Technology
Thoughts on using Apple’s Time Machine as a remote wireless hard disk
Nope - at least, nope for iPhoto and iTunes libraries. This is a job for Captain Ethernet.
Google Chrome: that’s no moon
Google’s much-anticipated operating system turns out to be real - but it’s built into a browser.
“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.
Ubiquity: this could be awesome
Sorry, on deadline just now so this’ll be quick: Mozilla’s Ubiquity could be amazing. More on MetaFilter.
Baby-proof my iPhone
An unusual request: does anybody know of a crystal case for the first-gen iPhone that *doesn’t* let you use the touch screen? I want to use it as a portable video player for baby bigmouth, but the touchscreen means she turns off the clips in seconds and then beats me around the face with the phone. Any ideas?
It’d be great if there was a preference that turned off the touch interface during video playback…
A happy Xbox experience
My Xbox 360 developed the dreaded Red Ring of Death the other week, and after trying the various troubleshooting tips it was pretty obvious that the ‘box was broken. So with a sinking feeling I called tech support to try and arrange a repair.
What I expected was this:
- Hours on the phone being passed from pillar to post
- Days and days before my console was picked up
- A couple of months without an Xbox while it sat in Germany gathering dust
- A returned Xbox with “there’s bugger-all wrong with it” written in biro on it
What I got was this:
- Talking to a real person within a few minutes
- An emailed shipping label that arrived during the phone call
- Pickup of the console within three hours
- An email update telling me it was fixed a week and a half later
- Delivery a few days after that, on the promised date
- A note explaining that my motherboard and DVD drive were buggered, so they’d been replaced
- A complimentary month’s membership of Xbox Live
Credit where credit’s due, that’s made me feel very positive about Microsoft.
Could shutting down Pandora open Pandora’s box?
An interesting post on Broadstuff about Pandora, the web-radio service whose extremely high royalty payments may force it out of business:
it’s clear that Pandora and its ilk will live - it’s far too good to lose - [so] it will just go to the P2P freenet if this practice continues, thus hurting the Industry even more in the medium term. If ever there is a case study of a short sighted tactic to shoot yourself in the foot strategically, this is it.
The problem is that Pandora doesn’t pay the same royalties as other forms of radio, as the Washington Post reports:
Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.
Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.
Pay-per-click journalism
Last year, I wrote a column for .net about the increasing importance of clicks - that is, judging the success of something not by how good or bad it is, but by how much traffic it generates.
A few weeks ago, the music reviewer from The Herald newspaper went to see My Chemical Romance and, quite rightly, concluded that they were rubbish. Within minutes of the review appearing online, fans of the band took a break from stabbing themselves with scissors and taking squinty pictures for their MySpace profiles and rushed to defend their idols. “No!” they howled. “They’re brilliant! YOU’RE RUBBISH!”
Just think. If the online editor hadn’t enabled comments, the human race would have been denied a crucial bit of information. My Chemical Romance aren’t, as you might believe, rubbish. They are, in fact, brilliant. Thank you, internet!
The commenters didn’t just set the record straight, though. Every time they hit F5 to see one of their fellow fans’ comments, a little “ker-ching!” appeared in the newspaper’s server logs. If they clicked on an ad for Clearasil or razor blades, another “ker-ching!” sounded. And it’s not just teenagers causing ker-chings. It’s the pro- and anti-Israel camps on Comment Is Free, the religious types getting into flame wars with atheists whenever Richard Dawkins writes something, it’s the quacks and the PS3 fanboys and the oh-so-interesting people whose choice of operating system is superior to your choice of operating system.
Every single one of them is shaping the media of the future. I fear the worst.
Which ties in quite nicely with this fascinating post by Chris Green of IT Pro.
Every few months I perform what I call a contributor/traffic analysis. This involves generating a report from the main IT PRO site stats tool that shows the page impressions (PIs) and unique user visits (UUs) generated by author, rather than by article type or section.
I then merge this data with the main contributor expenditure spreadsheet, where we record and track all our freelance spending.
The end result is that we have the traffic generated by an author alongside how much we’ve spent with them over the given period. You divide the amount spent by either the PIs or the UUs and you end up with a cost per PI and a cost per UU, based on a specific author.
…
I honestly believe that in the not too distant future, online publications in all sectors, not just technology, will have to adopt a results-driven approach to freelance commissions in order to maximise revenue and to achieve maximum return from their freelance budgets.
The most likely outcome will be that publications begin paying writers purely on how much traffic an article pulls in. Also likely is that commissioning editors will need to take a more frequent and brutal approach to deciding which freelancers to commission regularly and which to drop from their rotation, based on the kind of metrics I am currently looking at.
I’m sure he’s right. Back to that column.
In print, the blatantly populist stuff finances the more worthy, niche stuff (next month’s cover feature is “Paris Hilton does PHP in her Pants” to draw in the FHM crowd, but we hope they’ll stay to learn a bit of ActionScript). As long as the overall package sells, everybody’s happy. Once you move online, though, things get more interesting – and for magazine junkies like me who spend daft sums on my monthly print fix, more worrying. Metrics mean you can see the readership not just of an entire title, but of each individual component of that title. And if the webmaster can see it, the advertisers will want to see it.
To see where all this is heading, look at the way online advertising has changed over the years. At first, advertisers paid per thousand banner views. Then, they paid per click. Now, they pay per action – per sign-up, say, or per sale. In the past, advertisers knew that 50% of their budgets were wasted, but they didn’t know which 50%. Now, they do.
Advertisers are in the numbers business, not the content business, and the more hits you get the more clicks, sales and sign-ups you’re likely to get. That means Colleen McLoughlin is a better writer than Kurt Vonnegut, and a tutorial that makes your life easier and your clients happier is less important than blatant Digg-bait such as “732 reasons why Ubuntu users should be kicked in the nuts harder than anybody has ever been kicked in the nuts before.”
As the entire internet moves to an ad-funded business model, the democratisation of media means that ker-ching, not content, is king. Some people say it’s brilliant. It isn’t. It’s rubbish.
Of course, I’m deliberately taking an “O NOES” position in the column - that’s my job - but I can’t shake the mental image of online writing becoming a high-tech version of the “SEX! Now that we’ve got your attention, we’re having a kitchen sale!” adverts that used to infest local newspapers. As Paul Stallard notes in his wonderfully titled “Journalism in sex, 911 conspiracy theory, Britney Spears naked and online poker shocker” post:
According to the latest issue of Private Eye, journalists writing articles for the Telegraph website are being actively encouraged to include oft-searched-for-phrases in their copy. So an article about shoe sales among young women would open: “Young women – such as Britney Spears – are buying more shoes than ever”.
Apparently Private Eye was misinformed about that one, but it’s not hard to imagine publishers (or writers, worrying about future commissions) keeping an eye on Google Zeitgeist and crafting stories to suit what’s popular, over-egging stories to maximise hits or pandering to base instincts to attract those eyeballs. Then again, publishing is a business, not a charity. If something isn’t being read, why spend money on it?
On Chris’s blog, Guy Kewney makes a good point:
In publishing terms, perhaps a web site isn’t quite the same “unit” as a magazine title. People really do read just the one story that interests them. But regular visitors will only come if they know that it’s worth browsing your other pages. And some of the less “popular, exciting” sections (maybe, developer stories?) may provide some of your most loyal visitors. How will you judge the value of a low-traffic page - purely on the local hits? or on its contribution to brand image?
Maybe we need a journalistic version of Google’s PageRank.
iPhone 3G: never mind “it just works”; have you tried turning it off and back on again?
As I mentioned earlier, O2’s 3G network has gone to crap today in my bit of Scotland - but talking to customer services, they were very keen to send me a checklist for 3G problems anyway. “We’ve sent this to a lot of iPhone customers”, the rep told me. Here’s the checklist exactly as it was emailed (hence the crap formatting).
Turn Airplane Mode on, wait 15 seconds, and then turn Airplane Mode off
again. This resets all of iPhone’s wireless connections.2.Try restarting iPhone
To turn it off, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the red
slider appears. Slide your finger across the slider to turn off iPhone.
To turn iPhone on, press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple
logo appears.
Does iPhone appear frozen or stuck? Try pressing and holding the Home
button for 6 seconds to close a frozen application. Then try restarting
iPhone again.3.Reset the SIM
To remove the SIM card, insert the end of a small paper clip into the
hole on the SIM tray.
Insert the SIM card using the same method.4.Check APN
Select settings, then general, then network, then cellular data network. Please make sure the following info is there:
APN - mobile.o2.co.uk
Username - vertigo
password - password5. Try the sim in another handset
Remove sim, put into another handset. If you receive 3G or EDGE coverage while doing this, then the issue is with your handset. If your sim still does not work in another handset then your sim card may be faulty.6.Try restoring iPhone using iTunes.
Connect iPhone. When it appears in the Source list, click on Restore in
the Summary pane.
Note: This will delete all media and data. All settings will be reset
as well. If possible, sync iPhone with iTunes before restoring to back
up your most recent settings.If none of the above works, please call 2302 from your iPhone to arrange either a replacement handset or sim
Hmmm. That O2 has a checklist for iPhone customers suggests that they’ve had a lot of queries from iPhone 3G owners whose 3G isn’t behaving. That’s not good, is it? It’s like coffee machine owners whose kit does everything but make coffee, or hairdryer owners whose hairdryers don’t dry hair. And since when was “try rebooting… if that doesn’t work, try wiping it and restoring it” an everyday way of troubleshooting Apple kit?
iPhone 3G connection problems? Might not be your iPhone…
…or at least, it might not be if you’re in the West of Scotland. O2’s data network has gone tits-up and there’s no red-hot 3G action for anyone round these parts.
O2 network issues aside, is anyone else following the reports of iPhone problems and getting a flashback to the first Xbox 360 red rings of death? Just a few isolated problems, nothing serious, definitely not a manufacturing problem or a design flaw…