David Emery Online

The Doctor is [ OUT ]

I’m in New York this week.

I may get a chance to post, but then again I may not.

I hope you all manage ok.

Maybe you should set up a support group or something.

Netscaped

As you may have read, AOL have realigned Netscape into a digg style news site.

“So what” I hear you say. Well, don’t forget the netscape.com is one of the most popular sites in the world, getting millions of hits a day. Combine that with a system that allows anybody to post stories and vote of them and things start getting interesting.

It’s a bit of a shame that they’ve ripped off Digg so much – they could probably even sue – but it’s nice to see the addition of editorial content (in the form of “Anchors” that highlight certain stories). One think Digg suffers from is a vast amount of “silly” stories (“OMG look at this cool video!” etc) – some editorial input could really help in this space.

The key thing though that Netscape brings – when it’s out of beta – is a massive audience. It’ll be interesting to see how a user controlled site works with millions of users, and also means that smaller sections, such as music and pets for example, will still get a sizeable audience.

Of course, if you thought the “Digg” effect or Slashdotting was bad, you wait till you’ve been Netscaped…

Sorry Distraction

I know I promised proper paragraphs yesterday, but I got a shiny new MacBook this evening so I’m a bit preoccupied.

I’m sure you understand.

It’s lovely.

Sneak

Look.

I’m very busy, all right?

Too busy to post properly.

Above is a sneak preview of the upcoming redesign of this site.

Enjoy.

Watch this space tomorrow for proper paragraphs.

Your face here

Now, this is quite cool.

At work we’ve just put the finishing touches to the new Devendra Banhart LP

The cool part is that last year, we ran a competition (which was located at the link above) where people could send in pics of themselves all dressed up. We’ve then taken the pics, and put them on the cover (and inside sleeve) of the LP!

Pretty darn cool if you ask me.

What more would a fan want then to be on the cover of their favourite artist’s LP?

I also love the fact that we can utilise the internet to link artist and fan, and the result can be something as old school as a 12” record.

Personal

As you’ve almost certainly heard already, Robert Scoble – the man who has almost single handed turned around Microsoft’s online portrayal via his blog – is leaving to join podcast startup Podtech.net.

What, you mean you’ve never heard of them?

Oh, and their website looks like every other generic clueless podcast startup?

Yep.

Obviously these guys are slightly less clueless then their thousands of competitors as they’ve managed to get Scoble – he’s probably worth, what, about $10 million in advertising? However, I don’t see what elevates them above the masses at all (although I’m sure Scoble will tell us soon enough), and their website is, quite frankly, appalling.

What I’m sure it comes down to, as people are wont to forget sometimes, is the myriad of personal reasons for making a move like this. Is the move good for his career? Probably not. Does moving to California make a big difference? Almost certainly.

A million engines in neutral

The new Thom Yorke album, The Eraser, is easily the best album of heard this year.

Without a doubt.

It may even be the better then anything from last year as well.

Not only is it better then pretty much any recent release you care to name, I think it’s also better then Hail To The Thief, Radiohead’s last album.

“Harrowdown Hill” is my favourite track at the minute, but “And it rained all night” is utterly amazing as well. And “Black Swan”. And the title track as well. Oh, and don’t forget “Atoms For Peace”.

I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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Best read my disclaimer if you haven’t already as it’s again relevant to this post.

Hedged Bets

Many, many people have been talking about the “Google mania” evident since the launch of Google Speadsheet. They quite rightly point out that Google hasn’t done anything even remotely innovative with their speadsheet offering, and that it quite obviously doesn’t have anywhere near the amount of features Excel has.

I’ve also seen postulations on the topic of whether this is all a big distraction – leading Google’s competitors (such as Microsoft) to try and compete against Google’s web office, when Google is busy making lots of money off advertising.

I think everybody’s missing the point.

Microsoft make most of their money from Office. Don’t forget that. There is a huge market there for Google to go after, and it’s a market that Google – with it’s army of crack developers it’s being hiring for years now – can do well in (potentially at least).

With the point about Google’s core business being advertising, I think people are ignoring two things quite fundamental:

Firstly – with the amount of resources they’ve built up to date, why would they not go after the office market? They certainly have the capital to throw at it, and nothing to loose in that market.

Secondly, and more importantly – advertising is...

Barbara

So, you know how I said I had a load of things in the pipeline?

Here’s one of them: The new site for Barbara Carlotti

It is yaspbt (Yet-Another-Site-Powered-By-Textpattern) – I love how much of the site is powered by Textpattern without even having to do anything complicated (just using the powerful sections feature). The only plugin being used is upm_image to allow the integration with Lightbox for the photo galleries.

I think the best thing – if I do say so myself – about the site is it’s fluidity – try resizing your browser! This is what I mean when I talk about using javascript to help create a fluid width site. If you take a look at the source (the scaling is done in the js/main.js file) you’ll see that the code dynamically loads in higher res versions of the main image as you scale it up, so the image remains nice and sharp no matter what the size.

Google Office

This is the beginning of the end for Microsoft. While the purchase of Writely was a bit of a give-away, Google creating a spreadsheet app is the surest sign we’re going to get that they’re going straight after Microsoft’s core business.

Now, don’t get me wrong – Google isn’t there yet. This new spreadsheet app certainly isn’t going to offer most of the features that Excel offers – indeed, it probably doesn’t offer features that most people use on a daily basis. In the same way, Writely certainly doesn’t offer enough features at this stage to challenge Word.

But they don’t need to.

What Google’s web-based office offerings can offer is all sorts of features that, without Microsoft releasing their own web-based office release, Office will never be able to offer. Features like being able to access your documents wherever you are, seamless collaboration features and much more.

Office has beaten away it’s competitors for so long by having so many features that no-one has the resources to develop a serious competitor (that and file-format lock in).

This is all going to get very interesting.