David Emery OnlineInternet angered by website redesign
With radical features like black text typeset in Helvetica against a white background, a traditional blog river, bold headlines, faster load times and a fashionable 8-bit style logo, there are .. wait, there's nothing crazy at all! So what on Earth are its readers complaining about?
I like the focus on readability, the reduced clutter etc but – like most people, I hazard a guess – the problem I have with the new TechCrunch redesign is it doesn’t look very nice. It’s just not very aesthetically pleasing.
Just because the mob is up in arms about every redesign (or even slight tweak) doesn’t mean there’s not some truth to it every once in a while.
Visit ➔'How I Met Your Mother': Your Face Here
The news is this: thanks to groundbreaking technology, it is now possible to sell ads in old episodes of TV shows by digitally inserting things like TV screens in bar scenes or billboards on sidewalk scenes, and having those digital screens carry timely ads, for example, as EW noted, for the release of 'Bad Teacher' in an episode that was shot in 2009.
Great technology and all, but do advertisers seriously think they get a return on investment from taking the time to insert a product into the background on a rerun of a TV show?
I mean, really?
Visit ➔Things that are blogs
Things that are blogs:
Frequently updated webpages with content arranged in reverse chronological order
Things that are not blogs:
The Hype Machine
Blog posts
Blog comments
See also: “I’ve just posted a blog”.
Visit ➔The Collapse of Complex Business Models
Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
I could have quoted the whole of this to be honest. Really interesting.
Visit ➔Experiential Rights
Call it Kaplan’s Law: the more value a non-music company adds to the fan/artist relationship, the bigger the threat to those who’s business depends on being between the two.
Ethan hits the nail on the head here. Rights is hardly a sexy subject to talk about, but it’s an undeniable anchor that the whole industry is moored to (which – to stretch the metaphor to breaking point – is no good if you sitting in your speed boat, ready to set off).
turntable.fm is the perfect example, as it’s now blocked outside of the US due to “rights issues”. What this really means is that the US current has an easy way of licensing the specific model that turntable.fm uses – that of an online radio station – that other places don’t have (in exactly the same form at least). It’s the same system that Pandora (similarly US-only) uses, and to be perfectly frank I’d be surprised if it continues past 2015 (when the setup is up for renegotiation) as the major labels think they should be paid far more per play then the currently get from Pandora or turntable.fm (and damn them if they can’t stay in business as a result).
It’s a pretty complicated mess, it has to be said…
Visit ➔Secondary attention and the ghosts in the corner
I remember seeing a talk once from a guy who did sound for the ER (on TV, not in actual hospitals). He was telling stories with the sound - foreshadowing moments, enhancing themes, adding drama - all via secondary attention. And I've always wanted to try and use sound as a way of telling you what's going on in/on/with the web. We've been mucking about with a few varients of this - from the abstract and arty to the slightly less abstract and arty - and we're going to try them out via some boxes which Adrian's building for us.
There’s something really interesting in all of this. Not sure exactly what it is yet, though.
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The Horrors - Skying
Love the new album by The Horrors – ‘Endless Blue’ (wait for the guitars to kick in about half way though!) and ‘Moving Further Away’ (wait for the guitars to kick in about half way though!) are particular highlights.
Visit ➔Lil B, SwagSec, and the Gay Hacking Parade
But some of this didn’t add up. ‘Gay hackers target Amy Winehouse’ still seemed too good a headline to be true.
Then I saw that Lil B was releasing his new album today. Apparantly his album ‘I’m Gay’ (named so in support of the LGBT community, though Lil B is himself a heterosexual) had been released without any notice.
Convenient? I later hear through the grapevine that Winehouse and Pritchard share the same PR guy. Would it be too cynical to imagine he has a new client in Lil B? Yes, it would. Until you see that Lil B had a ‘secret’ meeting with Universal staff back in March.
Does this smell even a tiny bit like a marketing campaign? Is it possible that the site owners and label did this purely for press coverage?
Pretty crazy if true. Pretty lousy marketing if it is.
Visit ➔Walking Around In Circles: As Google+ Opens Up Will People Start Using It Correctly?
Who knows, maybe I’m just a Silicon Valley guy who has lost touch with reality. It’s entirely possible. But maybe, just maybe, the opposite is true. Maybe “regular” people have been allergic to using groups in the past because they simply don’t want to use groups. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s a good idea on paper or in a brain-storming session, but doesn’t translate onto the web.
Maybe — gasp — the web isn’t meant to mimic the real world.
I go on holiday for a week and come back to yet another social network. I haven’t used it yet, but from what I’ve read Google+ doesn’t seem to offer anything significantly different – significant enough to make people switch away from Facebook, at least.
This article pretty much sums up my feelings – the key differentiator is the ‘Circles’ groups concept, but I’m just not that convinced people can be bothered to split their friends up into groups when social networking. Even with a nifty UI it still sounds a lot like work to me, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
It also surprises me just how similar to Facebook Google+ is – it’s pretty shameless, right down to the UI look and layout. One thing I haven’t seen though is events, which I know was a massive driver for Facebook in the early days and I’m sure could do the same if/when it’s added to Google+.
Otherwise, the only thing Google+ has over Facebook is that it isn’t Facebook. That might be good enough for the geeks (who in my experience have never been Facebook fans, although I’ve never really figured out why) but I’m not sure it will be for everyone else.
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