David Emery OnlineLeave Britney Alone! (Where by Britney I mean Steve, Mark and Jimbo)
The problem here is one of perspective. We hardcore internet users might do well to realise that, just because we spend our days trawling TechCrunch and TechMeme and Hacker News doesn’t mean that the wider world shares our belief that privacy settings for photos we’ve chosen to post online, Flash on the iPad or our God-given right to see erections on Wikipedia are the most important issues in the world today.
I’m beginning to link to every column Paul Carr writes for TechCrunch, because he’s the only one in the tech media that seems to have any sense of perspective.
Don’t agree with Apple’s App Store policies? Don’t buy an iPhone.
Don’t agree with Facebook’s privacy policies? Don’t use Facebook.
It’s not difficult.
Visit ➔Six Degrees of Black Sabbath
Find the path that connects two artists
I think it’s impossible to go to this site and not get sucked in for at least 10 minutes.
Visit ➔On Turning The Page
Just let me scroll, please? I’ve been reading stuff off the screen seriously for what, 15 years? More? Scrolling is fine, you know.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the whole “pages versus scrolling” thing and I have to say I’m veering towards – at least on touch-based devices – pages being preferable. On the desktop, with scroll-wheel mice, scrolling works well but the incessant “swipe, swipe, swipe” method on mobile devices is pretty tiresome – especially as commonly there’s no quick way of jumping ahead like there is in a regular scrolling environment (which is one of the key benefits of scrolling).
Visit ➔Facebook Breached My Privacy, And Other Things That Whiny, Entitled Dipshits Say
In other words, their problem is not that something ended up online, simply that they were unable to keep control of something they willingly shared with at least a portion of the world. And it’s that attitude that needs to change – from one of retroactive bleating about privacy to one of proactive filtering of what we choose to share in the first place.
Blaming Facebook’s flaky approach to privacy for the ills of the exhibitionist generation is just yelling at the stable door, long after the horse has bolted.
Surprisingly for something on TechCrunch, this article is right on the money. I appreciate that, judging by the amount of people on Twitter* that seem to hate Facebook, I may be in a minority in my peer group but I have no problem with Facebook, and a fairly relaxed attitude to online privacy.
The key to me is just to assume that everyone can read or view anything you put on the internet, wherever that is, and act accordingly. It's the internet: you don't have any control, so don't worry about it.
* Most of which have public Twitter streams, Just sayin'.
Visit ➔Scribd CTO: “We Are Scrapping Flash And Betting The Company On HTML5″
Tomorrow, online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages. Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser, but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages.
Impressive stuff – I’m interested to see what the markup is going to be like (I’ve never seen a machine write good markup).
Visit ➔Indie music mogul: The net's great for us
You read the industry is 60 per cent of the size it was ten years ago. But that 40 per cent that has gone is almost entirely the cream at the top. Records that sold two million now sell 500,000 - that's where that's gone. At the same time it's easier to sell those slightly smaller levels. [...] 99 per cent of what you hear about artists who can survive on their own playing live is crap. It's recorded music that drives success in other areas. Something like Enter Shikari was clearly a contrary example, and Mumford and Sons are something of an exception too - they built a large live following before putting out records - but there are very few exceptions.
A great read, and dead on the money (of course I would say that, as Martin’s my boss).
Visit ➔Pitchfork.tv: The National - Terrible Love
The Brooklyn rockers bring their big sound to an abandoned castle overlooking New York's Hudson river.
This track is just astonishingly good live:
Visit ➔Fifth Birthday
On the 18th of April, 2005 I posted this inauspicious post and brought this blog blinking into the world. Everything has to start somewhere.
It’s quite a strange thought to me that this blog is 5 years old.
5 years is a strange in-between length of time that somehow simultaneously a long time and not that long at all. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing this blog for a huge amount of time, but yet I’ve somehow amassed 1376 posts – not including this one – totalling 200,000+ words (it’s very difficult to get an accurate figure) which seems like a hell of a lot.
Not that quantity is any indication of quality, of course.
Looking back at the first few posts indicates that at the very least my writing has got a little better (although I could really do with a proof reader), but also that my focus has got a bit broader (and maybe deeper?) – certainly less of ‘woo Apple have a new thing out’ posts hopefully. I think I’ve hit a much more sustainable rhythm that’s been mirrored by much of the rest of the blogosphere (hey, we don’t use that word really anymore, do we? Not...
Read more ➔Understand The Web
Perceptions of the web is changing. People are advocating that we treat the web like another application framework. An open, cross-platform, multi-device rival to Flash and Cocoa and everything else. I’m all for making the web richer, and exposing new functionality, but I value what makes the web weblike much, much more.
A must-read article on the state of the web today; I could quote practically every paragraph.
I remember a while back Khoi Vinh lamented that there are no ‘masterpieces’ on the web; no culture-defining works that will last the test of time. I’m sure he was referring to design when he wrote it (the particular post escapes me), but that’s a fallacy that touches on the same points made in this article; the web isn’t like print graphic design, just like TV isn’t like theatre or photography isn’t like painting. The same is true of the web and applications – they’re similar but different mediums.
I’d argue that YouTube is a masterpiece just as much as the Mona Lisa or 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a totally different kind of thing, and that’s the whole point.
Visit ➔