David Emery OnlineBlock
Sorry for the absence of Friday’s post, and sorry for the lack of anything too interesting today.
A combination of too much work combined with extreme busyness has lead to a rather amusing onset of writers block. It’s not that I don’t know what to write about – I have a few post topics in mind – it’s just I can’t quite bring myself to write them.
I think I’ll be back on track tomorrow though.
One small thing of note, check out http://www.electricsoftparade.com/. Not done by me (obviously, I hope) but has ripped off all sorts of code from http://www.pineygir.com, including my JS audio player which still has my name in the code. Also, they haven’t quite managed to change all the CSS correctly, so some bits of pink show up on some pages…
I really don’t care, but do find it quite amusing.
Read more ➔Music: where next?
I’ve been having some interesting discussions recently on the future of music, and the general direction the industry seems to be going in. It all leads to some interesting possibilities, and no small amount of contradictions.
With the recent change in chart rules to allow digital only singles, it’s been abundantly clear how increasingly irrelevant CD singles sales are. The in-excapable Mika is going to spend his third week at number 1 on Sunday, but this is the first week you’ve been able to buy it on CD (and still the digital sales are outstripping the CD sales – 17608 physical to 20903). This is not a quirk either – all of the tracks bar one in the top 10 have higher digital sales then physical.
Interestingly, the same cannot be said for album sales which continue to be physical led – digital only accounts for about 10% of album sales. I imagine this is due to several factors – the download format is a very good fit for impulse single sales, whereas when you’re buying a whole album you’re buying it not just for the music but for the experience – artwork, liner notes etc. Also, if you buy single tracks...
Read more ➔Future of the Left in London
Last night I tootled down to the 100 Club on Oxford St to see the rather wonderful Future of the Left.
Didn’t get to see the first support, but the second band on was three lads called Kong, who were surprisingly brilliant. Very loud, and certainly not afraid of doing a bit of shouting they were a breath of fresh air. They, err, also looked slightly scary.
Scarlyness paled into submission when Future of the Left came on, though – they were excellent; heavy riffs and interesting lyrics. The set was a little shorter then I would have liked, but they’ve not been around long so it’s to be expected. Extra bonus points for having the requisite witty banter, and dismantling the drum kit at the end while the drummer was still playing.
Here are some pics – all taken with my Canon G7. The first 5 are Kong, and the rest Future of the Left.
Read more ➔Video, Money, Video
Continuing on with last weeks ramblings on YouTube and Google, YouTube has finally announced that it’s going to start sharing advertising revenue with content uploaders.
Obviously this changes the game somewhat.
This also directly ties in with video adverts, which YouTube have also said they are exploring either in the form of post-roll, longer adverts, or pre-roll 3 second affairs (which is exactly what Joost does). The combination of the two could well have a radical affect on the content that gets posted on YouTube, with more traditional content producers such as TV networks becoming more inclined to post stuff now that they would get paid.
They still need to make the jump into the living room, but surely that’s all part of the plan – we just haven’t got there yet.
Continuing on with online video, although of a completely different kind, Gizmo – a VOIP company and direct competitor to Skype, has announced a browser-based version of their software which can both make video calls and traditional phone calls, all from the browser.
It’s a pretty nifty piece of technology, and I can see it having all sorts of uses in environments where you can’t install software. It also...
Read more ➔Storytelling
Diamond Geezer is one of the better and more widely read UK-based blogs. Normally, it deals with the reality of living in modern London; tube trains, museums the 2012 Olympics – always bordering on the boring but always coming out interesting (even if you’d be ashamed to admit it).
This week however, he’s doing something very interesting – something I’ve never seen done before, and something that really works.
Starting with this post Diamond Geezer has started posting from the future. Shod of the purely informative with a dab of editorial, he’s now moved straight into fiction with rather brilliant effect.
The story he’s weaving is a captivating tale of what appears to be a major terrorist attack on London, told in real time via the blog. Every few hours another post comes down the RSS feed, detailing his survival so far – first escape from a darkened tube train, then his fleeing from the power-mad authorities through the darkness of east London back to home and safety.
The format works so perfectly I’m sure we will see this repeated again (and I also assume that this isn’t the first, although I’ve not seen it before). The central character has so much...
Read more ➔Online Project Management
One of 37signals’ – one of the darlings of the modern web world, and rightly so – main products is a piece of software called Basecamp. Basecamp is an online, web-based project management tool which, like most of 37signals’ output, strips the concept back down to the bare essentials to provide a simple, easy to use experience.
It’s a great bit of software, and if you’re involved with working on a project with multiple other people it comes highly recommended. It does, however, come with a couple of drawbacks: firstly, other than the basic plan which only allows you one project it requires a monthly subscription fee. Secondly, Basecamp is a hosted application meaning it runs on 37signals’ servers. If you don’t want to administer your own server (and I imagine most don’t) this is great, but means there are very little possibilities for custom development – what you get is what 37signals give you, and you have no way to add to it.
At work we were looking for a solution to multi-people project management, and Basecamp certainly looked like a very attractive proposition. The monthly fee wasn’t a huge concern, although with our useage we’d probably need...
Read more ➔Google Mojo
Google have posted today on their blog about the future prospects of YouTube and Google Video.
Watch out guys: Google’s got their mojo back.
During 2005 and well into 2006 Google was really having problems. Not from a money problems obviously; like Microsoft before them they’ve managed to get themselves into a incredibly lucrative position in the market place. The problem was that everything “new” that was coming out of Google’s doors was falling short and faltering when it reached the public. Look at Google Video, Gtalk, Google Page Creator, Google Base and more for examples of this.
Luckily for Google early autumn last year they bought a little known San Bruno based startup – demonstrating at least that they weren’t going to disappear quite yet.
The announcement today that Google Video is going to concentrate on video search, leaving the user-content side to YouTube makes a huge amount of sense on all sorts of levels. Firstly, Google is bound to be currently investing a huge amount of R&D on video search so it can effectively start doing video advertising; both traditional adwords-style text ads around YouTube videos and true video adverts in the future. The video advertising space is going to...
Read more ➔Public Relations
It never fails to amaze me how some people just don’t “get it”, even when their entire job revolves around “getting it”.
As Ian has detailed a lovely PR company working on BTs behalf spammed what appears to be everybody who has blogged about BarCamp – including yours truly – a press release about BarCamp2. I personally don’t really mind too much – I get hundreds of spam mails every day, so one that’s vaguely about something I’m interested in is hardly the end of the world – but it just shows how far the PR industry at large has to go.
The whole ethos around BarCamp is that it’s a community event, and also massively over subscribed, so I can’t think what they were trying to gain by sending out a canned press release by email. Anybody who is interested enough in BarCamp London to write about it on their blog is going to know where to sign up already – it just reeks of a clueless PR company trying to convert their traditional press release based model into something that works with bloggers, and utterly failing in the process.
At some point companies like Octane PR – the sender of...
Read more ➔MacBook Lemon
My 7 month old base model MacBook now has the mantle of being both the best and the worst computer I’ve ever owned.
The good points are easy – the MacBook is one of the best computers Apple have ever made. The price is incredibly low for the features it has, like the beautiful 13.3 inch display, built in iSight, MagSafe power connector and more. It’s also amazingly fast for such a cheap computer. It truly is a joy to use.
When it works, that is.
Yesterday it completely died – it wouldn’t boot up. It looked like a classic hard disk failure, as the HD was making an ominous clicking sound and booting from a CD worked ok. Fine. Great. I can just about deal with a dead HD; I’m going to loose some data (I have some backups, but not complete ones) but I have a 80gb drive waiting to go in it so I’ll be up and running quite quickly.
Except I can’t get OS X to install on the new HD. Which means the logic board is probably screwed.
Sigh.
This just rounds off nicely the rather long list of problems that this MacBook has had:
- The battery completely died about 5 months...
Rework
As you may have noticed (unless you’re reading via RSS), I’ve done a minor redesign to this here site. Gone is the heavy red top bar and slightly odd logotype, replaced by something altogether lighter and simpler. The focus here is on the content – I’‘m trying to strip away as much “fluff” as possible, while still keeping it looking nice.
Also gone is the sidebar, which has effectively moved to the top and bottom of the page. The reasons for this are two-fold; firstly, the sidebar triggered a very strange bug in Safari which would mean it would occasionally get rendered twice which looked fairly nasty – I think it was something to do with the js image resizing, but any attempts to work around it would cause Safari to crash. Secondly, I’ve always quite liked having a one column layout as it really focuses the reader on the single article, without extraneous imagery and text in their periphery.
Not content with redesigning my site this weekend, I’ve also done a similar job for Goldrush. They’ve got a rather splendid new album out soon, so we’ve re-jigged the site to fit in with the look of the artwork.
As you...
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