David Emery Online

My Game Face

Brilliant photography series of children concentrating whilst playing computer games. Interestingly enough, they’re actually stills from video captured via a RED ONE camera – the line between video and photography is getting ever more blurred…

Idlewild's next album

Idlewild are pleased to announce plans for our forthcoming new studio album with an opportunity for our fans to be involved from an early stage.

This exact idea – pre-order the album direct from the artist, then get it well upfront of the traditional release – has been banded around for a while now, so it’s interesting to see someone make a proper go of it.

The whole industry is watching with interest, no doubt.

Leona was robbed

LEONA LEWIS has been robbed of a No1 single by a blunder which has left the singer’s team and fans furious.

The superstar was due to release her version of Run for download this week after she performed it on her return to The X Factor on Saturday.

But due to a bungle at Sony, the song has not been available online and this week’s planned internet release has been shelved.

A nice story – I think we can all enjoy the idea of Sony screwing up such a thing – but sadly from what I hear, untrue. Sony have purposefully kept the song off digital retailers to push people to the new deluxe edition of her album instead. And it looks like this sacrifice of single sales is going to work as well – the album is set to to be #1 this week.

It’s bad enough to block consumer choice and up-sell a whole album to people who probably have it already, but to then try and claim that it’s a screw up is quite deliciously evil.

Feed Me

I have a feeling I’ve written this post before, but hopefully the landscape has changed since whenever that was.

I am looking for a new feed reader.

Bloglines has been my main connection with the wonders of the web for a while now. I have entirely given up bookmarks – relying on OmniWeb’s good address auto-complete for the handful of sites I visit without an RSS feed – so it’s not really hyperbole to say that, for me at least, the web = feed reading.

I have just over 800 feeds in there (although that does include a handful of dead feeds I have weeded out yet) and read through them all every day – I know quite a few people who routinely have thousands of unread items, only checking most of them every week or so (with a handful they check more often); I’m not like that – while I don’t believe in ‘Inbox Zero’ for email I certainly do for feed reading.

The upshot of this is that I need a very quick feed reader, that works in the way that I work otherwise it quickly gets unmanageable. The list of vital features is small, but seems to eliminate a...

Google Adds Voice Recognition to iPhone App

I have a very good feeling about Google’s new iPhone app that does voice recognition. I’ve been playing with this voice recognition application for several weeks and I have to say that I’m really impressed. First and foremost, the voice recognition works really well.

It’s actually quite wonderful to be able to lift your phone up to your ear, speak a phrase and have the results pop-up on screen for you. It works surprisingly well, even with my non-US accent, although I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually use it.

Also, fyi for everyone that’s not in the US – you need to enable it in the preferences after you update, as it’s not on by default.

RED Camera: I'm RED with ENVY

You want to shoot 24mp images at 100 frames per second? OK. And you want the system to be 100% modular so you never have to buy an entirely new “camera” again? Check. And, you probably want to use all your Nikon, or Canon, or PL mount lenses too? No problem.

I really, really want one of these – they’re just stunning. Anyone got a spare $25,000 I could borrow? I’m good for it, I swear…

MySpace Launches Profile 2.0. No, You Don’t Have to Switch

…today MySpace is introducing Profile 2.0. Unlike Facebook’s recent redesign, MySpace’s redesign is fully optional and will remain so for a long period of time – MySpace’s official blog mentions years. Facebook’s gradual rollout of the redesign was carefully handled, but there were still a lot of angry users who wanted the look and feel of their old profiles back. As a result, MySpace isn’t taking any chances here.

Two things: 1) The whole ‘new’ Facebook fiasco should be ignored, but is a good reminder of how much people fear change. MySpace could have never done the same thing, as people have spent a lot of time customising their profiles already. 2) Obviously this looks a bit better, but it’s still not exactly great, is it? Also, does anyone know if you can upgrade a music/band account?

EventBox

Any long time reader will know that I’ve got a passing interest in a few upcoming web-ey trends (which seem to more often then not have slightly silly names); life streams and ambient interactivity come squarely in that category.

Life streams, for the uninitiated, are aggregate feeds of personal data – think someone’s Twitter, Flickr and Blog feeds all rolled up into one stream you can dip in and out of. Ambient interactivity is more of concept then a ‘thing’, but very much compliments life streams; as soon as you start combining multiple feeds of data together you very readily get to the point of overload if you try to interact and feed back into things – if every time you need to reply to someone you have to login to twitter, or to post a photo you have to trek over to flickr it becomes unwieldy. The idea of ambient interactivity is to make these things incredibly easy to do, so you can interact in an ‘ambient’ way without taking your main focus off what you’re doing.

Up until now there was no easy way of achieving either of these two things; there’s a few web based life streaming apps, most...

Deerhunter - Nothing Ever Happened

I've been listening to this track, and the whole album 'Microcastle' that it's from, on repeat at the moment. It's very, very good.

From http://thedailygrowl.blogspot.com/2008/10/deerhunter-microcastle-weird-era-cont.html

Deerhunter - Nothing Ever Happened

Ian Rogers' Digital Music Manifesto

On the connection between artists and fans: “Think about perspectives that matter. The artist, and the fan. I was on a panel last week in London at Musexpo and I listened to my friend Rob Wells from Universal Music Group talk to a gentleman from Nokia about Nokia’s Comes With Music for half an hour, and I was just sitting there thinking, these guys could talk for an hour and not mention music, an artist or a fan.

I bumped into Ian when he was in town last week – he’s a really nice guy and up to some very interesting things. Well worth a read.