Archive for July, 2006

HDTV? Meh.

In my role as rubbish superhero Gadget Boy, I get very excited about anything new, high-tech and shiny - so for example I’d cheerfully give a tramp a “happy finish” in exchange for a Nikon D50 digital SLR. But I can’t raise the slightest bit of enthusiasm for HDTV. At all. It’s like a normal TV, but a bit better, and a lot more expensive! Woo!

Yes, it’s better quality, and on a flat screen telly it’s nice to have jaggy-free TV. But with a normal-sized TV you sit so far away from the screen that the difference is marginal at best - and certainly not worth paying lots of extra money for. Am I missing something?

---

Woo-hoo for Yahoo!

According to Paidcontent.org, Yahoo! is experimenting with DRM-free digital downloads. There’s only one so far - a pricey Jessica Simpson MP3 - but it’s part of a general anti-DRM attitude at the firm. Paidcontent makes an interesting point:

On the survey Yahoo Music is doing, one of the questions in the survey: “Would you consider paying $1.09 for a single, unrestricted MP3 download that would have absolutely no limitations on its use and could be transferred to any portable audio player or computer?” …this is one way labels can subvert the power Apple holds over the digital music market, and I’m sure some of this is playing out behind the scenes with this move.

---

Auctioning podcast ads on eBay

Mark Hunter of the Tartan Podcast has come up with an interesting idea: auctioning ad breaks on eBay. Reckon it’ll work?

---

Adbusters is looking for writers

…and it’s paying. Here’s the info:

Dear Jammers and Creatives,

We’re already hard at work on the next issue - #68, dedicated to
creative non-fiction - and we’re hoping that some of you will let us
pick your brains. We’re looking for 100 to 200 word, punchy, sad, crazy,
or rude pieces inspired by a major event or epiphany in your life. It
could be about anything really . . . a haiku, a poem, a travel
remembrance, an anecdote about living in the post s11 era, a piece about
discovering one of your family’s dark secrets. We’re looking for stories
that provoke and that go straight to the heart, with a “slice of life”
feeling to them.

We’d like to pepper these short pieces throughout our upcoming issue.
One warning: the deadline is tight, so we need all submissions sent to
by July 26th. If we decide to go with your
submission, you’ll get to see your name in print, and we’ll also pay you
50 cents/word.

Remember: keep it short, keep it true, and fire it off to us as quickly
as you can.

Cheers,
The Adbusters Team.

---

Want a free copy of Vista?

Official Windows Vista magazine has some DVDs of the current Vista beta, and you can get ‘em for free - which is handy, ’cause the limited download period has ended. More here…

---

Picnic enemy number one

Scotland’s currently having its Annual Week of Sunshine, so I decided to take advantage of it on Sunday and have a picnic. It was great: we munched nice food, played with the dog, watched the dog take her first swim and cooled down with a bottled beer apiece. This, it seems, means I’m an enemy of the state. The Scottish Executive wants a country-wide ban on all public drinking to fight the problems with marches and parades.

Over to Devil’s Kitchen (this bit is one of the few ones I can quote in my efforts to keep this blog relatively swear-free):

In order to control the actions of a very, very tiny minority, the Scottish Executive are determined that everybody should suffer… Nice, middle-class family want to have a picnic in the sun on the Meadows and have a glass of Pimms? No, sorry, it’s off to the fucking slammer for you, son

Here’s a better idea. If the problem is because of marches and parades, why not ban orange marches? Or, and I bet you can predict this next bit, why not use the laws we already have?

We have laws that deal with public drunkenness. We have laws that deal with being an arse in public. We have laws that deal with violence. If the problem is that we can’t enforce the laws we already have, what possible benefit do we get from adding another one?

It’s hard to disagree with DK when he says to our elected representatives:

I hope that your limbs drop off and your lips are sewn together with coarse string impregnated with salt-water.

Me, I’d rather recycle Bill Hicks’ rant about marketing types. It seems appropriate.

Kill yourselves… No really, there’s no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan’s little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You’re the ruiner of all things good.

---

Voice recognition: not dead after all

Wading through the daily press release pile I’ve discovered that there’s a brand new version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the PC voice recognition program. Voice tech has fallen off the radar screen over the last few years, but according to the nice PR chap today’s speedy processors mean that computers finally have the horsepower for decent, accurate - and crucially, fast - voice-to-text conversion without tedious training.

I’m intrigued by this, because I always saw voice recognition as a potentially brilliant technology that didn’t quite cut it in reality. A review copy is winging its way to me right now, and as ever the resulting review will end up on the .net site. I’ll post a link when it does (assuming Dragon’s decent. If it isn’t, I won’t bother).

True fact: my Dad’s copy of IBM ViaVoice developed a weird quirk, where every time he dictated “new paragraph” it printed “uterus”.

---

Prefab populism

Paul pointed me towards an excellent Esquire article on the problems of populism: The Snakes On A Plane Problem. It’s an interesting piece on the dangers of pandering to blog opinion, and the problem of working out what exactly audiences/readers/whatever want. And it contains this superb anecdote:

True story: My friend Jenny is in law school, and one of her classmates went to a movie in April. When the coming attractions started, the first image was of dozens of unsuspecting plane passengers sitting in the cabin of an airborne 757. The moment he saw this, the mischievous law student yelled, “Snakes on a plane!” presumably to amuse and unify the other patrons. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a trailer for United 93, which significantly reduced the hilarity of his outburst.

---

The Sky has limits

Sky Broadband: for existing telly customers, 16MB broadband with no usage cap for a tenner a month. Yay! But it’s only available to fewer than 30% of the population - and if like me, you’re one of the majority, then the best they can offer is 8MB with a 40GB cap for £17 per month. Boo!

---

Customers who want to cancel are hot sales leads

Fascinating stuff over at Consumerist, which has got its hands on AOL’s customer retention manual.

If you stop and think about it, every Member that calls in to cancel their account is a hot lead. Most other sales jobs require you to create your own leads, but in the Retention Queue the leads come to you! Be eager to take more calls, get more leads and close more sales. More leads means more selling opportunities for you and cost savings for AOL.

Of course, AOL isn’t the only firm that does this - but unlike other firms, it’s famous for it.

---