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.

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!

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.

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.

Vice magazine: LONDON - A&E PATIENTS MAKE ME SICK

Vice magazine: LONDON - A&E PATIENTS MAKE ME SICK

And just whilst I'm in pointing to things mode - this is the most excellent rant by a Casualty receptionist.

We do love to complain about the falling standards of the NHS - and yes, the brave founders in the 40s would be shuddering to see what's happening to some areas of it. But on the other hand, we treat it with the kind of cavalier idiocy and helplessness that we bring to so many areas of our lives these days.

I wonder what it is that leads people to treat colds like medical emergencies? Why do we have so little faith in our ability to look after ourselves? What have we done to our collective societal common sense? When did we turn in to helpless lambs looking for someone to sort us out? Is unthinking disempowerment the malaise of our society?

I blame the media.

Soap and Flannel

eBay.co.uk: 1978/79 UNOPENED PACK OF PERSIL E3 DETERGENT! (item 7409875353 end time 01-May-06 15:22:17 BST)

"Unopened packets of retro detergent have become highly collectable and I have here a packet of PERSIL from 1978/79. It has a competition on it with a closing date of July 1979, and requests proof of purchase must date after 1 October 1978. Offered sealed."

How much do I love ebay? So very, very much.

Creative Future Day at the BBC

The following are my own views, and not necessarily those of my employer, the BBC.

(Although I am about to go and help with research on the BBC web 2.0 strategy, so hopefully the two views will coincide a bit more over the next few months...)

I thought, seeing as there's a bit of a kerfuffle around this idea that 'The BBC is building it's own version of MySpace' going around the internets, that, as a public service, I'd use a couple of quid of licensefee to transcribe the actual words uttered by Ashley Highfield in the internal BBC video.

This comes in the 'Share' section of a presentation under the headings of 'Find, Play, Share, Transform, Enable'. It was part of today's Creative Futures sessions. I've tacked on a bit about the Creative Archive too, just so you get the *whole* of the share section.

SHARE

Ashley Highfield: He's the 'big picture guy'
The ability of sharing programmes, your own thoughts, your own blogs, your own home videos along with our content - creating YOUR space.
Working out what your friends are watching, exchanging views and comments, and actually sort of building bbc.co.uk around you.

Grant Bremner
The creative archive is basically a license - its a framework the BBC has created along with other partners - including the British Film Institute, Channel Four, the Open University - that allows the public to effectively download the content from the BBC that we make available for non commercial purposes, that they can use for their creative endeavors. So basically we're allowing the public to actually download our content and use it.

And from this, you get a report in the Guardian that states (at the time of writing):

The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com.

And:

Mr Highfield said the share concept would allow users to "create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you", encouraging them to launch ther own blogs and post home videos on the site.

I'd encourage you to make up your own mind on whether or not the BBC is actually doing its own version of MySpace. The Guardian certainly did.

What I'd like to point to instead is the Programme Archive. A couple of folk here, just for a giggle, took an enormous database of eighty odd years worth of BBC output, and plopped it out on to the web. It's amazing.

The lovely thing is the way it all links together - by people, time, concepts. You have to admire the detail the hidden unsung heroes of the BBC archives have been adding to their database over time.

Imagine that, but with clips. And possibly a wikipedia entry for each show...

Anyway. If any of you have any interesting thoughts about what the BBC should be doing in this grim meathook brave web2.0 future, do let me know.

PIPEX System Status - System Status

PIPEX System Status - System Status

Sometimes, you suddenly get the desire to poke around in your hosting package. Specifically, when you get invoices from your hosting company.

Now, I've used my 'dedicated server administration' package about twice in the year I've had a server behind my domain. It's clunky, frankly, and I generally use FTP to squirt files on to the box, and that's it.

Surely some coincidence, then, that the two times I try and use the server admin stuff in the year, it's bloody broken.

Grr. Broken internets. Bad internets. Grr.

Ganking

60ganking.wmv (video/x-ms-wmv Object)

Heh. Human ingenuity, as applied to pwnage.

Sweet.

(Um, for those of you that don't speak fluent nerd.... that's a nice fan made warcraft video, showing a clever trick for killing high level characters when you're low level. Sort of David and Golliath, but with goblins, if you will.)

The Original Chinese Conjuror

Aldeburgh Productions | Series '59th Aldeburgh Festival'

My husband is - finally, after Years of very hard work, having his not-quite-an-opera performed at the Aldeburgh festival.

Hurrah!

THE ORIGINAL CHINESE CONJUROR

A Musical Diversion Suggested by the Lives of Chung Ling Soo



Music: Raymond Yiu

Libretto: Lee Warren



Director: Martin Duncan

Designer: Francis O?Connor

Lighting Designer: Chris Ellis



Almeida Ensemble

Conductor: Timothy Redmond



59th Aldeburgh Festival

Southwold Pier, Suffolk

15th, 17th and 18th of June, 2006

See: http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk/events/event_listings/series_event_display.cfm?current_row=11&catref=59th%20Aldeburgh%20Festival



Almeida Opera Season 2006

Almeida Theatre, London

1st, 2nd and 7th of July, 2006

See: http://www.almeida.co.uk/index.cfm?id=conjuror



Before the performance on the 7th July at Almeida Theatre, there is a concert given by my friend, the counter tenor Andrew Watt, who also stars in the show.

See: http://www.almeida.co.uk/index.cfm?id=concerts2006

Lily Allen

Crikey. This is going to be huge.

www.myspace.com/lilymusic

More grist to the faux/retro mill, I guess.

In other news, I'm just back from a week at MILIA. It was odd. I have notes, they may become a post at some point.

Standout event - being harangued by a very drunk, angry dutch producer whose pitch didn't win in their category. Still trying to decide whether to be really nice and contact her for a civilised chat about it all...

Put your hands in your pockets NOW.

Justgiving - a marathon for the hospices

My friend Kass is running the Marathon.

Sponsor her, immediately.

That is all.

auctineer - Google Search

auctineer - Google Search

Carla Gianolini is a Professional Auctineer. Yes, really. Trust her with your money and valuable posessions.

What Day is it Again?

Well, I'm coming to terms with the fact that yes, my body clock is broken, broken, broken.

I'm sure it's a lot to do with bad sleep hygiene, and the ammount of time I spend underneath artificial light at work, and when I get home. Clue: all of the time. It's particularly not being helped by the clocks changing today (not going back, as I've said in three different conversations already, but actually forward...).

There's added complexity to this at the moment. As I spend a lot of time in Warcraft, arranging things on server time (which is CET, or GMT+1) I've got used to mentally performing the maths to adjust to local time. I was rather excited by the idea that finally, BST would mean that Local time and Azeroth time were the same. Oh no - it turns out that Europe jumps to summertime now. I have NO idea whether any of my PC based clocks have changed, either, so I'm in an odd time-approximate limbo. Anyway, the upshot of this was accidentally going to bed at 1am on a schoolnight. It makes the Australian's trouble with Outlook look relatively trivial.

Boing Boing: Aussie timezone switch borks Exchange Server

And then thinking, weirdly, that the London Marathon was yesterday, whereas it is in fact in a months' time. Not to mention my diary slowly creeping out of control...

Something that seems to have slipped into the entertaining curiosity section of the newspapers is Friday's Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Bill reading in the House of Lords.

Now, more sunlight in the evenings is a Good Thing. I hate dark evenings, and long for the extra sunlight of summer. It makes me happier and more productive. But I do wonder about the bill - if, for instance, the Tabliods picked it up, and realised that it is actually a way of getting us on to Central European Time by stealth - can you imagine? it would be worse than giving up avoirdupois for kilos in the shops... I don't mind about the europe bit at all, personally, but I'm always sad to leave GMT for the magic of it being the universal standard, the zero point. It pleases my sense of mathematical balance, if not my sleep patterns.

Anyway, I'm hoping that I'll have woken up by the end of the day; at some point, hopefully, willpower willing, I'll be able to report that I've taken positive action on the whole sleep patterns thing. But I wouldn't set your watch by me.

How to Become an Early Riser

I'm bad in the mornings.

Well, actually, I'm very good in the mornings - but alas, I'm very good at the wrong thing. I'm good at not waking up, at rolling over, at being completely unrousable and dead to the world. I've been like this since I had a bad bout of depression during uni - around the same time that I developed serious RSI. I don't think the two are connected, but you never know.

Anyway. When I saw Cory linking to
How to Become an Early Riser I got a bit over excited. At last, the internet has delivered me the solution to the curse that's been ruining my life for the last few years - I, too, can become more efficient and successful, and not a complete pain in the bum to get out of bed.

It seems like sensible advice. And I read through it thinking it might be the answer. Until:

When my alarm goes off every morning, I turn it off, stretch for a couple seconds, and sit up. I don't think about it. I've learned that the longer it takes me to get up, the more likely I am to try to sleep in. So I don't allow myself to have conversations in my head about the benefits of sleeping in once the alarm goes off. Even if I want to sleep in, I always get up right away.

Ah. OK. So, fundamental understanding of the problem then. The waking up, fine. The alarm, great. The actually having enough control of myself to move, and not just to roll over and go straight back to sleep? Nu uh. That's actually the problem, love. Not the bedtimes thing, sorry.

Can someone write me a 'how to control your errant willpower when you're only semi concious, and not noted for your self control at the best of times, fatty.' article, please?

You know you play too much warcraft when...

You get one of these.

And think it's really lovely.

A Long Overdue Post about Nostalgia for Times that Never Were

Scattered around my various hard drives, and also various conversations over the last year, is a blog post. It's one of those mythical blogposts; one that would set a trend, be linked to, be sparkling and brilliant, insightful and timely. Alas, because I am nothing if not the queen of prevarication, I fear that the time for it may be past. So this is a summation, a mere shadow of the blog-that-might-have-been, only written because I find myself at home sick.

Last spring, I decided that I scented a new trend in the air. It didn't have a name, or an organising principal, but it did have some common symptoms. At the time, I tagged it as Faux Vintage, but that may not be the best term.

So - what is it? Well, there's a loose theme of nostalgia running through it, for a time before the 1960s. Roughly, it's any 'reworking' of 1890s to 1950s mainstream culture. It's camp, rather posh, about louche fun and frippery, about properly mixed martinis, about surface, about dressing for dinner, about the lost art of being a gentleman, about authenticity, about being most terribly modern.

If it had a manifesto, it would be Oscar Wilde's Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

Its visual aesthetic is somewhere between Aubrey Beardsley, sideshow art, cheesecake pinups and the Picture Post.

It sounds like The Real Tuesday Weld, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain or perhaps Noel Coward.

For fun, it likes to go to Lost Vagueness, or The Modern Times Club.

If feeling a little more louche, it may go to the Whoopeee Club, or even become involved with the Aristasians.

It might buy outfits from Danger Dames, or a proper gentleman's tailor.

It reads the Chap.

I'm not sure that there's much to say about it, per se, other than that it feels slightly like a response to so much slick, mediated, shiny culture; that it's a radical position in that it rejects the current mainstream in favour of a mainstream long gone. It isn't like punk, it's not a rewriting or a revolution, but it dismisses all the teenage angst of the underground with a raised eyebrow and a 'Well, I suppose it can't be helped; you are young, after all.' It's not a postmodern reappropriation either; it's not cynical enough. It's about genuinely enjoying the nostalgia, and the safe feeling of better times.

Most of all, it's stylish.

Geofftech - iBlog » All Mapped Out

Geofftech - iBlog » All Mapped Out

I love the tube map.

I also very much dislike the way that LUL's (TfL's?) lawyers have removed satirical sites that should, in fact, be covered under fair use (satire, I belive, being one of the exceptions to copyright, but I need to check the letter of the law on that one) of their prior art.

You know, like THE WORLD FAMOUS WORK OF ART, the Great Bear. Go and sue the Tate already, why don't you?

And re Trademarking; well, last time I checked, TfL weren't in the primary business of non-commercial comedy blogging, so where's the infringement?

I may actually get round to using Write To Them to register my displeasure with my London Assembly representative, the Mayor, and my MP. I encourage you to do the same.

Idiot Customer service, part Oh-I've-lost-count

I tried to join FileFront on saturday. I got stuck in an endless loop of failure to authenticate. So I told them. Here, for your edification, is our correspondance.

Kim Plowright to support@filefront.com 4 Mar (2 days ago)
Hi there,

I'm trying to use your service to upload a piece of game video.

Initially, I poked around on your Submit a File link (points to http://personal.filefront.com/) but kept getting directed to http://manage.hosted.filefront.com/ which just shows a message 'Please Login'.

So, I tried to register for your site. Interestingly, all through the registration there are large banners informing me that I do not need to register to upload video... but your submit a file link requires a login. How does one login without registering?

Finally, I went through the free registration process. The form submits my info, and returns the result page, but this loads your contextual navigation and a tall banner ad in the right hand margin of the page, then reports 'done' with no content in the content area. I'd take a wild stab at the possibility that your advertising services'
javascript is interfering with your registration system, if only because I've just had to troubleshoot a similar problem at work.

I haven't recieved any 'complete your registration' emails, so I assume that my registration isn't complete, and there was a further stage of information needed.

Can you let me know:
- What is the mechanism for uploading video if one chooses not to register on the site
- When I might be able to finish registering, and what the problem may have been?

Incidentally, I've tried in both Firefox 1.5 and IE6 on a PC running Windows XP. I tried to register using the 'register' link next to the login.

Thanks
Kim
----
L*** <***@filefront.com> to me, support 18:03
Miss,

Thank you for contacting customer support.

That is an error. You must register to upload to our site. Our records show
that your account was created. Some users email service blocks are email or
thinks it's spam and it's sent to the junk folder.

If you have anymore questions please feel free to contact me at this email
address.

Thank you for using FileFront.

L***
Customer Support Rep, FileFront
Ziff Davis Media Game Group
***@filefront.com
----

So... the answer appears to be 'Our site is wrong - and we think you're too stupid to have checked your junkmail folder, despite the fact you tried on several browsers and could use the word javascript in anger. And we didn't notice your questions, either'.

Sod that, I'll use YouTube, I think.