I’d lay a large bet that Neil Young doesn’t have an iPod. He’s been waging a war on digital compression since the early days of CDs, and is on record as saying that MP3s are even worse than CDs: “MP3 is a dog; the quality sucks. It’s all compressed and the data compression — it’s […]
Month: May 2005
Usability of People’s Network Enquire service
I covered the announcement of the People’s Network Online Enquiry Service last year, and, as of last week, the ‘Enquire’ service is operational. Here is the press release about the launch from the Museums Libraries and Archives Council, wherein the Chief Executive says “Enquire is designed to get answers to people wherever they are, night […]
Creating legal independent music podcasts
The use of music in podcasts is a legal grey area, but there are an increasing number of tools and services that make it easier to source music legally, usually from ‘unsigned’ artists, creating a genuinely grassroots channel for independent music and musicians. The reason for the doubts over the legal status of music podcasting […]
Full article on the economics of consumer attention now available
Originally I published only a couple of paragraphs of my article on the The Economics of Consumer Attention on this site, as a ‘teaser’ for the full print article (published under the title One Recommendation Under a Groove). Since it’s now six months old, the editor of Five Eight, where it was published, has agreed […]
Tufte, PowerPoint and oratory
As a result of today’s BBC strike, my normal lunch-break listening of The World at One was replaced by a short documentary called Microsoft Powerpoint and the decline of Civilisation.
Teaching as performance
Doug Brent has written an interesting paper in last month’s First Monday on how historical trends are being played out in online education. He draws a distinction between “knowledge [or, more strictly, teaching] as performance and knowledge as thing” (emphasis in the original). Loosely speaking you could map this onto my process-versus-product distinction in e-learning. […]
Bootstrap Network/interview with me
I met Graham Stewart a few months ago in connection with some online social networking developments. Graham’s very active in building, and experimenting with, social software. His latest endeavour (with Neil McEvoy) is the Bootstrap Network, a “self-organising community of Internet entrepreneurs seeking to collaborate and create new business ventures”. (For geeks, the Bootstrap Network, […]
Old singers, old songs
Yesterday I went to see the first of Linda Thompson’s three-night series of music-hall revue shows, which cited the Cole Porter quote, “strange how potent cheap music is”. Not just potent, but — at least in some cases — much more persistent than the disposable, ephemeral stuff it was thought to be. This comes at […]
BBC geek archive (sort of)
One news service to which I subscribe described the backstage.bbc.co.uk beta as “the talked-about BBC content archive”, which confuses it with the pilot of the Creative Archive, which it isn’t. But it’s easy to see how this confusion arises. The backstage site headline (at the time of writing) is “Build what you want using BBC […]
Recommendations for enhancing iTunes’ sharing features
Since my posting on research into iTunes music sharing, I’ve got a copy of the full paper and found time to read it on a recent train journey. Last time I focused on how people manage the impressions that others get from their music collections, but the research also has interesting things to say about […]