The Orchard in Grantchester, the other day. It looks a bit forlorn at this time of year, but it’s still the nicest place to have afternoon tea in or near Cambridge. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s next door to Jeffrey ‘Lord’ Archer’s country pile.
Blackout
It’s strange how shocking this is. It’s a reminder of how dependent we have become on our networked environment. As a sardonic colleague put it this morning, some of his students are going to be mightily discombobulated today when they realise that (a) an essay is due and (b) Wikipedia isn’t available. But that’s too cynical. He and I use Wikipedia every day, and it often saves us a lot of footnoting and explanation.
The blackout served a useful purpose — that of drawing attention to the SOPA and PIPA Bills now before the US Congress. I wrote about these on January 8. Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, has posted a really good essay explaining why he — and the Lab — oppose the Bills.
On the Internet…
… Nobody knows you’re a dog.
Lovely, witty photograph by Quentin.
Sunlight through a doorway
Wikipedia: many happy returns
Wikipedia turned 15 yesterday — so it’s now a fully-fledged adolescent. On the other hand if you count it in Internet years, it’s 105.
Either way, it’s a significant milestone. Here are two ways to celebrate it.
The Digger on Twitter?
Hmmm… There’s a Twitter account that purports to be from the man himself. The tweets are like a caricature of the Digger’s views as represented by Private Eye.
He/It has 140,751 followers at the moment.
I wonder…
Is YouTube really a threat to conventional TV?
From my piece in yesterday’s Observer.
The big question is whether YouTube poses a strategic threat to the traditional television industry. Up to now, most observers have been sceptical about that. They see conventional TV and YouTube as inhabitants of parallel universes. TV is all about marshalling scarce and expensive resources, exerting tight editorial control and charging for content. YouTube is all about the absence of editorial control, not charging for content, harnessing the abundance of free, user-generated (and sometimes copyrighted) material and extracting value from it by attaching personalised advertising to video clips.
The parallel-universes theory appears to be supported by comparisons of how people use YouTube and conventional TV. While a lot of people visit YouTube every day, they stay, on average, for only 15 minutes. Conventional television viewing, on the other hand, at between four and five hours a day in the US, seems to be holding up quite well. On the basis of these numbers, can TV executives continue to sleep easily?
Maybe. But Google, which owns YouTube, has plans to increase the “stickiness” of YouTube by getting into the content-creation business…
Red, red, red
Has Microsoft Word affected the way we write
This morning’s Observer column.
Here’s a trick question: who’s produced the most books in the past 30 years? Answer: a guy called Charles Simonyi. Eh? Well, I said it was a trick question. Mr Simonyi, you see, is the chap who created Microsoft Word, which is the word-processing program used by perhaps 95% of all writers currently extant, and although Simonyi didn’t actually write any books himself, the tool he made has definitely affected the ways texts are created. As Marshall McLuhan was fond of saying, we shape our tools and afterwards they shape us.
I write with feeling on the matter. When I started in journalism, I wrote on a manual typewriter. After I’d composed a paragraph, I would look at it, scribble between the lines, cross out words, type some more before eventually tearing the page out of the machine and retyping the para on a fresh sheet. This would go on until my desk was engulfed in a rising tide of scrunched-up balls of paper.
So you can imagine my joy when Mr Simonyi’s program appeared…
The piece has attracted some very thoughtful comments.
Everything you need to know about this year’s CES
From David Pogue.
LAS VEGAS — If you just peek into the huge International Consumer Electronics Show, you might think that it’s mostly a deafening showcase for tablets, thin TV screens, superthin laptops and Android phones.
But if you really take the time to look — if you walk all 15 miles of exhibit halls — you’ll discover that, in fact, you were right. C.E.S. really is primarily a deafening showcase for tablets, thin TV screens, superthin laptops and Android phones.