David Emery Online

I have never really seen the appeal of radio. I get my news from the internet, the papers, the television. I get my music from any one of the 'cater to your exact needs' online music services like last.fm or spotify or any of the unfairly overlooked podcast and online radio stations. FM/AM radio belongs in cars with tape decks. It does not belong in the age of bluetooth and iPod connectivity as standard.

As previously mentioned I’m a fan of 6music, but I will admit I don’t listen to it very often; occasionally on the weekend at most. I thought it was worth bring attention the other side of the fence – not so much against 6music, but more about the relevancy of radio when we have this whole internet thing.

I don’t agree with this article, but I wonder if many people under the age of 18 actually do.

At first it looks like an average video player, the kind that loads standard HTML5 video. As the video plays, you very quickly notice what’s happening at the edges. The plugin automatically grabs the average colour in each area, and spreads it across the bounds of the video.

Incredibly cool – makes me very excited about what the possibilities are for doing crazy things in HTML and JS with video.

MTV International (ie MTV in every country bar the US) rolled out a new identity and idents created by MTV's world design studio in Milan in collaboration with Universal Everything last year […] More recently (and potentially confusingly) we reported that MTV (in the US) has tweaked the logo in a separate (and for now localised) rebrand - although that logo tweak WILL impact in MTV International (non US) territories by the end of next year. Now MTV International has added to last year's rebranding exercise by rolling out brand new idents designed specifically for its separate, genre-based channels

Nice ‘brand harmonisation’ you’ve got going on there MTV.

I can’t help but feel like this raft of changes-for-changes-sake – most notably, from my point of view, the rebrand of MTV2 to the vomit-inducing MTV Rocks – is a last ditch attempt to become relevant again when it comes to music videos. It’s not going to work though; music video has found its true home on the internet, and it’s not going to be on TV in any meaningful way for much longer…

The cultural hole it would leave if scrapped, would have terrible repercussions for everyone from small promoters to indie labels to bands and to music fans of all ages. We’d be denying people the chance to hear music which could – even in just a few cases – alter their life, as listening to John Peel changed mine.

I’ve held back from writing about the proposed closure of BBC 6music as I don’t think I have anything to add to the debate that hasn’t already been said, and by better writers to boot.

Steve hits the nail on the head here, of course. None of the arguments hold any weight when examined with any thoroughness; it’s just politics, plain and simple.

Enter your email to receive an exclusive remix of 'Spanish Sahara'

Lovely new song from Foals – I’m not quite sure though why they’re only giving away a remix of it; I’m a fan of Foals, not whoever has screwed with a song I don’t really even know yet…

Condé Nast's editorial director, Thomas Wallace, noted that there's an experimental aspect to releasing these publications for the iPad. These titles will be used to test pricing and advertising strategies. It won't be easy, as distribution will be handled via iTunes, and Apple doesn't share reader data.

Lets hit this ‘ooh Apple doesn’t share reader data, how will we cope’ thing on the head now, before it gets out of hand shall we? Firstly, you don’t get reader data from non-subscription copies of physical magazines anyway which – if they follow the model they’re already pursuing with the GQ iPhone apps which have an app-per-issue – is a more accurate comparison then looking at subscriber copies.

Secondly – and more importantly – Apple isn’t limiting this in any way. If they want to get reader data, just put a step in on first launch to get reader data; they’re writing the app, so they can do anything they want. If we were talking about an Apple created eMagazine format with specific restrictions that would be a different story, but we’re not; we’re talking about the App Store, which actually lets you do pretty much anything you like.

One of the biggest challenges of technical publishing is that sinking feeling you get a few moments, days, weeks, or months after you first see a book in print: it's obsolete. No matter how much hard work you put into a book, you can only do so much future-proofing. Sometimes obsolescence comes slowly, but often, especially for popular topics, books have a depressingly short shelf life. Readers want to be able to use the latest and greatest, and blame books quickly when something no longer works.

What if there was some way, maybe via a computer for example, to publish something digitally and then keep updating and editing it afterwards?

Would be pretty clever, that.

There’s a really simple tip almost everybody can use to increase productivity tremendously. Not only is the tip free, it might even make you a bit of money. *And* it’ll make you smarter. It’s really easy, there’s only one step involved: Sell your TVs.

I don’t get how anyone can fail to see that TV is one of the most important source of culture and knowledge we have.

Might as well be saying ‘sell all your books’ or ‘don’t listen to music’.

Current Firefox nightlies have support for the bleeding-edge CSS transitions specification. […] CSS transitions make it easy to smoothly animate changes to CSS styles, instead of changes taking effect instantly.

Great news! I don’t think there’s a site I’ve done in the last year that doesn’t feature some CSS transitions – which up till now have been Webkit only. I’m less thrilled though about having to add -moz duplicates for all of them though; not great having to write all this fancy new CSS3 4 times over (Webkit, Gecko, Opera and without prefix just in case).

We took our website and turned it sideways. Why? Well, the site is for reading on screen, and I don’t know about you, but our screens are wider than they are tall. Putting text in columns makes it easier to read by providing a proper line length too. My eyes feel relieved already.

Well this is lovely isn’t it?

Love the horizontal, column-based layout – I tried to do this a few years ago with the To My Boy site (sadly offline now) but this is far nicer.

Don’t worry RSS readers, I haven’t redesigned again – you can rest easy. However, my css-tourettes has finally paid some dividends.

I’m linking to myself here, to point out that I’ve updated my archives post which has all the assorted different designs this blog has had over the years. It’s interesting how badly the blog format deals with updated content like this, and also with posts that have a more long term appeal (rather then the slightly ephemeral, time specific nature mosts posts have) – not really sure what to do about it though, so linking to myself will have to suffice.

Eagle eyed readers will also spot that not only have I put version 9 of this blog in the archive, but version 9b as well – I couldn’t resist doing some tweaks to it, even though it hadn’t been up for barely two weeks…

Financial Times reports that talks between Apple and a number of newspaper and magazine publishers have encountered several hurdles that have slowed the deal-making process as the periodicals publishing industry attempts to understand how the move to digital distribution will affect its business.

One of the major concerns publishers are reportedly having pertains to Apple's policy of sharing only limited customer information with its content partners. As the report notes, publishers have long mined data on their subscribers in order to develop marketing efforts and evolve the focus of their publications over time, but Apple's reluctance to share that information is reportedly making publishers uneasy. […] Another concern for newspaper and magazine publishers is Apple's proposed revenue sharing arrangement, which involves Apple taking a 30% share of revenue for handling distribution.

Read: greed and cluelessness seen as hurdles to newspapers and magazines continuing to do business.

The good news is that there is web browser support for CSS gradients in Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer (Opera will most likely add it soon too). The bad news is that, for a couple of reasons, the implementation in each web browser is different from the other.

I didn’t realise there was an IE filter for doing gradients as well – handy! I imagine there’s a performance hit though…

Graphs are clearly Laurie’s raison d‘être, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that a great way of thanking him would be to write some code that does something we’ve been working towards for some time at Last.fm: generating personalized, real-time scrobbling history graphs.

I love graphs, me. Last.fm + graphs is hence a match made in heaven.

I know a lot of people use Last.fm for things like the recommended radio, forums and all that jazz but I use it solely for scrobbling and storing that data – what I played, when and how often. In fact, the more ways I could replicate the idea of scrobbling across other media the better; I’d love to scrobble watching films and TV (which technically could be done by Sky if they wanted), reading books and magazines (maybe on the iPad?) and all sorts of other things; in fact, it’s what interested me in Foursquare, which is pretty much scrobbling of location.

My scrobble graph can be found here.

But that won’t dishearten newspaper and magazine publishers. Because, for all the bluster about iPad “saving media”, their real iPad salvation is this: they can present their editions in much the same old dead-tree format they did before that pesky HTML came along.

“I believe the iPad will be about sitting in front of the TV whilst watching TV, browsing a ‘magazine’,” McCaffrey - whose 2ergo made the apps for The Guardian, Fox News, Arsenal FC and others - told me in an interview. “It will switch on in a second, you’ll be straight in to your content - it will be almost exactly like a magazine that you pick up from the coffee table.”

Yep, brilliant – that’s exactly what we need: glorified PDFs outputted by InDesign.

Bound to work out just fine that strategy. Just fine.

Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson announced at the TED conference on Friday that the publication would be releasing its content for the iPad by summer.

[...]

“I’m from the media world,” Anderson told the audience “and as you may have heard, we have lots of questions about our future. The good news I think we found part of the answer…. We think this is a game changer.”

Back last month in the dark ages before the iPad had been unleashed upon the world I wrote a little article about what the possibilities the forthcoming tablet could hold, with a particular focus on eMagazines (or whatever we’re supposed to call them). The conclusion I got to (eventually) was that they just don’t really make any sense, so I was pretty eager to see what Apple was going to offer in that regard and how they made it make sense.

It turns out, of course, that they didn’t.

We got an eBook store – which we already know make sense – and a demo of a NY Times app (that did look lovely) but no proper official Apple solution; and you know if Apple thought it made sense, we would have got one. So, this Wired iPad app is undoubtedly the first announcement of many (there’s already quite a few for the iPhone, although none featuring in the Apps charts) but I’m not betting against Apple on this one…

These effects are CSS level 1 and 2.1 only. There is no javascript, css3 or whatever, just html and css.

They are all based on the CSS 2D displacement map technique that Román Cortés discovered when he created the infamous CSS Coke Can effect.

The prism effect in particular is stunning – it’s nice to see that there’s still room for old school CSS hackery (although I can’t help but think you could do it way more easily using CSS3).

HTML5 video goodness: no browser plugin, no Flash dependencies

I know a lot of people have linked to this already, but just in case you haven’t seen it yet this is well worth checking out. Obviously HTML5 video is not ready for prime time yet – Ogg is not a video format I’m going to encode in, so hence it only really works in Safari+Chrome – but when it is it’s good to know that not only will video playback be better then it currently is in flash, the user experience (read: slickness) will be as well.

MusicDNA, a new file format that looks a lot like Apple's iTunes LP format, wants to bring liner notes to the 21st century. MusicDNA is a new rich-media extension for digital music files that enriches songs and albums with additional data like lyrics,

I’m not super into the idea of these new ‘rich-media’ music formats – does anyone really want them? – but what I really don’t understand about either this or the rival CMX is where the hell people are supposed to buy these things from?

You’re certainly not going to be able to buy these things from iTunes (as they already have a rich-media format and have implemented it in the form of iTunes LP) and is it worth anybody’s time to make one of these things if you can’t sell them on the biggest music store?