David Emery Online

Friday Links XXXXIV

How we work: Philip Pullman, author
Always interesting to see how successful people do the thing that makes them successful.

Keynote Index Fund
“if you held the $10,000 of [Apple] shares bought in 1997, your investment would be worth $525,187 today”

Changes.app
Looks potentially very useful. I still want a decent Mac SVN client though…

Rails Is A Ghetto
“Repeat that to yourself. “He couldn’t keep his own servers running for longer than 4 minutes on average.””

I love a good rant, and this is a particularly good one (mostly because I’m not a Rails fan).

Fistfulayen on Radiohead
Exactly.

Gears Future APIs: Image Manipulation API
I really like the idea of being able to do things like image manipulation on the client side, but I can’t help but think a plugin like this isn’t the way to do it (if you’re using a plugin, you might as well use Flash).

io9
I really, really dislike the template that Gawker are using for all their blogs – please, could someone design them a new one?

MP3.com Meets Digg: Find New Music on Sixtyone
Sixtyone strikes me as being far too complicated, with all that points rubbish. Simple is a better...

Market share

I have a theory.

It’s fairly well established that Apple’s market share is going up, right? This statistic rather nicely coincides, of course, with the final vestiges of me caring about Mac market share disappearing, but is nevertheless a fact that would have greatly pleased the 13 year old me.

Obviously this increase is down to a million and one different factors; I’m sure the iPod is one of the main factors, OS X being another and the move to Intel being the third. There is though one more thing I think could well have contributed greatly, and it’s probably not too obvious.

Going back to my 13 year old self, one of the key past times I seemed to partake in was arguing profusely about which platform was better. It was an utterly pointless past time, and a waste of my precious youth. Obviously I should have either been playing cops and robbers or some-such (or possibly sailing) but I’m digressing purely because the platform contention argument was one I never really won.

I had at the time a LCII – which looking back was a pretty darn good machine for the time – and it did everything that you’d really need...

This is an advertisement

Employers: Get 50% off your listing at Authentic Jobs

Authentic Jobs New Year Promo: 50% off

Authentic Jobs 50% off promo

This isn’t the future of advertising, but I think some people might think it is.

The three sites linked to above are all ones I read on a regular basis and have a great deal of respect for, which is why it’s doubly jarring to get an advertisement doubling for a post in my RSS reader. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against ads, and I’m not against people trying to monetize their blogs. It’s the method that’s wrong; the faux sheen of ‘This Is A Blog Post’ versus ‘This is an advertisement’ that causes offence.

Of course, printed media has dealt with this already. The concept of ‘advertorial’ is well established, and can be seen in most slightly downmarket magazines on the shelf today. The big difference is the prominent ‘Advertisement’ text they have emblazoned on them – unless you’re blind (which is what the advertiser is hoping, of course) it’s normally pretty clear.

The clean separation between editorial and advertisement is one of the key differences between blogging and traditional media, and I really can’t see that changing anytime...

Resolutions

Welcome, welcome one and all to this lovely shiny new year. Tempting as it is to say that I hope this year is a bit better then last year it’s a bit pointless really, as it’s all relative; every year is as good or bad as the last one, depending on your point of view.

I fear I may have started rambling a mere sentence in to this year, which could be a bad sign all told.

Anywho… resolutions! That’s what new years are all about really; well, that and predictions and quite frankly I’m rubbish at predictions – just look at last year’s MacWorld predictions which were pretty much all wrong (and contained the infamous line “iPod Phone: It certainly won’t be called an iPhone…”). Now, I’m not one for resolutions normally – I have a thing against arbitrary social customs – but this year I feel I’ve been slacking a bit so here goes…

Firstly, I’ve recently acquired a lovely new Canon EOS 400D DSLR to replace my lovely-but-constraining Canon Powershot G7. The main use for this will be gig photography – a useable ISO 1600 and the ‘nifty-fifty’ 50mm f1.8 prime lens will help massively – but I also...

End of Year Quiz 2007

1. What did you do in 2007 that you’d never done before?

I was interviewed, which was quite fun.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I don’t think I made any last year, but I might make a couple this year (check back tomorrow).

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Nope (thank god).

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Sadly yes; I lost two grandparents within the space of a month which was pretty rubbish.

5. What countries did you visit?

USA and Finland.

6. What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007?

Depressingly, money. I’m quite hopeful though.

7. What date(s) from 2007 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Quite frankly, this year had a complete absence of truly memorable dates. Hopefully 2008 will be slightly better in this regard.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Being involved with this. Or possibly having a photo printed in NME.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Letting too many things get on top of me, and hence being too busy to do anything truly amazing. Also, I wish this hadn’t got so sidelined.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Nothing worse then a...

Friday Links XXXXIII

…but a Monocle’s supposed to treat myopia
Pretty much sums up perfectly my opinion of Monocle. I really want to like it, but find it insurmountably boring, and what is with the Nippophilia?

3 down, 1 to go: Warner Music Group drops DRM
Good stuff.

The Magazineer
Promising new site on magazines from Derek Powazek, founder of JPG amongst other things.

Idea: The Gethuman Dialer Application
Brilliant idea.

Wii play it together; How the some companies are redefining product usability
Nail on the head here; the Wii is outselling both the Xbox 360 and PS3 combined at the moment, and there’s a severe shortage. There’s a very good reason why, and it’s exactly the same reason the iPod does so well.

Hacky holidays on OS X
Useful reference for upgrading to 10.5 and keeping the web server going.

2007 Logo Trends
I quite like the OpticaLine ones; also, isn’t time people start using a bit more texture in logos?

101 Dumbest Moments in Business: Radiohead #1 Dumbest Moment in Journalism: Fortune

Digital music: 2007 year in review
Nice little roundup of this year in digital music. Summary: lots.

FlickrFan: A Clunky Screensaver for Mac Users
I couldn’t agree more;...

Friday Links XXXXII

A flashconf on fair use?
“I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.”

Hmm – this bit doesn’t seem to add up to me; images (unless specified with an attached license) aren’t just there for the taking. Just because people haven’t complained doesn’t mean it’s right.

Summize: A Sentiment Engine For The “Reviewosphere”
I quite like these simple visualisations of overall opinion.

Dear Head, meet Heart…and vice versa
When dealing with online communities, it’s all about heart.

Challenging the Apple archetype
Love those lego posters.

Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Amazing stuff. It would be fairly incredible if IE8 was up to the same standards as Firefox and Safari. We can but dream…

Developing apps for Google Android: it’s a mixed bag
Sounds like they’ve still got quite a way to go.

Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet and Dissect Its Inaccuracies, Fabrications, and Exaggerations Point-by-Point,...

2007 Top 20 (in videos)

Now, while compiling my excessively long Top 20 albums of 2007 post (2,163 words for those counting along at home) I briefly considered linking to an MP3 off each, before I realised two things:

1) I couldn’t be bothered (it took long enough just to write it).
2) MP3s aren’t really the best way of listening to tracks on the web, videos are.

So today, as a companion to yesterdays post, here’s the Top 20 albums of 2007 in video form:

20. Prinzhorn Dance School – Prinzhorn Dance School

Crackjack Docker (I would have shown Space Invader but they’ve rather stupidly disabled embedding on it)

19. Unkle – War Stories

Burn My Shadow

18. Kings of Leon – Because of the Times

Charmer

17. Grinderman – Grinderman

No Pussy Blues

16. Celebration – The Modern Tribe

Evergreen

15. Beirut – The Flying Club Cup