Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Who should you sneer at online?

    It’s all very confusing: one of my recent .net columns is up on Techradar:

    Print out this cut-out-and keep guide, pin it to your monitor and you’ll always know exactly who to look down on…

    If you’re on Bebo, you’re 14. If you’re on MySpace, you’re not in a band and you’re not an imbecile, you’re pretending to be 14 and you’ll soon be on the front of the local paper.

    One of the sites I slagged was Asmallworld, the exclusive social network for the filthy rich. I was amused when, just after this column hit print, a designer posted it on Asmallworld and the responses proved me right.

  • TV tweets are killing the cliffhanger

    Aaaaagh!

    The last time we looked, that big box on the Twitter homepage says “What are you doing?” Maybe it changes at 9.55pm on a Wednesday night to say “Why not tell the entire planet who’s been fired on The Apprentice?”, or maybe Americans get a special version that says “Quick, tell the Brits who dies in Season Five of The Wire! It’s not on there for months!”

  • How Yahoo became Boohoo – and what’s next

    Me, on You Know Where…

    Yahoo decided to take on Google. It bought search company Inktomi, Google’s closest rival, in 2002, and it bought search advertising firm Overture in 2003.

    All Yahoo needed to do was to put them together and integrate them with its existing search system. And that’s where the wheels came off.

  • eBooks won’t have a happy ending

    Publishers are getting ready to embrace eBooks. I think they’re making a big mistake.

    Books aren’t music. You don’t read a book when you’re concentrating on something important, you don’t skip between chapters, books and authors in the space of a few minutes and you don’t need 1,000 different titles to read on the bus.

    Unless you’re constantly hopping on and off planes or lugging around heavy textbooks, the electronic book is the answer to a question you didn’t ask.

    …there isn’t much illegal content to drive hardware sales, which mean that the Kindle is some way away from being the iPod of books. If publishers are smart, they’ll keep it that way.

  • The sodding new media evangelists

    Over at Will Write For Food, Dan Oliver gets annoyed about yet more “blogging is better than journalism, so nerrr” punditry.

    I’m inclined to agree with Dan: journalism isn’t dying, but the model is changing. I’m not convinced it’s changing for the better, but it’s definitely changing.

  • What really killed Maxim magazine?

    David Hepworth has a theory.

    The decline of the so-called “lad’s mag” – a sniffy name invented by the posher men’s titles, who know their readers are no older or wealthier but are in the business of selling luxury advertising – is not down to a sea change in society. It’s down to Photoshop.

  • Framing websites is bad, m’kay?

    There’s been a bit of controversy over Digg.com’s DiggBar, which shortens URLs and provides Digg-specific features. The main criticism is that you get the bar if someone sends you a Digg-ed URL, but it’s also annoyed website owners because it frames their content.

    Digg announced some big changes to the bar yesterday that will address the problems, but in this Techradar piece I’m arguing that they shouldn’t have designed the bar the way they did. Framing was evil ten years ago, and it’s still evil now.

    To give you an idea of how silly this can get, let’s go back to our YouTube bookmark. If we share the Facebook framed version on Digg, we now have two frames: the Digg one first, then the Facebook one.

    If we then share the Digg link on the URL shortening service ow.ly, we get three frames: Owly, then Digg, then Facebook.

    A few more shares and we’ve got a browser that’s all frames and no content.

  • Amazon’s big gay fail

    It’s Tuesday!

    Over the weekend, Twitter exploded with anger directed at Amazon.com. The bookselling giant had effectively blacklisted GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) books by blocking them from search results and sales rankings.

    We’re not just talking about explicit books, either. The affected books included scholarly works, award-winning novels and even Brokeback Mountain.

    Depending on whom you believe, there are three possible explanations for the sudden disappearance of more than 50,000 titles: human error, hacking or a sinister plot.

  • Hey! Teacher! Leave Wi-Fi alone!

    The teachers’ union ATL wants Wi-Fi to be ripped out of schools because of its evil brain-eating properties. Amazingly, I have an opinion about that. Techradar:

    Our kids are growing up in a confusing world. Marketers use pseudo-science to flog their products, online misinformation abounds and newspapers are all too happy to run scare stories that don’t stand up.

    That means teachers are invaluable: we rely on them to help our kids separate fact from fiction, truth from trash and scaremongering from science. Which is why it’s so depressing that the teaching union ATL has resurrected the killer Wi-Fi scare.

    [The teacher behind the motion] also mentions the Swedish use of tinfoil hats – well, anti-radiation paint – and instead of coming to the logical conclusion, which is that the Swedes are completely nuts, he persuaded the ATL to lobby the government to investigate the “considerable biological and thermal effects” of wireless networking – despite an investigation already being in progress, and there being no evidence of “considerable” anything.

  • Microsoft in “good ads” shocker

    The Windows Rookies campaign is really quite cute: