Archive for November, 2006

Stop – scammer time!

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

A fun day. A bit of wheeling, a bit of dealing. Listed my old phone on eBay only for it to be ‘bought’ by our old friend, a Nigerian “419″ scammer. Not a particularly good one either.

Obviously I caught it, reported it etc, but now I’m struck by a more interesting thought. Would the scammer deduce the URL for my blog from my email address, and mercilessly hunt me down over the internet? I do hope so. So, if you see any comments from people who have $15,000,000 US DOLLARS KEPT IN A SECRET ACCOUNT THAT WAS FROZEN BY THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT, it’s our man. I wait with baited breath.

(By the way, I’m sorry for the headline. I couldn’t think of anything witty.)

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Mobile TV – not quite yet…

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

Just upgraded to a Nokia N73. Very nice it is too. I’ve pretty much come to expect good usability from Nokia – I loved their older phones and they do an admiral job of keeping complex phones as simple as possible.

Anyway, it being a 3G handset, Orange are desperate to foist 3G content on me. So I have two months of free mobile Sky Sports TV, and unlimited off-peak browsing (meaning I’ll be spamming the lovely Flickr upload feature whenever the photographic urge takes me).

So, my first foray into mobile TV…

Well. It’s a great idea, but the quality’s just too damn low right now. Massive compression, glitchy visuals, and nowhere near enough detail. For the Ashes, it’s better than Test Match Special, but not by much. I can pick out a Warne leg break, but there’s no chance of seeing Hoggard swing it, although, based on the last Test, you’d struggle to see that on a 42″ high-definition screen.

But, oh well, it’s a start. It will get better soon enough. Google think an iPod will hold all of the world’s TV programmes in 12 years. Interesting, but I think the bigger issue is that TV programmes won’t exist in a format we know by then. As the long tail grows and convergence and YouTube continue to flatten everything in their path, where’s the line between ‘a programme’ and ‘visual content’?

Grasping the obvious, the BBC bleat “Online viewing eroding TV viewing“. Duh. It’ll erode it so much that they’ll be the same thing soon.

But not yet.

Categories: television, nokia, n73, phones, mobile, broadcast

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"Copyright is fundamentally socialist"

Monday, November 27th, 2006

Mick Hucknall makes a fool of himself on Comment Is Free. No need to add my own analysis, the comments suffice rather nicely. Poor Mick. Poor Cliff, too.

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You can’t Have Your Say and eat it

Monday, November 20th, 2006

Interesting article on the BBC site: “Web fuelling crisis in politics“. As a rule, I tend to find any government proclamation on the state of the web patronising at best, dangerously ill-informed at worst – but, for once, I’m in agreement. I find the majority of political blogs little more than infantile, partisan nonsense. This is normally countered by the stultifying suggestion that one can achieve a thorough knowledge of a topic simply by reading two contrasting and equally biased pieces.

This isn’t confined to new media of course – news orgs are largely the same and, yes, I’m quite aware that the paper I read (Guardian, natch) is guilty too. But there, opinion should act as the starting point for debate. As Ben Hammersley has said, no one buys newspapers for news any more. The web and 24-hour news channels will always be first for immediate unfolding reportage. Newspapers have to reposition themselves as channels for editorial and debate.

The news orgs that ‘get it’ – Guardian, Telegraph, BBC come to mind – are starting to open up in this way. Sure, the results aren’t pretty (particular the latter – Have Your Say is home to some of the most rabid prejudice and catfights I’ve seen) but at least they’re starting something genuinely interactive. I don’t see political blogs doing the same, despite the rhetoric of two-way communication and citizen activism. Instead, I only see the negativity and criticism that seems to blight our perception of politics.

Cynicism is healthy in small doses, but sometimes I think politicians get it right. It’s time to move on from the name-calling and sniping, and start using the citizen’s new voice for positive benefit.

Categories: politics, blogs, journalism

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Ys

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

It’s not often I talk about particular albums on here, mostly because I’m fully aware of the pitfalls of sounding like an amateur sixth form critic. But I have to recommend Joanna Newsom’s Ys. Please buy it.

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Banality #3

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

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