Pointless but amusing survey via the BBC:
Indie: Low self-esteem, creative, not hard working, not gentle
Chart pop: High self-esteem, not creative, hardworking, outgoing, gentle, not at ease
Jazz: appalling taste in music, ugly shoes
I may have made one of those up.
Nope – at least, nope for iPhoto and iTunes libraries. This is a job for Captain Ethernet.
Google’s much-anticipated operating system turns out to be real – but it’s built into a browser.
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.
An excellent article about selling records, file sharing and trying to flog MP3s via Word Magazine:
web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they’re from, even which web browser they’re using. We’ve got information about the reach of our music that we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they’re listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can’t fucking sell music to them.
XFM Scotland, the radio station formerly known as Beat 106, is to become part of the Galaxy dance music network.
The switch, which will be made in the autumn, is likely to see a radical overhaul of the station’s music output.
Sorry, on deadline just now so this’ll be quick: Mozilla’s Ubiquity could be amazing. More on MetaFilter.
Despite reports, Girls Aloud are not planning to recruit a new member – at least, not according to the official site:
Over the weekend the papers have been filled with false stories on the girls. But instead of the tired old ‘split’ stories, they have invented rumours of a brand new Girls Aloud reality show. These reports could not be more wrong and the Girls are far too busy putting the finishing touches to their brand new album to be filming a new show, let alone bringing on board a new member.
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…
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:
What I got was this:
Credit where credit’s due, that’s made me feel very positive about Microsoft.