There’s a very interesting article by Mark Cousins about the implications of the ‘DVD revolution’ on the film industry in the March issue of Prospect. DVDs are apparently the “fastest growing entertainment technology of all time,” and Cousins suggests some reasons why this technology has been embraced when the introduction of CDs took much longer. […]
Month: March 2004
BBC Creative Archive and ‘Martini Media’
There are several interesting points in this speech by the BBC’s Director of New Media & Technology. The points that caught my attention were: the first use I have seen of the term ‘Martini Media’ — anytime, anyplace, anywhere — to denote a concept I have elsewhere referred to as ubiquitous access; some pointers to […]
More Werner Herzog Quotes
I recently read Paul Cronin’s Herzog on Herzog and collected a few choice quotes about filmmaking and the perspectives that inform it. I’ve added these to my page of Herzog quotes — which seems to meet some kind of demand, if the number of Google searches it attracts is anything to go on. The page […]
Dungeness
Here are a couple of photos, taken with my mobile phone, from a trip to Dungeness this afternoon. We visited Derek Jarman’s garden. Google has just found me a Guardian article which gives an excellent introduction to the area and the story of how Jarman came to live there.
Schadenfreude isn’t in MS Word’s dictionary…
… so Microsoft won’t understand how I feel about the fines the EU wants to impose on them. There’s a generation of computer users who have come to assume that the bugs, glitches and security holes in Microsoft’s applications software are just an intrinsic feature, and all software is like that. Not true.
Simple overview of e-learning standards
At a meeting this week (the Advisory Board of CIPD’s Certificate in Online Learning) the vexed question of Why are there so many e-learning standards, and how do they relate to each other? came up. I busked an answer, and as sometimes (but not always!) happens the busked version came out more articulate and concise […]
Sunday afternoon anarchists
I’m spending part of my Sunday reading Boff Whalley’s book Footnote*, and am tickled as usual by the awkward frisson that someone as bourgeois as me loves Boff’s band Chumbawamba and the anarchist ideas they stand for. (It was the same when I bought the Dead Kennedys’ Holiday in Cambodia, with its lyric: “Play ethnicky […]
George Lucas on aesthetics of digital film making
At the end of an extremely hagiographic article about George Lucas, which casts him as the originator of just about every technological innovation in cinema in the last 30 years, and even compares his role to David Bowie’s Thomas Newton character in The Man Who Fell to Earth, there are some very sanguine comments from […]
Doubts about models for listening to music in the future
I’ve been reflecting more on my claim that online radio is the model for listening to music in the future, helped by a range of exchanges with others. Being sceptical I’ve so far come up with four types of reasons why my bold conjecture might come unstitched: Socio-Cultural; Economics of Technologies; Economics of Rights Management; […]
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
Asking rhetorical questions of politicians from the safety of your own web site is a cheap and easy way of scoring points without any serious risk of comeback from the other side, but I can’t let one of Geoff Hoon’s statements in this Time Out interview go unremarked. Commenting on his love for early Bob […]