iDon’t — a lovely (and subtly effective) site which attacks iPod conformity. With those white earphone cables becoming ubiquitous, the iPod is losing its cool image. It’s becoming the aural equivalent of Marks & Spencer knickers: what your parents wore — and what you wouldn’t be seen dead in! The site is sponsored by SanDisk, makers of an inexpensive MP3 player.
Daily Archives: June 25, 2006
Open source news
Perceptive column by Jeff Jarvis. Excerpt:
A week ago, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger made quite a stir when he announced that some articles destined for the newspaper would now go to the web first. This may not seem like a big deal, except to the journalists whose circadian rhythm of meetings, deadlines and drinks will now suffer chronic jetlag. And you might say that this is being done already as major newspapers put updates online. But in giving the web priority over the paper, the Guardian is handing its crown jewels, its polished final product, to the future. And that is changing the nature of that product.
When the paper puts an edited story online hours before the old evening deadline, it means that readers may then react, asking more questions, offering more facts. And that means the reporter can augment that story for print. Thus the simple act of exposing a story to daylight before the dark of print can improve the journalism in it. After publication, this continues as readers offer more help and the story is updated online, in its text or in the discussion around it. This needn’t become an endless edition. But it is the end of news on the stone tablet. News becomes plastic. And news opens up…
Gordon Brown: my secret passion
Hi,
One of the loveliest things about being born Middle English is you grow up with a profound love of its non-rugged countryside. Middle England is renowned for its breathtaking flat bits and, like many a hardy Middle Englander, I’ve made it something of an ambition to walk across all 284 of its flat bits before I’m 60. Sometimes, there are gentle hills and the views from the top are slightly more breathtaking. They make the three-minute climb worth it.
I also have a profound love of all Middle English sports, apart from croquet. Cricket is a great obsession of mine. I love the thrill of watching the bat-wielder hit the puck and try to get it into the hands of one of the men standing away at the other end of the field. No wonder there’s an enormous cheer when he does get it into the hands of the faraway man, because that sort of accuracy deserves enormous recognition.
Middle English pastimes are also enormous fun and are something I look forward to after a day in the office or a gruelling trip abroad to my Kirkcaldy constituency.
I love pork scratchings and on Friday nights, look out, because I hit the cider.
Saturday mornings are reserved for jam-making, so I was pleased to hear last week that Waitrose is going to sell misshapen fruit at knock-down prices for all jam-makers. This is the sort of enterprise that makes Middle England the powerhouse of industrial nations.
After all, it was a Middle Englander who invented the hovercraft. Anyway, next Saturday morning, rest assured, you’ll find me outside Waitrose’s door, with my apron on, and a wicker basket, simply panting with excitement. Just let me at those bulbous apricots. Mmmm, jam. I simply can’t express too much how I love it and I hope that’s coming across.
Then, after jam-making in the mornings, Saturday afternoons are left free for morris dancing. Sarah always teases me about how nuts I am about morris dancing. I pour my heart and soul into it, but it’s something I like to do on my own. After a tedious meeting in the City about money or some such, I hop straight on to a train into the Middle English countryside with a bag of bells and a stick. Then I go to a secluded clearing or dell in the woods and morris dance to my heart’s content. Then Sarah picks me up and we both go off for a late-night pub lunch. She keeps this magic spot secret, which is why there are no visual records in existence of me ever doing it. I’m extremely grateful to her for that. She keeps me very very un-dour.
Gordon
Taking on copyright abusers
This morning’s Observer column…
This year, Bloomsday was marked in somewhat different ways. In Dublin, the festivities were cancelled because of the state funeral of Charlie Haughey, the former Taoiseach. Such restraint was entirely out of character with the spirit of Bloomsday, for Haughey was as colourful a rogue as any encountered by Leopold Bloom on his perambulations on the day in 1904 on which the novel is set. The correct thing to do would have been to infiltrate the obsequies, thereby highlighting the absurdity of a political establishment seeking to pretend that Haughey had been somehow a statesman of note.
The failure of Joycean nerve in Dublin was, however, offset by a laudable display of spunk in California, where Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University filed a legal suit against James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, in a US district court, accusing the administrator of the writer’s estate of ‘copyright misuse’.
Given that the entire publishing world has been legally intimidated by Stephen Joyce for decades, this is a landmark action. And the case will be followed with interest in every jurisdiction in which works on James Joyce are published….