Excellent post by Andy Hairgrove.
Google’s new designs WASTE vertical space. It is as if they designed their applications for a monitor/screen that is set on it's side (720 wide X 1280 high instead of 1280 wide X 720 high).
He’s right — as the illustrations in his post explain.
Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, gave a terrific talk on “Innovation in Open Networks” at the Judge Business School today.
One of the points I often make in lectures is that economics has severe limitations as an analytical framework for looking at our new media ecosystem because it’s the study of the allocation of scarce resources, whereas what characterises the digital ecosystem is abundance. That sounds glib when I say it, but this installation by Erik Kessels — on show as part of an exhibition at Foam in Amsterdam — makes the point vividly. It features print-outs of all the images uploaded to Flickr in a single 24-hour period. There are several rooms like this…
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Back to the OU this afternoon (accompanied by my Arcadia Fellow, Helle Porsdam, who is doing a project on digital humanities) for the launch of Martin Weller’s new book, The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice. It’s a remarkably satisfying and rounded examination of three important and puzzling questions:
1. How is digital technology affecting scholarly practice?
2. How could it affect scholarly practice?
3. What are the implications for academia?
What’s great about Martin is that — unlike some academics — he doesn’t opine about this stuff from the sidelines: he lives and breathes networked scholarship. Thus he not only maintains a thoughtful and widely respected blog, but he campaigns energetically to have scholarly blogging recognised as a legitimate form of scholarly activity. He believes that academic work should be networked and open, and so refuses to do peer-reviewing for ‘closed’ journals. And in choosing a publisher for his new book, he went for Bloomsbury Academic, which publishes scholarly books under a Creative Commons licence. (Full disclosure: I’m on the Advisory Board of Bloomsbury Academic.) So you can buy the book in conventional print form. But you can also read it online for free.
I wish there were more academics like him.
Useful review in Wired of the upcoming Amazon Fire tablet. The verdict: don’t hold your breath.
If you already have $200 in your high-tech hardware slush fund, and you’re not willing to splurge one cent more, I suggest you wait longer before pulling the trigger on a tablet. Let that nest egg build. Let it grow interest. Wait for the Kindle Fire 2.
Or — yes, I’m going to go there — consider an iPad.
By the time iPad 3 comes out, Apple’s cheapest iPad 2 will almost certainly be even cheaper. And this could very well be the tablet for you: 9.7 inches of uncompromised screen real estate, a processor that rips through web pages like a chainsaw, and an app and digital content ecosystem that’s already commensurate to (if not better than; let’s be serious) anything Amazon offers.
iPad killer? No, the Kindle Fire is not. And it doesn’t even match the iPad in web browsing, the one area in which its hardware should have sufficient performance to compete. But the press has definitely supercharged Amazon’s product launch with a level of hype and enthusiasm that would make Apple proud.
WIRED A great platform for casual video playback. A perfectly fine Android 2.3 app device. A price that pleads “buy me,” repeatedly, until you crack a big grin, and give in like a good-natured father buying trinkets for the kids at Wal-Mart.
TIRED Small screen size and insufficient processing power. Crap browser performance. Near useless as a magazine reader, and roundly trumped by superb e-ink Kindles as a book reader.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Lovely time-lapse photography taken with a special low-light 4K-camera by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011.
This morning’s Observer column.
When a fellow MP once observed to Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary in the postwar Labour government, that his cabinet colleague Herbert Morrison was “his own worst enemy”, Bevin – who loathed Morrison – famously replied: “Not while I’m alive, he ain’t.” I keep thinking of this every time Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, appears in the news. The man does indeed appear to be his own worst enemy – alienating all but the most sycophantic supporters, repudiating his “authorised” biography, and so on. The impression one gets from conversations with people who have worked with him is that, as a colleague, he makes the late Steve Jobs look like St Francis of Assisi. But the truth is that Assange has far more formidable enemies than himself. And many of them work for what we might now call “old media”.
Great article by David Runciman about why British politicians are so afraid of the newspapers. Excerpt:
Politicians are always complaining that the 24-hour media cycle doesn’t give them time to think because the story is always changing. But there is another problem. As well as having short attention spans, newspapers also have long ones. They are still there long after the politicians have gone, which means they always get the last word. At the beginning of the film The Queen, Tony Blair is ushered into Downing Street and told by his monarch that he is her 10th prime minister. It is not hard to imagine a similar scene being played out in the court of Rupert Murdoch. David Cameron, after all, is his seventh prime minister. Murdoch resembles the Queen in more ways than he might like to admit. As well as being autocratic, press power also tends to be dynastic (the Daily Mail still belongs to the Rothermeres; Murdoch is still desperate to pass some newspapers to his children, as his father passed some newspapers to him). A lot depends on being able to outlast the politicians. The web has undone plenty of things about the newspaper business, but so far it hasn’t undone that. Newspaper owners can keep their power in the family in a way that democratic politicians can’t, however much some of them (the Clintons, the Bushes) might like to try.
One day soon that might change. The web, as well as altering the way we consume news, has also speeded up the business cycle: online enterprises rise and fall much faster than traditional media operations. As yet, this hasn’t reached the newspaper business. No new national title has been launched for more than two decades, and none has gone out of business, with the exception of the News of the World. But if newspapers start folding, and newspaper ownership starts changing hands more rapidly than it has done in the past, that might finally break the spell of the press barons. If it does happen, though, the politicians won’t simply feel relief. They will also feel a pang of regret and perhaps even of panic. The web, for all its ability to cut newspapers down to size, can’t offer politicians the same comforts. Newspapers represent the sort of power that politicians know, understand and respect. However much they might complain, as Blair did in his dying days in office, about the “feral” qualities of the press, it is nothing compared with the feral qualities of the web. No one can control it. As Henry Kissinger complained of Europe, when you want to call the internet, who do you call? At least Murdoch offered that reassurance – a voice at the end of the line.
Earlier in the piece, Runciman makes a perceptive observation that the real power of British newspapers comes not from determining the outcome of elections (apolitical readers don’t do what they’re advised by editorial writers) but from their ability to foment and amplify enmities and rivalries within parties and governments — which gives electorates the impression of the one thing voters apparently hate, namely internal bickering and feuding.
Worth reading in full.
End of the day on the Dingle peninsula. The view from the surfing beach on the Maharees.
Larger version here.
