David Emery OnlineWe was robbed
Sorry about the lack of a decent blog post today; I went to the Mercury Music Awards ceremony (at quite a short notice) so I’m going to have to be a bit brief.
Needless to say, the wrong people – Arctic Monkeys – won. That’s not to say that I don’t like the Arctic Monkeys; and the album is very strong, but I simply don’t think it’s as good as the Thom Yorke record which is probably my record of the year so far.
Of the live performers, Thom was easily the best (it’s not often you get to see him perform live solo as well), although I also enjoyed Hot Chip and Editors were surprisingly good – I’m not really a fan of the album (far too generic) but they were not too bad live.
Hopefully back to your regularly scheduled ramblings of boring web stuff tomorrow; after BarCamp I have a whole load of thoughts I’d like to commit to type before I forget them…
Read more ➔That was the weekend that was
Over the weekend I had the fortune to attend the first BarCamp London which was one of the interesting and well organised events I’ve been to in a long time. Much kudos to Ben Ian and Yahoo for organising it and providing the location.
I’m not sure where to start with a summation of the event – there was so much going on, and so much of it was interesting. My talk went quite well, I think – I chaired a discussion on Digital Music, which rambled around such topics as DRM, iTunes’ market monopoly, what’s next after the iPod (mobile phones, which I think everyone was sure of) and the potential impact of the MySpace records announcement (they’re letting anybody sell mp3s on MySpace).
Of the presentations I saw, the highlights were quite a varied bunch, which I think shows the strengths of the un-conference format (making everybody talk brings some interesting people out of the woodwork).
Simon Willison’s talk on OpenID was very interesting – OpenID solves one problem, that of having multiple usernames and passwords on multiple sites, but it does it in a way that seems well thought out and highly useful. I...
Read more ➔We Are Culture
This is why I’ve been so busy:
More information to come, when I get back from BarCamp London.
Read more ➔What's up at Mozilla?
Today the Mozilla foundation released Firefox 2 beta 2 . Sadly, it’s not very good and not only is it not very good it seems to be not very good on purpose.
The main issues I have with the current version – and I must stress that it is still in beta, so hopefully some of it will change – are with the numerous GUI changes they’ve made. Now, Firefox has never been the best Mac OS X citizen but the latest changes they’ve made have moved it even further off the beaten path.
For a start, a new range of toolbar icons have been introduced that are, quite simply, not as nice as the old ones. They’re too dark, lack the photo realism that other Mac toolbar icons have, have little contrast and by on large just look amateur. Quite why they’re using them above the old ones is beyond me.
Next, the tabs have had a similar unsuccessful aesthetic overhaul – they now have small, windows-esc close buttons (the concept of which is good, but the look is lacking), the background tabs text is faded out making it difficult to read and the shading on the line that runs under...
Read more ➔Google and Apple, sitting in a tree...
... making back-room corporate decisions. Yes, it doesn’t fit as well as k-i-s-s-i-n-g, but, well I doubt I’m going to be able to use that anytime soon.
As you may have already heard, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has joined Apple’s board of directors . This means both a lot less then it might sound like it should, but also a lot more then it would normally.
If you look into the set of people that currently occupy Apple’s board you’ll see that they really haven’t made much – if any – noticeable difference to Apple’s workings, with the possible exception of Millard Drexler, who’s experience as CEO of Gap surly helped in the success of the Apple Stores.
What you don’t, however, see on the board are any competitors to Apple – and how would that really work if their were? So, this move means that Google and Apple – at least for the foreseeable future – aren’t going to be competing. This has some pretty interesting ramifications in the various spaces that they currently either co-habitate in, or would logically move to in the future.
The most obvious of these is the iTunes Music Store. Google’s video offering is both currently...
Read more ➔Post Music
A fun time was had by all at this year’s Reading Festival. Highlights included Tapes ‘n Tapes (above) who played an excellent set on Sunday, Giant Drag who were both brilliant musically and quite funny, TV On The Radio who should really be a lot bigger and the always excellent Raconteurs.
Of note was the Klaxons performance – which was great, but that’s not why it’s noteworthy. No, that goes to the fact that not only was the tent full (admittedly the Carling tent, which is the smallest at Reading) but it was 20 people deep outside as well. The last time that happened was last year, and it wasn’t as busy as it was for the Klaxons.
That band? The Arctic Monkeys.
This ties back round to what I’ve been talking about previously with the current online music scene; it’s what gave birth to the Arctic Monkeys, and the Klaxons are following along their path; bringing a whole scene – “New Rave” according to NME – with them. The hype from traditional publications such as NME has really only just begun in the last month or so, and can no way be responsible for the thousands that turned out for them on...
Read more ➔Off to see the music
This weekend it’s Reading Festival, the second best festival in the world ( here’s the first ). I’m mostly looking forward to Eagles of Death Metal, The Noisettes, Giant Drag, The Raconteurs, Tapes ‘n Tapes, Metric and a few others.
This means I may well not have time to post tomorrow; we’ll see!
It doesn’t, of course, help that nothing much seems to be going on right now on t’internet. Following on from yesterday’s space oriented post comes the news that Pluto is no longer a planet .
Poor thing. Imagine, you go your entire life wandering around thinking you’re a planet and then: BAM! That’s it. Planet status no more!
It must be quite upsetting.
The only thing of any interest – battery recalls are not interesting, nor is Sony buying Grouper (they have money and are scared – it’s not rocket science) – is the launch of TechCrunch UK . The lack of a more active UK based startup scene is an interesting topic; hopefully TechCrunch UK will elucidate further on this topic and also prove to be something of a catalyst with UK based entrepreneurs.
Read more ➔This is what we need
In these times of global terror, of war, of governments that cannot be trusted we need something. Something to focus on.
What we need, is a space program
Orion, NASA’s just-announced name for its forthcoming set of missions to the Moon and Mars signifies something exciting – or at least, something that I hope will be exciting. Just think how amazing it will be if we can actually manage to put a man on Mars… while it doesn’t magically solve all of the worlds problems, at least it would prove that we are still capable of something astonishing.
Wouldn’t it be nice to think that the US Government can actually follow through on a project this large? Sure, it requires a huge amount of money, but since when have the US been shy of spending money? Manned space missions – exploration missions – are the only way to galvanise the public into supporting the space program; it’s nice to see that NASA seem to be back on track.
Of course, just think what would happen if they discovered oil on Mars…
Read more ➔Hype is only hype
As you may have heard, Snakes On A Plane – possibly the most hyped film of the year – has tanked at the box office . This comes as no surprise to anybody that’s seen the trailer, let alone the film, as by most accounts it’s a dismal film, with a weak story, appalling script and wooden acting.
I say most accounts, as there are quite a few people – all the people that hyped it up in the first place – that really liked the film (an interesting take on how it’s still a success if you follow that link, as well).
Here’s my hypothesis; firstly, take it as read that the film isn’t any good (if you liked it get off my blog just stay with me anyway). Secondly, look at the fact that you have a large – in web terms, but not Hollywood terms – mass of people who have not only been saying this film is great before they’ve even seen it, but telling everybody they can it’s great. And making t-shirts. And singing songs.
Are these people seriously going to do a u-turn when it turns out the film sucks?
I don’t think so.
It’s pretty much...
Read more ➔Trust
Over the weekend, David Watanabe, the developer of a couple of well regarded mac apps NewsFire and Inquisitor ran a promotion via his blog where you could get Inquisitor for free if you bought NewsFire. Nothing wrong with that – you can’t really complain about good old fashioned sales techniques.
Now, to boost up the visibility of the promotion he also offered a free copy of Inquisitor to anyone that blogged about the sale – this is where we enter murky waters. Just to make it clear, I don’t have a problem with what David’s doing – he’s just trying to shift product, after all (and freebies make the world go round…) – but the reaction across the blogosphere (we need to come up with a better name) has been eye opening, to say the least.
Over the weekend across most of the mac blogs I read there’s been a plague of “Check out this great promotion” posts. Check out this search on Technorati . What gets me, though, is how many of them (the overwhelming majority) don’t mention that they’re getting a freebie for posting about it:
Now, I’ve just taken 3 almost at random (I went...
Read more ➔