David Emery OnlineExcitement about excitement
“BOWIE!”
“Bowieeeee!!!!”
“BOWIEOMG”
“Bowie isn’t dead!”
“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWIE! BOWIEBOWIEBOWIEBOWIEBOWIEBOWIE! hyperventilates BOWIE! #Bowie”
All these tweets were posted within about 20 minutes of each other yesterday morning.
They simultaneously represent the best and worst of twitter.
Twitter is probably the best tool for breaking news you could think of. I remember in the weeks that followed the 7/7 London bombing when everything felt dangerous, strange and on edge pondering about the idea of a “breaking news” notification system that could pop up something on your computer if something important happened. Now we have that, but not just for what’s important to the world in general, but what’s important to you – a hand picked, curated importance. If something of interest happens and I’m near an open twitter client I’ll know what’s happened within minutes (if not seconds).
Same goes for when a funny picture of a cat get’s uploaded somewhere, but that’s my point – it’s curated.
But whilst we’ve gained something have we lost something as well?
In the speed to report events, there’s no time for opinion, no time for accuracy, no time for anything but “this happened!”. Frothy excitement, with no substance. All bubbles.
Maybe this is fine. The first wave of froth hits the...
Read more ➔The Mercury Effect
A little later then normal we are finally in that yearly UK music industry shit storm that is the Mercury Prize. As per normal the list is “uninspiring” and “does it really represent the best of UK music this year” and “why wasn’t [obscure eletro/metal/folk artist] nominated?!?”.
Side note – it’s entirely possible I follow too many music journalists on Twitter.
For the record there’s a couple of artists on the list that I wouldn’t mind winning, but it doesn’t seem like the most interesting selection of music I’ve ever seen. Nothing that grabs me, or moves music forward in a significant way.
But the music is irrelevant really, isn’t it? What we really want are graphs!
One of the key reasons why anyone actually cares about the Mercury prize is that it has a direct effect on sales of the nominated and winning records. It’s a bit of a circular situation – the industry cares because it increases sales, and it increases sales because the industry cares. And everyone sits there hoping that every year the house of cards stays intact (which it seems to, even when they get it a bit wrong *cough* Speech Debelle).
What I was wondering is what exactly does...
Read more ➔Retina iPad vs The Web
Many words have already been spilled about the sheer beauty of the screen on the new iPad; whilst they seem hyperbolic, they are pretty spot on: it’s amazing. The best screen I’ve ever seen, easily.
In fact, it’s too good.
When the iPhone 4 came out I – and many others – started shunning any apps that hadn’t been “retina-ized”, as they looked pretty rubbish in comparison with everything else on the device. The web got away ok on this front, as the screen was pretty small and most sites were being scaled down anyway (in fact, the retina display really helped with the readability of scaled down sites).
Now, however, in comes the retina iPad and it doesn’t have that luxury of scaling down sites; it has a big enough display to show sites at full resolution, and in fact the web is one of the primary uses of the device.
And now, all of a sudden, it looks rubbish.
Text is fine, as is anything using CSS3 properties like border-radius, but any and all graphics look pretty horrible and stand out like a sore thumb in their near 8bit pixel-y glory.
Fortunately it’s pretty easy to send retina-display devices (currently only iPads, iPods and...
Read more ➔Music apps – beyond the hype
‘Music apps – beyond the hype’ takes an in-depth look at the business realities of producing, marketing and monetising music related apps. The event features an overview of the music apps market, practical advice on how best to market your apps, instructive lessons from a variety of artist apps case studies, and a variety of speakers from across the music apps value chain.
I’ll be talking about the Adele mobile app at this tonight – hopefully should be a pretty interesting event.
Visit ➔Jack White - Love Interruption
"Love Interruption" is the first taste of Jack White's debut album, Blunderbuss, out April 23 on Third Man Records/XL Recordings.
Firstly: new Jack White solo record! I am a massive White Stripes fan, so this is a Very Good Thing. Also, we made a widget for it that spins at 45rpm:
I’m not sure if I’ve really mentioned the widgets we’ve developed and have been using since last August – they’re quite nifty, if I do say so myself. They’re HTML5-based and work on iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices; they get detected by the lovely HypeMachine so they show up when bloggers post about them; they’re completely fluid (using both media queries and a dab of JS) so they should work at any size; and lastly you can use them as little iOS web apps (if you have a data connection) – try saving this page to your home screen for example.
Visit ➔Google Fuses Google+ Into Search
The short version is that Google search results are going to be automatically personalized (to a greater degree than they were already) for each user, with signals drawn from your Google+ Circles being used to highlight things your friends — or you, yourself — have shared. Any of these personalized matches will appear alongside ‘normal’ search results. And Google will also pull in photos shared on Picasa or Google+ (they’ll even show up if you’ve marked them private, but they’ll still only be visible to you).
It seems like there’s an ever growing opportunity for someone to come in and do search much better then Google does it, stripping it back to basics and focusing on the quality of results (which are appalling for so many search types – anything product focused just leads to page upon page of retailer sites, for example).
I think the attempt to (badly) add social features to all of their platforms could be the undoing of Google.
Visit ➔How does a Pitchfork review affect an album's popularity?
Pitchfork is a popular-as-hell indie music blog. It's got a hipster-snobby reputation and the reviews are best summarised as "When Adjectives Attack," but their recommendations tend to be on the money and I've found a lot of good music thanks to their Best New Music category.
Pitchfork's also got a reputation of being a real tastemaker, anointing new albums & artists to the big leagues. But is this backed up by the data? I decided to find out.
In short: they don’t (although you need more data for a less flippant conclusion). Also: yay for graphs!
Visit ➔Defending Facebook
This is cross posted from the Music Ally blog, which has a new strand focused on industry opinions and analysis. It’s also a response to this post, also on the Music Ally blog by Darren Hemmings, so you might want to read that first for a slightly different take.
I feel like something of an rebel at this point as – unlike seemingly the rest of the tech community – I quite like Facebook. They’re a developer powerhouse, and with their recent acquisitions becoming increasingly a design powerhouse as well (the new timeline is a lovely piece of work, for example). They don’t always get things right, but they try lots of things and that’s far more interesting then being cautious – just look at the amount of development and change of Facebook in the last couple of years versus Twitter, for example.
The new ticker, and associated “Frictionless” sharing is a great example of them taking a chance on a concept, and to me it makes a lot of sense but could do with a bit of refining. The idea of sharing more things to Facebook opens up all sorts of possibilities (and not just for advertisers)...
Read more ➔Modern Grief
“R.I.P.” – about 3 minutes ago
Last Sunday, at around lunchtime, my Twitter feed spontaneously filled up with tributes to the late Gary Speed. It seems as though he took his own life at the age of 42, which is tragic whatever way you look at it. That kind of instant, mass outpouring of sadness is like a punch in the gut; you can’t help but be effected.
Up until lunchtime yesterday I had no idea who Gary Speed was. Now, I was grieving for him (albeit in only a relatively small way).
This is not a unique experience. In fact, it’s almost becoming a daily experience; if you keep an eye on the trends on Twitter you won’t go to long without seeing one for someone that has died, and the subsequent stream of tweets – of remembrance – that got the term trending.
There’s two angles on to why this is so affecting; social recommendation power and the instant nature of the modern Internet. We’ve long talked about how much more powerful a recommendation from a friend is versus one from a more traditional media source, and the same goes for death – a “R.I.P.” from a friend means so much more...
Read more ➔Early Results: Social News and the Open Graph
With the Open Graph , publishers can build a new kind of news app that makes it easy for people to discover what their friends are reading, and look back at top articles over time. As part of these features, we've also introduced new settings so people can easily control the experience after they opt-in. Each user decides if he or she wants to install a social news app, chooses the audience of who can see their activity with it, and can make edits to their settings at anytime.
I’ve seen a lot of criticism (a lot of which is pretty spot on) of some of the news publications and their integration with Facebook using the new Open Graph APIs, as typically they hijack links posted by other people to Facebook and funnel them into a custom app, and also auto-share things to the FB ticker.
These criticisms are almost universally directed at Facebook, but as this post shows it’s the publishers that should be getting the flack; yes, potentially Facebook could potentially place more restrictions on what the APIs can do, but almost all of the issues are on the publishers end.
Visit ➔