October 2011
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The new aesthetic, structural impressionism and...
I remember the first time I saw Soundcloud, the website that lets you share and listen to audio. Nice service, I thought, but is putting the waveform at the centre of things really sensible? Isn’t it too nerdy?
To me, as someone who has spent his fair share of time inside audio editing programs, it just felt as if the waveform was too far from ordinary people’s experiences of sound...
September 2011
The naming of things
Tom doesn’t like the term “3D printer”. He’s not the only one.
I’ve been writing and commissioning stories about fabrication and rapid prototyping for more years than I care to think about, and honestly: the biggest hurdle to getting this idea into the public sphere has always, always been the name.
Yes, it says something relatively accurate about the process -...
August 2011
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Weeknotes 72
The intriguing thing about weeknotes (or monthnotes, I suppose, in my case) is that when you are inside them, all the weeks feel the same.
August has felt like I’m hunkered down, day after day, doing the same sort of things: writing, thinking, reading, deliberating, deciding. Yet zoom out and you realise there’s a lot of variation in there. There’s a real topography to the...
July 2011
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Weeknotes 68
There’s been a hiatus here, mainly because it’s been all go for what seems like forever.
Work with GigaOM is proceeding well. Project Alika is making progress, and the way it’s pulling together surprises me on a regular basis. Meanwhile I’m hoping to get Project Ele, a great story that I’ve been circling around for a while, commissioned in the next few days. Lots...
June 2011
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Notes on the Copy Continuum
On Thursday night I gave a talk at the Byam Shaw Library, part of Central St Martins, called The Copy Continuum, about the way we perceive copying and how we might consider the world in context of shanzhai culture. It was part of The Piracy Project, a series of events about the organised by the lovely folk of AND Publishing, who kindly invited me to share some thoughts with the audience. Thanks to...
May 2011
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Meet GigaOM's new European correspondent
I’ve known Om Malik for quite a while now — in fact, it’s been such a long time our paths crossed that I can’t even remember when it was we met for the first time. Still, I’ve always liked him. The Silicon Valley technology journalism scene is, for whatever reason, populated by a lot of hucksters and full of self-aggrandising. In the middle of it all, Om’s one of the...
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Upcoming talk: The Copy Continuum
For years I’ve been interested in the way we think about piracy and copying, both in terms of the physical world and intellectual objects. It’s something that you can’t avoid if you spend a lot of time thinking and writing about technology, and has come up time and time again for me — as a creative worker, as someone who spends a lot of time talking to technology companies,...
April 2011
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Three things I found out today
⌘ There’s never something you can’t learn, as this list of 50 tips for journalists reminded me.
⌘ Nightlife in Cardiff is, well, surprising.
⌘ You’d think a police officer subjected to a sexual attack would be keen to prosecute the perpetrator. Not so, according to this piece in the Guardian. One of @IfYouOnly’s followers called it “espeluznante” (lurid) — I...
Weeknotes 52 / Yearnotes
Last week, as March rolled over and turned into April, I hit my first anniversary as a freelance. A year! It seems both the longest year of my life and a rapid tableau of brief, snatched moments.
In any case, it seemed only right to take a look back at how that first year has gone. I made some yearnotes at the end of 2010, which looked back on a tough time mainly from a personal perspective,...
March 2011
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What is a "technology writer"?
A few weeks ago, Alexis Madrigal — a chum and one of my favourite science and technology writers — punted a question out to his Twitter followers: “If you could hire any three journalists working primarily online today, who would they be?”.
It was an interesting question, though I struggled to answer, and he got plenty of response since he’s big on the internets. (In fact,...
1 tag
Three things I found out today
⌘ You can’t get blood from a stone, but you can get a very red liquid pouring out of a glacier.
⌘ IM is one of those tools that a lot of journalists don’t use and should — I remember in the Guardian offices it was barely touched, despite being bloody useful. Is it just a generation gap?
⌘ I told a friend recently that the phrase “fun run” was an oxymoron. Today I ran...
Silicon Alley rises again
The New York Observer has launched a new tech blog called BetaBeat, about the city’s technology scene. It’s got an honourable mission statement that essentially boils down to “we don’t want to be like all those other shitty blogs repeating the same piece of crap funding news, we want to bring you stories about the people who make the scene move”.
I like it so far...
1 tag
Three things I found out today
⌘ Mice sing to each other in voices that are way beyond our hearing range.
⌘ You can produce some truly stunning images with just a telescope and a camera. (OK, not just any old telescope and camera, but still).
⌘ If newspapers die out completely, the biggest loser may be the stock photographer: after all, how else will they sell their pictures of businessmen reading the newspaper and looking...
1 tag
Three things I found out today
⌘ Forget Charlie S***n: James Franco has managed to win the internet.
⌘ The technology industry has experienced a lot of change in its lifetime. But I think medicine has seen even more rapid, radical change. Not everyone agrees, but it’s worth thinking about the challenges on both sides and what one can learn from the other.
⌘ If blue whales were like people, they’d all die of...
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Three things I found out today
⌘ The treatment of Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, is a disgusting. It’s a travesty that Barack Obama — who made such a noise about treating prisoners properly while running for office — is complicit in this.
⌘ In 1989, 2 million people joined hands all the way from Tallinn, through Riga, to Vilnius.
⌘ Sometimes the future is beautiful.
Weeknotes 47
This past week was a strange one, all tides and comings and goings.
It started with ebullience and an unexpected £60 victory in a local pub quiz. That winningness fed into the energy I’ve been feeling over the last few weeks, something that’s building up as I spend more time running. I’m still doing it all in the gym, of course — let’s not pretend that when I exercise...
Three things I found out today
⌘ Journalists, enabled by the web, are increasingly defining success according to exposure, and news organizations are increasingly defining success according to the limitation of exposure.
⌘ One of the buildings I pass on my way into London is an asylum for idiots.
⌘ Very few ideas are unique - many great inventions were produced by several people, separately, at the same time. Here’s...
1 tag
Three things I found out today
⌘ There is a definite reason you should slice meat against the grain.
⌘ Twitter is at its best when unexpected news happens. It is at its worst when pre-orchestrated events take place. After a few weeks of watching so many interesting messages cross my stream about Egypt and, the torrent of brainfarts depicting every single second of the iPad 2 launch or the TED conference were a huge...
1 tag
Three things I found out today
⌘ Germans buy more Ikea furniture than anyone else.
⌘ A single city block in New York can change drastically over the course of a few generations, as this piece — from wilderness to brothels to the Apple store — shows. (via Phil)
⌘ While I wouldn’t go as far as suggesting that any readers with impaired vision should suddenly start running solo, but it’s amazing what technology can...
The power of history
You may or may not be familiar with Adam Curtis, the award-winning British documentary maker who was behind great films like The Power of Nightmares and The Trap.
His films are usually dissections of power and control, watching the way our attitudes are manipulated or changed over time. I like to think of him as a sort of epidemiological historian who works through the medium of TV.
Two years...
February 2011
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Three things I found out today
⌘ The world needs more outlets like Haaretz, and perhaps more owners like Amos Schocken.
⌘ Amanda Hocking is a self-published writer who sells by the bucketload. Amazon’s only going to make this trend more viable for more people, surely.
⌘ I thought I was the only one who found Mad Men empty and devoid of the depth that everyone else seemed to see. Not so!
1 tag
Three things I found out today
⌘ Where you read affects how and what you read. Sort of obvious I suppose, but worth saying.
⌘ For anyone who wonders whether the Foursquare-style checkin can ever reach the mainstream, I offer a tidbit of evidence: I discovered today that my mum’s house has been registered as a Facebook place. My family were all checked in: that means my 50 year old mother and two sisters aged 28 and 14,...
Jealousy?
One of the great chasms between traditional journalism and the startup world is money. Since editorial and commercial operations at most major news organisations are sharply divided (and for understandable reasons), there’s not a lot of crossover between the two worlds. So when it comes to talking money — or, god forbid, making quite a lot of it — well, for many journalists there’s...
1 tag
Three things I found out today
⌘ The people behind Bloom are doing exciting things, but on top of that, they also do a great line in parallax. Must use it.
⌘ Pravda hasn’t changed much from its notorious Soviet days. I read a piece today in which my former colleague Luke Harding — who it expelled from the country after he wrote about Wikileaks cables that were unflattering to Moscow — was called “a specialist for...
5 tags
Lo sono a Wired Italia!
I’m led to believe that my profile of Jan Chipchase and exploration of the art of shanzhai is going to be featured in a forthcoming edition of Wired Italia. Lovely!
While I’m at it, Wired.it is about to hit its second birthday: anyone in Milan on March 1 is invited to go along and join the festivities.
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Three things I found out today
⌘ Pitching is still the toughest part of the process for me.
⌘ It’s hard to make something extremely beautiful and entrancing with data. It’s harder to make it actually mean something.
⌘ There is no end to the amount of silliness inside the US military. (via stml
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Three things I found out today
⌘ The idea of “good taste” is a peculiar construction that often collapses under the weight of history. Well, that’s the only way I can explain this mushroom cloud cake being constructed to celebrate successful US atomic testing (via Aaron)
⌘ Having an idea is worth nothing if you can’t make it work, as Adam Greenfield’s blunt and insightful post on Nokia’s...
What I want from my media
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months looking at various media outlets, critiquing ideas, trying to understand what’s missing and thinking about how we can reinvigorate intelligent media and make features work for the web.
I started thinking about what I want from my media, particularly the press. Here’s a list I jotted down that’s mainly aimed at magazines,...
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Three things I found out today
⌘ People really like to think the worst of Microsoft. After President Obama’s private dinner with a handful of Silicon Valley executives, several people have wondered where on earth Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer was. This made me realise that either (a) people think Microsoft is from Silicon Valley (it isn’t, it’s based outside Seattle); (b) people think Seattle and San Francisco...
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Three things I found out today
⌘ Next generation TV critic Alan Sepinwall is not necessarily brilliant, but often very engaging and invested in a way that most traditional critics aren’t - ie they seem to hate TV. He got started by writing recaps of NYPD Blue.
⌘ People are starting to do interesting things around the Kindle: the Lendle service allows you to borrow books from other people or lend out your own books to...
1 tag
Three things I found out today
⌘ Freeman Dyson is more complicated than I realised.
⌘ You can bid for the ownership of the old Shoreditch Station, which closed five years ago. I had no idea it was so long-standing, to be honest: an underground station since 1913, and a rail station for a long time before that.
⌘ America is home to just one church designed by Sir Christopher Wren. It’s in Fulton, Missouri, but started...
4 tags
Gratification delayed
A few months ago I saw something about a new “slow journalism” magazine called Delayed Gratification. The idea sounded intriguing: a quarterly that tried to make a virtue of its long publishing cycle to try and turn the traditional idea of a news magazine upside down.
“Slow Journalism measures news in months not minutes, returning to stories after the dust has settled. The Slow...
1 tag
Three things I found out today
⌘ The song identification service Shazam employs an army of ‘music sourcers’ who go out to find new artists, remixes and club tracks to feed into the engine.
⌘ Richard Turley, a former-colleague-of-sorts-I-suppose at the Guardian, has gone on to do some very enjoyable things as creative director of Bloomberg Businessweek… giving a magazine that could be about some very boring things...
4 tags
What Scientology tells us about journalism
Over the years I’ve developed a mild but significant interest in Scientology — in the same way one might develop, say, a curiosity about the mental state of serial killers or keep an eye on the proliferation of nuclear weapons in dictatorships.
Imagine the shudder of pleasure, then, when I saw that this week’s New Yorker featured a monster piece about Scientology by Lawrence...
2 tags
Three things I found out today
Russell has tried watching TV with a second screen that projects Twitter. He’s using RIG’s dextr client. I already use my iPhone as a second screen for Twitter when I’m sitting at my desk (powered by Trickle), and it would be an interesting experiment to see it deployed in this way (which I like more than, say, an on-screen version). However, we don’t currently have a TV —...
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Thoughts on Finland, Nokia and saunas
Last week I wrote a piece for the BBC about Nokia, the struggling Finnish multinational mobile company, describing how its cultural quirks were — in part, at least — a reason for its troubles.
The story went far and wide, and has generated commentary elsewhere. A couple of people got in touch with me, however, to complain that I was being unfair to Finland and its people. One asked by email if...
2 tags
Weeknotes 44
This week saw the gears moving round a few clicks, with a mixture of work for GigaOM (on mechanising the news, Nokia’s troubles and its deal with Microsoft) and the BBC (including iPhone confessions and sauna culture).
Wednesday was most exciting. I was part of a Publishers’ Association event on digital books, where the assembled crowd discussed the travails of their industry — in...
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Weeknotes: 43
As January closes and the cold weather starts to draw in again, I’ve got that feeling as if I only really exist in the space between days. I’ve managed to conduct myself fairly normally as far as work goes — a couple of days at the BBC, some stuff for GigaOM, a couple of short freelance features — but at the same time everything seems disorientingly slow.
Still, solace in the...
January 2011
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Weeknotes 42
The weeks seem to be crawling by incredibly slowly. It’s just three weeks since my last *notes, and yet it feels as if it was months ago. Can I thank a moment of clarity for this? Am I in The Zone? Is it possible that I am trapped in some sort of quantum bubble that Vonnegut would be proud of?
Unlikely.
However, this treacly experience of time is not actually a bad thing. It means...
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An idea for digital books
When I bought my first MP3 player many years ago, it was a blank slate. Digital download services didn’t really exist then (at least legal ones) and even if they did, my internet connection was pretty slow. That didn’t stop me from using the player itself, however, since I could build a collection of music on it that largely consisted of the music I already owned.
Ripping my CDs gave...
Yearnotes
What can I say about the last 12 months?
2010 ended up being the really shitty hat that 2009 wore to the party.
To be honest, it’s hard to separate the two, as far as things go. Between them, both 2010 and its predecessor were depressing and dispiriting and about as melancholic and subdued as can be.
The job I had became precarious a long time ago, but it wasn’t until 2010...
8 Smears and Misconceptions About WikiLeaks Spread... →
The corporate media’s tendency to blare misinformation and outright fabrications has been particularly egregious in coverage of WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of “zombie lies” — misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how...
December 2010
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Mozilla's Mike Shaver on HTML5: 'We were a little...
When my recent Technology Review cover story about HTML5 and the rebirth of the web was published, it was the fruit of a lot of groundwork. I did dozens of interviews and uncovered some really interesting things — but not all of it could make it into the finished piece.
So I’m publishing some of the interviews I did here. We’ve already heard from Ian Hickson, the spec’s main...
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W3C's Philippe Le Hégaret on HTML5: 'In the past,...
When my recent Technology Review cover story about HTML5 and the rebirth of the web was published, it was the fruit of a lot of groundwork. I did dozens of interviews and uncovered some really interesting things — but not all of it could make it into the finished piece.
So I’m publishing some of the interviews I did here. We’ve already heard from Ian Hickson, the spec’s main...
