Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Technology

Shiny gadgets and clever computers

  • High street electrical shops: bloody miserable

    Der der der der der! I woke up this morning! Der der der der der! Went to a well known branch of a high street electrical chain! Der der der der der! It was rubbish! Der der der der der.

    The slightly more coherent version is over here:

    It’s a depressing old world at the moment.

    The combination of a global recession, swine flu, impending climate Armageddon and the continuing existence of OK Magazine are enough to make anyone feel down.

    But if you fancy cheering yourself up a bit then we have the answer: pop along to your nearest high street (or more likely, retail park) electrical retailer.

  • The wisdom of tramps

    One of my world-weary .net columns has made its way online:

    I’m not suggesting that social networks are bad. But again and again I’m finding that I seem to be living in a different world to the tech triumphalists [with] their sunny Californian positivity.

  • Just what the Internet needs right now: tax

    From the You Couldn’t Make It Up department:

    you’d need a very special brand of lunacy to decide that the best thing to do right now would be to put a tax on internet ads and broadband connections. Guess what? The government’s considering exactly that…

    To appreciate the genius of the idea, you need to know what the monies raised will be used for. You’ll need to take a deep breath. Ready? Okay then. The broadband tax will make broadband more expensive in order to ensure that rolling out broadband isn’t too expensive.

    The Internet ad tax will make advertising more expensive in order to help out broadcasters whose advertising revenues are plummeting because advertising is too expensive.

  • Free costs money. Who’s going to pay for it? Er, you

    Me, on Techradar:

    We’re so used to the idea that everything online should be free that we don’t even think about it.

    Of course the iPlayer should give us HD video for free. Of course Spotify should stream music for free. Websites? Free. News? Free. Video? Free. Software? Free.

    There’s only one problem. Free costs money, and there isn’t enough of it.

  • 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.

  • 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.