Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Probably the last thing I’m going to blog about The Scheme

    I’ve blogged about fly on the wall documentary series The Scheme a few times here, but the news that it’s now going to be broadcast in the rest of the UK made me want to add another bit.

    Having seen the whole series now – including a final episode that made it very clear that the media attention had made some participants’ lives worse – the thing that struck me most about The Scheme was the sheer hopelessness of it all. The families weren’t entirely representative – the programme makers have chosen the most TV-worthy people, so you get people whose lives are slow-motion car crashes – but I’ve met enough people from similar situations to know that life for some people starts off shite and gets progressively worse.

    It was summed up for me in one throwaway remark when a teenage boy was being sent back to prison – he hadn’t expected to be sent back so soon. Going back to prison was a given. The only thing that he could even slightly influence was the gap between incarcerations.

    There’s an argument that by showing people rotating in and out of prison, trying and failing to get off drugs, self-medicating in various other ways and trying to find things for the local kids to do The Scheme was providing an important service: asking us to look at the affordability and availability of alcohol, for example, or the effectiveness of anti-drug legislation, regulation and intervention, or the links between unhappy childhoods and adult substance abuse, or the way in which some parts of Scotland have effectively been left to rot.

    Then again, I know of somebody with real money and real power, riches of the “oh I don’t know, my butler takes care of that” variety. And to that person, The Scheme is quite simply the funniest programme ever made.

  • Cloud computing and Pippa Middleton’s arse

    Me, on Techradar, about Google’s brand new Chromebooks:

    Ah, says Samsung. “With nothing stored directly on the Series 5, malicious spyware, trojans and viruses are a thing of the past.” They’re a thing of the past on my Windows 7 PC too, because I’m not an idiot who opens unsolicited files that claim to be details of tax refunds or photos of Pippa Middleton’s arse.

  • Will Twitter get shitter?

    Twitter is five, and like all good five-year-olds it’s about time it paid its way. Me, on Techradar:

    I was in Glasgow’s famous Sauchiehall Street on Saturday night. If you haven’t been recently, it’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting where the demons wear too-short skirts or G-Star Raw. It’s genuinely unpleasant, a seething mass of drunken, vomiting and occasionally fist-fighting imbeciles.

    If you need proof that a significant part of the human race is as dumb as rocks, I can give you the postcode to prove it.

    Or I can let you see Twitter on my phone.

  • “An opportunity for Gary to take cheap shots at a band he doesn’t like and sneak in a mention for one he does”

    Jon Bon Jovi reckons Steve Jobs has killed the music business. Sometimes I love my job.

    By a happy coincidence, I reckon Jon Bon Jovi represents everything that’s wrong with the music business. I think there’s a reason why Bon Jovi albums don’t sell like they used to.

    It’s because they’re rubbish.

    And thanks to technology, they can’t get away with it any more.

     

  • Why should you pay more to use your iPhone as a portable hotspot?

    The latest iOS update enables you to turn your iPhone into a wi-fi hotspot, sharing your 3G connection with other devices – and even though iPhone data plans are capped, you still need to pay extra to use the feature. Why could that be? I think I know the answer.

    There are only two possible explanations.

    One, iPhone data is a different shape from Android data. It’s triangular, or maybe octagonal, and it gets stuck in the internet tubes.

    Or two, the networks are bastards.

  • ‘Contribute to my website’ is the new pay to play

    The nice people at .net magazine have a spanking new website, and one of my pieces is on it: “What are words worth”, where I… well, you saw the headline.

    In the age of social media and user-generated content, suggesting that your name on someone else’s website is “exposure” is like suggesting membership of the HTML Writer’s Guild will boost your chances of getting a well-paid agency job.

  • Thunderbolt and iPads

    Apple’s unveiled some new MacBook Pros, and the big news is Thunderbolt, also known as Light Peak. It’s very clever, and could enable some very interesting things:

    The new Macs look like iPads with keyboards. They’re clearly the latest iteration of Apple’s current design language, but what if they’re more than that? What if the iPad-ification of OS X and the iPad-like design of the MBPs are a sign of where this is all heading?

    We’ve seen how quickly mobile processors are progressing, and it won’t be long before it’s possible to put the specs of today’s MacBook Pros into a MacBook Air-thin iPad. Quad or six-core processors, oodles of RAM and a couple of Thunderbolt ports in an iPad could produce something really interesting.

  • Content farms and Google results

    A wee piece by me on Techradar:

    Google’s success has created a new kind of industry. Content farms are firms who produce what Google’s Matt Cuts calls “shallow or low-quality content”.

    Cutts is a funny guy, and his screenshots show the parody site The Content Farm, but the point is a serious one: often, when you search Google for something, you don’t necessarily get content that’s been created for you; you get content that’s been created for Google’s search algorithm.

    There’s nothing unethical or illegal about content farms – they’re not wicked, or dishonest, or evil – but their prominence in Google results means they can be an enormous pain in the backside.

  • Nokia. Connecting (Microsoft) people

    I wrote about Nokia’s fading fortunes a few months ago and got into trouble for suggesting Nokia should embrace another OS – Android, say, or Windows Phone 7. Today, Nokia announced that Windows Phone 7 would be the central plank of its smartphone strategy. Naturally I think that’s a great idea, and I explain why over on Techradar.

    Nothing in tech is certain, of course, and the whole partnership could end in disaster. But I’m really excited about this. Nokia makes stunning hardware, and Windows Phone 7 is a really nice mobile OS.

  • If I were the sort of person who used the phrase “paradigm shift”, I’d use it here

    Me: why the HP TouchPad is another nail in Windows’ coffin.

    What’s happening is incredible, and it’s happening incredibly quickly. Until very recently, personal computing generally meant Windows running on Intel, with a smattering of AMD, Linux and Mac OS X to keep the internet in arguments. Now, though, personal computing often doesn’t involve traditional computers at all.