UK broadband is ten. How would we manage without it?
If Chatroulette had existed in the year 2000 you’d have had to draw your genitals on a bit of paper, choose somebody’s address from the phone book and post the picture to their house.
Category: Media
Journalism, radio and stuff like that
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Happy birthday, broadband
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There’s a difference between printing something and publishing it
Novelist and former tech writer David Hewson on the coming eBook avalanche/apocalypse/delete as applicable and its implications for writers:
Technically it’s never been easier to get a book into digital print. But here you hit a perennial problem. Successful books aren’t just printed. They’re published. Anyone can print something. Few can publish successfully. Publishing involves a chain of skills — editing, revision, marketing, design, positioning and building an author’s career slowly and carefully.
…Does anyone seriously think you can replace all that simply by uploading a file to Apple and announcing your new work on Facebook?
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Print is dying? Really?
Adweek has a nice op-ed by Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter. I liked this line:
But in this age of constant information availability, it’s important to take a step back every now and then — once a month sounds about right — to immerse ourselves in the stories that define our times.
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Paying for news is doomed, isn’t it? On The Times, paywalls, porn and iPads
The Times and Sunday Times are doing the paywall thing from June. I’ve written a wee bit about it:
What we do know is that publishers need to do something now – or at least, they do if they want to avoid the same fate as the record industry.
The businesses aren’t identical – with newspapers, the people giving stuff away for free are the newspapers, not pirates – but the imminent iPad could be as much of a doomsday device as the iPod proved to be for the record business.
The iPad is a credible alternative to print, a device that’s usable for reading in a way laptops and desktops simply aren’t. If it, the next Kindle or some other new device takes off as a newsreader while free access remains the norm, then what little money’s left in news will be diverted from the content creators and into the pockets of the hardware firms.
It may be too late for the news business, of course. They’ve been giving their stuff away for a very long time now. If you’d been working for free for a decade and suddenly asked your boss to pay you, he’d probably tell you to piss off.
Craig Grannell, on the same topic:
Most online ‘journalism’ is bullshit, with people frantically copying and pasting stories without bothering to do any investigation or check any facts, and that’s because they’re being paid a few quid for a blog post (if that), rather than a decent amount of money to write some informed, professional copy.
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Waterhouse on style
The late, great Keith Waterhouse had some very strong opinions about journalists’ writing. Press Gazette has published some of them. I liked this one.
The standard Fleet Street excuse for shoddy or silly writing has always been that the offending story was written against the clock.
It usually isn’t so.
Deadline fever encourages taut, crisp writing with a maximum of facts and a minimum of frills. The straightforward hard news story, phoned virtually straight on to page one, rarely displays any of the faults discussed in this book.
The truly awfully-written story, of the kind that ought to be hung on the walls of schools of journalism as an example of how not to do it, demands time.
The puns have to be sweated over, the laborious intro has to be reworked again and again until it cannot possibly be any more forced, the jocular references have to be carefully strung together like blunt razor blades dangling from a magnet.
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Paying for girls’ attention? Isn’t there a word for that?
I’ve written a wee piece on Techradar about GameCrush, the frankly bizarre new service that will enable you to play videogames with girls, for a fee.
Paying women to talk to you? Isn’t that what the ads for HOT GRANNY ACTION in the back of movie magazines and men’s magazines are for?
Apparently not. GameCrush’s ethos is much purer than that. It’s designed to engage the brain, not engorge the groin. That’s why the girls can choose to offer chats ranging from “flirty” to “dirty” or, if they’re feeling particularly empowered, “flirty and dirty”.
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More covers
The Huffington Post details the best-selling magazine covers of 2009. This is one of them.
Isn’t that brilliant?
As you might expect, most of the other covers were about Michael Jackson. There’s also a slideshow of the worst-selling covers. Surprisingly Rolling Stone’s Shakira cover is one of them.
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Unintended consequences: why Windows’ new browser choice screen will only help Chrome
What we’ve got, then, isn’t a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted: it’s a case of locking the stable door after the horse has evolved opposable thumbs, learnt to drive cars and driven through the stable in a Challenger tank. It’s far too late for Netscape and Microsoft’s browser share will never recapture its near-total control of the internet.
It’s not going to make much difference to the minority browsers, either.
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Could Spotify work for ebooks?
As long term readers will know, I’m amazed by the way in which the music business spent more than ten years missing every business opportunity the Internet brought them, effectively handing their entire business over to the pirates. Services such as Spotify should have turned up a long time ago.
Could the same kind of thing work for ebooks? Is there enough ad money to go round? Do book readers want to social network?
we have real-world equivalents for both its free and subscriber services. Libraries give books away for nothing – or seem to; in reality authors get a little bit of money in the form of Public Lending Right (PLR) royalties, a gap that online ad revenues could easily plug – while book clubs have offered heavily discounted prices to subscribers for decades.
Could similar ideas work online?
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Stop insulting the elderly with crappy technology
It’s Tuesday. It’s Techradar time…
Sagem’s Cosyphone is aimed at the over-50s. Not only does it have really big buttons and numbers, but it has near field communications technology, too. Need to call somebody? Why not wave a big picture of them in the air, like a simpleton? “It uses cards, which can be customised with a photo or other information and pre-programmed with the number of the doctor’s surgery, or a friend or relative. To make a call, the user simply “waves” their phone over that card to speak to that person or send a text message.”
Remember, this is a phone for the over-50s, a group that includes such drooling basket cases as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and Chuck Norris – people who continue to do amazing things and who can kick your face off if you look at them funny