ASDA wants to edit your magazines

Bloody hell.

Asda has come under fire from independent magazine publishers for proposed alterations to distribution arrangements that include the supermarket being given editorial space in the publications it stocks…

Asda’s demands include a request for two pages of editorial or advertising space each month in titles of the company’s choosing.

And there’s an increase in the bribes – I can’t think of a better way of describing it – it demands to put magazines onto the shelves.

shop space given over to a distributor’s titles will be subject to a “space contribution” of £10,000 paid to the supermarket.

Asda is asking for a space contribution for each new Asda store opened of £2,500 per magazine title to be paid to the supermarket.

The supermarket company is also demanding that any new title distributed in its stores will be subject to an “item set up” charge of £2,464.

I know I keep saying this, but seriously: if you value a particular magazine, take out a subscription. It’ll save you money too.

AOL to AOL bloggers: stop blogging (or at least, don’t expect to be paid)

It seems that AOL’s intrepid army of bloggers has been told to stop posting in order to save money – so some of them are continuing to blog unpaid.

Cory Doctorow on the file sharing crackdown

An interesting and typically inflammatory piece from Mr Doctorow in the Guardian:

The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter… The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead… [here is] the tried-and-true answer to the problem of copyright-disrupting technology:

* acknowledge that it’s going to happen;

* find a place to collect a toll;

* charge a fee that’s low enough to get buy-in from the majority;

* ignore the penny-ante fee evaders;

* sue the blistering crap out of the big-time fee-evaders.

Let’s just nuke the planet from orbit

OK, I know I’m talking about the Daily Mail here, but the comments on this story make me want to kill people. Story first:

When Suzanne Richards and Sarah Dobinson decided to sell their £650,000 home, they expected professional service from their estate agents.

Instead, they were left feeling ‘insulted and violated’ after a staff member outed them as a same-sex couple in a website advertisement.

Logging on to check how their period home was being marketed, they were horrified to find the word ‘lesbians’ in the space where prospective buyers would expect to see a reference number.

It’s a clear-cut case of an estate agent employee being an arsehole, and the firm has settled out of court for £5,000. Bring on the Mail readers!

But they don’t seem to be worried having their names and photographs in a national newspaper along with the “lesbian” comment.

Stating the truth is now is an offence in England.

Hypocrites .. they should be made to repay the money.

Anyone would think they were ashamed to be gay.

Oh, please, do me a favour. Are they lesbians or not? Are they afraid of what they are and therefore unwilling to admit it to others?
Is lesbians a derogatory term now? In this day and age they shouldn’t shy away from what they are.
Well at least they got a bit of money out of it. Can I claim money if someone calls me hetrosexual?

If the women are ashamed of their life style, why live it?

Am I missing something here – They Are lesbians – what’s the problem?
Five grand for stating the obvious.
“Shaking with disbelief” when they read the advert, but more than happy to give a statement and provide a nice piccy.

Absolutely ridiculous! If the advert had said the house was being sold by an architect and his wife, would this be discrimination against architects and heterosexual couples?

It’s not all bad, though. Beeper is clearly being forced to read the Mail against his or her will.

I can’t believe all the commenters who actually think that it wasn’t a big deal. This world is full of bigotry and hatred and these estate agents were intentionally adding to that. This was not done lightheartedly, but with malice. Maybe the commenters would like to have their addresses printed along with choice one word descriptors of them? The first one that springs to mind is “bigot”.

And Beeper isn’t alone. Hats off to Lucy:

We have no idea how this came to be in the paper – it is entirely possible that the press picked the story up from the courts or from the estate agents rather than that the women went to them. It may not be ‘discrimination’ as such but it was certainly no accident – you can’t accidentally insert the word ‘lesbian’ where a reference number should be. So clearly someone at the estate agents thought it would be funny to invade the privacy of two people who had hired them to provide a professional service, and found their sexuality to be a huge joke. The women made a private complaint first which was dismissed out of hand – as with so many situations, had the firm had the decency to offer a sincere apology that would probably have been an end to it. Good for the women for demanding to be treated with courtesy and respect.

Why I’d buy a dedicated e-book reader if somebody invented a good one

I’ve just received my monthly threat from the newsagent, and it seems that my newspaper habit – that is, my one daily newspaper and two sunday newspapers – is costing £12.55 per week. Given that nine times out of ten the paper doesn’t turn up until I’ve been up and about for an hour or two, I’m spending £652.60 per year to read things I could get for free via RSS. And that doesn’t include the extra newspapers I tend to buy at lunchtimes, or my seriously scary magazine habit. Eek!

Four things I learnt on the internet today

“The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks” and 38 hours is considered a success. The LA Times on attempts to prevent fanboys watching camcorder copies of The Dark Knight.

The crackdown on file sharing may be bad news for people who don’t file share. “…service gets worse as you wait in a queue wondering why your broadband has gone down, while the 50 people in front of you all have perfectly functional internet connections but are wondering if a lawyer is going to show up at their door.” Charles Arthur on the possible consequences of anti-P2P letters.

Apple’s PR strategy is hurting its share price. “Apple, on the other hand, has had stellar financials, huge hit products, and massive growth sales for all its product lines. With those results you would expect Apple to outperform Microsoft.” Comment by Ian Betteridge on Dan Lyons’ post about Apple share prices.

Caffeine is self-regulating and works almost instantly. “Women generally metabolize caffeine faster than men. Smokers process it twice as quickly as nonsmokers do. Women taking birth-control pills metabolize it at perhaps one-third the rate that women not on the Pill do. Asians may do so more slowly than people of other races.” NY Magazine on the wonders of caffeine (via Metafilter).

Think first, publish later

Ian Betteridge argues that blogs aren’t as self-correcting as yer Scobles like to claim:

Watching the development and correction of stories, there’s something interesting that I’ve always observed. When someone posts something controversial (and wrong) few of the sites which post about that original post also post a correction.

And thus begins a classic network effect. Suppose Robert writes something erroneous, which 1,000 blogs pick up on and post about without correcting. If each of those has 100 readers, that’s 100,000 people who believe the original story – and unless Scoble’s readership is so huge that it encompasses all that 100,000 AND they correct their own posts, that’s a lot of misinformation out there on the web.

I’ve got a column about this very same thing in issue 181 of .net (which isn’t out for a while yet). It’s the old problem of truth versus Internet Facts.

Tangent: Ian’s blog fell out of my subscriptions list for no good reason a while back. I’d forgotten what a great blog he has.

One of these tags is not like the others

Amazon would like you to tag products. This screenshot is from the Xbox 360 HDMI cable.

Instapaper: a potentially brilliant iPhone application

Of all the iPhone apps kicking around, the one I’m liking best is Instapaper. It’s a simple solution to a genuine problem I have: there are loads of things online I’d like to read, but when I come across them I just don’t have time to read them – so I bookmark them and immediately forget all about them. With Instapaper it’s just a matter of hitting the Read Later bookmarklet in your web browser, logging in on the iPhone and reading the articles when you’ve got time to do so. I particularly like the choice of Web View, which is the original page, or Text View, which gets rid of extraneous content.

I say it’s potentially brilliant, because while it’s a great wee app there are a few issues for me. Updating from my iPhone is desperately slow (although that may be my connnection); I can’t find a way to mark things as read to make them disappear; and with big articles you often need to locate the printer-friendly view (not Instapaper’s fault; it’s the fault of websites who’d rather split an article into seven hundred ad-stuffed pages). Oh, and it’d be nice to be able to control the style sheet for text view so I could specify my own fonts and sizes. The “mark as read” thing is apparently in version 1.01, but I don’t see it in the iTunes store yet; other features are promised for a future upgrade, possibly splitting the app into a free version and a paid-for premium edition.

The faults are minor, though, and it’s a brilliant wee application – and you don’t need to be an iPhone-toting hipster to use it, as Instapaper works perfectly well as a browser app too. However, I do think it makes most sense as a portable application, because it’s great for killing time on buses or when you’re generally hanging around waiting for something. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re in the habit of spotting interesting things online that you never quite get round to reading.

Three things about The Dark Knight and one thing about a burger van

• If you’re going to see The Dark Knight, try and get to an IMAX cinema. Some of the scenes are jaw-dropping on that there giant projecto-screen.
• Even though it’s too long and tries a bit too hard to make parallels with current events, it’s still enormously exciting.
• I can’t believe it’s been given a 12A certificate (that is, kids of any age can see it with an adult present).
• The wee burger van on the road into the Glasgow Science Centre is brilliant.