Monthly Archives: March 2009

Read it, disregard it, drive into walls.

Posted on by

You know what? stfu, valleywag. I know you’re the Internet’s answer to The Sun, so I’m just going to disregard everything you just said in that article. I mean really? Alex is “forgettable”? Please, Alex is far more interesting than Kevin. If I had to pick one of them to go out and grab something to eat with it’d definitely be Alex.

If it’s true about Alex wanting to leave Diggnation, then Diggnation is dead. No really. Just Kevin sitting on a couch, with Glen and Prager? That’s not interesting. Alex’s retorts and spontaneous jokes (which sometimes are so spontaneous they don’t make sense) are what make that show interesting. They can’t get another co-host, because they just can’t afford to. They’d have to come from in house, and I’m not sitting thrugh 40 minutes of Martin Sargent.

Anyway, whilst I’m here. My ‘Freelance’ label in my gmail has never been more active. It’s quite intimidating. Priorities say I have to finish that website assignment first though. Well, first food, then website. I’ve decided on just using CC and GPL content to fill the pages. Perfectly legal, if a little lazy.

Link round up

Posted on by

I got home about seven today, with achy feet, and I decided I was in need of a nap. That nap lasted from seven till midnight, so I’m fairly alert now. I managed to get through sixty RSS items, and even wrote up some ideas on two of them (which you probably just read). Anyway, on my travels I stumbled upon very few interesting things. I did find out amazingly that awesome things happen when you live in San Fransico.

Prager, producer of Diggnation,  had a random guy just stumble into his apartment, use his bathroom, take his trousers off and try to go to sleep. Being a third generation news provider that he is, he decided to twitter and ustream it up. I saw that article on in Reader and thought “lol, some people are dumb”. Then realised that it was Prager (why isn’t his name headline news? that guy’s awesome) and lolz ensued and I was slightly less shocked.

Lifehacker found an awesome Greasemonkey script that keeps your place on long pages. (In fact Lifehacker didn’t find it, gHacks did but their website is ugly, I mean serious, more ad space than content.) I was actually just about to make a Firefox extension that allows you to click a place on a page which inserts a name link tag, so that you could then bookmark that. But since I’ve just found this, I guess it’ll do.

If you find that you do decide to read Watchmen, then you’ll be needing something like this comic book reader. Whilst I’m linking to comic book stuff, I rediscovered StopTazmo the other day, free manga for the win.

Product placement should save piracy

Posted on by

I’m just going to throw this idea out there; when TV show marketers are selling out slots for their product placement bits (whenever you saw a phone on 24, someone had paid for that to be there) do they take into account the number of expected illegal downloads the program will receive?

What phone does Elle use... Oh yeah.

What phone does Elle use... Oh yeah.

Lost is one of the most expensively produce shows on Earth, maybe even the most expensive (the reason we’re not so much in Hawaii this year? because that was costing about half a million dollars each episode, probably more now). Heroes, Battlestar, and 24 are all probably ranking up there in the hundreds of thousands of pounds per episode too.

I’d be pretty annoyed if I was a network publisher and we weren’t capitalising from the ten and a half million people illegally watching TV by downloading it. Product placement must be worth more than traditional ads when trying to improve company image and recognition. Traditional ads are removed from every downloaded piece of TV I’ve ever seen, making the benefit to the advertisers zero. Whereas product placed adverts can’t be removed easily, and who would want to anyway? They’re not in the way. They rarely dilute the story. So all those millions of people are definitely going to see your business’ logo, which is what you wanted, right?

I expect that if they don’t incorporate those statistics into their pricing it’s because there’s no reliable statistics out there. ShowInsider grabs their data (I’m guessing) by monitoring how many seeds and peers a torrent has. That’s really not a very effective method that promises much accuracy. Some people hide their tracker data, they can’t be looking at data from private trackers, or just trackers that are too small to know about. There are a lot of fake seeders out there (MediaDefender-esk). Lost’s 1,700,000 downloads this week could easily be as little as a million or as great as three million. It’s just not possible to find out well.

Even if you do trust ShowInsider’s data, you still have absolutely no demographics on who’s downloading. It’s incredibly hard to find advertisers when you can’t tell them who’s watching your show (BMW don’t want be advertising to twelve year olds). I know that’s one of the reasons there was such a big overhaul in the distribution method over at Revision3.

Back in the day you used to be able to donate $5 a month (or however much, really) to get Diggnation earlier. What happened was that one guy donated teh $5 a month, ripped the video from the site, and posted it on his own, days before it was released to the general public on Rev3′s website. I don’t think Rev3 minded that so much (this was before there was advertising on their website) as it was all extra coverage for them, but the problem it lead to was who the hell was this extra coverage? Because they weren’t going to Rev3′s website they couldn’t poll them to find that information out.

That’s largely I suspect why things like Hulu and iPlayer exist now. ABC got annoyed with not having the demographics on their veiwers, so they decided to release their content in a way that they could. Piracy is so arrife because I can’t watch Hulu though…

How Google should make money

Posted on by

Ages ago I did a post on how ad-funded services were likely to die off, and other methods of monetization that people could use. I didn’t even think about how all that would affect Google until I just noticed a post on valleywag regarding them making more of their services paid for.

That really doesn’t surprise me though; Google is the prefect company to be making money through freemium services. At the moment they’re focusing mainly on the business markets, which makes sense since they have more motivation to pay for a service and they’ll also need better customer support which comes at a price, and they know it. No feathers are ruffled there.

It just makes sense to charge those guys.

How about making money from us individuals using freemium revenue sources?

I’d be pretty pissed if Google Reader started limiting the number of feeds I can subscribe to, unless I paid $5 a month. It’s not that the service isn’t worth paying for – I love it, it’s been my  homepage for the past few years – but there are alternatives out there that I could easily switch to. If all else fails, I could just program my own. I wouldn’t put up with having to pay for it.

So how can Google make money from it, that isn’t advertising (which they don’t)?

We can just go back to the idea of charging businesses, or power users. I know that some of the blog author’s that I read use Google Reader for research and second-hand-news purposes (which most of it is on the internet, like this post for instance). I’m sure if Google paneled them they’d find a whole host of features that reports need and are willing to pay for in order for their job to be easier or for them to produce better content, finding news quicker.

There could be a feature for paid users only which gives links and citation data to other websites and even news papers which Google have archived. They have all the known internet at their finger tips, why not tell the people looking for it about it? They could order these links by the sentiments of the pages; are you looking for pages pro-, or anti-Apple? is the author liberal or conservative? Those kinds of things would help authors do their job, and I’m sure Gawker or Wired wouldn’t mind paying for it. Hell, if I could afford it, I’d get it for when I (very occasionally) do reviews on here.

So, again I’ve come to the conclusion that service providers should charge their business and pro-users, becuase they aren’t willing to leave. Give them a few nicher features and you’re good to go.

Last minute coursework again…

Posted on by

Now I’ve finished that freelance gig I was given (well, almost finished, I just need to convert the guy’s old pages to new ones) I can actually start on my coursework. Which is due in Friday.

It’s basically a website. So long as it’s valid XHTML and CSS, and has form pages, I’ve been told anything can pass. I’m actually not going to be putting much effort into content due to that. I just want to make sure that I have it finished. Maybe later, when I have more time I’ll add better content.

It’s basically a website about Leicester from the prospective of a fresher – someone how just needs some information about Leicester and where to go and what to do.

I’ve already done the actual template. I just need to add content. Laura and Chris have already taken photos, which we need to include in our website, so I’ll just use some of theirs. They certainly took enough.

Food for thought

Posted on by

In an idea that’s two parts to have a use for the account, and one part to keep track of my diet, I decided to use my twitter as a food journal! I’ve decided to list pretty much everything I eat, and I’ve done so so far. Most of the time a meal can be summed up in 140 characters, and you can text to update twitter, so it seemed the most ideal platform. I could do that on this blog, but I can’t text to update, and I’d rather this blog not be spammed up with “cheese on toast” every few hours.

Depending on how long twitter keeps your tweets, and if they let you search them (I’m sure there are tools), it’ll be cool to see what I’ve tried before and see how my diet changes. I’ll also put if I like that type of food so people can see and know what I like. It’s not exciting but meh, it could be fun, if not interesting.

Why Watchmen should never have been a film

Posted on by

Leaving the cinema after seeing Watchmen left me with a heavy, disappointed heart. Even though I’ve not read the graphic novel, I knew the epicness of it. I knew that if it were only it were a little more popular it would be a comic book foundation, like the X-Mens and Batmans of the world. Because of that, this film had a lot to live up to, and it didn’t put out. Continue reading →

Debian experience so far

Posted on by

I switched to Debian four or so days ago, and it’s kinda making me feel stressed. I’m having to put a lot more work into the operating system to just make it work.

Firefox for instance – oh, sorry, Iceweasel – took a lot of Googling and about:configing before it felt the same as it did on Windows. Why some of those keys and things have changed is odd for me. Why has ^J for the download menu suddenly been switched to ^Y? Why use Alt instead of Ctrl for tab manipulation? Why doesn’t clicking the address bar auto-highlight it all? These just seem like weird changes to me.

I’ve installed a few extensions in Songbird. It says they’re installed but there’s no other sign of them. No way to run them. No obvious way to get to the iPod functions which apparently exist…

I’ve no idea what I’m supposed to be installing to get OpenGL to work. I need it to play Eve… (Which is apparently no longer in development…)

Installing things is also a little bit of work… I don’t know why more things don’t come with a set up wizard, like I’m so used to in Windows. Instead, I have to try and remember the switches for untaring things, putting them in the right place. Sometimes just guessing what I should be doing to run the damn thing.

This just isn't nice...

This just isn't nice... It looks like it can't decide on what width to use for letters sometimes. Blatant attempts at adding extra pixels to make it more round.

Fonts are a weird, picky problem for me too. But I think that’s just because I’ve not played around with the defaults enough yet, to find one I actually like. Needs more anti-alias, and better kerning.

On the installation for Debian set up thing, I asked it to install a web server. That may exist, but I’ve no idea where to find it… My PHP pages aren’t giving me any errors, they just don’t seem to be outputting anything at all.

It’s just not new user friendly. I’m hoping that Ubuntu is much better in this domain, since that’s what it’s designed for really. So, I may be switching back to Windows some time soon. I don’t think my life can handle not having it as a primary operating system just yet. In the furutre though, I’ll defintely be installing another Linux OS on my next machine.

Freudian slip

Posted on by

(23:29:39) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: my mates leant me a 40K book and basically gone “give it a chance”
(23:29:54) Shane: Whaaaaaaat?
(23:30:04) Shane: As if I’m being blown off due to war hammer
(23:30:24) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: no – your being blown off becuase i want to clamber into my pit and begin to read a book
(23:30:33) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: so that if the first chapter is shit he can have it back 2morrow
(23:30:42) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: and id blow you off for bits of plastic anyday
(23:30:45) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: wait.
(23:30:46) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: no.
(23:30:47) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: DOH!
(23:30:52) Shane: :D
(23:30:59) ***Shane finds some plastic
(23:31:02) Luke ~ Mr. Funk: ¬¬¬”