February 2012
11 posts
There is no such thing as an ethical smartphone →
The best-designed newspapers
The winners have been chosen [ snd.org ]
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Shock: Quality works, says Salon ed →
Salon Editor @KerryLauerman writes on how quality over quantity produced better results for Internet journalism (& for Salon)
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Premiership "likes" top 50 million
Enough to spend some of that IPO money on TV? [ via Wallblog ]
Apple's labour practices →
Democracy Now spoke to journalists who have placed the spotlight on Apple’s unethical supply chain. Unsurprisingly, Apple were not able to put forward an employee capable of defending the company’s practices.
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The black: Future gets there first?
The magazine and web publisher Future has hit a key target in the media industry’s great transition - UK digital revenues made up for print revenue falls between October and December.
According to the Paid Content website, digital circulation and advertising revenue grew 51 percent from the previous year after the company pushed 65 of its titles to iTunes Store upon Newsstand’s launch early...
Social Media vs Social Meds →
Beware. Your online habit may turn out to be more addictive than tobacco. Connectivity may in the end be acting more as an SSRI than software, the most effective opiate the people have tasted yet. [ ABC ]
* Depressed? Mobile device will act “as a therapist”? [ Mashable Tech ]
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TV: Apple cash mountain vs the rest →
What will Apple do with its cash mountain? Whenever I ask myself who is more likely to make a success of the next generation television, I imagine which brand would do better if competing for some of the big global content rights packages, like English football or Formula 1. Facebook may have the connected user numbers to make a global TV play credible, but it is the maker of the iPhone and iPad...
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Our data is worth more, not us
1 China 1,339,724,852; 2 India 1,210,193,422; 3. Facebook 845 000 000; 3 United States 312,946,000; 4 Indonesia 237,641,326; 5 Brazil 192,376,496. The largest virtual community today aggregates a population which would make it the third largest nation on the planet. And its only currency is our behavioural and experiential data. From today, that data will be worth more than ever. As...
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BMW & Mini reap the whirlwind →
BMW, ever a self-confident brand, seemed to lose its grip recently when a campaign for their Mini used Berlin’s Free University Met Institute’s “Adopt a Vortex” scheme to rename a coming cold snap “Cooper” within Germany. Since then, the “Cooper” cold snap is believed to have killed 112 people in Eastern Europe. [ Business Insider ]
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The median & the mean
Judging by Facebook comments alone it seems that making content free only magnifies the power of stupid exponentially. The responses to pieces posted by even so-called “highbrow” journals like New Yorker, New Scientist or Economist suggests that most of the new readers recruited through social media are basically as dumb as nuts. Their capacity to misinterpret and butcher even the...
January 2012
30 posts
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“Personal data is the “currency
of the digital economy. And like any
currency...”
– Viviane Reding, the European Union’s justice commissioner, is the harbinger of a clash set to unfold between the world’s trading blocks over the use of personal data. [ The Economist ]
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Tweeting for @Sweden
For the third week running I have witnessed the relay on the @Sweden twitter feed . The latest to pick up the baton and tweet for the nation (after the lesbian truck driver and the supercute jnr school teacher) is a perfume loving political journalist … I just think it may be my favourite twitter campaign. Clever and engaging, it ticks all my marketing boxes yet so far has managed to...
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Dumb Tweets @ Brands →
… believe it or not this Tumblr is related to DumbTweets@Celebrities
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State of the Multiverse ...
When I saw this clip on YouTube, only 31 other humans had done so. And on some darker days that’s just about the size the progressive response to our corporate world feels. State of the Union? Sometimes I am convinced I live in a parallel universe. Which makes “State of the Multiverse” a reasonable title for this response to American President Barack Obama’s formal...
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“… I just went to the bathroom
without my phone.
I had to read shampoo...”
– Top mobile media insight delivered in the form of a retro musical gag by that tweeter most amusing, Sputnik Sweetheart
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Watch & point & click & buy ...
Luminate, which embeds interactivity and direct calls to action, including sales links, into images, is very hot. How soon before this kind of technology transforms inline product placement in all our TV content? I liked the concept already, before the biz got a new name out of Harry Potter and was still Pixazza. Clearly, then it did not have the tech chops to step forward. Now? Like most strong...
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US jobs? Don't ask Apple ... →
“Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google … This means “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products. [ nyt ]
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Is This Land Made For You And Me? The bequest of Woody Guthrie’s beautiful journals sparks the conscience of the great progressive commentator BillMoyers
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Sopa is bad law, tweets EU "internet tsar" →
Neelie Kroes, the EU commissioner for the digital agenda, tweeted on Friday: “Glad tide is turning on Sopa: don’t need bad legislation when should be safeguarding benefits of open net.” And so say all of us … and them
Update: … and then SOPA died … probably because the US Government has the power to shut down and seize whatever they like anyhow. Yes, that...
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“… “To manage one million
animals gives me a headache ”...”
– Clearly, there is no app for running Foxconn, yet. Terry Gou, chairman of Taipei-based Hon Hai, Foxconn’s parent company, was quoted as saying this at a recent company party, according to the Want China Times. [ RWW ]
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When I first saw this, I struck me as a near perfect metatweet (or should that be “epitweet”): the combination of an obviously ironic moniker with the RT of an apparently fake celebrity alleging to tweet about a mundane event and getting it just wrong enough. @sixthformpoet I salute you.
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Assange-watch →
He does not have a great deal new to say, in truth, but I appreciate it that there is still someone around prepared to offer him the opportunity to say it. Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone has had its ups and downs over the years but as a reader of over 30 years standing, I am persuaded that the publisher’s heart is golden. On the other hand, I have to wonder how the raggedy path of The...
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Data-mining for hopes & dreams
“Dreamcatching” is the cool new way the Obama brain trust describes its sophisticated data mining programme, directed by former Accenture analyst Rayid Ghani, also known as the president’s “chief scientist”.
“Share your story,” Obama’s website encouraged voters just before the holidays, above a text field roomy enough for even one of the president’s own...
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Talking to the "appillionaires " →
A new book talks to the app authors who have struck it rich [ The Guardian ]
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How confusing UI stopped Mahler →
… in which a ringtone halts the New York Philarmonic. [ Biancolo.com ]
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Inside the Apple Factory with Mr Daisy →
Mike Daisey was a self-described “worshipper in the cult of Mac”. Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He travelled to China in 2010 to find out. In the second part WBEZ questions the author. Is his witness of talking to teenage labourers accurate or over-dramatic? They talk with Ian...
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Apple: Whichever way you look at it ...
Apple’s real-life growing pains are so much less serene and pleasing to the eye than its much vaunted (nae monastically curated) designs; and much more like an unremarkable, down-and-dirty omelette than the classy souffle their brand would demand.
This week, Apple in China manifested strains on both sides of the business model: retail and manufacturing. Here above, shoppers in Sunlitun...
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Hacking: Time to tape over the webcam? →
The disturbing tale of Luis Mijangos, who hacked into webcams to commit “sextortion”. When eventually captured, FBI found 15,000 videos, 900 audio recordings, 13,000 screen grabs. From a total of 230 victims [ GQ ]
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Drop-down tablet feels like another wind-up →
I’ve seen so many mock-ups of this product I am getting a little woozy. But now, One Laptop Per Child claims that its new low-cost tablet PC will actually be dropped on the poor from a dizzy height! Yep. The new gadget, still scheduled to be a wind-up tablet when it ever surfaces and gets an actual price, is expected to be “dropped into remote areas from helicopters”. RT...
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Android apps rush to the desktop
Music to the ears of Android app developers. BlueStacks says their App Player software will be compatible with Windows 8, giving PC users the ability to use the over 400,000 Android Market applications on their Windows devices. The App Player will be compatible with both the standard desktop and Metro UI Windows 8 platforms, and owners of Windows 8 powered desktops, laptops, and tablets...
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The future of online advertising →
A whole heap of common sense from somebody without an agenda. Top advice for publishers by Felix Salmon of Reuters.
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Who needs FB more, you or the car?
The integration of all our devices and appliances in our web of personal media continues apace with the announcement that Mercedes-Benz USA is bringing Facebook to its cars, with a stripped-down version of the service that is built-in to a new in-vehicle telematics system.
What puzzles me is why manufacturs eagerly facilitate services which appear to pamper the customer but won’t extend...
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Kindle, kindler, kindlest →
Amazon sold over a million Kindle e-readers a week in the UK this Christmas and the Guardian reports that 1:40 on the island got a Kindle as a gift.
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Pentagram must be so proud
The girls at GoFugYourself said it best: “Among the many, many phrases I never EVER needed to have associated with SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD Dakota Fanning are: “His Best Sex Ever,” “Too Naughty To Say Here: But You Have to Try This Sex Trick,” and — WORST HEADLINE OF THE YEAR SO FAR — “Um, Vagina, Are You Okay Down There?” Let us all just take a moment to drink that one in … I hope...
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Conflict-free iPhones? iDon't think so →
I’ve witnessed firsthand the horror caused in the Congo by the militias’ trade in minerals, which is why I’m petitioning Apple, writes Delly Mawazo Sesete
December 2011
17 posts
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Who owns a Twitter account anyway?
A lawsuit in the United States raises interesting questions about employment rights for those developing social media audiences. Are they doing so in their own right or is their audience an asset “owned” by the employer? Well, a Twitter user is now being sued for $350k by his former employer for taking his online followers with him when he switched jobs. Noah Kravitz, a writer from...
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Louis CK's $5 video earns $1m →
… because Louis CK is a funny, charming presence if ever there was one. Here is the marketing story, and here is the rather more entertaining Reddit chat Louis had with fans before his “thing” went live.
PS: Louis is keeping a bit less than a quarter of his million, a quarter is going towards recouping production costs, and the rest is going to charity and for bonuses for his...
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Twitter & the Prince
“… Did you hear about the Arab prince who got a $300 million stake in the heart of Twitter. He wouldn’t let his wife drive it in …” (badabim!) Apparently, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal says Twitter is a high-growth business. [ The Guardian ]
* Twitter and the “War on Terror”: US Government gets antsy about Twitter account used by Somali resistance group [ nyt ]
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Happy f***** Birthday, Bradley Manning →
An interview with Glenn Greenwald on occasion of the birthday in detention of alleged Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning. [ Democracy Now ]
* … and another with the douchebag who shopped him, Adrian Lamo
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Think Different? Steve "didn't like it" →
“He was far from the mastermind behind the renowned launch spot. In fact, he was blatantly harsh on the commercial that would eventually play a pivotal role in helping Apple achieve one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in business history.” Rob Siltanen, chairman and chief creative officer at Siltanen & Partners was the creative director and managing partner at...
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The Top Graphs of 2011
When the information is this interesting, one can spare the horses on the graphics. 12 leading economists selected these graphs to illustrate the financial turmoil of 2011. Plenty to interest, especially graph six: Why is the private sector paying down debt with interest rates so low? [ bbc ]
Who is a Journalist? →
The harassment of individuals reporting on the recent Occupy events in the United States has drawn new attention to the need for new definitions of what & who constitute “media”. [ BoingBoing ]
* Judges will decide who can tweet from court [ The Guardian ]
* Below: A conversation with a most unconventional journalist, the constitutional lawyer-turned political blogger Glenn...
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Baldwin rant recruits 300k for Zynga
Did you hear about Alec Baldwin’s spat with American Airlines? What? You’ve been in North Pole ? Well, the 30 Rock actor was kicked off a flight after refusing to stop playing “Words with Friends” on his iPhone. Well, since then, the games company has reported a boost of 300 000 downloads, according to the New York Daily News. Nice attention for the pre-IPO parent company,...