Why Digital Britain dropped the “three strikes” policy

Good point from No Rock’n'Roll Fun:

Ed Stourton summarised the position of the Digital Britain report as seeing access to broadband as being on a par with access to power and water: an essential service for the way we live now. It’s impossible to see how you could square a belief that broadband is an essential service with arbitrary removal of that service on the whim of a record company.

New “words” that drive me nuts

I know, it’s not like me, but these drive me crazy. Any additional suggestions will, of course, be welcome:

Webinar

Short for web-based seminar: a presentation, workshop or seminar delivered over the Web. So why not call it a presentation, workshop or seminar?

Webisode

An episode, delivered via the Web. We don’t talk about tellysodes or radiosodes or bookysodes, do we? Not even Russell Brand does that. And that’s because it would make us sound like twats.

NuLabour

This crops up a lot in newspaper readers’ comments – as does its even worse friend, NuLab. It is, of course, a contraction of New Labour. Whatever the original intention, today it makes me think the poster thinks they’re really clever in a studenty kind of way. Because, like, we’re taking the New Labour branding and, you know, rebranding the rebranding! We’re using their own media spin against them! Oh, fuck off.

Tweeple

People who use Twitter. Every time I see it I think of Bonnie Langford as Violet Elizabeth in Just William. Come on, we’re supposed to be adults. If this one takes off the human race is doomed. Doomed!

Art? My 15-month-old could do that.

Baby Bigmouth drew with crayons for the first time today, scrawling all over the paper, cackling, and trying to eat the ones with the most interesting colours.

Would it make me a bad person if I pinned it to the fridge, ordered visitors to look at it and – with a straight face – drew their attention to areas of specific artistic interest, babbling on in an appropriately wanky style about Baby B’s burgeoning artistic talent, and making it obvious that if they dared suggest it was just a bunch of marks on paper I’d hit them with a frying pan?

It would?

Sheesh. You people are no fun.

Techradar Thursday: Macs, dangerous bullshit and Digital Britain

A whole bunch of things are going up today. First, If Macs are so great, why isn’t everybody switching?

Design, reliability, security… we all know why Apple addicts love their Macs.

But despite fawning press coverage and the bad publicity surrounding Vista, Macs are still very much in the minority.

So, why are PC owners sticking with Windows? Do Macs cost too much, or are PC owners masochists?

Also, Think before you link:

More often than not, we – that is, bloggers, forum users, Twitterers and the like – will link to an interesting or scary news story when it’s first published. How many of us go back to check whether the story stands up, and rewrite our blog posts if the story turns out to be wrong?

And later on, some stuff about Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report. I’ll update this post with a link when that one’s up. And by “when that one’s up” I mean “when I’ve written it.”

Update: here’s the Digital Britain piece: The Good, The Bad and the WTF?

Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report isn’t an easy read, not least because some of it appears to have been written by aliens.Cut through the bureaucratese, though, and there are some interesting plans up the Government’s sleeve. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, and some are just weird.

Christian Voice rapped by the ASA

From Press Gazette:

A Christian group has been warned by the Advertising Standards Agency not to repeat a “misleading” claim about teenage pregnancy it placed in the New Statesman.

The ad claimed that the HPV vaccine causes teenage infertility.

“Now we have the disaster of teenage infertility.

“Every government initiative, including the HPV vaccine, will increase it, but as all the targets revolve around pregnancy, no-one in power knows how many young people they are making sterile and nobody cares.”

The ASA points out that to make such claims, you really need evidence rather than, you know, MAKING SHIT UP. CV claimed that MAKING SHIT UP comes under freedom of expression. The ASA told them not to be so silly.

Me, I’d have picked up on the “every government initiative” bit. The bank bailout will increase teenage infertility! The communications database will increase teenage infertility! Etc.

What does CV’s Stephen Green have to say?

‘It is a good job the Advertising Standards Authority was not around when the Old Testament was written, or we would be missing half the Christmas story. The ASA would have wanted Isaiah to substantiate his claim that ‘a virgin shall conceive and shall bear a son’ (Isa 7:14). They would have demanded ‘robust, scientific evidence’ that virgins can conceive.

‘The Prophet’s predictions of the fall of Jerusalem and of Christ’s crucifixion would have gone the same way. As for nations beating swords into ploughshares, and the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the ASA would have banned him from ever repeating such an unsubstantiated claim.

Um, Stephen? The Bible isn’t an advert.

Techradar Tuesday: why Windows is winning the netbook war

It’s that time of the week again:

In the beginning, there was the Asus Eee PC. And the masses looked at it, and they found that it was good. Verily, they said, this Linux thingy isn’t half bad.

And there was much rejoicing in the land of the penguin, for Linux had the market all to itself. A pox on all your houses, Microsoft, cried the penguin lovers. We have found a category in which you cannot compete! Your Vista is too bloated! Your XP is too dead!

Aha! Said Microsoft. We will resurrect Windows XP and give Vista a child, which will not be rubbish, and which will be pretty nifty on a netbook! Screw you, hippies!

Photoshop tomfoolery: I am easily amused

I’ve no idea where I found this, but it made me laugh (if its yours, please get in touch and I’ll credit the pic or take it down):

Customers care about quality? Really?

My father has spent many years in the trenches of continuous improvement, quality management, BS this, EN that, ISO the next thing. And after careful consideration, he’s come to the conclusion that it’s a load of hairy old bollocks. Although he probably wouldn’t use those exact words.

As my dad explains it, the doctrine of quality management and customer focus says that if firms don’t look after their customers, they’ll go out of business. That sounds perfectly reasonable, he says, until you actually look at the products and services people use. Quality doesn’t come into it. Quite the reverse, in fact: some of the most successful firms seem to treat their customers with contempt.

Examples? IKEA’s stores are deliberately designed to confuse you, its returns policy is evil, and the aisles are always packed with punters. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary makes no secret of his contempt for his customers – he’s said he’d prefer it if they stood during flights, so he could get more people into a plane – and you just know he’d fire them out of cannons if he thought he could get away with it. It’s one of the world’s most successful airlines.

It happens in publishing too. The Daily Mail is the UK’s most popular newspaper among middle-class women. It spends most of its time telling those women that they’re hideous hags and that everything they’ve ever done will give the kids cancer. It’s one of the few success stories in print publishing – as is OK magazine, whose cover routinely lies about its contents. To take just two offences, “David Van Day: Scrooge Alone At Christmas” was about his plans to spend the holidays with his daughters in Barbados, while January’s Cheryl Cole story – “Being pregnant won’t split the band… baby boy predicted” – was based on nothing but an interview with a so-called psychic.

I know what you’re thinking. We’re smarter than that. We care about quality. Nobody’s going to palm off a half-arsed product on us. And I say, Twitter.

Twitter is a great idea and a terrible service. The servers fall over if somebody sneezes. The interface is horrible, and features are non-existent – in fact, it’s so bad that an entire industry of desktop and mobile phone clients has sprung up in an attempt to make Twitter usable. January’s celebrity account hacks suggest that security isn’t up to much. It doesn’t (at the time of writing, at least) have the faintest idea of how it’s going to generate revenues. And yet the VCs keep funding it, and people continue to flock to it.

And that’s because what matters isn’t quality; it’s whether the product or service is good enough to overlook its shortcomings. Sometimes good enough means the price is right. Sometimes good enough means that a service is entertaining or useful despite its flaws. Sometimes good enough is because you aren’t buying OK for quality journalism. But it’s rarely, if ever, about BS this, EN that, ISO the next thing.

Q Magazine: comebacks aren’t just for musicians

I’ve been reading Q Magazine for as long as I can remember, but last year I finally stopped buying it. That was partly because I’d reached the age where I had absolutely no idea who any of the bands in it actually were, but it was mainly because Q became crap. Lists of songs are funny when you’re doing a collaborative playlist on Spotify; they’re dull as ditchwater to read.

But now – as Smash Hits might have put it – it’s back! Back! Baaaaaack!

Credit where credit’s due: rather than head further into Heat territory, editor Paul Rees (formerly of Kerrang, I think) has taken the magazine in the opposite direction. I’d hate to see the freelance bill, but Rees seems to have looked up the Big Book of Good Music Writers, hired them, and given them enough space to do something interesting. The result is a magazine that’s as good as, if not better than, it was in its heyday.

If you’re a lapsed Q reader, it’s worth picking up again. The current issue even manages to get an interesting feature from a Take That interview. Really.

PC Plus 2.0 (and a piece about iPhones and Android)

PC Plus has revamped its website, and while content’s pretty thin at the moment – it’s a start-from-scratch job rather than a makeover – it’s looking good. A few long articles are already up, including one I did a few months back comparing the technology, business models and opportunities for iPhones and Google’s Android.

If you’re interested in the background to the new site, the gorgeous, pouting Richard Cobbett talks about it on his blog.

Also online: some Windows 7 features Apple could steal and improve upon.