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On the back of thelondonpaper today, an ad by British Gas for a price guarantee - fix your prices until 2011. This is on the day it announced a 35% price rise.
That's just gauranteed to infuriate people even more. Plus of course, the reason they're offering it is because they know that prices will drop from their current high over the next few years. Centrica have scores of analysts who work on predicting prices years in advance, so they know his very well.
Not sure if this is new, but Amazon UK is sending out emails promoting Mechanical Turk. Was it available in the UK before?
Ben Hammersley's Other Blog • It won't be what you expect..
"David Rowan’s editorship of the UK edition of Wired raises many questions. The first being “Who is going to be his number two?”
The answer to which is, after signing yesterday, me. Starting in a few weeks, first issue next year; more news to come."
If Ben's involved, it will be interesting.
There's a small hacking community building up around the MSI Wind/Advent 4211 which is using the low-cost, ultra-portable machine to run Mac OS X. It takes lots of work - you need to replace the WiFi card for one thing - but it's always great to see people hacking around with hardware to do crazy stuff like this.
But it raises a question: how much would you pay for an ultraportable Mac from Apple, and what would you expect the spec to be? I've heard Mac users dismiss the whole low-cost ultraportable scene as "nothing more that toys", but in fact machines like the Wind are anything but.
It packs a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 80GB hard drive, 10in screen, nice quality keyboard, and 1GB of memory into a package that's lighter than a MacBook Air. Plus, of course, you could buy four of them for the price of a MacBook Air. Sure, you're not going to be doing heavyweight Photoshop work on them - but you're not going to be doing that on the Air, either.
Whether Apple will embrace this category of machine I don't know. The profit margins on them must be low, and low-margin categories are ones that Apple traditionally avoids. But if it did actually make one, here's what I'd like to see:
I'd be first in the queue for that kind of machine. What about you? Do you think Apple should make a machine like this - and would you buy one if it did?
Lots of Twitterers commented on how they heard from Twitter first about the LA Earthquake, and how amazing it is. Not so fast:
"I'd suggest a far more likely scenario is that Twitter is the first place that bloggers and other chatterati first saw it, and as they are the ones who tend to talk about it in the blogosphere echo system which consumes nearly all their attention, that's clearly where they perceive it was first reported.....The poor old mainstream media of course are hobbled by totally unreasonable requirements such as checking and confirming facts before its broadcast, unlike a social network."
(Via broadstuff.)
If there's one thing that I can't stand, it's needless segmented product lines - and that's something that Microsoft continues to be more guilty of than any other company.
Today's example is Office 2008 for Mac. As well as it's upgrade options (more of which later), Microsoft offers three variants of Office: Home and Student Edition, Standard Edition, and Special Media Edition. The differences between them are largely artificial: Home and Student Edition is for, erm, home and student use, and has had support for Exchange servers hacked out of it. Special Media Edition bundles Expression, which no one uses.
And of course that hacking out Exchange support not only makes it unsuitable for some students - there are universities who run their email and calendaring on Exchange - but also means that home users who use Exchange need to spend £312 on the "full" version, just to get a single feature.
"But," you might say, "how many home users use Exchange?" To which the answer is "a whole lot more in the future, thanks to Exchange support being in the iPhone". As I've mentioned before, I'm using Exchange rather than MobileMe for my "home" email for a wide range of reasons. It's simple, it's reliable, and it just works.
And ISPs are likely to start offering it as a "value add" service for their customers in the not-too-distant future. That, of course, means more Exchange licenses sold for Microsoft - but no one is going to want to pay more than they paid for their iPhone in order to get Exchange support on their Mac. Charging £300+ for client code is a disincentive to users to switch to Exchange, which is something that will probably lose Microsoft more money than it gains.
In the meantime, I'll be sticking with the old, sluggish Entourage 2004 - which includes Exchange support, but sadly doesn't include Intel code.
Google Notebook has had a bit of an update, and it looks like it now supports Safari as well as Firefox and IE. At least, it no longer complains if I use Safari with it.
"'I'm convinced that newspapers need to rise up and take responsibility not just for the quality of the news, but for the quality of the conversation,"
This is totally true, and actually reflects a significant change in what a news story (or, for that matter, a blog post) actually is. Rather than think of a story as a single finished article, think of it as part of a network of the story, it's comments, and the comments and posts that it spawns across the web. As a writer, you write the story: but you also act as something like a curator for the conversation across the web, too.
A story is no longer a single page: it is a network of pages.
Relating this back to my post the other day, about how self-correction in blogging is a vice, not a virtue, this raises a simple question: is the job of a "journalist" is not just to write the story, but to tend and curate comments and discussions wherever they exist on the web?
I think that might well be the way things are heading. This then means going back to rework the original post in the light of the ongoing discussion, but also planting "seeds" into other nodes of discussion, too.
And here's the bad part for publishers: this is time consuming, and expensive, but it's also the only way to be truly step beyond the one-way model of "broadcast" journalism we've all grown up with.
I promise not to spend the rest of the evening approvingly quoting Dan Lyons... but I can't let this beauty of a paragraph get away:
"Friends, I’m sorry, but you’re enablers. Steve Jobs behaves like a spoiled child and you not only tolerate it, you defend it. Apple PR is arrogant, rude, and then stumbles trying to handle a textbook PR situation — the kind of situation that occurs pretty regularly in the business world, and the reason that companies have PR departments in the first place — and you defend that too. You refuse to hold Apple to the same standards as every other company."
