Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Digg-ing a hole

    Digg, the social news site formerly valued at around $200 million, was sold this week for a paltry $500,000. It’s been a long time coming, as I wrote in .net last year:

    There’s an old saying about websites: if you can’t work out what product the site is selling, then the product is probably you. It’s something website users often forget, which perhaps explains how people can get so angry when you slightly change a logo or layout. “This site, for which I pay nothing, has changed very slightly! I’m angry and demand compensation!”

    It can be a pain dealing with such complaints, but it turns out that the alternative is even worse. If you make it too obvious that the punters are your product, that they’re the computerised cows in your online abattoir, they tend to stop mooing and start moving. If enough of them escape, they can bring your entire business crashing down.

    Just ask Digg.

  • Word magazine is dead, and Q’s gone a funny colour. If you love a mag, subscribe

    A nice piece in The Atlantic on the demise of the much-loved Word magazine:

    But the recently announced demise of The Word, a nine-year-old British rock monthly, hurts more than most. The Word did something that seems beyond most of its competitors now: It breathed. Even at its most list-tacular, there was nothing assembly-line about it. When it puts out its final issue this week, the best music magazine anybody published in the last decade will be officially dead.

    If you’re looking for intelligent life on planet rock, many Word contributors now write for the revamped Q magazine, but it isn’t looking too clever: the current issue has a subscription deal offering 12 issues for just £12, which to me looks like a panicky move to protect a magazine on life support. If you haven’t seen Q recently it’s well worth your time, and at £12 for a year it’s a steal.

    Of course, the problems don’t just affect music magazine: the internet, the economy… you know the score. More than ever before, subscribing to the magazines you love isn’t just about saving money; it’s about ensuring that they can continue to delight you month after month – and these days subs can be for digital issues as well as, or instead of, dead-tree ones.

    Here are a few links to some of my favourites:

    .net  |  PC Plus |  MacFormat  |  What Laptop, Tablet and Smartphone  |  Tap!  |  Edge  |  Private Eye

    (Those subscription links aren’t an affiliate thing; I’m not getting any cash if you take out a sub to anything) 

  • Ooh ooh pointy thing

    Me, at Techradar, on why IMAX is better than 3D.

    When you consider all the cons of 3D – the price, the stupid specs, the hurty-eyes bit when you look at the background and it’s all blurry – against the single pro, which is that at some point you’ll be able to go “OOH OOH POINTY THING POINTING AT ME OUT OF THE SCREEN”, because nobody’s ever seen that in a cinema before… it’s proof that Hollywood thinks you’re an idiot.

    I can make my point in just three words.

    Top Cat 3D.

  • Apple’s iPhone: quite good

    The iPhone is five today.

    Tech journalists like me are paid to be the Waldorf and Statler of technology, the grumpy old men in the Muppet Theatre’s balcony pouring scorn on everything they see, but even at my most jaded and cynical I can’t help being excited about where we are now.

  • OEMs in the firing line

    Me, on Techradar, writing about Microsoft’s Surface and Google’s Nexus 7:

    By getting Asus to make millions of exceptionally cheap Nexuses, Google isn’t saying “Hey, guys! Make these!” to the other OEMs.
    It’s throwing a tablet party, and the other OEMs aren’t invited.

  • Creative Bloq: a new site for creative types

    Permit me a quick plug: Dan Oliver, formerly of .net, has a new project: Creative Bloq. Promising a daily dose of design inspiration, the site aims to bring together the best content from the creative side of the Future Publishing portfolio – .net, ImagineFX, ComputerArts and so on – as well as commissioning original content. If you’re a creative, techy type it’s well worth your time.

  • Who among us hasn’t thought, “man! I wish more websites told me about their iOS app on each visit!”?

    I’ve written a wee guide to Apple’s latest mobile OS, iOS 6, which comes out this autumn.

  • Graham has invited you to play Cats In Spats! Angela has invited you to play Sheep That Beep!

    Me on Techradar: the most annoying things non-geeks ask you to do.

    …while technology is absolutely everywhere, not everyone who’s bought it knows how to use it or what to do when it goes wrong.

    That’s where we come in, whether we like it or not: as far as friends, family and co-workers are concerned we’re the go-to guys and girls for every kind of computer calamity from wonky Wi-Fi to troublesome torrents.

    We’re happy to help, of course, but sometimes we can’t help thinking that people are taking the mickey.

  • You know the bit at the beginning of every hospital drama on TV where a bloke does something ordinary, but in a really obviously dangerous and stupid way? That’s me

    Me, in PC Plus, writing about building PCs:

    As I blundered around the kitchen, wailing, bumping into things, shooting jets of bright red blood all over the cupboards and shouting “WHERE THE HELL ARE THE BLOODY PLASTERS?” it’s safe to say that my wife wasn’t thinking “Ooh! Now that’s sexy!”

  • Amazon reviewers: just as reliable as professional critics

    Here’s an interesting one: a study that suggests Amazon reviews are just as reliable as newpaper ones, for non-fiction at least. I agree entirely, although I reserve the right to edit this post if people start posting one-star jobs…

    Although the study points out that there is “virtually no quality assurance” in Amazon’s consumer reviews, which can also be “gamed” by publishers or competitors submitting false reviews, they found that, nevertheless, experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.

    Amazon reviewers were more likely to give a favourable review to a debut author, which the Harvard academics said suggested that “one drawback of expert reviews is that they may be slower to learn about new and unknown books”.

    Professional critics were more positive about prizewinning authors, and “more favourable to authors who have garnered other attention in the press (as measured by number of media mentions outside of the review)”.