… is 1920×1200. Pixels, that is.
Apologies — geek joke. (I got it from Quentin, whose parting shot it was yesterday as he left after brunch.)
Happy New Year!
USB, er, sticks
Don’t ask. You can get them from here.
Dead trees: dead media?
Thanks to Bill Thompson for this:
Smash Hits closed down this year. It was probably past saving but still sad. Is there room for a pop magazine to launch in 2007? Let’s do a little roleplay.
Publisher: Hey kids! Here’s a new magazine.
Kids: What’s a magazine?
Publisher: Well, it’s like a book…
Kids: Oh piss off.
Publisher: No wait! It’s in full colour, and you can read it on the bus on the way to school…
Kids: We read our text messages on the way to school.
Publisher: Okay – well we’ve mocked up a magazine to show you. Take a look at THIS!
Kids: Where are the videos?
Publisher: What?
Kids: Where’s the button to press play on the videos?
Publisher: Well, no, you see these are just photographs…
Kids: We’ve already downloaded all these photographs from the internet. How do we use this to talk to each other?
Publisher: Well, there’s a letters page…
Kids: How do we know when our friends are reading the same magazine?
Publisher: Well, you don’t…
Kids: Hang on, this still says that Ray might win X Factor…
Publisher: Well, you see we had to write this last week because it takes a long time to print onto paper…
Kids: But shouldn’t that have changed to say Leona by now?
Publisher: You can’t change it – it’s printed on paper!
Kids: So it doesn’t update?
Publisher: Well, no, but… Well anyway. How much would you pay for this magazine, do you think?
Kids: Pay? You have got to be ****ing joking.
Powerpoint Karaoke
Here’s a nice new game for tired executives — Powerpoint Karaoke. It’s simple: you stand up. They cue up a random presentation. You ad-lib it.
And — a neat twist invented by yours truly: as you do it, a ‘friend’ videos your performance and uploads it to YouTube.
Caution: do not try this at work.
Looking back, looking forward
This morning’s Observer column…
This year was also the one in which old-media companies came out of denial about what they had hitherto regarded as an oxymoron, ‘user-generated content’ – text, audio, imagery and video created and published by mere amateurs. (Think of blogging, Flickr and YouTube.) Having awoken from their slumbers, the Time-Warners of the world reasoned thus: how can we exploit this garbage? After all, there’s a serious financial opportunity here.
If you’re an old-media outfit, creating ‘content’ is an expensive business: you have to hire producers, directors, studios, actors, writers and a host of other low-life types, pay them good money up front and wait until they produce the goods. Only then can you start to make money from it. But the explosion of user-generated content suggests that there are millions of schmucks out there who are willing to do all this for free! So the question for the old-media world was: ‘how do we cash in on this racket?’
Second life: cod statistics
Clay Shirky has written a terrific piece on media naivete about the Second Life phenomenon. Sample:
The prize bit of PReporting so far, though, has to be Elizabeth Corcoran’s piece for Forbes called A Walk on the Virtual Side, where she claimed that Second Life had recently passed “a million unique customers.”
This is three lies in four words. There isn’t one million of anything human inhabiting Second Life. There is no one-to-one correlation between Residents and users. And whatever Residents does measure, it has nothing to do with paying customers. The number of paid accounts is in the tens of thousands, not the millions (and remember, if you’re playing along at home, there can be more than one account per person. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, how many logged into St. Ides?)
Despite the credulity of the Fourth Estate (Classic Edition), there are enough questions being asked in the weblogs covering Second Life that the usefulness is going to drain out of the ‘Resident™ doesn’t mean resident’ trick over the next few months. We’re going to see three things happen as a result.
The first thing that’s going to happen, or rather not happen, is that the regular press isn’t going go back over this story looking for real figures. As much as they’ve written about the virtual economy and the next net, the press hasn’t really covered Second Life as business story or tech story so much as a trend story. The sine qua non of trend stories is that a trend is fast-growing. The Residents figure was never really part of the story, it just provided permission to write about about how crazy it is that all the kids these days are getting avatars. By the time any given writer was pitching that story to their editors, any skepticism about the basic proposition had already been smothered…
I wonder if Linden Labs (proprietors of Second Life) regard me as a ‘resident’ of their virtual land. I signed up for an account a while back (mainly because serious people like Bill Thompson and Charlie Nesson seemed to think it was interesting). But after signing up I examined the kinds of avatars available and rather lost the will to second live (as it were). I have my hands full living my first life; to add a second seems like a step too far.
Shirky’s piece is good on Second Life, but even better on the deficiencies of journalism.
The weakest link
From Technology Review…
A few seconds of undersea quaking was all it took to cause massive telecommunications disruptions throughout tech-savvy Asia, where Internet services have been snapped or slowed, phone lines disabled and financial transactions crippled.
Analysts said the service disruption–caused by the rupture of two undersea data transmission cables in Tuesday’s earthquake in Taiwan–highlights how crucial the cable and Internet infrastructure has become to the modern world.
A decade ago, telephones and faxes were essential to businesses and governments. Now, telephone lines often take second place, piggybacking on networks set up for Internet or mobile communication.
”Governments now recognize these industries as fundamental infrastructure, equal to electricity, water, sewage, roads,” said Markus Buchhorn, an information technology expert at Australian National University. ”So if you do have a major breakdown, people will move heaven and earth to fix it.”
Telecom companies scrambled to reroute connections after the break in the undersea cables. A Taiwanese officials said nearly all of Asia’s Internet service and 80 percent of its phone service was to be restored by noon (0400 GMT) Thursday.
In Hong Kong, a government statement said Thursday it would take at least five days to partially repair the damage to two undersea cables. A Hong Kong telecommunications official said all seven major cables serving the Chinese territory were affected, some severely.
In the meantime, telecommunications remained slow–and in some areas nonexistent–in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Singapore and South Korea.In Seoul, banks reported a slowdown in foreign exchange trading. Hong Kong’s Internet data capacity was reduced by 50 percent.
Meanwhile, some customers in China completely lost Internet access. Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and the Philippines reported slowdowns or access difficulties, mainly to foreign Web sites, including search engines and some e-mail programs. Thailand reported a disruption in international phone service.”
I haven’t experienced anything like this before,” said Francis Lun, general manager at Fulbright Securities, one of many Hong Kong financial firms that were forced to conduct business by telephone on Wednesday.
”We’ve become too dependent on these optic fibers–a few of them get damaged, and everything collapses. Many lost the opportunity to make fast money.”
The Wii workout
Well, well. The little Nintendo machine is having some strange side-effects — for example this experiment in which a chap is going to do 30 minutes’ Wiing a day and report the impact on his physique.
OK, so I was thinking one day after I played a good 1/2 hour of Wii Sports that I was getting a pretty heavy duty cardio workout. I decided to try out an experiment, where I would do everything I normally did, eat everything I normally ate and see if anything changes after playing 30 minutes of Wii Sports everyday for 6 weeks. If I miss a day, I’ll make a note of it and that weeks report…
Of course, he could go for a swim or a brisk walk every day!
Alt Predictions for 2007
I like these Alt Predictions for 2007, especially this:
President Bush finally manages to raise his approval ratings by recording a video of himself lip-syncing to “Barbie Girl” in makeup and a halter top with two oranges stuffed into the bust, and releasing the video onto the web. While his handling of the war in Iraq remains unpopular, his video is given four and a half stars and praised as “wicked funny,” “so dam hilarious” and “LOLOLOLOLOL.”
And this:
The consumer launch of Windows Vista does not go as well as planned. A cult forms within Microsoft, meeting secretly in the catacombs beneath the Redmond campus. The cult is devoted to a mysterious text message that declares Bill Gates the Once and Future CEO and prophesies that Gates will return in Microsoft’s time of greatest need, delivering stock options to the faithful, smiting the apostate, and possibly even coming up with a decent MP3 player.
An X-ray picture of US consumerism
Amazon.com’s Best of 2006. Hottest selling products in a range of categories. Intriguing to see that in “Health and Personal Care” Pampers Cruisers (various sizes) come top!