- Rumour is that Heroes is no longer going to be sold through iTunes in the US If this is because of rising tensions between iTunes and the industry over pricing, then the only thing that the industry has to do is find and support a plausible alternative, not demand more control over the iTunes model.
- Gideon Lichfield–foreign correspondent for the Economist in Jerusalem–and someone I’ve known a very very long time has started a blog about the situation called ‘Fugitive Peace’ It’s fascinating to be able to see what’s going on at ground level in Palestine and Israel and it makes it all the more real to me that I’ve known the commentator for almost half my life.
Category: Links
- Via Dan Hill, I come across Jossip’s list of the amount of advertising in magazines. Only 13% of Vogue’s last issue was editorial. I post this mainly to suggest that for the moment at least there’s a fair amount of money in the advertising industry and that we don’t have to worry too much about the Internet collapsing for lack of money in the short-term at least…
- Absolutely insane image resizing and editing video from the Guardian Technology blog Israeli scientists identify paths through a an image that contain the least information and then allow you to resize the image while retaining the most significant proportions of the information rich bits. Hard to explain. Must see!
- A beautiful Flickr set of typesettings from the past Astonishingly gorgeous, pre-digital books of type.
- Should ‘UGC’ as a term be replaced by ‘Indigenous content’? Clay’s post on this is highly entertaining and I love the idea. I may start using it in meetings and see what kinds of eyebrows I get.
- I’m a bit frustrated by the trailers for BBC Four’s Comics Britannia season It’s all Bash Street Kids and I’m not sure I even see the connection between that stuff and things like 2000AD or the British comics creators working in the American idiom.
- Search Engine Land’s article “The Impending Social Search Inflection Point” borderline convinces me that there is no such thing as ‘Social Search’ in any meaningful way I swear that social search is basically a way to explain to people why search engines buy social stuff, by explaining it in terms that their shareholders understand, without it actually referring to anything real in the world…
- Bruce Nussbaum says, “CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them” and I think he’s right. The problem-solving, find a user need and fill it as close to perfectly as you can is where the future is, particularly in technology… “In today’s global marketplace, [the key skills are being] able to understand the consumer, prototype possible new products, services and experiences, quickly filter the good, the bad and the ugly and deliver them to people who want them…”
- I think I’m obsessed with Mark Titchner. His work seems to describe the honourable goal of my industry while savagely satirising it. I like that. It’s good to have some dark perspective. Slogans like, “We want answers to the questions of tomorrow”, “The Future demands your participation” and “We want to make dreams a reality” all resonate with me very strongly even as I know how political or messianic they sound.
- ‘Things’ is a beautiful looking GTD application that’s supposed to be launching relatively soon in competition with OmniFocus Could I make one suggestion. The name of your product can only result in no one being able to find it online. I stumbled upon it once and then had to wait until I stumbled upon it again by accident to post a link to it. Not good, I’m thinking.
- A relatively old interview with Tim O’Reilly from Wired News declares Web 2.0 is about ownership of data.. The only slight proviso I’d make is that it’s about access to or ownership of data. One of the main interesting territories in social media is how to work with your audience to create a repository of value to everyone. Good piece though.
- Merlin Mann is in a similar state with regards to PR people… Lovely graphic he’s posting. That other people are feeling the same way maybe indicates that the PR people are upscaling their assault on webloggia?
- Do you have more than $700,000 lying around that you would rather spend on a semi-squatted domain? That’s what Flickr.com is currently going for. Ridiculous. Aggravating.
- Spot the Open Rights Group poster in new episodes of the I.T. Crowd! I haven’t really watched the show myself, but perhaps I should do so. Yay, Open Rights Group.
- ‘Faceball’ Craze Hitting Cubicles Around The Globe Awesome video featuring lovable Flickrinos Alspaw and Orchard. Very entertaining.
- Lovely “Dance Dance” David Heinemeier Hansson (Revolution) post about the rhetoric that people use about ‘the real world’ “The Real World must be a truly depressing place to live. It’s apparently a realm where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always lose.”
- Fascinating Pasta & Vinegar post about user research on Halo The best thing about this post is how much of the success of the game is predicated on the topography of the landscape. Something interesting there.
- Alice Taylor spots a really bloody nice looking coffee mug All styled up like a Chemistry beaker for your more accurate mix of coffee and milk, I’m guessing.
- Another coffee/tea-cup design experiment, this time allowing you get a sense of how milky/strong your tea should be based on colour. This is nice and everything, but I think it misses a trick. Assuming for a moment you put the tea in first you need to evaluate strength immediately separately from milkiness. I propose a colour guide at the bottom to recommend appropriate strength.
- Stephen at PRBlogger has put up a big post warning PR people not to spam bloggers… I have to be honest, Stephen has done his utmost to make this (limited) situation right and I can’t thank him enough. If his post gets the attention of people in the PR industry that’ll be a really good start.
- Just watched the 1936 film ‘Things to Come’ based on HG Well’s book Wow. That was extraordinary. A celebratory song for science and progress that contains some of the most extraordinary and convincing special effects I’ve ever seen. I’m not kidding. Extraordinary.
- Insane story about a guy who sold a dime worth $1.9 million and had to fly it across the US Jason Kottke is quite right. The best line is the bit where he says that he didn’t take the dime out because it’s suspicious to stare at dimes in public.
- Another Kottke rip-off – the trailer for new Wes Anderson film, ‘The Darjeeling Limited’ I love his style and the last two films, but it looked kind of samey from the trailer.
- Meg Hourihan has a very interesting and well-researched post on what she ate when she was pregnant and why… Really genuinely interesting. I imagine the world is litigious enough that most people are now too afraid to recommend anything with very very limited risks in case they got sued by those poor unfortunate people.
- An extraordinary blog post about The Punisher who gets his face messed up and needs to go into hiding so a plastic surgeon with a stack of melanin makes him black Jaw on the floor awesome. They don’t make ludicrous madshit like this any more.
- The London Evening Standard Headline Generator Brilliant fun. Ludicrous statements at the best of times, subsequently chopped up and recontextualised.
- Weird story from Wired News: Astronomers have found a huge area of the Universe completely devoid of, well, anything… My mind leaps to terms like Necrid Expanse from Star Trek. This is because I am a dweeb.
- How to do water droplets in Photoshop in five minutes I mean it’s fascinating and everything but having watched it all the way through twice I still actually have no idea how they did it or what each of the various things they did accomplished. Still, a fascinating five minutes.
- I’m fascinated to hear that there are PR databases full of my contact details! Oh happy day! Do you work in PR and want to differentiate yourself from the unscrupulous people who lie and spam for cash!? Then get access to these databases and find out what they say about me! Screencaps preferred!
- A new version of Thinglink has launched. It’s got some weird little usability irritations for me, but it’s nice to see it up and running. Big two problems for me: clicking on ‘home’ takes you to a login page for some reason, text on the homepage doesn’t make it clear what’s a tagline and what’s a link. Otherwise pretty interesting!
- If you remember, Google turned off its TV distribution efforts and everyone who had bought things using its local DRM found that they no longer worked. They were ‘reimbursed’ with Google store credit… Google have since reimbursed people. That’s good. But this is the narrative of future DRM-based media collapses, only in the future when a company goes bankrupt you’ll not likely get reimbursed for your lost media…
- Vaguely entertaining video parody of a supposed Microsoft Zune version of the iPhone Honestly, at the moment I think pretty much everyone is still reeling from the launch of the iPhone, so it feels a bit mean to pick on Microsoft in particular. Still, it’s sort of funny.
- A nice supportive message from Stowe Boyd… “Tom expresses the feeling that most well-known bloggers share: a learned avoidance — if not physical disgust — of PR folks who bombard us with PR.”
- Drew B writes on ‘How not to court a Blogger’ citing my recent explosion on Flickr And I quote: “And maybe bloggers need to realise that if they publish and they have an audience, they are vehicles conveying messages, and companies will always look to sign them up.” They’re no better than spammers.
- Michael Clayton George Clooney thriller. Looks intelligent and interesting. Bit suits and eyebrows and slightly raised voices. Don’t know what it’ll be like. Anyone seen it?
- Anywhere.FM Fascinating idea. You upload your music to a central repository, and have a web interface to it wherever you are in the world that you use instead of iTunes. Full network joy ensues. Lots of possibilities here for social stuff obviously.
- Ged Carroll writes a rather over-flattering post about something I said on Flickr I’m going to write up my thoughts on the whole PR / blog thing as soon as I get a moment. Maybe later today if I’ve got plasticbag.org’s comments working properly again.
- If you’re voting for sessions for SXSW then perhaps you’d consider giving your honest evaluation to a session on presence that Brian Oberkirch, Biz Stone, Leisa Reichelt and myself are thinking about… I’d be talking about Fire Eagle, which I’ve not really talked about at all on this site, but will be doing so soon. It’s a joint Yahoo Research Berkeley and Brickhouse project with a distinguished roster of contributors. More soon.
- Noisy Decent Graphics has a highly entertaining post on the book “Churnmore”, a satire on PR, advertising and brand people Thanks to Matt Jones for pointing it out to me. I will be heading to Amazon and buying it immediately.
- Absurd news story of the day: A man gets arrested for using someone else’s unsecured wifi network without their explicit permission. WTF!? This is insane. Absolutely insane. “This arrest should act as a warning to anyone who thinks it is acceptable to illegally use other people’s broadband connections.” Ridiculous.
- The BBC Magazine asks. “Is stealing wireless wrong?” Nowhere in these discussions does anyone ask about those people who want to leave their wifi nodes open for the convenience of other people. It’s like putting a drinking fountain outside your front door by the road and shooting anyone who tries to drink!
- The Last.fm Normaliser tells you which bands and albums you’ve listened to for longest (based on the average song length) If you like your Orbital, as I do, then suddenly the fact that their tunes are four times as long as music by the Pixies counts for something.
- I’ve got a bit of a lust on for the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM This is the white monster for taking interesting candid photos and nature shots. Looks heavy!
- Is it just me that’s been having trouble with Yahoo Messenger for the Mac since the Safari Betas came out? Webkit seems to have changed its behaviour in such a way that Messenger no longer works quite so well. I’ll have to find out who to talk to about that.
- I keep walking past adverts for a new George Clooney film, Michael Clayton, but I don’t know much about it… I’ve watched the trailer and it looks quite interesting, but it’s sort of appeared on my horizon without any hype at all. Anyone know what the word on it is?