Post Mayan Thoughts

I need a digital butler slash cleaner slash addiction therapist.
Is it possible these days to give up wifi for Lent?

The Best Read Office in the World

This Saturday, the documentary I made with Vera Frankl about the readers at the British Library is on Radio 4 at 10.30 am. Listen in or catch it on Iplayer.

Media is complicated

Trieste

Camden

Euston

Bologna

Conscious Culture this week, to April 1

Anselm Kiefer at White Cube. Durs Grubein at the Southbank. Souce Code at the Everyman. The Happy Thieves, Richard Condon. Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger. Field Grey, Philip Kerr. Plague Writing in Early Modern England, Ernest Gilman. The Sense of Ending, Frank Kermode. Episodes 19/20, The Killing. Episode 4, Treme.

Update

This blog will resume soon. In the meantime here's the MIT Technology Review, archive now available.

The Kind of Photo I Can't Take

But will really try this time.



From Magnum Photos picture of the week.

That's Alec Guinness learning his lines. I'd say Richmond, upon Thames.

Long Strange Year

The past 12 months have been different, to say the least. And this blog has suffered for that.

Anyway, for the next few months anything I may need to say can be found on Betwixt Europe as I finish the walk I started in May 2007. This time it's the Rhine, Switzerland, Germany and Holland. All thoughts of a technological or indeed Jacobean nature gratefully received.

Robin

Mobile mobility?

According to new data from ChangeWave Research, both usage and consumer sentiment towards Google's mobile operating system Android has increased over the past several months. As of December 2009, the research firm's survey shows that 4% of all smartphone owners now use a phone running some version of the Android OS. That's an increase of 200% since the previous survey released in September.

Read Write Web

Is the NYT having its L'Oreal moment?

New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.

From New York Magazine.

The peasants are revolting

In his new book, You Are Not a Gadget, musician and avant-garde computer scientist Jaron Lanier examines the downsides to the internet’s free culture, according to a new New York Times review. He calls artists the “new peasants,” saying that by freely sharing their work, they have undermined not only the traditional media that once allowed artists to be paid for contributing creatively to society but also themselves. And even their art.

He rages against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism”: in other words, “the glorification of open-source software, free information, and collective work at the expense of individual creativity.”

From FW Weekly.

9 million and counting

A study by a company that helps track pirated digital books estimates that there were 9 million illegal downloads of copyrighted books in the final months of last year. Attributor, which works for publishers including Hachette Book Group and John Wiley & Sons, scanned 25 Web sites that offer readers downloadable content, looking for 913 titles across categories ranging from business and investing to fiction.

From the NYT

Close to the Edge

The website of the Borders bookshop chain in the UK has stopped taking new orders for books while "the business is in discussion with potential buyers".

The firm says that existing customer orders are also being delayed but will be fulfilled.

From the BBC.

Films of the Decade (1)

The Times Top Ten Films of the Decade:

Hidden
The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum
No Country For Old Men
Grizzly Man
Team America
Slumdog Millionaire
The Last King of Scotland
Casino Royale
The Queen
Hunger

And at 11: Borat (?)

Full List here . I would replace No Country - vapid, over-stylized, with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. and Slumdog with Michael Clayton. Otherwise, pretty good - maybe Waltzing for Bashir and Todd Haynes I'm Not There instead of The Queen? And the Hurt Locker?

It has been another low dishonest decade and these films tell that story, I think. So perhaps Zoolander as well - the first film I saw in Manhattan after 9/11. We laughed hsyterically. Comeback film of the decade (on DVD) must be Fight Club, as the New York Times recently wrote.

It's Coming

Google is poised to launch its "buy anywhere, read anywhere" digital books programme Google Editions simultaneously in the US, UK and Europe within the first half of next year.

Speaking at the Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, Amanda Edmonds, Google's director of strategic partnerships, said the programme would be rolled out by June.

From this morning's Bookseller briefing.

Now

NOWISM | “Consumers’ ingrained lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are also feverishly contributing to the real-time content avalanche that’s building as we speak. As a result, expect your brand and company to have no choice but to finally mirror and join the ‘now’, in all its splendid chaos, realness and excitement.”

From Trendwatching.

"Creative" Commons: after the trust has gone

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

As Alan Rusbridger says: Kafka.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

Merkel attacks Google aka European politician looks for new Microsoft

But this was interesting:

Merkel also stressed that she doesn't believe that eBooks will ever replace traditional books - though she does mention that 'new' technologies like audio books have changed the book market over the last few years.

From Read Write Web. Also the Google stuff.

He Returns: tomorrow (at dusk presumably)

Thanks to the daily dose from Flavorwire.

This authorized sequel picks up 25 years after the classic Dracula, and is based largely on Bram Stoker’s handwritten notes for characters and plot threads. Taking a new generation into account, it features Van Helsing’s morphine-obsessed protégé; Mina and Jonathan Harker’s lawyer-turned-actor son; and even the elder Stoker himself as a London theater director.

The video, of course:

Email is so over, says WSJ

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

From the WSJ.

NHS gets US support, from the UK

Americans living in the United Kingdom and other European countries have been surprised to see the national health services in their host countries criticised so harshly in the US. While the system is far from perfect, we recognize that our fellow citizens at home are being misled and manipulated by political forces.

This website provides the basis for a forum for discussion and productive debate about Healthcare Reform in the USA, giving people a place where they can post their experiences - both good and bad - with various national health systems across the world.

Visit National Health Truths here.