David Emery Online

Experiment

At work, I’m embarking on a little experiment.

Currently, we send out quite a few CDs to to journalists, DJs etc and also music bloggers, in the hope that they ideally review the CD or at least to get a band on their radar. It’s a process that’s been going on for decades, and is pretty much the foundation of the record company <-> journalist relationship.

Now, obviously this strays directly into pretty murky ethical territory; simply by sending someone a CD we’ve automatically changed their relationship with both the record and the band, compared to if they had discovered a band themselves. Also, by giving someone a CD there’s automatically an assumption that we’d like that person to either review it, or to look at that band in more detail – after all, we’re giving them someone a CD so surely we expect something in return, right?

This kind of activity has got a lot of attention recently in the blog world (I’m currently trying to reduce my usage of the word “blogosphere”), with things like Pay Per Post getting a huge amount of negative press.

Which leads directly on to the experiment.

Basically, I’m going to start sending out limited quantities of...

What's wrong with Apple?

There’s nothing wrong with Apple, I hear you cry!

Right now you might be right, but they’ve got a very rocky road ahead of them, most of which hinges on their new wunder-product, the iPhone. Think of today’s post as a bit of a reality check.

iPods, as it stands today, are a great success but we’re rapidly reaching the point of saturation; there’s only going to be a finite number of people in the world that want an iPod, and how many of them don’t have one yet. This would be fine, as Apple has traditionally updated the iPod often to keep up with fashion and to keep them “fresh”, but they now have a slightly tricky problem:

The iPhone.

Firstly, the iPhone doesn’t replace the iPod in any way, as it’s far more expensive, tied into a contract and has limited storage space (although most people use iPod Nanos of similar size). Now, the iPod – specifically the full size video iPod – is well overdue for an update, and it’s bound to use some of the same technology as the iPhone, including the multi-touch display. Exactly how many features it gets, though, is a pretty tricky issue – is it an...

Good Car Bad Car

Normally I don’t do requests, but today is an exception.

It’s a simple request and, as I’m always stuck for blog post topics (what? You mean you hadn’t noticed?), I thought I’d indulge. It’s a 2 part question: what is my all time favourite car, followed by the opposite: my least favourite car?

My All Time Favourite Car

This is really not as easy as it first seems. For a very long time the Ferrari F40 was my favourite car; the performance, handling and looks were all simply perfect. It’s still pretty darn high up the list, but I think the progress of time has been a bit unkind on its lines – it just looks a bit old now, and not in a good way.

I have similar issues with the great McLaren F1; a huge triumph of engineering – it had a gold leaf lined engine bay for gods sake! – and embodies a lot of very noble principles in its lightweight design and packaging but suffers aesthetically. Lets just say I’m not a fan of early nineties car design..

It may be becoming abundantly clear that the design and “look” of a car is of up-most importance to me; quite frankly engineering...

Eager

Normally I would probably write at length about the EMI/Apple announcement, but to be honest I’m not sure if there’s much more to discuss.

Yes, it’s a good thing.

Yes, Apple is smart by tying this in to both a price rise and a audio-format quality change.

No, it’s not the end of DRM (yet).

I think the most interesting thing is that the album prices are the same for the DRM versions and the non-DRM versions – there’s now much more reason to buy the full album. No doubt this is an effort to try and combat the album’s current failure to be relevant digitally. It would be also interesting to know if the price rise is down to Apple trying to make more money, coupled with higher distribution costs for the larger files, or whether EMI demanded a higher per-track rate then before, to offset the lack of DRM.

Anyway, that’s quite enough of that.

At the weekend I went to see the rather wonderful To My Boy and Cajun Dance Party. The gig mostly notable for the age of the audience – this was an all ages show, and the average age was probably about 15.

I felt really quite old.

What amazed me most,...

Friday Links VII

Sorry for the radio silence; Thursday went a bit tits-up from a doing-to-much perspective – which would have been fine, as I planned to post twice on Friday to make up for it.

On Friday I had no power all evening, so that went out the window too. Oh well! To get back on track here’s a bumper edition of Friday Links (posted on Saturday):

Apple adds “Complete My Album” to iTunes Store – Nice bit of extra functionality added to the iTunes store, and while they say it’s time limited I’d be surprised if this isn’t eventually a permanent feature.

From Pixels to Plastic, Matt Webb – Matt Webb’s keynote from Etech, containing some very, very interesting ideas (as always).

Sony BMG Tries To Cut Cleaning-Crew Costs By Moving Demo Process Online – Interesting, but ultimately weird and short sighted. It’s like they’ve finally discovered blogs, 5 years after they were really interesting. I do quite like the idea of “Digg for Demos”, though, but that’s not what this is.

The Leaks Come Out At Night: More On The Pre-Release Mini-Controversy – Leaks are a good thing. I don’t understand why there’s a discussion about this, it’s so god-darn obvious....

People

What’s going on at the moment?

The internet, and the tech bit of it specifically, seem to be in a real funk at the moment.

Witness both Kathy Sierra’s post, which created a huge amount of hubbub and activity – including being featured on the BBC website – and also Molly’s post.

I’ll be honest, both of these posts rub me up the wrong way slightly.

That’s not to say I don’t think both aren’t really bad (especially in Kathy’s case) situations, I’d really hope that that almost doesn’t need to be said. I guess what it boils down to is that I’m a realist.

People suck.

They do mean things.

It’s a pretty universal truth.

So whenever someone, or a group of people, do something shit it really doesn’t surprise me that much; everyone does it sometimes, whether they mean to or not. Even if you didn’t mean to be mean, and someone misinterpreted what you said, it takes a lot to be able to say “whoops, sorry – I didn’t mean it like that”.

The other thing that gets to me is the “mob” that things like this encourage. It’s exactly the same state of affairs as when someone is accused as being a pedophile;...

One Year

Time for something completely different. Today (and this idea is totally stolen from nostrich.net) I’m going to look back 1 year to see what I was writing about then, and how right or off-base I was.

First up is Free is much better in which I proclaim that we’re all screwed.

About podcasts, at least.

Luckily – and I’m not normally quite so happy to be proved wrong – the Ricky Gervais podcast, which moved to a pay-for model in it’s highly successful second season, seems to have been a one-off with no major people following in their footsteps. Indeed, the latest season has switched back to a free, sponsor-based system, although it also seems to be made available as a audiobook (which does cost). I have a sneaking suspicion that we have been saved from this fate by Apple, although merely accidentally.

Apple have surprisingly little time for things that fall outside of their core music store business – witness the fate of music videos, which take an age to get onto the store and still number in their hundreds, not thousands. The same applies, I think, for paid podcasts – Apple just don’t have the time, or don’t think it’s...

So so-so?

Last week the Apple TV, Apple’s first foray into the living room, finally shipped. My first opinion was, I’ll be honest, a bit lukewarm.

Yes, it’s an Apple product so, yes it looks nice.

Ditto for the user interface, although that being said it’s nothing special (certainly no iPhone).

Ditto for the iTunes and iLife integration.

So far, so so-so.

My current home setup is an old 867mhz 12” PowerBook (still the best machine Apple has ever made) hooked up to my TV, which I then VNC into to play videos on using VLC. This just about services, as I’ve – like most of the UK – don’t have an HD TV and have no real plans to get one. The second I start to want to play anything above 640×480 I’m probably going to hit the upper limits of my decoding power.

So, in theory an Apple TV sounds like a great solution to the problem; as soon as I start to want to play HD content – which is what I guess Apple will start selling over here when they finally get round to it – it becomes a whole bunch more useful.

Except for the fact that none of the video I have –...

Friday Links VI

The Lefsetz Letter – Choice – “Piracy didn’t kill the major label business model, choice did”.

Tumblr – “Tumblelogs are like blogs with less fuss. Tumblr is your friendly and free tool for creating tumblelogs”.

First Screen Shots Of Google Pay Per Action In Action – A new form of adverts from Google (the biggest online advertiser), which are “Action” based, as opposed to “Click” based.

We just got xvid working on the Apple TV – The more I read about the Apple TV, the more I want one (even though I really don’t need one).

Excerpts from Stephen King’s “On Writing” – “In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.”

A face only a bot could love – I think the Microsoft “Spot the kitty” captcha is a great idea, but this totally trumps it.

Electrelane Tour Blog – We just launched this week the Electrelane Tour Blog, for them to use whilst they’re on tour...

Desktop Web Apps

There seems to be an interesting trend emerging out of the Web 2.0 bubble:

Desktop Web Apps.

It’s one of the things Adobe are pinning their hopes on with their Apollo platform, which went public this week. Apollo looks interesting, but I’m not really hugely impressed – the fact that end users have to download the Apollo runtime before they can use your Apollo app is a bit of a deal killer for me; it would have been much better if they had come up with a way to bundle it in with your code so you could just provide a simple, double clickable application to your users.

Another interesting player in this space is Joyent’s new Slingshot product. Slingshot is a desktop runtime environment for your Ruby on Rails based web-app. It looks as though – certainly on the Mac side – it’s a Ruby on Rails server coupled with a WebKit implementation, with a little bit of extra interfacing code so you can do things like drag and drop.

The big headline feature seems to be the offline mode, which allows the app to work without a net connection. This also seems to be one of the big features in...