Pig masters video-chat in today’s Pearls Before Swine.
When using Firefox or Chrome, does anyone else close a tab they’re finished with, then immediately open a new one to type in an address for another website? I sort of have this obsessive-compulsive thing where I need to start afresh each time I go to a new website.
Am I the only one who does this?
When they have got nowhere else to go, they will start paying if it is reasonable. No one is going to ask for a lot of money.
Rupert Murdoch, on newspaper website paywalls, two of which he is shortly to erect for The Times and The Sunday Times, which will join the Wall St Journal as Murdoch-owned paywall news sites.
I think what he doesn’t realise is that not all news websites will put up paywalls. Some of them are defined by their belief in news being free, and that as audiences increase, as will revenue from advertising. Murdoch seems to be of the opinion that all newspapers will charge, when it is quite clear that many won’t.
It then becomes a question of what the paywall newspapers can offer which is of value to the reader, above that which is given away for free by others. Will a big enough audience really be devoted to particular columnists, opinion or analysis? My gut feeling is that they won’t, especially as unpaid columnists (i.e. bloggers) are often more insightful and are a better read.
London Burrito Blog
This is exactly why the internet was invented: niche interests that would otherwise never have a home nor an audience. Also, check out this photoset, behind the scenes at the frankly fantastic Daddy Donkey, which I’ve raved about previously.
Geocities finally closes its doors.
Or has its doors closed by Yahoo, whichever. I made my first ever websites on Geocities, at the tail end of the 90s, teaching myself HTML and the value of free hosting. Even then my distaste of advertising was evident, because I figured out the CSS and Javascript which ran the ads in the top corner, and managed to prevent it from displaying. It was a sad little teenage boy’s website, full of nonsense and whatnot, but I’m still pretty proud of the eventual design I settled on. It looked pretty cool, and even had a neat little sliding clam-shell interface for navigation. I maintained that website for a few years, probably until I was about 16-17, and then did a couple of websites for my school’s Sixth Form. One of those almost got me expelled, but that’s a story for another time. I then discovered Blogger.com, where I kept a blog for a couple of years during my university times, and then almost two years ago I ended up on Tumblr, where I’m more than happy. So RIP Geocities, you were my (and many others’) introduction to the world of publishing myself online.
Yes please, BBC Food website, you can indeed show me more cheddar-based recipes.
Is it a sign of laziness or of utilising time-saving technologies in order to make better use of my non-working hours that I’m getting this week’s food shopping delivered to the flat later this evening? This is the second time we’ve done it, and I’m a big, big fan.
I figure that it’s not only going to save me some time, but also some money, because I’ll be less inclined to make impulse buys. I’m terrible at food shopping, especially as I usually do it after work whilst hungry. My trolley/basket is always full of stuff that I don’t need/want on those occasions.
When shopping online, I’ve found it easier to spot multibuy deals, or discounts, and don’t end up with things like Pringles, Nutella, and massive sirloin steaks at the checkout. And it’s bloody well delivered to the doorstep! Ideal.
Now, if only I could convince the delivery guy to help me carry it all up the stairs to my flat…
Jeez, you’ve got to sit through a pre-roll advert before listening to a “radio” station on last.fm nowadays. I only noticed because I couldn’t get any radio stations to start playing, so disabled Adblock in my Firefox.
Refreshing the page launched the player straight away, but with a 30-second video advert for some crappy horror film before any songs were played. I’m half-expecting more adverts after a couple of tracks…
Maybe I need to renew my last.fm subscription. It was only £3 a month or so, pretty good value.
Actually, whilst I’m talking about the last.fm radio player, it’s worth noting how much it has changed over the last year or so. It used to be very small, borderline minimalistic, with not much more than the track details, volume controls, and options to “love”/”ban” the track, as well as being able to skip to the next song.
It was also a pop-up, in its own little window, perfectly sized and with nothing else other than the Flash player.
Sometime recently, the player became much bigger, and you now can’t pop it out into a new mini-window. With some automagic, the rest of the page updates to include more details of the artist you’re listening to, which can be handy when you’re discovering new music.
But with the increased size came the use of slideshows. These are constantly moving/changing images from the user-uploads for the artist in question, and as the artist changes so do the images. For me, this is pointless, because I open last.fm in one tab, start playing some music and then have it on in the background. I don’t see any of the images, so I’ve turned off the slideshow and just get one static image instead.
What I didn’t realise until just now is that the larger player and the capability to having moving images means that it is the perfect display device to show video adverts. Highly intrusive, unskippable, unmutable adverts. Sigh.
I guess this is what happens when a huge media conglomerate (CBS) takes over something that was previously fun and useful…
I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn’t congruent to a similar sentence written at the time of rise of the novel - about how people were no longer reading sermons and classical literature, but were reading novels from subscription libraries instead.
The literature at the time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, describing the contempt that the learned establishment had for the rise of the novel - and then of course later with the rise of the penny dreadfuls and sensational literature as more and more people came to read it - again there was a great cry of despair at how there would be nothing but illiteracy in the world, or at least a kind of refusal or inability to engage in proper, serious study.
And we hear the cry again.
The literature at the time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, describing the contempt that the learned establishment had for the rise of the novel - and then of course later with the rise of the penny dreadfuls and sensational literature as more and more people came to read it - again there was a great cry of despair at how there would be nothing but illiteracy in the world, or at least a kind of refusal or inability to engage in proper, serious study.
And we hear the cry again.
Stephen Fry, talking about the web, and specifically that group of “web worriers” who blame the internet for the downfall of society and so forth.
It’s weird that I enjoy Twitter so much yet can barely stand to look at the Status Updates page on Facebook. The vast, vast majority of people I follow on Twitter are randoms; people I don’t know and have never met. Hell, I’ve not even exchanged an email or @reply with most of them.
Whereas on Facebook most of my friends are in fact real life friends. Admittedly, a good chunk of them are people from school that I don’t talk to any more, but I did know them well for a few years.
I just find Facebook updates to be inane, utterly uninteresting, and pointless. Yes, many critics of Twitter have accused that service of containing the same level of banality, but the beauty of Twitter is choosing who to follow.
On Facebook, it’s harder to go the whole hog and delete someone from your friends list, just because their updates are annoying. On Twitter, it’s not so much of a big thing. Maybe this is because of Twitter’s anonymity, and because of the knowledge that I won’t ever meet the person I’m unfollowing.
With Facebook, there’s more of a chance of bumping into someone, especially when I go back to my hometown for Christmas or a weekend. I doubt that there would be any repercussions, but it’s not nice to have to face someone and basically tell them that they’re annoying!
Equally, some of my best mates/friends, who I would never think of deleting from my Facebook, post some of the biggest loads of crap on their Updates. I’d have to plough through that each day/hour to get to the occasional good post from someone a bit more random.
With Twitter, I’ve fine-tuned who I follow so that I don’t have to sift through the crap to get to the good stuff. Likewise with Tumblr, I guess.
