There’s a wonderful road which runs north to south through the Dingle Peninsula. Not for the faint-hearted (steep drops at one side), but the pay-off is a wonderful view as you come over the rise. This is what it was like this morning on the way to Inch.
… or just plain desperation? This appeared on ITV screens this morning after reports of the Hemel Hempstead oil depot fire.
Door to the cafe at Inch beach, Co Kerry, this morning. It’s run by a charming Iraqi who speaks with a broad Kerry accent. Lovely.
I’ve been following the arguments about the quality of Wikipedia entries and came on this thoughtful post by Ethan Zuckerman. Excerpt:
When I use Wikipedia to research technical topics, I generally have a positive experience, frequently finding information I would be unlikely to find in any other context, generally resolving my technical questions – “How does the GSM cellphone standard work?” with a single search. When I use Wikipedia to obtain information that I could find in a conventional encyclopedia, I often have a terrible experience, encountering articles that are unsatisfying at best and useless at worst. Generally, these experiences result from a search where I already know a little about a topic and am looking for additional, specific information, usually when I’m researching a city or a nation to provide context for a blog entry. My current operating hypothesis? Wikipedia is a fantastic reference work for stuff that doesn’t exist in other reference works, and a lousy knock-off of existing works when they do exist.
The most interesting question is not whether Friends Reunited will save ITV, but if ITV will destroy Friends Reunited. That depends on the extent to which Allen and his management team leave their acquisition alone.
Television people are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the web because they have been socially and professionally conditioned in the world of ‘push’ media with its attendant control freakery and inbuilt assumptions about the passivity and stupidity of audiences. Very little of their experience or skills are useful in a ‘pull’ medium like the web, where the consumer is active, fickle and informed, and history to date suggests that if they are put in charge of internet operations they screw up.
My guess is that Allen & Co will not be able to resist the temptation to meddle with their new toy…
