This is something new. A project to launch an independent, viewer-funded news TV station (and a 24/7 news website).
Thanks to Francis Meynell for the link.
Memory Mapping
Here’s an interesting idea. Flickr allows one to select sections of an image and add an annotation to the image corresponding to the selected portion. Someone who’d been an undergraduate at Cambridge has taken an aerial photograph of the city and annotated it with his memories of various locations. Given his memories, I wonder if that was a particularly wise thing to do, but the idea is intriguing and ingenious.
Thanks to Brian for the link.
Corporate psychoses
From Stowe Boyd’s Work blog…
Working with a client recently, an executive said something along these lines:
We don’t need to do the right thing, because we can do the wrong thing really well.
This has got to be one of the most dangerous sorts of thinking in start-ups, which I believe are all psychological reactions to stress, leading to ‘entrepreneurialitis’. Here’s others that I worry about whenever I hear them:
1. We don’t need to do the right thing, because we can do the wrong thing really well. [means: we don’t have to adapt to the world, the world will have to adapt to us.]
2. Yes, that feature is important, but we’ll put it into a later release. [means: I don’t want to decide what’s important, so we will defer.]
3. We don’t need to test the business model: it’s obvious! [means: I don’t know how to test the business model.]
4. We don’t need to bring in outside experts, and we don’t have time to assimilate that many viewpoints, anyway. [We know everything, and who the hell are you, wise guy?]
5. People believe that building successful applications is hard, but it’s easy if you just [fill in pet obsession here]. [means: it better be simple, because that’s all I am prepared for.]
6. I know what to do: God told me. [This actually happened to me, I am not kidding.]
These range from the mildly out of touch to the paranoid and delusional, but they all are dangerous. Anything short of painful openness to the complexities and subtleties of building successful apps, any retreat from trying to learn from others successes and failures, can lead to complacency, insider thinking, convergent mindsets, and eventually doom for the company…
DRM-free publication
This morning’s Observer column…
From the moment the internet appeared in 1983, it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that it was a heaven-sent machine for delivering bits from one place to another. This insight, however, somehow eluded the record companies, despite the fact that they had just gone digital (the CD was launched in 1982) and were in the business of transporting bits from recording studios to consumers’ CD players.
Over the next decade and a half, the music industry continued to ignore the net. As a result, the record companies failed to develop a legal method for consumers to buy music online. In 1999, Shawn Fanning launched Napster and unleashed the illicit file-sharing habits that nearly destroyed the industry…
Ancient relics
Came on this — the first ‘integrated’ package for the Macintosh — when sorting stuff in my office. I couldn’t bear to throw it out. And although none of my current Macs has a drive that could read the disk, I still have my Mac Plus, which can.
My other roof’s a ski-jump
I love the jaunty look of these houses in Northampton Street, Cambridge. I can imagine Pixar making the one on the right into an animated cartoon character.
Guardian reaches issue no. 50,000
Yep. Today’s edition is the 50,000th. Quite an achievement and one marked by publishing a facsimile of the very first edition. “It is unlikely”, said the blurb, “we would [today] lead the paper with an ad for a lost dog”. The ad reads:
TAKEN UP
A BLACK NEWFOUNDLAND BITCH, and person having lost the same may have her again on describing her marks, and paying all expences, by applying at No. 80 Shudehall or at the York Inn.
NB If now owned in 14 days from the date below, she will be sold to defray expences.
May 5, 1821
The price of the first edition was seven pence, which I imagine was a substantial sum in those days — equivalent perhaps to the £3.95 that I pay for the New Yorker in a newsagent.
Wonder if there will be a 100,000 paper edition of the Guardian ? I wouldn’t bet on it. (Just as well, really — I won’t be around to collect or pay up.)
Babelgum: the poor man’s Joost?
That’s what TechCrunch thinks anyway.
[Aside] Where do they get these daft names from?
Steal this laptop
Richard Charkin is a Big Cheese in Macmillan, the publishers. On his blog he admits to a heist. He posts a photograph of the Google stand at a trade fair (BookExpo America). Then, he continues:
There’s no computer where a computer should be to the left of the gentleman’s arm. You will also notice that there is no sign saying ‘please do not steal the computers’. I confess that a colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed. This took more than an hour.
Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.
‘If you don’t tell us we may not digitise something, we shall do so. But we do no evil. So if you tell us to desist we shall.’
I felt rather shabby playing this trick on Google. They should feel the same playing the same trick on authors and publishers…
Well it’s one way of making your point. And an even better way of getting attention.