I stayed up late last night to watch the Superbowl. I like American Football, and once you get over the inordinate number of breaks in play it's a fine sport. I suggest that you either diligently us your PVR in live pause mode, or do as I did last night and decide that it was the perfect time to install Windows 7 on my netbook (it went fine on my Samsung N110 thanks for asking).
But there are a few other differences. The actual game seems to be very low down the order of importance surrounding the whole thing. It's all about the specially made ads (somewhat disappointing by all accounts this year, although the Dave/Oprah/Jay promo was funny), or the half-time show (The Who playing a poor medley of CSI theme tunes. I think I'll stick to CDs thanks).
One thing I can never get over is how unexcited the commentators seem to be. I know they're professionals and they have to bring that special gravitas to the event, but a bit more life in their voices wouldn't go amiss. Sometimes Motty might be a little over the top, and Sky will make a deathly-dull game sound more exciting than everyone watching knows it is, but at least they try to convey some of the excitement. Even the sound mix seems to minimise the crowd noise. Of course the fans don't tend to songs, and it being the Superbowl, actual honest to goodness fans are few and far between since the world and their mum has bought tickets. And they're not cheap.
But the real difference comes at the end. For a country who presents sport with enormous professionalism, the scenes at the end of a regular season game are frankly chaotic. This is only increased in the Superbowl where there are already several hundred player, coaches, officials, journalists, cameramen, photographers and others prowling the touchlines.
At the final whistle all hell lets loose. Everyone brings their families on too.
Yet it's at the presentation that things really change. With the FA Cup or the Champions' League, journalists are kept in roped areas. A stand might be built, or the steps are ascended at Wembley. And then the players go up to collect the trophy. You know - the guys who've been running around and entertaining us for the last couple of hours, plus all those weeks and months leading up to the final. The team Captain receives the trophy and raises it aloft. Then the rest of the players will get a go, and among them, the manager will bashfully accept it too.
At the Superbowl, a small podium is built in the middle of the pitch. The trophy is brought out to the middle of the pitch and players try to touch it as it goes by. Just as well, as for the time being, this is the closest most of them will get to it.
Then the trophy is presented... to the team's owner. Yes the "franchisee" is the person who accepts it. Yes - he pays the bills, and without him or her, there'd be no team, but it wasn't him (let's face it, it is a "him") running around out there. Next the head coach of the team - the manager figure - gets his turn. Finally, the MVP (Most Valuable Player) gets a turn. And that's it.
And all around, everyone's wearing slightly tacky T-shirts or baseball caps proclaiming the winners (another box, should the other team have won, is quietly boxed up and recycled or sent to Africa for charity), while the local newspaper distributes copies proclaiming the winners.
As I say. I like American Football, and enjoy the spectacle and the occasion. Perhaps the charm of it is the lack professionalism at the end. The memorable images tend to be grabbed from the midst of a scrum of cameramen with the camera pointing upwards. But it could be better done.
I've been very slowly publishing my Iceland photos. Plenty more still to come.
Transatlantic Sessions is one of those TV programmes which you may have seen if you spend any time watching BBC Four, BBC Alba, or (I guess) BBC Scotland.
Jerry Douglas hosts a variety of musicians from Scotland, Ireland, the US and elsewhere as they record - well, sessions - which are then broadcast in a very lush manner. Anyone and everyone seems to get involved.
As Celtic Connections has just taken place in Glasgow, a Transatlantic Sessions "band" was put together and last night in the Royal Festival Hall was the last night of their short tour. I got a late ticket when they put the Choir seats on sale. As is obvious from the picture above (and below), that meant I was sitting behind the band. Fortunately, the sound was fine with the RFH thoughtfully placing some speakers pointing backwards.
The set-up was fun in that rarely were all 17 singers and musicians playing simultaneously, so there were a couple of sofas just below where I was sitting for everyone not playing in a particular song to "hang out."
So who else was there? Well lots of people.
Cara Dillon; fresh from winning the Best Album award at the BBC Folk Awards.
Dan Tyminski; the "voice" of George Clooney in O Brother Where Art Thou, and who is part of Alison Krauss and Union Station (when it's not on "hiatus").
Sara Watkins; part of Nickel Creek who I once saw play live at work, and now performing solo.
Eddi Reader; once of Fairground Attraction fame.
And plenty more.
Lots of original work and more than a few covers. I fear that I'll be looking out a few CDs in the coming weeks.
Most of my thoughts on RAJAR today are published on the One Golden Square blog. So I won't bother repeating them here.
I needed a photo to illustrate RAJAR on the blog, so I took the one above. Although RAJAR's mostly electronic these days, printing a copy of the summary PDF is still useful.
But of course I've previously taken a very similar RAJAR photo. And wouldn't you know it? The Radio Four Blog used it to illustrate its piece about that station's RAJAR figures using the Creative Commons licence I apply to nearly every photo I place on Flickr.
Note to self: must think of some different illustrative photos of RAJAR.
[I'd put a disclaimer on this post, about these being my thoughts and not those of my employer, but that's a bit redundant in this instance. And in any case, the thoughts published on the One Golden Square blog, do actually reflect those of my employer.]
I've been frankly awful detailing what I've been reading recently. So let's try to right that wrong in 2010.
The book I've most enjoyed recently - if enjoyment is the right word - is Henry Porter's new novel, The Dying Light.
Porter is British editor of Vanity Fair, but more relevant is that he was one of the people behind last year's Covention on Modern Liberty and as well as writing for The Observer, he blogs at The Guardian's Liberty Central Blog.
The Dying Light takes place in a post-2012 Britain in which we've moved on from Blair and Brown to a new Prime Minister, John Temple. The book opens as one of Temple's previous aides, David Eyam is being declared dead - killed in an explosion in Colombia.
We follow Kate Lockhart, an old friend and lover, who's catapulted into a Britain where our liberties have been evaporating in a slow but steady manner. Citizens are tracked and watched in a manner that Ceausescu might only have dreamt of.
What had Eyam uncovered? Who's in on it? How can an overbearing State be defeated.
The themes of Porter's novel are clear, and he paints a vivid picture of a world not far from our own. To that extent, his is the best fictionalisation of that fear that I've come across recently.
There was 2008's BBC1 drama, The Last Enemy, that was ultimately unsuccessful. Given the propensity of Hollywood to take British political thriller TV series and remake then as films, this would be a good candidate for dramatising?
The book did have a stark reminders to me. Some of the action in the novel takes place in Chequers, the Prime Minister's "weekend retreat." The Prime Minister and his press secretary take a walk while they're there to Cymbeline's Castle, an earthwork on Beacon Hill. As it happens, I walked up that very hill last year and took this photo from that very spot.
Clearly, the camera is placed there, because it's on the edge of the Chequers estate, but I think it's somehow indicative of the society we've become, and we're becoming.
The other aside in the novel that resonated was when one character, who studies Middle Eastern history in his spare time, talks about what a Sumerian astronomer was able to record with the help of a planisphere in 3123 BC. An asteroid hit the alps.
A very similar example appears in the current edition of New Scientist, relating to the Venus Tablet of Ammisaduqa from about 700 BC but recording events from 1000 years earlier.
In both the novel and the New Scientist piece, the gist is that much of our knowledge is stored in an ephemeral manner, and writing it down (or engraving it!) ensures that the knowledge lasts many thousands of years.
In these instances, the language was cuniform, and Radio 4's fabulous new series, A History of the World in 100 Objects examines cuniform this Friday.
Anyway - I'm straying. This book is a real page turner and well worth reading.
What are we to make over the weekend's bit of fun over at Amazon.com?
In brief, Amazon likes to charge a single price for its ebooks on the Kindle - $9.99. Macmillan, one of the biggest publishers in the US and the world, fundamentally disagrees with that philosophy.
While it's a clear and simple proposition for Amazon's customers, it's Amazon who is largely calling the shots. Yet the products they're selling belong to the publishers and authors.
A few things to note about this largely American scrap. US books are generally higher priced than they are in the UK. That said, if you've bought a Kindle in the UK, you're buying from the US Amazon store, so this does affect you.
For example, Stephen King's most recent novel, has a US list price of $35 and currently retails on Amazon for $20.47 (£12.82 at current conversion rates, compared with a current UK price of £11.99). But the Kindle price is $14.09.
King is published by Scribner in US, a Macmillan subsidiary. And Macmillan "won" this brief sortie.
There's a lot of discussion about what a fair price is to charge for an ebook. Many would point out that there are little to no distribution and transportation costs. Shops aren't required to keep stock, and inventory can be essentially infinite. In the above example, the saving is significant, but not massive. King's novel runs to nearly 900 pages, so surely the production costs must be immense.
But in reality, most physical media that we buy is actually pretty cheap to produce. Aside from sumptuously put together boxsets, the average CD, DVD or book costs mere pence to manufacture - assuming that you've got some kind of significant production run. That includes hardback books.
Whereas once albums were largely priced at a level that was largely kept the same year after year, we've been used for some time now, to buying catalogue material at generally knock down prices. Wander into your local HMV or scour the pages of Amazon, and any album more than a year or so old will be discounted from its original price quite heavily. Even the biggest selling artists' most recent works will eventually be just a few pounds in a sale.
The same is true of DVDs which might initially retail for around £14, before coming down in price a few months later, and then reaching a lower price again a few months after that. By the time the film has been screened on terrestrial TV it'll be under a fiver on DVD.
In the book world, variable pricing has been around since Penguin started printing paperbacks. Broadly, we've reached a stage where a hardback is published at a premium price, and roughly a year later, the paperback comes out. Mixed into this ecology are trade paperbacks sometimes sitting between the two, club editions, and the ending of the Net Book Agreement meaning that a popular hardback such as Dan Brown's recent novel, can be discounted massively depending on what retailers - especially online ones like Amazon and supermarkets - are prepared to do.
The belief is that this scrap has been prompted by Apple's ebook offering - last week's iPad launch. It's notable that Apple is letting publishers set their own prices as happens in the App store currently, with Apple taking 30% off the top.
The curious thing is that Amazon and Apple are currently in a reversal of their previous positions with music. In setting up the iTunes store, Apple managed to persuade all the record labels to charge a single price - 79c initially - for a single track.
Labels weren't happy with this but played along with it, and have reaped the rewards to an extent. Amazon, in launching its own mp3 store, allowed labels to adopt variable pricing - perhaps putting a premium on newer releases and discounting catalogue.
The record labels have managed to put pressure on Apple to change their postition and today, a single track can be charged at a range of different prices dictated by the record label.
It's almost as though it's in the best interests of whoever's first to market to have fixed pricing - presenting a strong proposition for consumers - only for second players to come in and demand alternatives.
But variable pricing has got to be the correct way? If Macmillan set their prices too high, then consumers will simply not purchase their offerings. And it's surely not in a publisher's interests to agree to a pricing route that undercuts their main source of income (sales of physical product vastly outweighs sales of ebooks and will do for quite some time).
Against the backdrop of all of this is the "Open" or "Closed" system debate. The iPad is a closed developmental environment - unless Apple approves your application, you can't run it on an iPad. More pertinent to ebooks is the fact that you'll only be able to buy iBooks through Apple's own iBookstore. The same is true for the Kindle which only lets you directly purchase from Amazon's own store.
Both the iPad and Kindle will accept ePub files, which can be bought from third parties, but it's clear that like the video games world, closed ecosystems are at the forefront. And that's probably not a good thing.
And having been mulling over this whole topic for the last few days, Bill Thompson neatly wraps it up over at the BBC.
This afternoon, I'll be watching Arsenal v Man Utd in 3D.
No - I'm not going to one of Sky's un-named pubs which will be showing the game in 3D - instead I'll be in the ground.
But with Avatar number one at the box office, and large numbers of exhibitors at the recent CES trade show showing off 3D TVs, the question must surely be when will 3D arrive and not if. Or is it?
When I was little, in my grandparents house I found and old box of photos from the turn of the last century. Obviously they were black and white, but they were stereoscopic images. Alongside the collection of photos was a viewer. You the photos in the viewer and one eye saw each photo - together giving the impression of 3D.
That's still how it works today. With polarised lenses and the like in cinemas, or even using different colour lenses to display or remove information as in the old red/blue cardboard glasses.
The first time I remember television trying to do 3D was sometime around 1982. ITV was showing a series of films on Sunday afternoons - if my memory serves me - which largely dated from the 50s when one of the earlier 3D crazes had begun. You got your glasses with the TV Times and could watch the films in glorious 3D.
Not in our house you couldn't. For starters, the edition of the TV Times that gave out the glasses was hard to get hold of, and then there was the small matter of our TV being black and white. I remember tuning in one afternoon to see what I was missing and realising that it was a dull western with a blurry image.
At the cinemas around the same time I could have watched Jaws 3-D or Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. I remember phoning up my local ABC (now a Tesco) to check that they gave out 3D glasses for the latter. But I didn't go. It's probably as well - the film's awful (that's why you've not heard of it) and the 3D was equally awful.
3D never died of course. It carried on improving, although seemingly largely limited to theme parks (e.g. Pirates 3D starring Leslie Nielsen) or IMAX films.
But now we're in a new 3D age, where the technology has matured so far, that any certainly just about any animated film - and quite a few horror films - simply have to be made in 3D.
Nope - I still haven't seen Avatar. Just that preview I described back in August. Indeed my 3D film going experience in its current incarnation is limited to that short, Coraline and Beowulf.
Those latter two films are set in slightly dark worlds which is just as well because the main issue I have with 3D is that it's actually too dark. At the Avatar preview I saw, the vivid colours of the world Cameron has built were a bit "muddy" for me. Taking my glasses off, revealed how much light was missing.
And I should point out that I've seen all these films in state of the art surroundings.
Have I got especially sensitive eyes? I don't know. I have 20:20 vision; not wearing contacts or glasses. But it's clear to me that the picture is inferior even if we do get an extra dimension.
I'm fussy about things like visuals and sounds. I was once the only person in a packed cinema who bothered to complain that the film was being screened in the wrong ratio. Yesterday, nobody apart from me seemed to mind that the film was being shown in mono when it had clearly been mastered in Dolby Digital (or other) and the cinema was equipped with as much.
So to me, 3D films are inferior because they're dark. And watching a film like that is a bit like watching a film on a sunny day in your living room with the light reflecting from your TV. You can watch a film like that, but don't expect me not to draw the curtains.
Sky and TV manufacturers are now all racing to build 3D sets. They think that we'll all want them in our homes. But I'm really not so sure.
Where do we stand in home entertainment? Well HD Ready TV sets are everywhere, although the technology moves apace and LED is to an extent replacing Plasma and LCD. And there'll no doubt be OLED at some point too. But most of what people are watching on these TVs is not HD.
Sky's current TV campaign is trying to drive that home. At best these TVs are being used to play PS3 or Xbox360 games in HD, and perhaps the odd Blu-Ray film. But only a relatively small number of people have HD either through Sky, Virgin Media or Freesat.
Freeview HD is due to launch any day now as the first Humax box becomes available, with the half the population being theoretically able to watch the World Cup in HD this summer. But there's still quite a job to get people to actually hook up an HD source to their HD sets (and speaking personally - I'm not prepared to pay a premium for it).
Sound is also vital. People are less willing to install full home cinema sound kit into their rooms, leaving the irony of them having some fantastic pictures on their new super-slim sets, but awful sound. Sets that slim simply can't put out good quality sound.
Buying a cheap receiver and plugging a few inexpensive speakers into it can make a colossal difference. But most consumers aren't aware of that.
So now it's onto 3D. I think the first question that needs to be asked is whether everyone is prepared to upgrade their sets again so soon? I'm not sure they are. HD Ready sets have only truly been mainstream for the last couple of years. And most have probably got another five or more years in them.
Then the next question to ask is whether you're prepared to wear a special set of glasses at home to watch TV? I really doubt it.
3D has a wow-factor, but imagine the scene at home. You've found the remote, but not the glasses. Or you've got two pairs but not a third for the other family member. Sure they can go out and get more, but those ones your cinema sold you for 80p won't work on your TV set.
There's also the small matter that a single format hasn't yet been determined for the home market.
I think that like the "fads" for 3D in the fifties and eighties, we're going through another one now. With computer animation it's actually somewhat easier to make a film in 3D so there's a certain "why not" attached to doing so. You just have to render the "other eye". And of course, they earn you more in revenue. But it's a craze. And I think I'll take a pass. There will be some excellent photos of people in pubs watching the Arsenal game though!
What links these two films? Absolutely nothing, although both were showing in the Curzon Mayfair last week, I only saw A Prophet there. For better of for worse, I saw Up In The Air in my local Cineworld. They offer very different cinema going experiences, yet not at a colossal price differential.
I'll get onto the films themselves shortly, but I really should visit the polite environment of the Curzon chain a little more. The print we saw of A Prophet was digital, and the sound excellent. The only issue I had with the cinema was that their soda machine had broken. This would be a greater problem at Cineworld, but the superior Curzon-goer is more likely to take a glass of wine into their screen. Personally, if you're seeing A Prophet in the cinema then bear in mind it's two and a half hours, and you might want to think twice about drinking too much of anything.
At Cineworld, Avatar still seemed enormously popular, with everyone else seemingly wandering around with 3D glasses. Knowing how popular the cinema is, I pre-booked my tickets in advance. Sadly of the three machines printing pre-booked tickets in the cinema lobby, only two were working, and neither would print my tickets. When I asked a security guard who was diligently searching everyone's bags as they entered the cinema (although had been absent as I walked in with my bag), he told me to go to the front of the long queue where someone printed out my tickets for me. And unlike previous visits to this cinema, the number of people working behind the concessions stand meant that I was served pretty quickly there.
The only downside was that as the adverts and trailers began, it became clear that I as only hearing mono sound from the speakers behind the screen. The speakers all down either wall were off. That might have been a problem with the ad reel, so I waited until the ads ended (including one proclaiming the power of cinema advertising with its flat sound and scratchy print).
When the film itself began the sound problem hadn't been fixed, so I found the only person available and asked him. He immediately phoned the projection room saying he'd get on the case. I left him to it, since I didn't want to miss anything. Sadly, the sound never was fixed. I saw Up In The Air in mono.
Final grades:-
Curzon Mayfair: A-
Cineworld Enfield: C+
(And I'm being generous because I think sound is a vital part of any film and far more important than things like 3D).
Onto the films. French cinema is evidently having a good time in making sprawling epic crime dramas. Last year we had the two parts of Mesrine which was excellent although it could have been released as a single film with some length cut. At least the DVD which has just been released contains both films.
A Prophet is one of those films that really is worth going into knowing as little as possible. We follow a young Arab - Malik - as he begins to serve his first prison sentence in an adult prison, starting a six year stretch.
In the prison, are two main camps - the Muslims and the Corsicans. It's the latter group who grab Malik and tell him he must either murder someone for them or be murdered himself. What follows is based entirely around the choice he makes here. The performances throughout are excellent and with the exception of a couple of scenes set outside the prison I found a little hard to believe, it was all very real.
If you enjoyed Mesrine or the Italian film, Gomorrah, then you must see this.
Up In The Air is something entirely different. Quite light in flavour but with a slightly offbeat humour, we follow the life of George Clooney's corporate firer. He jets in to different businesses where it's his job to make people redundant. That's his only job. But he tells us at one point that he spent 322 days the previous year on the road. And this is his life. He dreams of reaching 10 million frequent flier miles; an achievement only reached by six people previously. He actively dislikes his dismal little apartment that he spends as little time as possible.
As is the way with these things, his world is shaken up when Nathalie (Anna Kendrick) joins his firm and persuades their boss that her video-conferencing firing should be adopted. They'll save vast amounts of travel expenses. Not something that Clooney's character wants.
Along the way Clooney has met a kindred spirit in the fantastic Vera Farmiga who plays Alex. Soon the two are having a liaison set in hotel rooms across the mainland USA as and when their schedules collide.
How it all plays out is fun and while it's not a gag-fest, there are some laugh out loud moments.
There's one thing I was left wondering: why had American Airlines and Hilton seemingly partnered up with this film since the life is presented as soulless. While both companies are presented efficiently, a scene where Clooney queue-jumps at a Hilton check-in because he's a high-ranked member of their corporate scheme leaves me cold.
It's all about the status and getting the "carbon fibre" card. While the film essentially presents it as lifeless, it doesn't totally paint an awful picture. Clooney's flights are on time, and there are never any problems with his rooms.
Up In The Air has had some so-so reviews, but I really liked it. And Farmiga is absolute fabulous in it.
Apple as a company is incredibly skillful in the way it essentially manipulates the media surrounding the launch of one of its new products. And the media justs lets itself be manipulated.
Apple certainly designs beautiful products that take design in consumer electronics to the next level. And their corporate muscle has managed to open doors, as we've seen with the iTunes store, in spite of the relatively poor user experience of some of their software (come on - you don't really like iTunes or Quicktime do you?).
So what do we have in the iPad? Is it a game changing device? Does this mean the end for all other netbooks or e-readers? Should Amazon, Asus and Samsung be running scared?
Not really.
Unless I've really missed something, they've built a more powerful than average netbook, but left off the keyboard (although you can get one as an optional extra!). I'm typing this on a rather gorgeous Asus UL30A. It's bigger than the iPad. In fact it's 13.3", but it's awfully slim. They key thing is that it has a lovely keyboard. Typing an email is a breeze. That's not really the case on touch screen devices is it? When was the last time someone sent you a long email via their iPhone? You can tell - because iPhone users, like Blackberry users before them, seem to love to brag about the device that they sent their message from. While this particular netbook is somewhat better powered than most with a CULV processor (and to be fair, more expensive than some iPads), it's also very easy for me to type on my Samsung N110. And the Asus gives me 12 hours on WiFi incidentally. What I'm really trying to say is that as a user interface, the traditional physical keyboard has yet to be beaten.
The iPad certainly cheaper than I was expecting with prices starting at $499, but with Apple being Apple, don't just run that through a currency converter to get the UK price. For starters, there's going to be VAT on top. And quite probably other import duties. To see what I mean check out the prices of the basic MacBook at the moment. In the US it's priced in the Apple Store at $999 which according to Google is £618. Yet Apple's UK Store charges £816 for the same computer. In the absence of any international pricing just yet, I'd suggest at least £399 if we're incredibly lucky, and up to £499 if we're not. For the base model without 3G.
What's really curious is the huge jump in prices between the ones with space for a SIM card and those that don't. While you can buy a USB stick for your laptop for around £15 on pay as you go, Apple seems to be charging $130 for adding that functionality. I wouldn't pretend that a stick out of the side or back of your netbook or laptop isn't a little unsightly, but that's a lot to pay to make it "sightly."
I'd suggest that it'd be more sensible to just go out and buy one of those aforementioned 3G sticks and pop it into your iPad. But unfortunately, rather than shipping with a traditional two or three USB ports, the iPad comes with none. You're going to have to buy an adaptor to get things into it.
That's certainly going to make transferring data onto it really easy from USB sticks and the like, just a little bit fiddly. You'd better hope you've got good online reception if you want to move your data around, because you're probably going to have to do it wirelessly.
Getting back to those price points for the 3G versions - the data packages will be extra. Do you really want to take out what's effectively a third internet subscription. You already have your home ISP and you mobile package (which, if you're interested in this product, will definitely include data). You might even already have a third subscription in the form of a Blackberry if you keep calls and email separate. Do you have a lot of cash burning a hole in your pocket right now? Well we have come out of the recession. But you might still have to cancel that gym membership.
At least that processor should let you do - you know - more than one thing at a time.
Nope. No multitasking. No leaving your Twitter application running while you do something else.
And it wouldn't have killed to put a little camera in the top would it? You know - for Skype and similar.
What about reading books on the device? Well I've not been happy with any of the products I've seen on the market to date, and I still have severe reservations about most people even wanting to read on an electronic device. I honestly don't see bookshops going out of business because of this (Bookshops may well go out of business, but that's because of the price cutting Amazon and the supermarkets are able to achieve - but that's another story entirely). I've been through the arguments before, but in essence books are more to me than bits in some memory somewhere. And I own rather than licencing them.
I've no doubt that some will want one for reading the paper, or books. But it's a damned expensive ebook reader. I've always been dubious of taking things like the Kindle or one of Sony's devices to places like the beach, or your bath. I certainly wouldn't go near one of those places with this. Indeed, I'm not sure I'd want to get it out on a London bus or tube. And those other e-readers use e-ink which means that you're power supply is going to last for ages. I'm not convinced that's the case with the iPad, with Jobs claiming a 10 hour life. There are going to be some dull journeys home when, because the device was on the work WiFi network all day, the battery flattened when you wanted to get back into your novel for the journey home.
Look - I've been especially negative about this. And that's probably been brought on by the sheer frenzy of everyone desperately wanting to be excited by whatever Apple bring out; the hostility is a little unfair. But the "Cult of Jobs" brings out the worst in me.
I've no doubt that they'll sell enough to make it worthwhile - it can't be less popular in the UK than Apple TV can it? But this is not going to be a massmarket device. Most people are going to be better off with a Dell Mini, or a Sony E-reader; a PSP or even an iPod Touch. Some will have great uses for it; I can already imagine that some professional photographers will immediately be buying one to display their wares in place of big albums of photos. The style conscious will want one to leave around on their Danish designed coffee table just next to the Bang and Olufsen remote.
If I get a chance to play with one, I'll jump at it. It's an unquestionably beautiful device. Yet for all that, I'm really not sure what it's offering me that I haven't already got.
In the end, I just don't see this as being a broad appeal device. If it was a little closer to Lenovo's IdeaPad U1 in functionality, then I can see it. Sadly that device has a predicted $999 cost, an awful lot for a netbook, however well designed, so it could be a while yet.
It does, as Steve Jobs pointed out, make a very lovely digital photo frame though*.
* If you buy the stand accessory.
What's the best length for a podcast?
That's a bit like asking, "How long is a piece of string?"
The recent RAJAR MIDAS data showed a wide range of opinions:
What this shows is that there's no consensus. I listen to podcasts that can vary between a couple of minutes and nearly two hours. So I tend towards the belief that it really does depend on the podcast.
At Absolute Radio, none of our podcasts lasts over an hour. That's because we're a music station, and once you removed that (and advertising) from a programme, no matter how much the DJ speaks, the show isn't going to be all that long.
But what if you're a speech station? Five Live have recently started effectively podcasting the entirety of two different programmes, each running for two hours. Danny Baker's podcast began back in September when his new Saturday morning show started, while the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo podcast began a couple of weeks ago when their new Friday show began.
In both cases, the BBC has decided to break the programme up into two parts. But there's a problem with this.
By default, iTunes only downloads the most recent podcast available. If you subscribe to, say, a daily podcast, but only run iTunes a couple of times a week, then it'll only download the most recent edition. With the BBC putting out two podcasts in swift succession for Danny Baker and Kermode/Mayo, most people will only automatically download the second "hour" of each programme.
I noticed as a listener this week that Simon Mayo has started suggesting that you "adjust your podcast settings" if you're only getting one podcast.
The problem with that is that it's incredibly unintuitive in iTunes, the most popular podcasting software by a long way, for users to do this.
You might start by looking at in Edit > Preferences menu, or Advanced. But you'll look in vain. Right hand clicking on a podcast won't help. Nor will attaching your iPod and trying to navigate via that.
No. You have to use the Settings button at the foot of the page, uncheck the Use Default Settings check-box, and choose Download all from the dropdown (You can also just adjust your overall defaults to change iTunes behaviour for all your podcasts).
iTunes is a fairly awful piece of software. It's bloatware, and much of it is completely unintuitive. I had to use Google to discover this functionality. No wonder that nobody's in a rush to explain exactly what to do.
Somebody at the BBC has almost certainly noticed that their programmes' second parts are downloaded far more than their part ones. But I'd attack the problem another way, and simply offer a single download. Yes - that probably means 30-45 MB instead of 20MB per podcast. But does that make much difference? Yes - I know the chart above shows that nobody wants 1 hr plus podcasts, but lots of your audience only getting half the programme is not a good solution.
