Monday, May 22, 2006

Among the audience | Economist.com

Among the audience | Economist.com: "Mr Diller concedes that ?all of the distribution methods get thrown up in the air, and how they land is, well, still up in the air.? Yet Mr Diller is confident that participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry. ?Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,? he says. ?Talent is the new limited resource.?

?What an ignoramus!? says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He advises companies on the uses of new media tools. ?Look around and there's tons of great stuff from rank amateurs,? he says. ?Diller is assuming that there's a finite amount of talent and that he can corner it. He's completely wrong.? Not everything in the ?blogosphere? is poetry, not every audio ?podcast? is a symphony, not every video ?vlog? would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia, the free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica."


I kind of agree with the talent as a finite resource model.

What the second argument fails to take into account is that the rank amateurs do have talent; the ones that become popular beyond their immediate social circle.

The others are only really interesting to their immediate circle of friends; because a pre-existing relationship makes their content valuable to a limited audience.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Any colour you want...

So Apple have released the new MacBook. It looks kind of sweet, and I'm nearly tempted by a Mac Laptop.

But... but... but. OK, so you look at the middle model. The White one. £899. The only difference between that and the £1029 black model is the size of the harddrive. That'll be 60gig vs 80gig.

And then on the customisation page, you get to upgrade the size of the white MacBook's harddrive to 80gig, taking the total cost to £939.00.

Um.

Ninety quid.

It costs ninety quid to have it in black.

I'm not sure what I despair more about - that Apple are doing this, or that idiots will actually buy it.

Rebecca Warren FTW!

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Turner Prize judges cast net wide

Gosh - my old Photography Tutor has just been nominated for the Turner Prize.

She rocked. Hurrah!

Saturday, May 13, 2006

AC FTW

Any description of this weekend is going to make me sound like a phenomenal geek. But hey, I am a phenomenal geek, so what's your beef? Anyway.

My Warcraft guildmates came to London. I currently have Four Danes, a Scot, and a bloke from High Wycombe sitting in my livingroom making jokes about Palladins. And it's been great.

There's more to follow, possibly, about the strange things that happen when people who've been playing together for a year finally meet - mostly about how it's impossible to call anyone by their given name. This weekend, I've been answering to 'Kuya'.

The best thing has been the interchange of jokes - both ongoing jokes from the game - More Dots! Banana Phone! - but also trading jokes between cultures.

Which brings me on to wanting to fuck your ear.

I think that the english-speaking world needs to be made aware of the sheer marvellousness of Dolph and Wulff. It's a cult comedy show in Denmark, with puppets. One of the characters is a beaver called Rocco, who is... well. He has a large libido. And wants to Fuck you in the Ear.

I thoroughly recommend listening to this clip about Bird Flu. You won't follow the Danish, but the English will make you laugh like a loon.

Uh, wear headphones in the office, guys.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Six Degrees of Muscle Strain

"The controller's got X-Y-Z, pitch, roll, yaw, lateral motion detection. The controller uses bluetooth and wireless controls. It's lighter than the PS2 controller. This is interesting, because it suddenly makes Microsoft look like the odd man out on the motion-sensing controller front. "

Engadget & Joystiq's live coverage of Sony's PlayStation 3 E3 event - Joystiqjavascript:void(0);
Publish Post

Well, that's going to completely shag my RSI, then.