Throbbing Gristle's version of the cult gadget is the most fun
16 March 2010, 23:45
I have written before about the Buddha Machine. It is like a mystical modern-day music box. I’m a big fan.
The original was described by some as the anti-iPod. It looks like the sort of iPod knock-off that you might get free in a cereal packet. Instead of loading it with several gigabytes of your favourite music, the Buddha Machine comes pre-packaged with nine low-fi loops, which vaguely emanate from the fuzzy in-built speaker.
And it’s marvellous. The Buddha Machine may look cheap and tacky, and the sound quality certainly is not great, but this all adds to the quaint and charming nature of the device.
It became a cult object. Brian Eno is said to have been so entranced that he bought eight of them on the spot. It was treated by some as a musical instrument in its own right. Artists created remix albums inspired by the Buddha Machine. It even spawned a bizarre game, Buddha Boxing. Any resemblance to World Championship Stare-out is purely coincidental.
The second version of the Buddha Machine brought new loops, and the addition of a pitch-bending function, adding an extra dimension to the curious box of sounds. But it still retained its charm.
Now the idea has been developed further with Gristleism. It is a new variant on the Buddha Machine concept developed by the revered experimental group Throbbing Gristle.
As you can see from the demonstration video, Throbbing Gristle’s take on the Buddha Machine is rather more brutal than FM3’s more relaxing version. And while the originals come in unassuming, antiquated, almost second-hand packaging, Gristleism has a very slick, modern and extravagant style to its packaging.
Gristleism is an altogether different product. But it chimes with the same ideas about what it means to buy music in a physical format in these days of digital downloads. Record companies are increasingly seeking to make the physical editions of albums more appealing by making the package more of the product. The stylish packaging of Gristleism asks questions about music, just as the original Buddha Machines did.
Musically, Gristelism fulfils a completely different role. The originals, with the music composed by FM3, were more ambient in nature. They could sit happily in the corner, quietly emitting unobtrusive drones.
But as you would expect with Throbbing Gristle, things are a bit more madcap here. I have to admit that when I first started playing with this, I couldn’t stop grinning. I had to interact with the music. You can really utilise that pitch altering knob to great effect.
The best of Scottish blogging recognised by fellow bloggers and blog readers
5 February 2010, 12:00
I never got a chance to say so here, but many readers will know that for the past couple of weeks I have been, bit by bit, revealing the winners of the first ever Scotblogs Awards.
Today it is time to reveal the top 100 blogs. I have decided to post the top 100 here as well, to give that little bit of extra recognition to the cream of Scottish blogging.
I’ve been neglecting this blog a bit (what’s new?). This week, this has been because most of my blog time has been spent on the Scotblogs awards. The voting phase began on this week, and will continue until 8pm on Wednesday 27 January. For the full details, visit the Scotblogs awards page on Scottish Roundup.
Over at Scottish Roundup, I have written the introductory article about the Scotblogs awards. One or two people had suggested to me that it would be good for Scottish Roundup to run a blogging awards scheme, and after testing the idea out on a few bloggers it was agreed that it would be a good idea.
It is also intended to be a way of discovering new blogs. Without a doubt, the most difficult aspect of running Scottish Roundup is trying to find new blogs. If you are pressed for time (and who isn’t?), it is easy to keep on featuring the same blogs week after week — and Scottish Roundup fell into that trap.
This is a conscious effort to turn that tide. For that reason, self nominations are encouraged. In turn, I am hoping that this will encourage more people to nominate blogs for the regular weekly roundup.
I am still looking for two or three more panellists to help out on the awards — so please get in touch if you’re up for it. Any help on what the categories should be would be much appreciated too.
The nominations phase will end on 13 January, and voting will end on 27 January. The winners will be unveiled soon afterwards.
Looking back on an odd year, and an announcement about this website
24 December 2009, 18:00
I would like to wish everyone who still reads this a very merry Christmas.
As time has gone on, my updates have become increasingly sporadic. I am surprised and touched that people keep coming back to read and comment on what I have written. Looking back, I have actually written almost a hundred articles for this website in the past year (I am surprised it is that many). But at times it has been at the rate of just a few a month.
My year in brief
It has been quite a strange year. It started with me losing my part-time job at Woolworths. The closure of the store was itself quite an odd experience.
But losing that job didn’t hit me so hard. My long term future was never going to be with Woolworths. I graduated in summer 2008 and was hoping to find a job that could have reflected this. But it wasn’t happening.
I spent several months visiting the Jobcentre while experimenting with being self employed. While the bits and bobs of freelance work I was doing was good in the sense that I made an amount of money that was greater than zero, it didn’t provide anything like the security I needed in order to make plans for the long term.
It was the first time I had gone on anything resembling a holiday for a long while. I hung around in Oxford for a day or so then on the way back went via London to briefly visit friends. But because of the last-minute nature of the trip it was very hectic and felt rushed. It is the only time I have ever felt what I would call being intensely tired.
I arrived back to bad news on the work front. After another month or so of inactivity, it had felt like things had hit rock bottom.
Luckily, it was rock bottom. Since then, the news has all been good. Having decided that doing anything was better than rotting at home, I applied for an internship in the office of an MP. Unlike the freelance work, I did not earn more than zero by doing this. However, I can safely say that nothing has been more valuable to me in terms of gaining confidence in my abilities, which had been totally shot.
I only had to spend a couple of months there before — finally — finding a good job. My first month working at the University of St Andrews has been great. The only problem is the journey from Kirkcaldy, which is a bit on the long side. But apart from that, things are going well. In complete contrast to earlier on this year, I now feel lucky in so many ways.
The future of my online activities
Now that I am settling down to some kind of routine, I am hoping to be able to update this website more regularly. Certainly, once I move closer to St Andrews I will hopefully have more spare time in the evenings.
But now that I am in full time employment, I don’t have the time or energy to continue running three separate blogs, as I have been doing for the past couple of years. At the start of 2007, I decided to stop writing about motorsport here and set up a separate blog, vee8, to act as an outlet for my thoughts on Formula 1.
That worked really well at first. But over the past year or so, as I have had less and less time on my hands, it has meant that both doctorvee and vee8 have been neglected too much. It is so easy to concentrate on one blog and forget about the other. I feel that now both websites are suffering.
So I have taken the decision to close down vee8, and bring my writing on motorsport back onto this website. I know this won’t be popular with everyone, but it no longer makes sense to have these two separate websites when I no longer even have the time to properly maintain one. The change will happen some time in the new year.
In preparation for the change, I will remind those readers who are not in the least bit interested in F1 that the F1-free RSS feed still works. So if you want to subscribe to this website without being bombarded with opinion on motorsport, subscribe to the F1-free RSS feed.
Merry Christmas!
Until that happens, I hope you all have a relaxing Christmas period. I could certainly do with a wee break to recover from the hectic nature of the tail end of this year, and the extra time will come in handy for working on the changes I am making to this website.
The recent blogging scandals present an opportunity, not a threat
8 December 2009, 23:40
It has been an unusual few weeks in the Scottish political blogosphere. Already, a number of bloggers had apparently lost motivation and were openly wondering if they should continue. Since then, a number of blogs have closed down, apparently due to external pressures.
Firstly, Wardog was closed down after journalists from a number of major newspapers sought to write stories about it. The angle was that the blog was pretty close to the bone and potentially offensive. Was it acceptable behaviour for an employee of a university?
Then, the author of the Universality of Cheese was “outed” as Michael Russell’s office manager. Mark MacLachlan had to close down his blog and quit his job. The added twist to the story was that Michael Russell, an SNP Government minister, has been a major advocate of new media such as blogging within the Scottish Government. It remains to be seen if this scandal has an adverse impact on the admirable aim of using new web technologies in government.
At the weekend, Subrosa opted to close her blog, apparently out of fear that she was going to be “outed” as well. As the weekend passed and the Sunday newspapers were published without event, the blog has since re-opened.
[Update: Please see Subrosa's comment below for a clarification on the information in the above paragraph.]
The author of Advanced Media Watch appears to have decided to keep his blog closed. Meanwhile, even Scotland’s top SNP blogger, Jeff Breslin of SNP Tactical Voting, was also involved in a minor stooshie.
I have seen it written by more than one person that it feels as though the Scottish blogosphere is “under attack”. Maybe under attack is putting it too strongly, but certainly some big giants are peering into this particular goldfish bowl just now.
But as far as the scandal goes, it appears as though not all blogs are affected. It is a sub-set of blogs. The common thread is easy to spot. All of the bloggers involved are SNP supporters.
There are two possible theories as to why. One explanation — the one favoured by nationalists — that the “Labour establishment” in the Scottish media has stitched them up.
More likely is the idea that this is an effect of the “cybernat” phenomenon. Some of the bloggers who have been put under the microscope over the past few weeks could not be compared with the cybernats. But some were worse than others, and certainly one or two of them sailed too close to the wind.
Those who sailed the closest had to shut their blogs down. I felt that some of these blogs, in their better moments, were lacking in rigour. In their worst moments… well, the news reports have let you know about that. I should point out that this description by no means applies to all of the blogs that have been caught up in the recent fracas.
There may be a temptation among some to put this down to the fact that bloggers can be anonymous. That was certainly the conclusion of Iain Macwhirter. However, the cybernat phenomenon does not have much to do with anonymity (although that is an aspect of it, and apparently sock puppet accounts are rife).
But the fact is that the person who ran Wardog, the first blog to take a hit, was not anonymous. His name was displayed on his blog, in addition to his occupation and the fact that he was a lecturer! Clearly he was not ashamed of the way he presented his opinions, even if he had to relent when challenged about it. Nor is Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting anonymous (although it is totally unfair to compare his rather minor incident with the closures of the other blogs).
There is no doubt that the ability to be anonymous on the internet is abused by many, including a high proportion of cybernats. But there can be sound reasons for wanting to be anonymous. There may be those whose blogs are innocuous, but who prefer to remain anonymous in case it upsets their employer or someone close to them.
The problem that has hit the Scottish blogosphere in the shape of cybernats is not as a result of anonymity. The problem is the fact that some SNP activists just get too excited for their own good. SNP activists in general are known for being particularly boisterous, excitable and even aggressive. On the internet, some become absolutely feral.
As I have said before, I have absolutely no doubt that the cybernats are a very small minority of SNP activists. It is a tiny proportion who get a bit too excited and don’t properly think through the consequences of their actions. It goes without saying that some of Scotland’s best and most clear-thinking bloggers are SNP supporters.
But the cybernat issue has bubbled under for too long. For a couple of years the phenomenon has been doing the SNP a great deal of damage in terms of its image. Perhaps it was easily dismissed as the hidden nocturnal ramblings of a small few in the comments section of a dying newspaper’s website. Maybe blogging was not mainstream enough for it to concern them.
It’s different when Sunday newspapers start to take notice and write articles about it though. And not just a one-off — a sustained burst targeting multiple blogs.
Now it is said that Alex Salmond has asked SNP activists to shape up and play nicely online. You just wonder why he hasn’t done it before now, when it was too late.
While some seem to believe that the Scottish political blogosphere is “under attack”, and that this can only be a bad thing, the truth is more nuanced than that. This is an overdue weeding-out of the dreg-ends of the gutter of the blogosphere.
Bloggers should take this not as a threat. It is a warning, but also an opportunity. As Will Patterson says:
…we can raise our game, answer the charges with the positive, celebrate the good things we get up to and in so doing, make the critics look like muppets, simply by proving them wrong.
Or, as someone else put it to me, the blogosphere will be “leaner, cleaner and keener” from now on. It is all about bloggers engaging their brains a bit more and becoming a more savvy about what they say and do. Overall, the blogosphere will be stronger in the end.
Other interesting takes
As you expect with a story about blogging, bloggers have been all over it. Here are some of my favourites:
I don’t often write about myself here these days. Despite the fact that I went to all the effort to set up a personal website, I do think it is a tad self-indulgent to bang on about myself. However, some readers may be interested in recent developments in my life.
Regular readers will know that I haven’t had the best year when it comes to work. After graduating from university last year, I struggled to find employment. Then I lost my part-time job when Woolworths closed down. I had done bits and pieces of freelance work, but not much else.
A few months ago I decided to bite the bullet and look for unpaid work. I saw an internship at the office of Willie Rennie MP advertised, and went for it. It made sense in a lot of ways. The Liberal Democrats have long been the party I sympathise with the most.
Plus, Willie Rennie’s constituency of Dunfermline and West Fife is just next door to mine, so there is the local connection too. I liked the fact that he beat Labour in an area that is so left wing that it was once represented by a Communist MP — a great achievement.
I spent a few months helping out there doing a variety of tasks, and I enjoyed it so much that I will still help out from time to time. It is worth pointing out, in the interests of transparency and what-not, that I have joined the Liberal Democrats.
But I no longer catch the bus to Dunfermline to work there. That is because I have finally found a proper job — one that involves being paid and everything.
I am now working as the Web Editor at the University of St Andrews. When you read this, I will have started my second week there. As you may imagine, I’m really pleased to have got the job.
All the knowledge that enabled me to get the job was gathered as a result of my hobby running websites. I have no other background or qualifications in editing content for the web. Mind you, I gather that this is no barrier.
There is another way in which this blog helped me get the job. I was originally alerted to the position by a reader of this blog. Then, despite expressing my initial reluctance, she encouraged me to apply. That person has proved difficult to get in contact with since. But if you happen to still be reading, you know who you are — thanks so much!
I am not yet sure what this means for the future of this blog. While I have been busier over the past few months, my already-infrequent updates have become even less frequent. I will spend the winter months experimenting to see what works.
Hopefully I will be able to continue updating, but maybe with a different different focus. Less about sin taxes, and more about syntax? Less about dealing with the DSS, and more about dealing with CSS?
Whatever, stay tuned. I’ll be back with more posts soon.
It is commonly said that blogging is dead. The refrain has increased in frequency over the past year or so, as Twitter extends its influence further and further.
I have been blogging since 2002, when I was just 16. Over the years, it has been my favourite means of communicating online — more than Facebook or Twitter. More than IM and perhaps even email.
But increasingly I find myself becoming tired of it. Partly, this is due to that pesky “real life” nonsense taking over. As I make the transition from school pupil to student bum to full time worker, I have less and less spare time to dedicate to blogging.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that I am trying to run three blogs at once (the others being Scottish Roundup and vee8). In addition, I have started to write for other websites and have begun to dabble with podcasting.
Blogging is not what it once was
There have been many changes in the nature of blogging since 2002 as well. The emergence of other tools like social networks, microblogs and tumblelogs has encroached on territory that blogging used to inhabit.
In 2002, blogs were the best (or only) way to interact with friends online. It was pre-MySpace, never mind Facebook. Back then, blogs were a good way to publish snippets of transient, inconsequential thoughts — to get stuff off your chest. Now, Twitter is ideal for that. For those who feel too constrained by the 140 character limit, you can always set up a tumblelog.
But now that these new tools exist, blogging has been forced to become a medium where you publish more in-depth thoughts. Without a doubt, I update this blog much less often than I used to. In 2004, I published 880 posts. This year I might just about get above 100. But five years ago many of my posts were extremely short. Now, to justify even touching my blog, I feel like I have to produce an essay.
There is also the fact that I posted a lot of nonsense when I was younger, whereas now I have to be more responsible with the way I update my blog. I need to come across well, which means I have to quite carefully consider everything I publish.
In short, blogging is now hard work, whereas beforehand it was just good fun. None of this is news. But today, a couple of things have again focused my attention on blogging.
Where are the new readers?
Firstly, Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting wrote a post announcing “the death of blogging“. He senses a general malaise in the blogosphere. According to him, there are few new readers. Moreover, some big Scottish blogging names have hung up their keyboards in the past few months.
In response to Jeff, I would say that I don’t think a year has gone by when a big name hasn’t given up blogging. But blogging life goes on. While I am not happy to have seen the likes of Scottish Unionist and Malc in the Burgh close down their blogs, and others dramatically decrease the frequency of their updates, blogging is not about who the big names are. It is about the conversation between bloggers.
Jeff may well be right that there are fewer new readers though. In terms of statistics, the best days of this blog are certainly long gone. Visitor numbers peaked in 2006 and 2007, and have steadily declined since. This is in stark contrast to the early years, when readership grew seemingly exponentially, as though it were viral. In fairness, you should expect this if you publish much less, as I do. I doubt the same applies to Jeff though.
Twitter increases in authority
Perhaps more ominous in terms of the value of this blog is not the fact that readers appear to be losing interest, but the revelation that Google appears to view my Twitter account as more authoritative.
I was astonished to find that my Twitter account apparently has a PageRank of 5. In comparison, this blog today has a PageRank of 3 (a shadow of what it used to be).
Of course, it is probably wise not to focus much on the importance of PageRank. Google itself increasingly plays down the role of PageRank. Of course, that hasn’t stopped them from using PageRank as a means of publicly “bitch-slapping” websites that it views as threatening its advertising revenues gaming its search engine.
PageRank is the one small window provided to webmasters who want to see what Google really thinks about their websites. For my Twitter account to be clearly rated higher in this way than my blog has come as a surprise. I am not even the most prolific of Twitter users.
So is the blogging era over? I couldn’t have articulated this in 140 characters or less. But if few people are going to read it anyway, and if even Google doesn’t care so much, it makes me wonder what the point is any more.
An hour or so of my evening has been poured into writing this post. Soon I will have even fewer spare hours to spend on blogging. I persevere with blogging because I think it is, in a way, important. But if Twitter is easier (which it undoubtedly is) and has more impact (which apparently now it does), is there much point in continuing?
An interesting way to talk to voters — but is it the voters who are listening?
11 November 2009, 09:28
Something I have noticed about the Glasgow North East by-election is amount of innovative online coverage there has been from the media. All Media Scotland has reported on interesting methods of covering the election which have been adopted by three Scottish newspapers.
The Scotsman has invited the candidates from five of the main parties to contribute to its politics blog The Steamie in the run-up to the election. Full credit to The Scotsman for coming up with the idea. They are clearly trying something interesting with The Steamie, having recently invited some of Scotland’s top bloggers to regularly contribute to it.
It is interesting to see how the various candidates are using this platform. Will Patterson is analysing the candidates’ blog posts to see what message they are trying to get across.
I am infact surprised that the candidates feel that regularly contributing lengthy posts to a blog is a useful way to spend the final week of the campaign. Are there that many votes to be won among the readers of The Steamie?
The Daily Record has held its own type of digital hustings in the shape of a podcast. The Record’s political editor, Magnus Gardham, sat five of the candidates round a table to answer questions sent in by the newspaper’s readers.
Interestingly, the Daily Record chose Tommy Sheridan as its fifth candidate, while The Scotsman chose the Greens’ David Doherty. Perhaps the choice reflects the demographics of the newspapers’ readerships, with the Record thinking that its readers will be more interested in what Tommy Sheridan has to say.
Who is right about who the most credible fifth candidate is? It is not easy to tell, particularly when some believe that the BNP may even come third.
Not to be outdone, The Herald has done its own podcast for the by-election, chaired by its political editor Brian Currie. They have opted to feature just the candidates of the four main parties.
Clearly, the candidates feel that engaging with the electorate online in this way is worthwhile. It’s interesting that the media outlets are so interested in pursuing relatively innovative ways to cover the by-election. There seems to be a lot of experimentation among Scottish media outlets as they work out how to survive the current choppy waters. The increasingly common use of blogging and podcasting by Scottish newspapers is certainly to be welcomed.
But it’s interesting that all of this innovative digital activity should surround a by-election taking place in east Glasgow. In a way, you could hardly pick a worse city in which to pursue this sort of strategy. Glasgow is firmly on the wrong side of the digital divide. A study by Ofcom conducted last year found that only 32% of homes in Glasgow had broadband, and that Glaswegians are significantly less likely to own a PC than the average Brit.
No doubt someone is paying attention to these virtual hustings. But it is more likely to be middle-class political geeks than the actual voters of north-east Glasgow.
Is being a motorsport fan incompatible with my liberal views?
23 October 2009, 00:19
This the accompanying article to my contribution to this week’s edition of The Pod Delusion. Here you can find videos and links if you want to delve further into the topic.
As you may guess from the title, this article is about motorsport. I do not normally write about motorsport on this website. That is reserved for my motorsport website, vee8. However, I have published it here as it is designed to be of interest to people who do not like motorsport.
You can listen to the full podcast below.
My name is Duncan, and I am a motorsport fan. Is it a bad thing? Am I evil? Do I need to join Petrolheads Anonymous?
This year’s Formula 1 World Championship is coming to an end. The Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships have been wrapped up by Jenson Button and Brawn-Mercedes respectively, and now we have one last race to enjoy before the sport takes a break for the winter.
This has not been an easy year to be an F1 fan. In terms of newsworthy stories, it’s the sport that keeps on giving. But even by F1’s standards, it has been an extraordinary year for scandals.
Bear in mind that in previous years Formula 1 has brought extraordinary enough stories. There was, for instance, the so-called “spying” scandal which led to the sport’s governing body, the FIA, handing the McLaren team a fine of ONE HUNDRED MEELION DOLLARS. Then there was the “German prisoner” sex scandal involving the FIA’s President Max Mosley.
This year cranked up the scandal ever-further. Even in the first race, a major scandal blew up when Lewis Hamilton and his McLaren team were caught lying to the race stewards.
It also emerged this year that the Renault team had colluded with its driver Nelsinho Piquet to deliberately crash his car to hand an advantage to his team mate Fernando Alonso in last year’s Singapore Grand Prix. This endangered the life of Piquet and of other drivers and spectators.
In the past year, two major manufacturers — Honda and BMW — have pulled out of the sport, with persistent rumours surrounding the commitment of the other manufacturers. Moreover, almost all of the teams threatened to break away from F1 to set up a rival championship, in protest at the way the sport is governed by Max Mosley and the FIA.
The governance of the sport may change this week, as Max Mosley is stepping down as FIA President. The election to replace him is taking place today, on Friday. This actually may have more widespread implications than many realise.
Even though during last year’s sex scandal Max Mosley was persistently described by the media as “F1 boss”, the job of FIA President goes much further than that. The FIA has significant sway over road safety issues and effectively represents car users on the world stage. If you are a member of the AA, the RAC or even the Camping and Caravanning Club, you are represented by the FIA.
Clearly, this year there has been a lot going on in the world of motorsport. While cynics point out that, for the sport’s commercial boss Bernie Ecclestone, any publicity is good publicity, this all served to further discredit a sport which isn’t exactly the most popular among some. Formula 1 is seen by many as a sport which is dangerous, environmentally unfriendly, the personification of greed — and perhaps even sexist.
No doubt there is an element of truth to some of these accusations. So, how does this sit with me? I am a massive fan of motorsport, but I have liberal political views and a concern for the environment. Do I lack principles? Is F1 a guilty pleasure for me?
I actually see no reason why it should be. Some motorsport fans are unapologetic about their passion, and they see no reason to dress it up as anything but an extravagant bit of fun. But I see motorsport as a positive force that has a lot to contribute to the world.
Yes, Formula 1 is dangerous. This year, one driver, Felipe Massa, had an horrific accident when he was struck on the head while travelling at 170mph by a spring as heavy as a bag of sugar which had fallen off another car and was bouncing around on the circuit. He was lucky to have suffered no long term damage. The spring destroyed his helmet, but if it had hit him at another point he could have lost his sight or even died.
Sadly, one Formula Two driver was not so lucky. Henry Surtees was killed when he was struck on the head by a tyre which was bouncing around on the circuit after it had detached from another car in another accident.
While a ticket to a grand prix states in large letters, “motor sport is dangerous”, such accidents are mercifully rare in top-line motorsport these days. Major injuries are rare, and the last fatality in Formula 1 was in 1994. Believe it or not, more than 2½ times as many people have died while competing in the Great North Run than have died in F1 since 1981, when the Great North Run began.
But this year’s events in motorsport show that complacency should never set in, which is why improvements in safety are always being pushed forward. Perhaps the real scandal though is that, despite the increasingly safe environment that professional racing drivers face, 1.3 million people still die on the world’s roads every year.
F1 technology can play a major role in reducing the number of accidents on public roads, and already has done. In 2007, one F1 driver, Robert Kubica, survived a 75g impact with nothing more than light concussion. The materials that make an F1 car so safe are exotic and expensive, meaning that the opportunities to help make road cars safer using F1 research are a bit limited.
But electronics such as ABS and traction control are commonplace on today’s road cars. Such technologies unquestionably save lives all the time, and their development was helped by early applications in racing cars.
The money that flows through F1, and the high-stakes nature of the competition, make it a great test bed for important technologies that improve our daily lives. F1 is an R&D powerhouse.
There is currently an exhibition in the Science Museum in London called Fast Forward, which showcases twenty instances of F1 technology improving the lives of others.
Included on display are high-tech tyre pressure indicators which alert drivers to a developing puncture before it becomes dangerous. Then there are F1 materials being used to help protect troops in Afghanistan from bullets and explosions. Slip-resistant boots based on F1 tyre technology for people who work in slippery environments, thereby reducing injuries in the workplace, are also on display.
A bit more down to earth is the gadget that can stop your central heating system from becoming clogged up with rust and sludge, thereby reducing energy consumption in the home. Hospitals have even analysed mechanics’ behaviour and procedures during pitstops in order to improve the speed and accuracy of medical teams.
But how about the environmental impact of this gas-guzzling sport? I must say that my view is that rather too much is made of this. That is not to say that Formula 1 does not a significant environmental impact — it does. But emissions from the F1 cars themselves are actually a drop in the ocean. The racing itself does little environmental damage.
What is really damaging is all the travelling that teams, the media and fans must do in order to attend the races. The good news on this front is that F1 is carbon neutral, and has been since 1997. The FIA Foundation, the charity arm of the FIA, has taken into account not only emissions from the F1 cars and the travel of the teams, but also the transport of the fans that attend the races.
But any activity that involves being somewhere requires travel. F1 is a global sport, so there is a lot of global travel involved. But otherwise the sport actually seems rather restrained. In just 17-or-so races, a World Champion driver emerges.
Compare this to another competition, say the English Premier League in football. To come up with a mere national league-winning club, 380 football matches must be played, with all the travel this entails too. In comparison, F1 looks positively restrained.
Maybe that is an apples-and-oranges comparsion. It is just as well, then, that F1 technology also looks set to pave the way towards a green future. Formula 1 has the potential to help greatly reduce energy consumption. Refuelling during races will be banned from next year, shifting the balance more towards fuel consumption rather than raw power.
Another major initiative is the Kinetic Energy Recovery System, or kers, which the FIA finally legalised for this season. Kers is a system which harvests the kinetic energy that is dissipated under braking and would otherwise be wasted, and re-deploys that energy into the powertrain.
This technology has had a rather troubled birth in F1. The systems have been too expensive for teams to develop in the current economic climate, and it looks as though kers may take a back seat for a few years. There is also scepticism over whether kers as it is applied in F1 is actually relevant to road cars.
But one team, Williams, is adamant that its flywheel system will find a large variety of applications in the real world. The team says that its energy recovery system could improve road cars, vehicles used in mining, rail systems and “anything that moves”.
Plans continue to gather pace on this front. On Wednesday, the FIA outlined its plans for a green future of F1 (PDF). This includes a plan to make motorsport a competition based more on efficiency than raw power, and a stronger focus on energy recovery technologies.
The FIA also plans to introduce its own carbon neutral scheme, including offsetting its regulatory presence. It may also make carbon offsetting a condition of involvement in a championship.
So there you have it. Motorsport is a force for good in the world. Not bad for something that is hugely enjoyable. My halo is in tact.
I know from email correspondence that he has, from time to time, thought about the future of his blog. Now he appears to have decided to call it a day for good.
What a great shame that is. Scottish Unionist did a fine job of exposing the rotten nature of nationalism. His eviscerations of the borderline illiterate Cybernats who pollute the Scottish blogosphere were excellent.
This may have led to the blog been a bit one-note and too negative. Plus, the knuckle-dragging nature of Cybernats is somewhat self-evident. But the case cannot be made too often.
The personal experience that Scottish Unionist has gone through while facing up to the aggressive nationalists has been truly shocking in some cases. It spoke volumes of Scottish Unionist as a person that he always conducted his debates with dignity, treating his opponents with respect — much more than a Cybernat could ever achieve.
I echo the sentiments of Jeff. I doubt that the Cybernats really need to be tackled — they discredit their ideology enough with their own words.
But Scottish Unionist was more or less the only person who frequently visited the constitutional issue, at a time when we could be facing a fundamental referendum in the next couple of years. Perhaps the rest of us should step up to the plate.
I was delighted when Scottish Unionist asked if I would write a guest piece for his blog earlier this year. You can still read my piece about a vision of a federalism in the UK.
A look at the trashier end of the Freeview channel list
2 October 2009, 09:00
This is an accompanying article to my contribution on this week’s episode of The Pod Delusion. You can listen below.
This week, Freeview has had one of its occasional retuning events. As new channels come and old channels go, the channel list becomes increasingly messy until the point where the powers-that-be decide enough is enough and it’s time to bring some organisation to it.
This sort of thing is a necessary evil of the digital era. But I feel sorry for those, particularly older, people who are used to setting up their television once when they buy it, then making do with two and a half channels for the rest of their lives.
A couple of weeks ago in the first episode of The Pod Delusion, James O’Malley spoke about the bonkers-sounding Conspiracy Channel. Sadly, I do not have Sky, so have been unable to sample its delights for myself. I must rely on humble Freeview for my post analogue switch-off telly fix.
Freeview brings a wealth of choice that simply did not exist on analogue terrestrial television. That is of course a good thing, and I personally cannot imagine going back to making do with the five analogue channels. But there is an element of truth to that Fry & Laurie sketch, where a dining Government minister is dumped on by the waiter with a “choice” of cutlery which turns out to be countless plastic coffee stirrers.
At the same time as this week’s big retune, the long-awaited launch of Quest, the new channel from Discovery, has taken place. Its original launch had already been long delayed and finally aborted at the last minute several months ago.
While a channel that promises something resembling quality struggled to get off the ground, there has been no shortage of utter crud getting airtime on Freeview. In fact, I struggled to think of any half-decent channels that had launched recently. So I decided to look it up, and see what changes had been made to Freeview over the previous year.
10 September — Smile TV 2 (a mucky Babestation-style channel; closed on 19 March)
January — Rocks & Co (shopping channel)
8 January — SuperCasino (roulette channel)
8 January — NetPlay TV (broadcasting shopping programmes or infomercials)
15 January — CNN International — 4 hours per day
22 January — Dave+1
2 February — Russia Today — 2 hours per day
3 February — DirectGov (text service)
12 March — Partyland
1 April — Gems TV — 5 hours per day
5 April — CNN increases hours to 7 hours per day, 2 hours of which is SuperCasino
1 May — Gems TV closed down
13 May — Smile TV 2 relaunched — 5 hours per day
14 May — Quest — 14 hours per day — launch aborted!
20 May — Virgin 1 goes 24 hours per day
20 May — Virgin 1+1 — 12 hours per day
23 May — Film4 extends hours
1 July — Create & Craft (shopping channel) launches — 5 hours per day
4 July — Russia Today gets second slot — 2 hours per day
15 July — Big Deal (quiz channel) launches — 7 hours per day
27 August — Price-drop tv returns
27 August — Smile TV 3
27 August — Babestation
30 September — Quest launched
So a couple of channels — Film4 and Virgin 1 — have extended their hours. A couple of news channels have been able to find scraps of space here and there. I say news channels, though in the case of Russia Today, propaganda may be a more accurate description. These channels broadcast at quite obscure hours. It is certainly an interesting spin on the concept of “24 hour news”.
Beyond that, the vast majority of new Freeview channels are pure trash. There are two new “+1″ channels, replaying exactly what was broadcast on a channel an hour ago. By my reckoning, there are now at least five such channels on Freeview, which doesn’t seem like the best use of limited bandwidth.
Beyond that, there is a collection of shopping channels, gambling channels, quiz channels and adult channels. Frankly, this is the sort of stuff you expect at the arse end of the darkest nooks of the Sky EPG. I am not quite sure this is what they had in mind when the digital revolution was promised.
The Babestation channels have long been a fixture on Sky. But their presence on Freeview is relatively novel. They are interesting for the fact that it hasn’t taken long for four of them to crop up. It is surprising because their appeal seems rather limited to me.
If you have never seen it (er, not that I’m an expert, of course), basically the format is quite simple. A few glamour models who couldn’t present their way out of a paper bag sit on a couch trying to encourage people to phone in for a mucky chit-chat.
Once someone with more money than sense takes the bait, the microphone is switched off, and some cheap-sounding music is turned up. The women proceeds to talk dirty on the phone — without the viewer being able to hear a word. They sort of wriggle around on the couch in a way that I assume is supposed to look sexy, but it really just makes them look vaguely like they need the toilet.
In short, it is the modern-day equivalent of the dodgy services advertised on business cards left in piss-stained telephone boxes, only with the beady eye of Ofcom overseeing proceedings. There is nothing extreme in the slightest about these channels. You wonder what goes through the mind of people who would sooner pay through the nose to sample such services when you could quite easily find more enticing free porn on the internet.
Up until this week’s retune, the positioning of one of these channels — Partyland — in the channel list was certainly interesting. It was channel number 50, but with no channels occupying numbers 51-69, the next channel up was CBBC. Even though the broadcasting hours do not clash, I can imagine plenty of children just pressing the down button on their remote and coming across a strange new channel promising a party land. It certainly would provide a more eye-popping rite of passage than accidentally stumbling across the frilly knickers section of the Argos catalogue.
It remains to be seen whether these channels remain a long-term fixture on the Freeview platform. One trashy genre which sadly appears to have stood the test of time is quiz channels. These late-night televisual travesties are hypnotically awful. A slightly desperate presenter will appear to engage you in a stare-out competition while goading you into answering questions with non-existent answers.
Even though they still live on, such quiz channels are not quite as prevalent as they used to be. They were a major victim of the collapse in trust that broadcasters faced a couple of years ago. Into the vacuum came the gambling channels.
It’s noted that this sort of programming tends to be on late at night, especially at the weekend. In other words, they are aimed squarely at the post-pub market.
The morals are pretty dubious. The clear idea is to target people whose judgement has been impaired by their alcoholic consumption, goading people into phoning premium rate phone lines when they perhaps shouldn’t. In the case of the gambling channels, it could be said that they intend to capture a particular section of the population that may have problems with addiction.
This is not quite the vision of digital television that was sold to the public. It is funny how most of the extra “choice” that has been brought into our living rooms revolves around extracting large amounts of cash from our wallets.
As you have no doubt seen if you are a regular reader, there was a meetup of bloggers on Thursday. What a good evening it was too — plenty of friendly chit-chat and drinks.
So thanks to those who came and made it such a great evening:
Special mention to those who went out of their way to come, especially Wendy, Yousuf and Holyrood Patter who went through to Edinburgh from Glasgow. It was good to meet some people again, and great to meet some people for the first time. Will Howells, whose blog I have been reading for years and years, even popped down briefly to Holyrood 9A between shows after we had vacated the Pleasance due to the deteriorating weather.
However, Tom Harris was there in spirit. Well, maybe not in spirit, but in the form of twenty pounds which he kindly donated towards a round! That was good of him.
It was a shame some people were unable to make it, but I get the sense that it won’t be too long until the next bloggy get-together. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and as Jeff noted the whole thing went very quickly which is a good sign. The next one will probably be soon, and will probably be in Glasgow to make up for all of our Edinburgh encounters.
Pleasance Courtyard on Thursday 27 August from 6pm
25 August 2009, 02:16
Apologies for the lack of proper material here. It’s all been meetup chat for the past couple of weeks, for which I apologise. Hopefully normal service will soon resume (whatever “normal service” is round here).
I need to tie up a few of the loose ends which were present in the last update about the meetup. So here are all the details you need to know.
We will be meeting in the Pleasance Courtyard in Edinburgh on Thursday 27 August from around 6pm onwards.
Some people have suggested Pleasance Courtyard may be too busy so there may have to be a Plan B. In case we need to change plans, I will try my best to keep everyone updated on Twitter — @doctorvee. Likewise, if anyone needs to get in contact with me the best way is probably to direct message me on Twitter. Alternatively you can email me — the address is in the sidebar.
To help people find us, I will wear a green long-sleeved t-shirt. Look for a young-but-strangely-jaded-looking person and chances are it’ll be me. (My picture is up in the top right there, though I’m constantly told I don’t look much like it.)
Everyone is welcome and based on the feedback so far it seems like we’ll get a relatively good turnout. So I hope to see you there!
The votes are in, and 27 August won by one vote! (I know it looks like it won by two votes, but one person had to change their plan after they’d already voted.) I would actually have preferred the 25th and I was sorely tempted to ignore the vote, but we wouldn’t want another Scottish election scandal on our hands. So 27 August it is. We can kick things off at around 6pm.
There wasn’t any overwhelming verdict on whether we should see a show. Seven people wanted to see one (but were split on which one to see), and six didn’t. I think as a compromise we can let those who’d like to see NewsRevue see it, while everyone else can have a chat.
In terms of where our meetup will take place, that would tend to lead us somewhere around the Pleasance Courtyard. I’ve never been for a drink there and actually come to think of it I couldn’t suggest anywhere else because I’m not familiar enough with Edinburgh’s booze scene! That rather raises the question of why on earth I’m organising this thing, but shh!
Last year we met at the Udderbelly which seemed quite good, but is a five or ten minute walk for the NewsRevuers to make.
So if anyone can provide any more solid suggestions in terms of meeting and having a chat round a table, do let me know in the comments and I’ll update this post when we’re settled.
Having looked at the initial round of feedback, I have decided that two dates in particular stand out as the most suitable: 25 or 27 August. Alternative possibilities are 26 or 28 August. Personally, I am erring towards 25 August, but if more people can come on one of the other dates we can go with that.
So that I can get a sense of everyone’s availability, I have set up a poll so that people who are thinking of attending can let us know which dates suit best. We will probably go with the date that has the most votes.
We are also thinking about going to see a show at the Fringe as part of the meetup. This may not be to everyone’s taste — some might prefer to chat and do meetup-type stuff.
Jeff has suggested NewsRevue, which starts at 6pm at the Pleasance Courtyard. Stephen has suggested About the Scots which is at 8pm at the Beehive Inn on the Grassmarket.
Personally, I am erring towards NewsRevue because it might end up being cheaper (Jeff says he might be able to get half price tickets). Also, the earlier start time means that people can avoid it more easily if they wish by just popping along a bit later, and it leaves more time for chat after the show has finished.
If you would rather not go to see a show though, I have included that as an option on the poll too.
Of course, the choice of show almost makes our choice of venue for us, so I will wait until we have settled on an answer before we finalise those plans.
I will take the poll results as they stand at noon on Friday which gives you about two days to vote, while giving people plenty of time to plan ahead for the meetup if they need to.
In my previous article, I argued that the problems that are hitting journalism are more to do with the quality of the content than with the fact that it’s difficult to charge for content these days. “Why pay to read Telegraph Digg-bait when you can read BBC churnalism for free?”, I asked.
I am sure plenty of journalists realise this if they stop to think about the situation. The fact that so many professionals blame bloggers for the industry’s ills says it all. Despite journalists’ qualifications, experience and resources, their entire business is supposedly being dismantled by a bunch of hobbyists who spend the odd hour of their spare time opining on the internet.
A few weeks ago I met a journalist at a party and I engaged him in a conversation about the future of his industry. He told me he hates bloggers (whoops! — I kept schtoom). But he told me that in his view the biggest problem was people scooping him on web forums! If the professionals see online discussion forums as not only competing with them but doing better than them, that surely must make them wonder if the product they are asking people to buy simply is not good enough.
Anyone who thinks that bloggers and the mainstream media are competing is wrong. If they are competing, the media simply isn’t doing its job properly. Let us face facts. For the most part, bloggers don’t have the contacts, the resources or the expertise to do, for instance, a big investigative story.
If the media is worried about amateur bloggers, it is a pretty bad reflection on the professionals. Perhaps to distinguish itself, the media should be focussing on those aspects of content production that bloggers cannot do.
The supply of mediocre content is too high. Too much of the same sort of content is as readily available to news junkies as sea water is to beach-goers. In effect, for the past decade or so newspapers have been driving up to the beach with a tankful of sea water, then pumping their water into the sea. Later they started stretching out their hands like beggars wondering, “why won’t these beach-goers pay us for all this seawater we’re providing them?!”
So what is the answer? In my view, less is more. What newspapers need to do is offer something distinctive and different. They should specialise more and differentiate their content from everyone else’s. They need to offer less, but better, content.
Newspapers should forget about reporting all the same hard news as every other outlet is. It is a crowded marketplace so there is no money to be made there. Instead, they should work on more exclusives, investigative reporting, analysis and features.
Actually, there is a problem with that idea, which is that it won’t save all newspapers as we know them at all. It points to a future where many daily newspapers may wither. But weeklies, monthlies and specialist publications are more likely to thrive. It wouldn’t stop the press from having a difficult period of job losses and paper closures. But it would mean those who could get it right would be able to charge for content quite comfortably.
Evidence suggests that this shift may already be happening. Speaking personally, there is not one daily newspaper that I would be happy to pay for. But up until recently I was perfectly happy to pay for the weekly Economist (and in truth, I only stopped because I didn’t have the time to read it). As for specialist publications, I still like to read the monthly F1 Racing if I get the chance.
It may be the same for other people too. Recent evidence seems to suggest that many specialist publications are doing well at the moment, even amid all the turmoil in the press and the worst recession in living memory. According to Malcolm Coles, 216,000 people are perfectly happy to pay £7.75 per month for an online subscription to Which?.
Yesterday I also read about two major news websites relaunching — with less emphasis on news. On the new LA Times website, Hamilton Nolan at Gawker wrote:
Scroll down from the top of page at the new LAT site and you find: Health, Food, Education, Technology, Sports, Blogs, Columns, Opinion, Photos & Video, Summer Hot List, and “Your Scene, Your Comments.” Did you miss the, say, ‘International news’ section? It is way up at the top in tiny tiny type. Below the top fifth or so of the page, there is no “hard news” at all.
Someone still has to do the worthy news stories though. Maybe that can be better left to agencies or major broadcasters. But maybe a simple reduction in the number of newspapers would suffice. Iain Hepburn recently estimated that as many as 17 major media outlets are all aiming at the same audience in Scotland. We make do without 17 major supermarket chains — five or six different ones satisfy most consumers. So do we need more than five or six major news outlets?
A merger here, a takeover there and even the odd shutdown or two might be a good thing. Fewer outlets can have a higher market share, more resources, more of the best journalists — and they’ll produce a better product as a result. Five or six excellent news sources would be much better than 17 so-so ones, which is more or less what we’ve got at the moment. Surely that is what’s needed to make news a viable business going forward.
Rupert Murdoch’s decision to experiment with charging for content has ruffled a few feathers. Fair play to Murdoch for being brave enough to put his head above the parapet. If anyone can take the risk, it’s Murdoch — and the rest of the media will have him to thank if the gamble pays off and it reveals the business model that other outlets can follow. Malcolm Coles certainly makes a fairly good case to suggest that Murdoch can get away with it.
Without doubt, monetising content online has been a very tough nut to crack, so much so that many appear almost to have given up. Indeed, the controversy surrounding Murdoch’s decision shows just how much some people now believe that it is impossible to charge for content.
No doubt the advent of the web has changed the game. It is much more difficult to charge for something that doesn’t physically exist, and something which can very easily be distributed for almost zero cost. This more or less means that, if you want to, you can probably get it for free.
I know of one major national newspaper that found that having a paywall was detrimental to their business because they made more money by removing the paywall and instead displaying Google ads to the extra readers. Anyone who has used Google ads will know that we are talking about pretty low amounts here. It is a real demonstration that a simple subscription model will not work for everyone.
But we know that there are plenty of people who are willing to pay for content. As Malcolm Coles points out, there are countless examples of people paying for music, audiobooks and whatever else, when they could have got it for free. That is because, contrary to what many people assume, most humans have a conscience.
For instance, the pay-what-you-like or “honesty box” model actually seems to work. There is the example popularised by Freakonomics about the bagel man. Radiohead seemed to make it work when they released In Rainbows.
Just last week I heard an interview with a taxi driver from Vermont, USA who invites all of his customers to pay what they like. “Nobody has shortchanged me yet,” he says. Even in cases where cash payment was not forthcoming, payment in the form of CDs was.
The problem is, you won’t be able to charge anyone anything if you only serve up a pile of samey crap. Your product needs to be distinctive. The bagel man wouldn’t have done so well if he was trying to sell pens. Radiohead made it work because they are the best band in the world with a loyal fanbase.
But how many media outlets can offer something so attractive? The problem as I see it is not that you cannot monetise any content. The problem is that the content newspapers are producing just now is not the sort of content they can get away with charging for.
Jeff has suggested that there needs to be a sense of duty to buy newspapers, just like there is a sense of duty to vote. But people should only really pay for something that they value, otherwise inefficiencies will result.
If people still value newspapers, they should be willing to pay — and many still are. Most people would feel guilty otherwise, as the honesty box examples suggest. But the problem is that many people just don’t like newspapers any more, as is evident in the comments on Jeff’s post.
It is not as if there is anything wrong with the physical product, despite the jibe about newspapers being “dead trees”. I can imagine a parallel universe where the newspaper was invented after the internet, where the physical paper would be seen as a luxury item. You don’t have to be connected to the internet. You can fold it up and carry it about with you. You can scribble on it if you want to. You can frame it if you love it enough.
But the problem is with the content. With the advent of new technologies, newspapers have become much less useful to consumers. Once, newspapers were almost the only way to find out about the news. Today they are the slowest of many ways to find out the news.
How many times does a major story break late in the day? That story will be all over the breakfast radio and all over the 24 hour news channels. There will be countless reports about it on the internet, and to add insult to injury the bloggers will have had their say too. But if you want to read it in the newspaper, you will have to wait until tomorrow.
Maybe a major story doesn’t break so late very often. But even in these cases, the chances are that you have had ample chance to hear analysis about the front page stories on the radio or the television the night before. In essence, newspapers now do little more than peddle what is literally yesterday’s news.
Like the music industry, the newspaper industry’s mistake was to fail to adapt. They arrogantly assumed that they could carry on with the same template and tinker round the edges, fumbling around for a business model that would work.
Of course, most newspapers have websites these days. But if anything, that has exacerbated the problem. It has led to phenomena like churnalism, with journalists producing more and more content with fewer and fewer resources. As such, much of newspaper websites’ content is watered-down crap. Worse still, much of it is Digg-bait which has been SEOed to death.
That is the crux of the matter. The media is sullied, and journalism as a profession is held in contempt by much of the general public. No wonder people won’t pay for content — it’s not any good, and there is nothing to distinguish it from free alternatives. Why pay to read Telegraph Digg-bait when you can read BBC churnalism for free?
So is there a solution? Keep an eye out for my next article where I will put forward a few suggestions.
On Twitter, @milkmiruku said: “how bout an RL BBQ at some point? maybe even with debates or suchlike?” Then in the comments, Yousuf and Steve chipped in, which led me to wonder if it’s time for another bloggers’ meetup of some sort.
I’m not sure about having a barbecue with debates just yet — maybe in the future! But certainly, on the back of the success of previous meetups, I think it’s worth having another informal chit-chat. Last time, Iain Macwhirter turned up unannounced, so you never know what might happen at our next one!
Right now, on Malc’s suggestion we’re thinking of holding it in Edinburgh sometime during the last week of the festival, which I make the week beginning 31 August (Update: Or week beginning 24 August). If anyone has any thoughts, let us know. Of course I’ll keep you updated with any plans we concoct.
It is notoriously hard to get to grips with the youth. Advertisers hate it. The age group of 15–24 — of which, incidentally, I am still part — is notoriously fickle. They define themselves almost in terms of what they are not rather than what they are.
That is the explanation being given to the counter-intuitive finding by Ofcom that the proportion of 15–24-year-olds using Facebook has decreased in the past year. Facebook as a whole is still growing. But the problem is that it’s now full of parents and teachers, and it would be deeply uncool to be using a website like that.
In the same week, a Nielsen study has shown that teenagers don’t use Twitter. It has been long suspected that they never did use Twitter in large numbers, but now there are figures to prove it.
That came just weeks after a 15-year-old doing work experience made a splash with Morgan Stanley who were trying to get a grip on what the future might look like. Matthew Robson said, among other things, that Twitter is for old people only.
It probably comes a surprise to some. Even Mashable implies it wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t seen the figures. I am sure there are lots of people out there who imagine sites like Facebook and Twitter being full of youths donning virtual hoodies and organising virtual knifings. But young people are not so easy to pin down. The Ofcom report declines to tell us what young people actually are spending their time online doing, although we know for sure that they are online in their droves.
Mine is the first generation to have grown up with the internet. And like every shift in in youth culture, from rock and roll to video games, it gets people thinking about the possible downsides of growing up in a new environment. So they say that the internet gives you a short attention span. Or it dehumanises community life and leads to suicide.
I was recently emailed by a reader and occasional commenter here, Fran Walker. She was curious to know, what with me being a youth and all, if I have a life outside the computer?
As the worry of tinies not being able to interact with other humans, and the problems this may later lead to, is current news, it makes me wonder how you get on, as I regard you as one of the first of the “totally familiar with computers generation”? My son, who is 39 and lives in Taiwan, uses them for specific tasks, dislikes emails, prefers phone calls, and was in the first lot at school when computers were introduced, but he had a computer free childhood before that (say before 12 or 13), whereas, I suspect you had access to your parents’ computer since you can remember?
Like, I suspect, most people my age, I do indeed have a life outside of the computer, although it’s true I spend a lot of time on it. Partly this is because most of my work requires me to use the computer. Then, much of my spare time is consumed by the search for work, which is easiest to do on the internet.
There is also the plain fact that I love being connected to the internet for a whole host of reasons. Most of all, it brings me into contact with so many people I otherwise would not have. And it enables me to contact existing friends easily and comfortably. As Shane Richmond pointed out in his response to Vincent Nichols, the internet “enriches communication, it doesn’t destroy it.”
It is definitely the case that people in my generation are more familiar with computers. When I was young my parents had a BBC Micro, although it was quite old-fashioned even then. As far as I was concerned it was only really good for playing quite rudimentary games, when I could have been playing more sophisticated console games.
We only really got a contemporary computer in the late 1990s, and access to the internet came after that. By that time I was into my teens, so I can definitely remember a pre-internet era. I think for my generation, there were still a lot of people who didn’t have experience with the internet until they were fairly old.
I certainly remember when we started using the internet at school during my standard grades, aged about 15 or 16, there was at least one person in my class who had never used the internet before. Mind you, it’s true that I remember it so vividly because it was so unusual.
People often pose the hypothetical question, “could you survive for a day without the internet?” I recently went away for a short break, and I probably spent longer away from the internet than I have done for years.
Mind you, I expected to still be connected. But thanks to O2’s shaky 3G service it wasn’t to be. That was quite annoying because I wanted to contact people through Twitter. But it wasn’t the end of the world. I had a lot to do anyway, and was focusing on doing the things I wanted to do on my break.
As for voluntarily foregoing access, I think it would be difficult but not impossible. Certainly, one of the first things I do when I get up in the morning is check the internet, and it’s one of the last things I do at night. Would there be any point in not checking? I don’t think so.
A thought experiment like this is not terribly useful. You could try to “survive” a day without the internet, but what would it prove? Could you go for a week without reading your post? Or a month without reading newspapers? I certainly couldn’t survive a day without listening to the radio — I would go round the bend very quickly if I was deprived of it. Is that healthy or unhealthy?
For my generation, having a life outside the computer is no problem. Certainly, I spend a while on the computer. But many people might spend that time watching bad television or getting steaming drunk down the pub, which is much less healthy than spending your time reading Wikipedia.
But — and this is where I start to show that I am at the older end of the “youth” bracket — there is a but. My generation is not the first to grow up having not known a pre-internet world. In fact, I haven’t even had access to the internet for half of my life. So the real people to ask about the worry of an internet-obsessed world would be those who are currently 10 or under, and have never known a pre-internet home or school.
However, I would predict that, like Elvis’s dangerously swinging pelvis, we will come to view as quaint the fact that there was ever any concern.
As you can probably see, I have decided to give this place a new look. The old design was starting to feel a bit old, and to be fair it was easily the longest-serving design the website has had, so it was time for a change.
I had been thinking redesigning it for a little while, but couldn’t think quite what it was I wanted to change about it. Then I saw this groovy icon set which gave me the inspiration for the new design. As you can probably see, I have used a few of those icons and created some of my own based on the same idea. This stretched my graphic design skills to the limit but I think I have done an okay job at it.
Part of the motivation was not just to freshen this place up a bit, but also to make it more suitable for the direction I seem to have gone in. For whatever reason, I have been publishing fewer, more in-depth articles. So instead of resolving to create more content (which I sadly don’t have so much time for), I have gone about this redesign with a view to tapping into the archives and bringing more attention to the stuff I do that isn’t for doctorvee.
In the end, though, I was surprised at how little I actually changed. It is certainly a fresh lick of paint, but apart from that visitors should find that not much is actually different.
In the long run I will be thinking about ways of displaying content other than reverse chronological order. The traditional blog-style layout seems more inappropriate while I am unable to update so often, so sometime soon the front page might have a different feel to it, perhaps with more emphasis on archived content or showcasing articles that are filed under each of the main categories.
Speaking of categories, I have created a new one called Editor’s Picks. These are archived articles which I have decided to bring attention to. A list of these articles appears in the sidebar. I haven’t gone very far back though — just a few months. It will build up over time. It is really to replace the old featured articles plugin I used, which was a real pain in the neck to use. This solution should be much easier to maintain.
I have created a few new pages, although I haven’t quite decided where to put them yet. I have brought back the Subscribe page which outlines ways to subscribe. You can now subscribe by email if you are that way inclined.
The Praise page contains some kind things other people have said about my writing. I have noticed a few other bloggers bringing attention to that sort of thing, so I thought I might as well join the bandwagon.
I have also re-jigged the “best of” section which had become a bit cluttered. The main page is now called Highlights and brings to attention some notable articles from the archives — mostly when my writing has been featured in the mainstream media.
Popular articles as calculated by user ratings are now on a standalone page called Top rated articles.
There is also a totally new page called Media appearances, which I have created mostly to remind me of the good old days when I managed to get on the radio a few times. On that note I’d like to point out that I am available for any radio appearances, newspaper interviews and bar mitzvahs. And jobs, if anyone has a spare one of them going.
I haven’t quite finished the redesign yet, and I expect that it is still a bit rough around the edges. I also need to work a bit on browser compatibility. I designed it on Firefox 3, but having quickly checked it in other browsers there don’t seem to be many problems. But I wanted to switch it over to the new look so that I can get some feedback while I’m still working on it.
So if you have any thoughts, or if you see anything that seems broken, please do let me know!
The sophisticated music discovery engine... Twitter?
19 July 2009, 01:26
This is a purchase that I made experimentally. A few months ago I was accumulating a hefty order on Boomkat, and I was within touching distance of getting the free postage for spending £50 or more. But I couldn’t work out what to buy.
So I put it to Twitter, and Twitter made the decision for me. Why not, I thought? This way I would probably end up getting something that I wouldn’t normally consider. It’s good to broaden those horizons. Malc was pretty sceptical about it to me. He pointed out that it would have been cheaper for me to forego the free postage and not buy the extra CD.
But that wasn’t the point. Well, it sort of was. I can’t resist that free postage option. But anyway. What if the extra CD I bought actually ended up being good?
David Heggie was the first person on Twitter to respond with something that Boomkat sold. He suggested I should buy Noble Beast by Andrew Bird. I had heard of Andrew Bird, but I had no idea what sort of music he made, so this really was a leap into the dark for me.
It turns out to be a pretty good fit. I have tended to favour experimental and esoteric electronic music for the majority of my adult life. But in the absense of anything fresh or innovative-sounding in that arena, over the past couple of years I have found myself drifting towards more conventional acoustic, guitar-driven music. Pseudo-folksy stuff like Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes; bands I may well have shunned five years ago.
Andrew Bird fits this template pretty well. Before I probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to him. Indeed, I wouldn’t have paid any attention to him anyway if it wasn’t for this Twitter experiment.
But it turns out to be not half bad. This style of music can easily fall into a steady template of blandness. Well, blandness to my ears at least, which usually need some kind of musical gimmickry to be satisfied. But Andrew Bird has enough idiosyncrasies to prevent it from being a problem in Noble Beast. For instance, his USP appears to be the fact that he is a virtuoso whistler.
My favourite track on the album is ‘Not a Robot, But a Ghost’. This video of him and his band performing it live demonstrates that he’s quite an impressive performer — not just as a singer, but as a whistler and a violinist too. Unfortunately, the live version cuts out the best bit of the song, which you can listen to below.
So the experiment which could have gone badly wrong (well, okay, it would only have left me in the possession of a CD that I vaguely disliked) has actually gone very well, despite Malc’s pooh-poohing of the scheme. It’s funny how things work sometimes.
In this age I could turn to Last.fm for recommendations based on a huge database of my listening habits for the past ten years. Or I could have tested out music on Spotify, or browsed around YouTube. Or any number of more sophisticated options. But the best unexpected new musical find I have made came from a random message on Twitter.
At least it’s something else I can tell people the next time someone is sceptical about Twitter. Thanks, Twitter! And thanks David Heggie!
There are many advantages of using Twitter to spread your message. I have written before about the fact that in some respects Twitter seems to have superseded social bookmarking sites like Delicious. The reason? Twitter has an upper hand in any activity where you want to alert people right away to something you want to share right now.
But this immediacy comes at the expense of its long-term value. Trying to find an old tweet is a nightmare; an impossibility even. You can’t tag tweets — at least without substantially eating into your stringent 140 character limit. And the use of URL shortening services necessitated by Twitter’s character limit comes with its own bucketful of problems.
So should a newspaper completely ditch RSS feeds in favour of Twitter, as Malcolm Coles seems to suggest? Hell no.
His first argument is the strangest of the lot. He points out that many RSS feeds provided by newspapers appear to have few subscribers, and maintains that this is a weakness of RSS.
Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.
The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK …
Never heard of the long tail? Having few subscribers to an RSS feed isn’t a weakness. In fact, it plays to the strengths of RSS feeds as the ideal way to disseminate niche content. For me, the problem with newspapers’ approaches to RSS feeds is the complete opposite. As I have written before, they don’t offer enough RSS feeds.
You can scoff at the fact that The Guardian publishes more RSS feeds than there are people living in the UK. But the cost of doing so is pretty small, especially if the feed doesn’t actually have that many takers (because then it uses up less bandwidth). Indeed, as Jon Bounds notes in the comments to the article, in a decent CMS it will take longer (i.e. be more costly) to switch an RSS feed off rather than leave it on.
What potential alternative does a newspaper have if it decides to give up on RSS? Twitter seems to be the big suggestion. Would a Melanie Phillips Twitter account run by the Daily Mail have more than 11 followers on Twitter? Maybe, but the majority of them would probably be robots advertising mucky webcam shows.
For Malcolm Coles, Twitter would be better because you can see which stories are the best by seeing what is retweeted. Retweets are extra good because they promote a newspaper’s content. But people will tweet and retweet about articles they like anyway, whether it comes from an official newspaper Twitter account or not. And to be honest, I could do without my Twitter stream being filled with yet more junky retweets.
According to Malcolm Coles, you can also provide more context in Twitter because “There’s space in 140 characters for newspapers to give some background to stories as well as the headline.” But you can provide the whole article in an RSS feed if you want to, as The Guardian (whose RSS feeds are by far the most popular) has demonstrated. The inability to provide context is in fact Twitter’s greatest weakness. Even a social bookmarking site like Delicious gives you 1,000 characters to play with, not just 140.
It is true that you can have a conversation about stories on Twitter, which you can’t do with RSS feeds. Conversation is practically the raison d’être of Twitter though, so this is not exactly a surprise. All that this underlines is the fact that Twitter and RSS are two very different kinds of tools. One cannot be comfortably substituted for the other.
Malcolm Coles says that the newspapers agree with him because they do not bother to promote their RSS feeds properly. He says that they “have already given up on RSS feeds and no longer actively promote them.”
This ignores the fact that newspapers have never actively promoted RSS feeds. Promotions of RSS feeds haven’t just recently been relegated to the footers. If anything, they have just been promoted there. My last post about newspapers’ RSS feeds outlined my exasperation over the fact that their implementation is sloppy and amateurish, and it is nigh-on impossible to find out if the RSS feed you’re looking for even exists, never mind where it is.
Perhaps, indeed, the newspapers’ failure to properly promote their RSS feeds this is the reason why Melanie Phillips only has eleven subscribers in Google Reader. Maybe Malcolm Coles sees this as a chicken-and-egg scenario, but in this case I definitely know which came first.
The real problem is not that RSS has failed for newspapers. It’s that newspapers have failed at RSS. This is demonstrated by the fact that in the comments, Malcolm Coles ends up relying on the unreliability of the Express’s RSS feeds, rather than any inherent weaknesses in the RSS format itself, in his attempts to support his arguments. If the Express’s RSS feeds are broken and poorly promoted, that’s the Express’s fault, not RSS’s fault.
Personally, if newspapers turned off RSS, I suspect they’d never see me visit their sites again – I use Twitter as a real time stream of information, but my RSS Reader is a library of sources I’ve invested time nad effort in reading regularly and getting to know. One doesn’t replace the other – they co-exist.
The Tartan Feartie saga is a sad reflection of politics
26 June 2009, 14:50
Here is the full text of an article written by Grant Thoms for his Tartan Hero blog on 24 November 2007:
Wendy’s in a ’spin’ again
It should have been third time lucky for Wendy Alexander and a head of communications for the Labour Group. First, Brian Lironi left within days of Wendy’s coronation. Then Babyface Marr spectacularly resigned last week after a bout of political Tourette’s Syndrome. Now, the third man, Gavin Yates is in a spin after his blog postings were reported by the Sunday Post and Sunday Herald.
In his blog (which has since been closed down, a fine example of bolting the stable door), he praised Alex Salmond as ‘a politician at the top of his game’ and lauded the SNP Government’s achievements in it’s first 100 days. Now we shall see if this ‘journalist’ will change his tune now Labour is paying for his pipes.
Today, the Tartan Hero stable finds its door bolted firmly shut. A message simply reads: “the blog at tartanhero.blogspot.com has been removed.” His blog posts are now being reported in The Herald.
It seems as though “Tartan Hero” has become the Tartan Feartie, scared of his own views. For the man the SNP were pinning their hopes on for the Glasgow North East by-election has now withdrawn from the contest, apparently afraid that his blog “would return to haunt him”.
We have seen this sort of thing before of course. As Tartan Hero’s post says, one of Wendy Alexander’s spin doctors, Gavin Yates, closed down his blog and deleted it. As I pointed out at the time, if you want to hide your blog then deleting it is pretty futile. You leave traces of yourself all over the place, and deleting your blog only brings attention to the fact that you might have something to hide.
In the case of Gavin Yates, I was still able to access all of his archives which were sitting in my Google Reader account. Anyone can access old RSS feeds in Google Reader as long as they were subscribed to the website while it was still being published.
This week The Herald says that “traces” of the Tartan Hero blog have been retrieved by Mr Thoms’s political opponents. In my Google Reader account I have found a bit more than “traces”. I have access to the full content of 684 of his articles. I think this is a very substantial proportion of his archives.
In the words of Lallands Peat Worrier, he has been “Indygalled“! We can add his name to the list which includes Gavin Yates (whom, ironically, he gloated about), “Indygal” Anne McLaughlin and Kezia Dugdale.
Anne McLaughlin’s blog made the news when she became an MSP. Journalists trawled her archives looking for anything vaguely juicy, and they found a few interesting comments about (and a few photographs of) other politicians, but not much more. After some of the offending content was deleted, and a brief hiatus, she continued blogging and the whole thing blew over.
Kezia Dugdale also took some time off her blog after deciding it was “far too risky a past-time”. I think she got in hot water a couple of times about some of the things she published. Now with a promise that she will “be a bit smarter” with her blogging activities, it remains one of the very best Scottish Labour blogs going.
Tartan Hero was not among my personal favourites (although I guess I should be grateful to him for once rather inexplicably deciding that this was the second best Scottish political blog!). But it was clearly a very popular blog and appeared to attract quite a wide audience. His opinions didn’t do him any harm then.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think there is anything in Tartan Hero’s archives which is worth getting too excited about, which makes the deletion all the more strange in my view. The Herald hints at worries about this views on gay rights and Catholic schools. Jeff (apparently with the scoop!) also pinpointed Catholic schools as a potential issue.
The thing is, Tartan Hero was always had quite a provocative style. The views were not particularly extreme, but they were forthright and strongly expressed.
It seems strange to me that a politician would get cold feet over political views they so vehemently expressed just a year or two ago. It can’t be a surprise that his writing would find itself in the spotlight. Indeed, that was surely the intention.
It is true that in the rough-and-tumble world of party politics, one’s character and history faces a different type of scrutiny, and the game is not often played very fairly. But Grant Thoms is surely an intelligent person who has presumably had his sights set on becoming a Parliamentarian for a while now. None of this can be a surprise to him and he will surely have seen it coming.
So the deletion of his blog does make me scratch my head a bit. Moreover, it looks particularly silly given what he wrote when Gavin Yates deleted his blog.
As I said the last time I tackled this issue, no doubt if someone tried hard enough they’d find plenty of material on my blog to use against me. After all, as a mere 22 23-year-old scamp who has been blogging since 2002, I have left a fairly thorough record of my opinions going back to the age of 16.
It’s not that my opinions as a 16-year-old were particularly invalid or wrong, but a lot of them will have changed. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that I have written something in the past that could be taken out of context and used against me.
I’d like to trust people to be responsible about it, but I wonder if it’s possible. Certainly, it is a sad reflection of the state of politics that astute bloggers feel the need to cover up their writing for fear of it being used against them and thwarting their political careers.
At least Anne McLaughlin and Kezia Dugdale have not been put off for good and have been able to continue blogging in the long run. I wonder if one day soon a modified version of Tartan Hero will return to the blogosphere.
Our second Scotweb2 event takes place tomorrow in Edinburgh. In case you’ve never seen me write about it before, Scotweb2 is a project that I help on to do with web 2.0 initiatives in Scotland. Tomorrow is our second event.
Check out the Scotweb2 in the morning to see how it is progressing.
I am Duncan Stephen, based in Kirkcaldy, Fife. I am currently employed as the Web Editor at the University of St Andrews. This website contains my writing on a number of subjects with a particular focus on current affairs and technology.
Gristleism is an altogether different product. But it chimes with the same ideas about what it means to buy music in a physical format in these days of digital downloads. Record companies are increasingly seeking to make the physical editions of albums more appealing by making the package more of the product. The stylish packaging of Gristleism asks questions about music, just as the original Buddha Machines did.
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This is a purchase that I made experimentally. A few months ago I was accumulating a hefty order on 
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