One of the things that the Web-is-dead meme also ignores is the small matter of HTML5. Here’s an eye-opening set of experiments showing what can be done with it.
Daily Archives: August 22, 2010
The lost decade
Interesting, thoughtful talk by Umair Haque.
The real crisis isn’t about bankers, bonuses, and bailouts — it’s about an economy that’s geared to create thin value; value that’s artificial, meaningless, and often, actually worth little, in human terms. So the real challenge isn’t about eking out another penny of profit by laying off more another hundred people, offshoring with an even greater ferocity, crushing your fiercest rival more savagely, or churning out more lowest-common-denominator “product.” It’s about learning to create thicker value: authentic value, that endures, resonates, and multiplies. Unless, of course, you think you can survive another lost decade.
Remembering Frank
I wrote a small tribute to Frank Kermode for today’s Observer.
Ever since Tuesday, a movie has been running on a continuous loop in my mind. In it, I am driving down Grange Road in Cambridge, passing Selwyn College’s gloomy front range and turning right into Pinehurst, the enclave of classy apartment blocks sometimes known as “life’s departure lounge” because it’s where retired dons go after they’ve downsized. I park outside the most upmarket block and ring the bell. The door opens into a discreetly carpeted foyer and the lift whooshes me upwards. Then it stops and the door opens. And there is Frank, smiling, with pipe in hand and twinkle in eye. “Come in, come in,” he says, and we settle in his booklined sitting-room with the view over Selwyn Gardens to drink, smoke and gossip. And each time this happens, I cannot believe my luck, because I spent a good deal of my earlier life in awe of the man who is now – apparently – treating me as an equal…
The ‘Death-of-the-Web’ meme rides again
This morning’s Observer column.
It’s possible, of course, that the Anderson-Wolff scare story was the product of an innocent mistake. But let us, for a moment, refuse them the benefit of the doubt. The core of their argument is that the popularity of apps as on iPhone and Android phones signals the death knell of the web. The marketplace has spoken, they write. When it comes to the applications that run on top of the net, people are starting to choose quality of service. We want TweetDeck to organise our Twitter feeds because it s more convenient than the Twitter web page. The Google Maps mobile app on our phone works better in the car than the Google Maps website on our laptop. And we’d rather lean back to read books with our Kindle or iPad app than lean forward to peer at our desktop browser.
That’s the message. Now, who is the messenger? Answer: Condé Nast, the publishing conglomerate that owns Wired — as well as the New Yorker, GQ and Vanity Fair. The web has posed a serious threat to their business model as it has to almost all print publishers because they have thus far failed to find a way to get people to pay serious money for online content.
The arrival of iPhone and, later, iPad apps was the first good news that magazine conglomerates had received in a decade. Why? Because, in contrast to the Wild West Web, apps are tightly controlled by Apple and consumers willingly pay for them. As a result, print publishers have fallen on the apps idea like ravening wolves…