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Marina Hyde in Binge-drinking in the name of science:
"Do you think there's a department called ITV Science?"
One can only imagine that the answer to this question follows the old media maxim that any headline in the form of a question automatically has the correct answer "no".
Rory Sutherland: Let's put sales promotion at the heart of the agency:
"The second assumption is just as dangerous: it is the dangerously linear assumption that the best way to build a brand is to set out to build a brand. I really don't believe this. I think if you set out to build a great business, you'll stand a fair chance of building a great brand. I am not equally confident that someone aspiring to build a great brand will build a great business."
I'm now beta testing Blogo, a new blog editor which looks pretty, and has some rather elegant features. Chief amongst these is the ability to switch to a full-screen editing mode, which - like the equivalents in text editors like WriteRoom, let you concentrate solely on your words without any distractions.
I'm not totally sure that it will replace the excellent MarsEdit as my default blogging tool of choice. It lacks the flexibility with HTML which MarsEdit has, as well as useful tools such as the ability to easily create Technorati tags for the bottom of your post. But as a tool for focusing on the words rather than links, it's looking very good. And it also has a rather marvellous icon.
There appears to be an issue with .Mac synching in Leopard which occasionally means that the disk image it syncs your iDisk to gets bigger than 1Gb... a lot bigger, in fact. In my my case, it suddenly decided that it wanted to claim 45GB of my drive space.
If this happens to you, turn off iDisk syncing. This will move the disk image to your desktop, where you can happily delete it. Leopard keeps its sync disk images in a different place to Tiger - /Library/FileSync.
Incidentally, I found this out by poking around in a fantastic little utility called WhatSize, which I'd heartily recommend to all.
Technorati Tags:
.mac, Apple, Mac, Mac OS X, Leopard
Nick Carr notes that the launch of Kindle is being used by a bunch of anti-Gutenbergians as another excuse to trounce the book in general:
"But Kelly and his fellow-travelers are wrong, and Bezos is right. The only thing that will keep books great is respect for the individual author, the individual reader, and the sanctity of the book as a closed container. When that respect goes, the book goes with it."
Technorati Tags:
Amazon, Kindle
Shared Items are a very nice feature of Google Reader, and I wish more people will make use of them - they effectively allow you to make your own edited stream of interesting articles.
Now that I'm back using Google Reader again, I've added the list of Shared Items to the side of my blog, over on the left there. This is basically a list of stuff which I think is interesting, but which I either don't have time to comment on or don't have much to say about. You can, however, subscribe to a feed of the full text of the shared items here.
I'm still a big fan of the Tablet PC format, although Vista's so-called "improvements" have proved to be nothing of the sort. That's why I'm hoping that sooner rather than later, Dell actually ships this machine. And preferably at a reasonable price, too.
Technorati Tags:
Dell, Tablet PC
The press conference is over, people have their hands on some of the first Kindles, and lots more details are emerging.
Gizmodo has a video on how to use the Kindle, which shows off the e-ink quite nicely. It also has a hands-on session with lots and lots of pictures. Also included is details of the formats which the Kindle will support:
"What file formats are supported? Kindle (.azw), text (.txt), unprotected Mobipocket (.mobi, .prc), Audible (.aa) and MP3 (.mp3)."
CrunchGear also has a hands-on, with some very nice pictures, as does Engadget.
Robert Scoble tells us all about the deal which bloggers are getting for allowing their RSS feeds to be sold - 30% of the fee which Amazon charges. On a $0.99 monthly charge, that could add up to a tidy little sum. Bloggers who are interested in getting their blogs up to be distributed to Kindle users can contact Amazon via a link on the Kindle Store page.
John Gruber raises a very, very smart little point:
"What if Amazon gave you a free Kindle e-book version of every physical book you’ve ever purchased from Amazon?"
Overall, Kindle is a really, really interesting product - more groundbreaking in many ways than something like the iPhone - and I wish it well. As long as the DRM doesn't suck.
Technorati Tags:
Amazon, Daring Fireball, Robert Scoble, Kindle
