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!”
Category: Technology
Shiny gadgets and clever computers
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TV tweets are killing the cliffhanger
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How Yahoo became Boohoo – and what’s next
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Amazon’s big gay fail
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.
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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.
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Revealed: the world’s best browser
It doesn’t exist. So I’ve invented it!
Your web browser is probably the most important thing on your computer – and you almost certainly spend more time with it than you do with family or friends.
It’s no wonder, then, that browser battles cause so much controversy. Some browsers don’t render sites properly, others don’t include useful features, and yet more won’t let you tweak them to suit yourself.
That’s why we’ve decided to create a manifesto for our own. TechRadar doesn’t build browsers, but we think you’ll agree: if we did, it’d probably be the best browser in the world.
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What supermarkets can tell us about videogames
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but one of my pet theories is that you can tell the shape of consumer technology by going to the supermarket. Supermarkets care very much about making money, so they don’t stock what they don’t think they can sell – so for example Blu-Ray is still conspicuous by its absence, and films on Sony’s UMD format barely appeared before disappearing again. So it’s interesting (to me, at least) to see what the three big supermarkets in my area are up to with videogames.
In the last couple of weeks, all three big chains – Tesco, Asda and Morrison’s – have changed their games aisles. Previously you’d find three equal sections: Wii/DS, Xbox/PC and PS3/PS2. Now, all three supermarkets have reshuffled things. The winner? Nintendo’s Wii. In my local Tesco it has two sections to itself, with a third section shared between the Xbox, PS3 and DS titles. PS2 and PC are relegated to the bargain buckets.
The reason is obvious: supermarkets make money from Wii games in a way they don’t from more serious consoles. Maybe it’s because Xbox and PS3 gamers buy online, or go the preowned route (I do the latter, which is why I’m currently being irritated by Army of Two before turning to Mirror’s Edge). Or maybe it’s because the Wii market dovetails nicely with the typical supermarket buyer, who doesn’t read Edge and who hasn’t heard of Metacritic. Whatever the reason, it’s proof that Nintendo has cleverly carved itself a whole new niche in gaming: games for people who aren’t gamers.
While we’re on the subject of supermarkets, my printer needed a pair of ink cartridges last week. It worked out £2 cheaper to buy a new, better printer with ink in it than to replace the cartridges in my existing one. If you had any doubt that the money’s in the ink and that printer firms sell hardware like Gillette sells razors…