… is online. Lots of speculation in the Blogosphere about What It Means. I like the view that it’s basically early Yahoo! in reverse: where Yahoo! had Directory first, then Search, Google now has Search first, Directory second. And users build the directory, whereas Yahoo! had to pay people to do it for them. But it’s too early to say how this will pan out.
The complete New Yorker archive
Yep. The entire shooting match on eight DVDs.
4,109 issues. Half a million pages. And only $70. I want it. Now. Transatlantic shipping is $65 though. Hmmm… who do I know in the US who’s contemplating a trip?
Pure talent…
… is a wonderful thing. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik has it in spades. I’ve just read two beautiful pieces by him in the same week. First his lovely preface to the new edition of Molly Hughes’s Victorian memoir, A London Child of the 1870s, and then a startlingly good New Yorker essay on C.S. Lewis.
Moonrise
There are some things for which digital cameras are just useless. And of course at the back of every photographer’s mind at this time of the evening is Ansel Adams’s unforgettable picture of Hernandez, New Mexico.
Blazes of glory
Sunset over East Anglia, this afternoon.
Blair abolishes elections:
“too dangerous” say police chiefs
Lovely spoof from Owen Barder’s Blog.
PIN 2 PIN
Quentin alerted me to an interesting facility of the BlackBerry — direct handset-to-handset messaging. In the event of a catastrophic loss of network, email, or back-end infrastructure, BlackBerry users can take advantage of PIN-to-PIN messaging to communicate directly with similarly-equipped folks over the wireless network. Unlike email, PIN messages travel within RIM’s messaging network and are not routed through your organisation’s (or network’s) email servers. This provides greater speed of interaction and communications fault tolerance. BlackBerry PIN messaging will continue to work when email servers are down or when their connection to the Internet is disrupted. That’s one reason why BlackBerries are increasingly popular with governments and security services. Paradoxically, it’s also why they have become problematic for US banks and financial institutions in a post-Enron age. Many financial firms are bound by SEC and NASD regulations to archive and monitor all forms of communications between their employees and customers — and to avoid the liability of non-compliance, many have chosen to disable PIN messaging, thus reducing the communication flexibility provided by the BlackBerry device. Verily technology giveth and the law taketh away.
Peter Drucker…
The real significance of the DVD
Normal Lebrecht ponders what happens when you can have everything on your bookshelf (or on your hard drive):
The complete works of Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut are about to go on sale and no self-respecting cineaste will walk by without feeling a tug at the purse strings. To have and to hold every film that guided your artistic and emotional maturation, through adolescence and beyond, is something many will find irresistible. Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Tarkovsky and the Ealing comedies are equally on offer. What was formerly part of a romanticised past, glimpsed infrequently on late-night TV, has become urgently present (perhaps the perfect present). The eternally elusive turns up in plastic boxes.
What this means, in cultural terms, is that film now takes its place beside literature, music and visual imagery as an art that can be owned and bookmarked. Where once you had to visit a cinema or spool through half a mile of clunky videotape in order to access a seminal scene in an essential movie, you now zone into it on DVD as quickly as finding a name in the index of an artist biography.
Publish and be downloaded
This morning’s Observer column.
While the internet has been rampaging through the business models of the music, newspaper and movie industries, book publishers have been quietly hoping that if they keep their heads down the monster will go away. After all, print is rather low-tech and unsexy, and teenagers aren’t much interested in it, so the dangers of being ripped off wholesale by online text-sharing seemed remote…