Media
“What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”
Not everybody in marketing sees the entire world as an advertising opportunity, it seems. According to Silicon Alley Insider, Procter & Gamble’s GM for interactive marketing and innovation, Ted McConnell, isn’t keen on Facebook ads.
Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.
Newspapers: firing the wrong people?
There’s an interesting piece by David Carr in today’s New York Times about (US) newspapers’ latest cost-cutting wheeze: firing their best writers.
Right now, the consumer has all manner of text to choose from on platforms that range from a cellphone to broadsheet. The critical point of difference journalism offers is that it can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio and provide trusted, branded information. That will be a business into the future, perhaps less paper-bound and smaller, but a very real business.
…Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks, newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve.
I’m inclined to agree with this bit too:
I have always thought of journalism as more craft than profession and tell students that it is the accumulation of experience and technique that makes a journalist valuable, not some ineffable beckoning of the muse.
HD video cameras: as long as tech is this confusing, we’ll need people to cut through the bullshit
A while back, I mentioned that taking baby steps into “proper” photography made me weep hot salty tears of frustration and rage, until a bit of informed advice and a few magazines cheered me up and translated the crap into plain English. It turns out that the world of digital photography is the simplest thing in the world compared to video.
It’s entirely academic at the moment - I’ll probably have to mug some schoolchildren at lunchtime in order to afford a pint or two tonight - but at some point in the near future I want to buy a video camera. I’ve learnt from my previous mistakes - best summarised as “don’t buy on price” - and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want.
It’s not complicated. I want a camera that has these features:
* High definition, because if I’m going to shell out on a camera I might as well get one that’s reasonably future-proof.
* Card storage, because I hate DVDs and like the security of being able to carry a few spare cards around.
* Mac compatibility.
And naturally, I don’t want to pay a million pounds for it. Even window shopping is suffering from the credit crunch.
So off I trot to the wonderful world of manufacturer websites and product spec sheets. And what a confusing load of crap it all is.
In no particular order, here are some of the things you need to know about:
* HD means different things depending on what you’re looking at. This camera here is HD, with 720p HD! This camera here is also HD, but it has 1080p HD! But this 720p one has better pictures than the 1080p because it has better fps and that one is better than the other ones because it is not interlaced and over here this one is the very bestest camera ever because it has magic space pixies that live inside it!
* The jargon around video cameras is even worse than with still cameras. In addition to all the f-stop stuff and JPEG profiles you’d expect, there’s CMOS and CCD and 3DDNR and BIONZ image processors and X many frames per second and face detection and AVC/H.264 and DIS and OIS and OMGWTFINEEDALIEDOWN.
* It’s not enough to go “no, Sony, your memory sticks are evil” and plump for something that uses SD cards. Different cameras have different levels of SD support, so some max out at a particular level of storage, others are utterly pointless unless you get SDHC cards. And of those, some of them don’t really work unless you go for Class 4 HD cards. Class what?
* Mac compatible doesn’t necessarily mean Mac compatible, because the combination of the highest HD resolutions and the AVCHD format used by some cameras isn’t yet supported by OS X software such as iMovie (although this may have changed by now. I’m too confused to keep looking).
Kudos to Techradar*, T3**, the Guardian*** et al for trying to explain all this stuff sensibly in reviews and product comparisons, but I can’t help thinking that this is the best option:
* Instead of buying an HD camera, take lots of still photos, print them out and wave them around really, really quickly.
* Vested interest: I write for it, albeit not about video cameras
** Vested interest: I’ve written for it, albeit not about video cameras
*** Vested interest: I’ve written for that too, albeit.. you get the idea
What’s wrong with the Daily Mail (typography)?
Is it just me, or does the typeface used for the bullet points in this boxout (from the Daily Mail) really suck? It’s used for body text in lots of the paper, and it makes my eyeballs bleed.
Silicon Alley Insider on *that* Steve Jobs rumour
SAI spots an uncorroborated, anonymous post that says Jobs has had a heart attack. Publishes it, causing an immediate drop in Apple share prices. O noes! Uncorroborated, anonymous bollocks turns out to be bollocks!
Time for some retrospective justification:
We viewed it as significant, however, both for those who care about Apple and Steve and as a first meaningful test of “citizen journalism.”
Meaningful test my arse.
A small, vocal minority, however–including some members of the mainstream media–believe we should have waited to comment on the iReport story until we had heard back from Apple.
How about just checking whether there was any likelihood of the story being true? Charles Arthur:
First of all: what time would it be in California, where Jobs lives? Hmm, at 2pm on a Friday in London, it would be at least 8 hours behind - in other words, 6am. That at once gave a doubtful cast to two of the points in that “report”.
Who and where could the “insider” be? Not someone at Apple. While there might be people at 1 Infinite Loop who’d work until 3am or 4am, Jobs wouldn’t. He’s got a family and, well, a life. So he would have been at home. So the “insider” would be inside to what? The hospital? Paramedic dispatch? In which case they either wouldn’t know that it was a major heart attack, or what the symptoms were.
SAI commenter Mark Centz:
Whether journalists are just plain citizens or professionals, there is still the obligation to confirm facts wherever possible.
“RealPlayer: like the Black Death, but made of software”
Feeling ranty? Techradar’s just uploaded “48 things we hate about tech“, which enabled yours truly to cheer himself up by being nasty about things. Any I’ve missed?
Techno arse
If you read Techmeme, the aggregator of news in the Technosphere, you may not have noticed that the world’s financial markets nearly collapsed yesterday and that the world is again looking at a 1930’s style Great Depression scenario. You would not know that artist Damien Hirst flogged off £70m of “fine art” including the Formaldehyde Shark above - nor will you know that art prices nearly always reach top levels at the same time that commercial property development hits the point where it implodes, which is the guaranteed signal of recession.
You will, of course, be very well aware of the latest Apple, Blackberry, Google etc shiny shiny stuff though.
Plastic Logic’s e-book reader: I want one
Details and video at TG Daily.
Manufacturer’s blurb:
Differentiated by a stunning form factor (the size of 8.5 x 11-inch paper), the Plastic Logic reader features a big readable display. Yet it’s thinner than a pad of paper, lighter than many business periodicals, and offers a high-quality reading experience - better than alternatives of paper or other electronic readers on the market today.
The Plastic Logic reader supports a full range of business document formats, such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Adobe PDFs, as well as newspapers, periodicals and books. It has an easy gesture-based user interface and powerful software tools that will help business users to organize and manage their information. Users can connect to their information either wired or wirelessly and store thousands of documents on the device. The reader incorporates E Ink technology for great readability and features low power consumption and long battery life. The Plastic Logic reader is scheduled to ship in the first half of 2009.
“Like those yucky strings of poo sometimes seen dangling from goldfish”
A nice contrast to blog evangelism: PC Pro’s Dick Pountain on why he doesn’t blog, and why he thinks blogs are bad for writing.
Publishers, being straightforward capitalists, have a duty to maximise their profits, and one way to do this is to pay writers less or pay fewer writers. To them, the blogosphere is starting to look like a huge open-cast mine of free copy, and the fact that it’s neither researched nor necessarily true is beside the point: that just means they can fire the research department too…
Lacking any quality control mechanism, blogs easily sink into a Hobbesian state of nature - rule by the loudest and the nastiest.
The “let’s post stupid comments on the Mail website” movement is still going on, I see
The story: BAA will have to sell some airports.
The comment:
well said Kieth of Somerset, definetly should be a UK Ownership, but with Nu Labour and PC Brigade, probably sold to El QUADA