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!
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...