful than their own small, increasingly individual and isolated lives.

Frankly, I have no idea whether it's any of those things, but I can imagine them being suggested by the usual assortment of commentators. Myself, I've actually turned my avatar green, and to be honest I'm not entirely sure why.

At first it started to occur to me that maybe everyone else who'd turned green would (wrongly) assume I was in disagreement with them. Then I decided that just because I couldn't entirely see the point it didn't mean that there wasn't one, and anyway, it's just a couple of mouse clicks, so I might as well do something rather than absolutely nothing. If it achieves anything, great; if not, never mind.

Even so, none of this explains what it was hoped that making Twitter resemble some collective absinthe hallucination might actually achieve.

The first thing of this order that I remember is a day on which everyone was supposed to wear red in support of the Burmese monks and Aung San Suu Kyi. Again, I didn't entirely see the point, but I think the idea was that photos would appear on Flickr and the Burmese would know that the rest of the world was behind them and that we cared about what was happening.

More recently, there was the Twitter blackout, protesting against draconian internet regulation plans in New Zealand. Apparently, despite much skepticism, this proved successful (or played some part in the resultant climbdown), and maybe that's why the strategy has been revived in the wake of the Iran elections. However, it does seem that applying that same strategy to the present situation is somewhat of a category error; like assuming that because you've found that 2+2 = 4 and 2+3 is also a mathematical problem it must also have the same answer. Just because one government is likely to pay attention to what amounts to an international online petition, doesn't mean another one will.

But I doubt anyone really expects that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will give in to a small army of sickly looking Twitter avatars - unless, perhaps, he assumes them to bear him some kind of virtual swine fever. So I guess the aim here is closer in spirit to the wear-red-for-Burma day: to show any Twitter-engaged protesting Iranians, and their ex-patriate friends and relatives, that there is a wider international support for their cause. Or anyway at least enough that people will click a mouse a couple of times.

But again I veer towards cynicism.

The truth is, I still don't really know exactly what these kind of protests achieve, or exactly why my Twitter avatar is now tinted a misty green. All I can really say is that since the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, et al, it's almost as easy to register at least some small protest as not to, on pretty much any topic, whether it be about the disappearance of your favourite chocolate bar or about the disappearance of civil liberties. What, if any, the impact might be doubtless varies wildly according to the nature of the issue, but at least it allows you to do something, no matter how infinitessimally small - and perhaps it even allows you to take part in proving yourself wrong. I hope so.

A random bit of balance: At least one person isn't so sure Twitter's been a helpful voice in the Iranian situation: yes, it spreads information fast, but what happens when that's false information?

Digital Britain: The Debrief

2009-06-17T11:43:00.007Z

The government's final Digital Britain White Paper was published on schedule yesterday, despite speculation that it would be delayed due to the mayhem caused by the recent expenses scandal and the surprise resignation last week of its author, Lord Carter.

The main points - and shortcomings - of the report have been well covered in the media, so there's no need to reiterate them here.

Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC, for example, has a nice, clear analysis of why the actions outlined in the report are very unlikely to put Britain at the top of the global broadband league - despite Gordon Brown's insistence that they will, while Bryan Glick at Computing takes a more positive view.

But I did just want to put on record the debrief that I gave to the Cornwall Social Media Café last night. Last month I co-ordinated the CSMC's response to the interim Digital Britain report and our recommendations for consideration in the final report, as part of the series of Digital Britain Unconferences that took place around the country.

At the time I wasn't confident that our response would have any effect. But as it turns out, it does seem to have helped to make a concrete difference to the government's proposals, and is even explicitly acknowledged on page 10 of the final report itself.

Here's the debrief more or less as I delivered it last night:

The final Digital Britain report – all 245 pages of it – was published today and announced in Parliament by the new culture secretary Ben Bradshaw.

The report takes into account the recommendations made by the twelve Digital Britain Unconferences that took place last month, one of which we had here in Vertigo Bar at our last CSMC meet on the 12th May.

The aim of those conferences was to provide last-minute feedback and recommendations to the government ahead of the final report. Our feedback was based on the recommendations outlined in the Digital Britain interim report published in January.

Our feedback focused mainly on the government’s proposal to deliver 2MB/s broadband to everyone in the country by 2012. We felt that this would put rural areas at a disadvantage as some urban areas already benefit from ‘next-generation’ broadband speeds of 20MB/s or more provided by the likes of BT and Virgin Media.

We said that if the government left it up to the market to provide next generation broadband, rural areas would fall behind as it is unprofitable for BT and Virgin to lay fibre to remoter communities. We urged the government to take a more active role in ensuring that everyone could have access to next-generation speeds.

The good news is that the government has taken this feedback on board, and they no longer plan to leave the rollout of next-gen broadband up to the market.

The bad news (depending on how you look at it) is that it seems we’ve been instrumental in creating a new tax. Everyone with a fixed phone line will pay 50p a month to create a new public fund for the rollout of next-generation broadband across the country. (Vulnerable people will be exempt.)

Personally I think 50p a month is a small price to pay to ensure that rural communities and other ‘notspots’ can keep pace with urban centres. Others may not agree! And some people think that the funds will take a long time to raise, and rural areas may not see their super-fast broadband till 2017 by some estimates.

But the bottom line is that we provided feedback and the government listened. Because of that, the rollout of next-gen broadband across the whole country should be faster and more extensive than it would have been had we not provided our input as part of the Digital Britain Unconferences. So I think we can all be quite proud of ourselves.

Further Resources

Full text of the Cornwall Social Media Café's response to the Digital Britain Interim Report

Summary of the amalgamated reports from all 12 Digital Britain Unconferences

Full collated reports from all 12 Digital Britain Unconferences

The full, final Digital Britain White Paper

Thanks

Thanks go to Kathryn Corrick, Tom de Grunwald, Bill Thompson and Alastair Duncan for instigating and co-ordinating the Unconferences and editing and submitting the collated report, and to Aren Grimshaw and Laura McKay for agreeing to hold a Digital Britain Unconference during the May CSMC meet and for allowing me the time to deliver the debrief last night.

Twitter: inspiring underinformed journalism throughout the land

2009-06-02T09:48:00.000Z

Twitter, much like Jonathan Ross, seems to have quite a knack for annoying certain people. Cue inevitable snooty article in The Independent's Friday Review section, then, upon the news of @wossy's Twitter based Book Club. "The very idea!" you can almost hear Boyd Tonkin snorting, while failing to properly research his article. In fact, what he actually said was

It sounds like some belated April Fool's gag designed to tickle every exposed nerve of anxiety, greed and fashion-victimhood in the palsied frame of the book business.

But that phrasing probably came a bit later.

It's not the choice of the first book to be read that seems to have got his goat (sorry); or even entirely that Jonathan Ross was behind it; rather, his main issue seems to be that Pan MacMillan were craven and obsequious enough to make it "alarmingly for authors, briefly available as a free download".

The thing is, they actually didn't. And nor did Jon Ronson appear at all alarmed (or no more than usual).

What actually happened was: on the back of Ross's recommendation a paper copy of The Men Who Stare At Goats became almost impossible to get hold of; to meet the demand an e-book was swiftly made available as a paid for download, on Exact Editions; and only for the hour during which the @atwossybookclub Twittering was to take place was a copy available for free, though even then only to read and refer to online, not to download. Which all strikes me as, in fact, a commendably quick reaction; one that for the participants of the book club at least might have actually put the book industry into quite a decent light.

As for the suitability of Twitter as a venue for book club discussion, even Jonathan Ross isn't claiming it's ideal - at least not unextended.

Tonkin's real beef, though, it seems, is with the British publishing industry; which he seems to think is focusing too much on the gadgets on which we will be reading our books, rather than on creating the readers who will read them - the way Pan MacMillan pandered to the Ross book club (or at least that was the story as Tonkin understood it) is just another example of their short-termism; a quick fix. But even here his argument seems to have got a bit confused: doubtless British publishers do need to think about how to "nurture fresh readerships", especially in certain genres, but surely the proliferation of different reading devices, from the Kindle to mobile phones, is a big part of the answer, rather than a distraction?

Imagine, for instance, this article on the humourous bits of Haydn - but read on a device that could supply in-context MP3s. At present, it alienates anyone lacking a certain level of understanding of musical theory, but being able to instantly hear what's being described would bring a whole new reading experience; perhaps a whole new readership - the until now only Classically-curious.

Moreover, the Exact Editions e-book platform mentioned above, which makes it possible to link to and cite individual pages of the text, is if anything evidence of the publishing industry trying to nurture new readerships - for people who might be unable to attend an offline book group, Exact Editions could be used as a common edition, then a forum set up, and problem solved. Indeed other e-book platforms, as demonstrated by the Golden Notebook Project, go even further towards enabling communal reading online.

Whether there are enough of such initiatives, however, Tonkin I'm sure knows better than me, and there's doubtless a valuable article to be written on the matter. But harumphing about a book club on Twitter, that boosts sales and brings fresh readers to a work like Leaves of Grass, or indeed to graphic novels, really isn't the way to start it.

Back to the future...

2009-05-27T18:10:00.001Z

More specifically, the future of news; a topic we've featured on this blog a couple of times this month. Following up on those posts, then, here are a couple of podcasts to download.

The BBC's ever wonderful Pods & Blogs has twice this month devoted a chunk of its weekly podcast to discussions and developments around the future of news. Most recently, this week's edition spent some time at the recent Media140 conference (on the future of real-time news) talking to folks from The Daily Telegraph and Reuters, as well as interviewing Guy Degen, who uses mobile technology and social media to enable his numerous freelance reporting endeavours.

For more on Media140 and some of the speeches and interviews just follow the link.

Going back a couple of weeks, Pods & Blogs was also at the JEEcamp unconference (JEE = Journalism Enterprise and Entrepreneurship), an event which describes itself as

an opportunity for a range of people to get together to talk about how on earth journalists and publishers can make a living from journalism in the era of free information, what the challenges are, and what we've learned so far.

An interview with JEEcamp's founder Paul Bradshaw kicked off the week's podcast, before attention was turned to the potential fate of newspaper cartoonists, Matthew Buck and Alex Hughes of The Bloghorn, the digital cartoon blog of The Professional Cartoonists' Organisation, being asked how media developments are starting to affect them and in what ways they and their colleagues are responding.

The show may still be available for download at iTunes; but if not, you can download it from this temporary drop.io link.

For more information about the JEEcamp, this article at Guardian Tech looks helpfully peppered with links.

Anyway, enjoy! (And maybe follow the show on Twitter).