My son discovered this in the South London Theatre dressing rooms last week.
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Archive for the ‘General’ Category
links for 2008-10-04
October 4th, 2008
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McClure's metrics sideshow. V. useful.
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McClure's bravura demo of what you should measure and how. Thanks to Matt Locke for this one.
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Quote from Shirky's presentation: "If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it’s a fact." As Clay says, it's from Yitzhak Rabin "and he would know."
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Fascinating and fun introduction to cross-media content for those of us who haven't got a clue where to hang their thinking.
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This is why newspaper journalists should have blogs. Having read this will inform everything I read from Brogan in future. He's a human now, not a byline. Great stuff.
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links for 2008-10-03
October 3rd, 2008
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"People who understand coding and journalism are in great demand now — at traditional media companies as well as startups. Media companies want people who can build better systems for news production and distribution. Newsrooms want journalists who can help figure out the best way to present data-driven stories on digital platforms. Startup companies want developers who understand how people use and consume information. And there are endless opportunities to create new digital products that engage audiences with information they need to be citizens."
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links for 2008-10-02
October 2nd, 2008
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Is that makes Peston so alarmingly uncomfortable on TV also what makes him such a great blogger? Random informed verbosity - the hallmark of the ace blogger.
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links for 2008-10-01
October 1st, 2008
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A lot, say some. A little, say others. Some fascinating numbers in here, says I.
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Sign Amnesty’s petition
October 1st, 2008
Amnesty’s increasing the heat under 42 days with an online petition. Sign it. I did.
http://www.protectthehuman.com/petition_actions/say-no-to-42-days-
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links for 2008-09-30
September 30th, 2008
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"For the past year or so, I have been working with three universities on a study of the online behaviours of listeners and fans of BBC radio and over the rest of this week, we're going to be publishing guest posts from each of the researchers on their case studies: interactivity on the BBC Radio messageboards, the off-BBC activity of fans of Terry Wogan, fan cultures around the Archers and how the BBC serves specialist music fans."
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"At least as important: You can't find the clips on YouTube. As of late Monday afternoon, YouTube offered plenty of clips of Tina Fey's first turn as Palin, which ran three weeks ago. But if you wanted to see this weekend's sketch you were out of luck: You could only find small snippets, or stories about the sketch, or spam masquerading as the sketch. We don't know if that's because NBC is spending a lot of time sending takedown notices to YouTube, or if YouTube is being extra vigilant about filter. But it's certainly not a conincidence."
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"Along with six billion other humans you were forced to rethink your life plan as one set of bastards rejected a bail-out for another set of bastards because they were worried about losing their seats when a third set of bastards goes to the polls in November."
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Now Florida goes blue
September 30th, 2008
www.intrade.com continues to show McCain’s vote collapsing. Now Florida’s gone blue. Virginia went yesterday.
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links for 2008-09-29
September 29th, 2008
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Data data data.
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UK residents, get snapping! The Open Rights Group and No2ID are asking people to take pictures of stuff they see in their day-to-day lives that embodies the surveillance society the UK is turning into. In two week's time, in a London location TBC, we'll be mosaicing the photos live to make a bigger picture - a picture that shows where incremental infringements of our privacy will eventually lead.
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The latest from James Cridland on developments in higher-quality BBC audio streaming.
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I do think that Sarah Palin might be a bit of a liability, to be honest. Did you see her with Charlie Gibson the other day? When he asked her about the "Bush Doctrine?" She looked like she'd just had sap put up her anus and filled with two-dozen Vietnamese red pincher ants. It is good that she's telegenic, though. Unlike John McCain who, if I recall, is covered in deep blue mallet-shaped bruises all up and down the left side of his body, with a massively swollen eye, and more than a few broken teeth. Right John?
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"Alertness Solutions, a sleep consulting company in Cupertino, Calif., provided consultations and recommendations to a number of United States Olympic teams before the Beijing games and also works with corporate clients. Bob Agostino, vice president of operations at L. J. Aviation, in Latrobe, Pa., worked with Alertness Solutions at a previous employer and says that employees learned specific strategies to improve performance. These included when and how long to nap, how to determine the amount of sleep one needs, and how to recognize signs of fatigue and symptoms of sleep disorders."
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Advertising Age media jobs
September 29th, 2008
Chart showing increase/decrease in media jobs on 2002 and on 2006. Figures are for 2007. Looks like new media jobs got very squeezed between 2002 and 2006, doesn’t it?
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Ohio goes Blue
September 29th, 2008
Intrade shows McCain collapsing, but this is particularly interesting: Ohio has been red since pretty much the time the nominations were finalised. It’s now gone blue. Worth playing around with the electoral college calculator at http://www.intrade.com
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links for 2008-09-26
September 26th, 2008
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Behind the bluster, however, it's clear that Mascoli takes pizzas very seriously. He is particularly obsessed with dough, and is a mine of information regarding gluten, proofing temperatures and rising times. Before he and Hugo opened Franco Manca, they turned his kitchen into a dough laboratory; it took them months to perfect the recipe. Franco Manca's pizzas have a sourdough crust, which means that the dough is made using a starter culture, not yeast. The starter Mascoli and Hugo use was stolen by a friend from a bakery on Ischia (a small island off the coast of Naples) and, he says, dates from at least the 1730s. 'If it's that old, it's likely to be good.'
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"It was the most interesting of the various sessions I’ve run on this theme. Umair gives good analogy and his comparison of the social media chaff we’re creating by the truckload with the toxic debt produced by the financial community was instructive. He said that the increasingly clever and sophisticated architectures we’re developing are like the impossibly exotic financial derivatives that have brought a large part of the investment banking industry to his knees. I suggested we might liken the wasteful, unsustainable social media that’s beginning to clog the wires to the smog that disfigures big cities everywhere."
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links for 2008-09-25
September 25th, 2008
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When we first introduced you to Elgg two years ago, it was a new social networking platform whose focus was on e-learning. Since that time, the software has been rewritten and it has moved away from being strictly for educational use only. Today, the award-winning Elgg is one of the top open source social networking platforms available on the internet. A little over a month ago, Elgg 1.0 was introduced to the world. In this newest release, several years in the making, the software has been improved from the inside out. It has a more attractive UI and design, for starters. But under the hood you'll find more changes like better plugin support, RSS and OpenDD views, and a new database schema.
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The Guardian's website maintained its position as the most popular website of the national titles audited monthly by the bureau with 23,111,862 unique users – a jump of 12.1 per cent from 20,622,063 in July.
Telegraph.co.uk posted a rise of 3,313,923 unique users (17.7 per cent) from July, when the site recorded a month-on-month drop, to 22,059,948 in August. -
Jane Tranter, the outgoing BBC Fiction controller, has given the UK Web show market a major boost today by committing £1.3m for original online drama projects.
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"As for the fee structure, MySpace explains: “There is no fee for you advertisement to appear on MySpace. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your profile to learn more about your offer. We will keep showing your ad on MySpace until your campaign has reached its expiration date, or you have reached your spending limit.” There is however a $25 minimum for campaigns."
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"I had the same reaction to the BBC when I visited last year to the one I had for newspapers. The BBC is about television, what it really should be about it video and distributing that video. And the two can be disconnected. I'm a big fan producing content and finding every possible way imaginable to deliver it and monetise it."
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"This doesn't really seem to me to be the way forward at all. Somewhere they [the Telegraph managers and editors] seem to have forgotten, or jettisoned, the notion of publishing things that are interesting as opposed to iterative."
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The new integration brings several Oracle products to the cloud, including the Oracle Database (11g), Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager. These products can be licensed and run on EC2 virtual server instances and customers can even use their existing Oracle licenses with no additional license fees. There are several Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) pre-bundled with Oracle products to make it easy to set up a virtual instance of Oracle (the AMIs include Oracle developer tools such as Application Express and JDeveloper).
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links for 2008-09-24
September 24th, 2008
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Actually, the presence of a Hirst in a collection is a sure sign of dullness of taste. What serious person could want those collages of dead butterflies, which are nothing more than replays of Victorian decor? What is there to those empty spin paintings, enlarged versions of the pseudo-art made in funfairs? Who can look for long at his silly sub-Bridget Riley spot paintings, or at the pointless imitations of drug bottles on pharmacy shelves? No wonder so many business big-shots go for Hirst: his work is both simple-minded and sensationalist, just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free. Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons's balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat's stoned scribbles, Richard Prince's feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols. Such works of art are bound to hang out together, a uniform message from our fin-de-siècle decadence.
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Jesus. Can't the Internet be harnessed to put names to faces of these people?
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Looking to revamp its Online Video Network, the Associated Press is handing over the running of its video player and uploading service from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) to thePlatform, the Comcast-owned broadband and mobile video services provider.
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links for 2008-09-23
September 23rd, 2008
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Some 95% of mums and 75% of dads rely on the internet for task-oriented parenting, according to research by AOL's Platform-A and global communications agency OMD. The research looked into the lifestyle and media preferences of 7,000 online parents and found that UK parents spent eight hours of their 16-hour working day with consuming media over mobile and the internet.
The research looked into the lifestyle and media preferences of 7,000 online parents and found that UK parents spent eight hours of their 16-hour working day with consuming media over mobile and the internet.
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Best viral ad ever?
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3) Ladies - there are so many of you who don't realise you need to give space in the behaviour modification programme for your man to do guy stuff. What this might be depends on the social context. Golf, football, watching sport in general, watching porn, masturbation, going for a pint with the lads, DIY, watching Newsnight and smoking spliffs or whatever. If you don't allow for this understand that there are only two possibilities: 1) he's doing it without your knowledge, 2) if he's not doing it, at some point he'll feel the need to do so; if you don't let him, your relationship's fucked.
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links for 2008-09-22
September 22nd, 2008
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Not so long ago, media consumption was as simple as switching a channel. Today, technology and content distribution have got so complex that a new infrastructure is needed to return simplicity to media consumption. Enter URIplay, a DNS for media.
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BORIS Johnson's plan to build an artificial island in the Thames and then put an airport on it has been backed by the majority of Britain's 12 year-old boys.
According to Johnson's £500 squillion plan, the island will be surrounded by laser cannons and thousands of deadly sharks to keep out terrorists and girls.
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links for 2008-09-20
September 20th, 2008
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"With Lieutenant Thomas Wedderburn, who was nicknamed "Tojo" for his short stature and thick glasses, Challenor moved across mountainous terrain by night until they found their objective, a tunnel on the La Spezia-Bologna line. As they finished placing their charges, they heard a train approaching on the "down" line and had to sprint for their lives out of the tunnel. Moments after the first explosion, a second train rattled into the tunnel on the "up" line. Both trains were derailed and destroyed amid an almighty cacophony of torn metal and splintered wood, and the line was completely blocked.
A few days later, Tanky and Tojo blew up another train on the Pontremoli-La Spezia line for good measure, then set off southwards in the hope of finding the Allied lines. They walked for 300 miles until they reached L'Alquila, some 80 miles north of Cassino, where the Allied advance had stalled. Here a peasant matriarch, Mama Eliseio, took them in until they were finally captured, just after C
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Decent Labour website ahoy! Finally…
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links for 2008-09-19
September 19th, 2008
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"…for some time now, he's been standing up in front of large audiences, announcing that he was short Lehman Brothers stock, and then explaining in great detail its dubious accounting practices. The SEC responded by demanding to see his firm's e- mail, hinting darkly that he was part of some conspiracy to drive Lehman Brothers out of business, and generally making him feel that he'd pay a price for telling the truth."
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So here's a true fact to embellish his reputation (not that it needs much embellishment): He wrote two senior theses at Amherst. A creative thesis in English that was his first novel, "The Broom of the System," and a philosophy thesis on fatalism. Both were judged to be Summa Cum Laude theses. The opinion of those who looked at the philosophy thesis was that it, too, with just a few tweaks to flesh out the scholarly apparatus, was a publishable piece of creative philosophy investigating the interplay between time and modality in original ways.
That much is probably common knowledge. Here's what is not so widely known: Though theses normally take a whole school year to write, DFW had complete drafts of his theses by Christmas, and they were finished by spring break. He spent the last quarter of his senior year reading, commenting on, and generally improving the theses of all his friends and acquaintances. It was a great year for theses at Amherst.
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links for 2008-09-18
September 18th, 2008
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Designed to complement its S3 storage service and EC2 web services, the CDN will be available later this year and will provide users with a high performance method of distributing content to end users. Amazon claims it will have low latency and high data transfer rates when users access the content and it will be specifically designed (in the beginning at least) for “developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections.”
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A new job at Channel 4
September 14th, 2008
Big day for me tomorrow: I’m starting a new full-time position at Channel 4. After a year of working for myself, I’m stepping back into an office.
And what a way to step back. For me, Channel 4 is still the epitome of exciting homegrown media. In its first 25 years, it’s established a distinctive, forthright position in British life and it continues to produce stuff which is intelligent and creative - things like Skins and the Disarming Britain season, things which (it seems to me) no other British broadcaster, including the Big British Castle, would know how to do.
I’m going in to help Jon Gisby (my ex-boss at Yahoo!) and his New Media team plan for the future, in the context of Channel 4’s Next On 4 programme. I think Channel 4’s got some unique opportunities because, since its inception, it’s been a different type of broadcaster. As a “publisher-broadcaster” it does not produce any of its own content; it commissions it from independent producers. To apply web terms to broadcasting, it’s a platform for other people’s content: it takes programming from outside, and applies some vertical platform elements to it: scheduling, marketing, advertising and transmission. It’s like Blogger for telly.
And that is where the opportunity lies online, I think: transferring that openness and accessibility to digital platforms. Some amazing things are already happening: Loosemore going into 4IP (itself an interestingly appropriate project for C4), Matt Locke’s wonderful standalone projects in Education, the Disarming Britain blogs, and much more. I’m excited to be going into an organisation with so many brilliant people, and so much exciting creative capital. And it all starts tomorrow. Woo-hoo!
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