If you type “iPhone” into the Google search bars in Firefox (left) and Safari (right), you get subtly different results. Why? After all, one is querying the same search engine.
Thanks to Pete for pointing it out.
Later: Many thanks to all who emailed pointing out that one search was on google.co.uk and the other on google.com. The great thing about the Web is that it enables one to expose one’s ignorance/carelessness so comprehensively. Headgear being eaten as you read this.
This morning’s Observer column…
Let us now brandish a clove of garlic and dispel the Reality Distortion Field for a moment. The iPhone looks like a cute gadget, but it does raise awkward questions. Will its screen scratch as easily as the iPod Nano’s does? Will it be as unreliable as the iPod range appears to be? (I speak from bitter experience.) Why does it have a built-in battery, just like the iPods? Will users have to send their phones back to Apple when the batteries give up the ghost? How robust is the mobile version of OS X – the phone’s operating system? Why is the mobile connectivity not 3G? And how did Apple come to overlook the awkward fact that the ‘iPhone’ name belongs to Cisco?
Answers, please – engraved on the back of a dead iPod – to Steven P Jobs, Apple Inc, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA 95014, USA.
One’s personality and vision are shaped by other writers, by movies, by paintings, by music. But the work itself, you know — sentence by sentence, page by page — it’s much too intimate, much too private, to come from anywhere but deep inside the writer himself. It comes out of all the time a writer wastes. We stand around, look out of the window, walk down the hall, come pack to the page, and, in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream that comes out of daydreaming. It’s too deep to be attributed to clear sources.
From a conversation with David Remnick that was published originally in the New Yorker and later in Reporting.
Thoughtful column by the Guardian‘s music critic, Dorian Lynskey, reflecting on the commenting that now follows almost every piece on the paper’s website…
I’m not convinced, though, that what might politely be described as “robust” debate on the blog generates light as well as heat. The internet has always licensed people to be far ruder than they would be in a face-to-face encounter. In 1990, US attorney Mike Godwin formulated Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Similarly, as an arts blog discussion grows longer, the probability of the writer being branded “smug”, “pointless”, “arrogant” or “London-obsessed” approaches one.
There is an appetite for genuine debate on the web, but it is often drowned out by the howling of people who seem to regard the very existence of professional critics as an outrageous affront. The subtext is this: anyone can be a critic, so anyone who has the temerity to be paid for the privilege deserves to be put in the stocks.
This is just one front in a wide-ranging battle between the blogosphere and so-called old media. In an ideal world, there should be room for both print critics and online ones, with plenty of overlap between them. Good writing is good writing, wherever it appears. But the campaign is in its early days and there are several years’ worth of grievances to thrash out before a peace treaty can be agreed.
Many of the people who post on blogs appear to be annoyed not by what the writers say so much as the fact that they’re in a position to say it. You can spot this type because they write things like: “You’ve only written this to provoke a reaction.” Or: “Why did you even write this? What a waste of time.” As if writing to complain about a waste of time were not, in fact, a bigger waste of time. Or, my favourite: “Typical Guardian.” Perhaps they also post on the website of Practical Caravan magazine, complaining: “Typical Practical Caravan. So caravancentric.”
The most belligerent voices on the blogs speak with either a weary, condescending sneer or a florid pomposity redolent of Ignatius J Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. If, as they imply, their taste is flawless and their intellect mighty, then perhaps they could find a better use for these prodigious gifts than taking potshots on websites. Just a thought…
From the extraordinary Inside Iraq Blog maintained by the McClatchy Baghdad Bureau…
A couple of weeks ago it was time for my wife to deliver a baby girl, in that day me, my wife, my mother and my wife’s mother headed to the hospital in karada area at about 7:30 am, its usually takes between 30 – 40 minutes with the normal traffic but in that day something happened!!!! A car bomb exploded almost half way to the hospital and the only way which led to the hospital was blocked for many hours, I could see my wife started getting very worried and I was too but I tried not to show her about my concerns, the traffic was not moving at all for a couple of hours and I was worried that my wife might start having delivery pain but thank god we made it after 4 hours and it was the longest hours in my life, after all I had a beautiful baby daughter that made me forget the long tiring day.
James Button has a thoughtful and interesting interview with John Lloyd in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Lloyd has helped to found the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. Opened in November, it plans to analyse a profession he believes is too little studied. This is remarkable, given its power. Compare the amount it is studied with the scrutiny of politics or law. Part of the problem is that the media usually do a poor job of reflecting on themselves.
Lloyd, the institute’s director of journalism, plans to get journalists thinking and writing about what they do. How, for example, do they balance ethical priorities against the commercial demands of employers? How will the digital age change reporting? Lloyd knows of few centres anywhere trying to answer such questions (the University of Melbourne is believed to be planning a similar project). He thinks that, for journalism’s health, that has to change.
The idea for the institute came to him when he returned to London in 1996 after five years as Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times. Before that, he had worked in television, edited Time Out and the moderate-left magazine New Statesman, and was British Journalist of the Year in 1984. But an insight changed him from being merely in the media to a thinker about the media.
In Russia, people relied almost totally on new newspapers and television stations for political information. That was unsurprising: the all-powerful Soviet state had collapsed and parties and the non-government sector were still too frail to command the political stage.
But in Britain, with its long history of civic institutions, Lloyd observed the same phenomenon. On the Labour side, unions had lost power. The many local and patriotic organisations linked to the Conservatives had atrophied. Neither party retained a large membership base; almost no one attended political meetings.
Instead, the media had become “almost the monopoly carrier of political messages”. If politicians wanted to speak to the people, they had nowhere to go but to a camera or a reporter’s notebook. In Britain, Russia and elsewhere, the fields had effectively merged. Politics had become media…
Thanks to Adrian Monck for the link.
Psst… want to know who will win the next-generation DVD format battle? According to this report, the ‘adult’ entertainment industry has plumped for HD DVD — the Toshiba format. Poor ol’ Sony: it’s Betamax all over again.
Some of the stuff Wired spotted at Macworld.
Funny story from James Murphy’s review of the second volume of Gore Vidal’s autobiography:
The names continue to drop at a rate unknown outside the pages of Hello! magazine, and the end paper collage pictures the author’s apotheosis, surrounded by crowding celebrities, as it might have been attempted by Tiepolo. Some we have met before, some not. We get to know more of Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, and friends from the hotter media like Paul Newman and the chat show host Johnny Carson, but acting here as his own Boswell, Vidal offers much less anecdotal detail than he gave us before. Still, many of his stories are diverting and some are even memorable, such as the demand which the actor-director José Ferrer received from Hollywood studio executives to exclude all reference to Jews from a film he was making about the Dreyfus Affair…
The New York Times sees parallels between the iPhone and the original Macintosh.
When the Macintosh computer — which was also designed by a small group shrouded in secrecy — was introduced in January 1984, it was received with the same kind of wild hyperbole that greeted the iPhone this week. But a year later, the shortcomings of the first-generation Macintosh cost Mr. Jobs his job at the company he founded nine years earlier with a high school friend, Stephen Wozniak.
In light of the iPhone’s closed appliance-style design, it is worth recounting the Mac’s early history because of the potential parallel pitfalls that Mr. Jobs and his company may face.
Despite its high price of $2,495, the Macintosh initially sold briskly. But Mr. Jobs’s early predictions of huge sales failed to materialize. (On Tuesday, in a similar fashion, he set an iPhone goal of 1 percent of the world’s cellular phone market by the end of 2008.)
The Mac’s stumble was in part because of pricing and in part because Mr. Jobs had intentionally restricted its expandability. Despite his assertion that a slow data connection would be enough, the gamble failed when Apple’s business stalled and Mr. Jobs was forced out of the company by the chief executive he had brought in, John Sculley.
In a similar fashion, Mr. Jobs is gambling that people will pay a premium ($499 or $599) for the iPhone and he appears to have sought to limit its expandability.
The device is not currently compatible with the faster 3G wireless data networks that are driving cellular revenues to sharp gains in the United States (although several Apple insiders said the phone could be upgraded to 3G with software if Apple later decides to enable that feature).
Moreover, Mr. Jobs also appears to be restricting the potential for third-party software developers to write applications for the new handset, like ring tones and word processors…
Perceptive.