You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2006.
I promised my own thoughts on the book. The concept is a fabulous and fascinating piece of analysis, which many have recognised and I recall my admiration when finishing Anderson’s original piece in Wired. The problem is once you have the idea, which can be picked up and grasped in seconds, what do you do with it? I just don’t think there is a book’s worth of material here. Effectively what Anderson has done is to produce a very diligently researched consolidation of the key concept. I’m not sure what one gets from the repetition or the relatively granular analysis of say Rhapsody downloads. When he eventually moves on from the analysis there is an attempt to stretch the book so that one comes to see the Long Tail effect in everything . I have some sympathy with the Slate review I linked to earlier on this point. So, a bit of a disappointment.
Very interesting post from Robert Scoble on ‘the coming developer wars’ here.
Interesting piece by Cory Doctorow on the Locus site. It has a rather more attention grabbing title than this post: Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet.
From the article:
I’ve discovered what many authors have also discovered: releasing electronic texts of books drives sales of the print editions.
For example:
My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is in its sixth printing from Tor, and has been downloaded more than 650,000 times from my website, and an untold number of times from others’ websites.
I’d say that was success by anyone’s standards!
Interesting review by Tim Wu in Slate of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. Wu makes some good points, although I can’t help feeling that the review’s title, The Wrong Tail: How to turn a powerful idea into a dubious theory of everything was probably written by an overzealous subeditor as it implies a rather more extreme view than Wu expresses!
More on The Long Tail here next week.
I would normally expect to be writing a lot more about the Proms but two things have conspired against me.
First, I have had almost no time to listen to them (let alone attend in person). One of the reasons for this is that I am rehearsing myself for my first ever Proms appearance next Saturday (along with a few hundred other singers). More of that later no doubt.
Second, I’ve just found the programming hasn’t quite hit the mark for me in the first week. This often seems to happen and is probably a purely personal thing (I seem to work myself into ever increasing enthusiasm as the season continues for some reason), but it was typified for me by the rather odd First Night (which you can watch and listen to online for another 24 hours or so). Mozart, Smetana, Dvorák, Shostakovich anyone?
Actually, the Shostakovich was a compelling performance I thought, which along with the Cosi Fan Tutte (listen online until next Tuesday evening) from Glyndebourne was my highlight so far.
If all this sounds slightly grudging then I would plead that it all needs to be seen relatively in the context of the consistently excellent approach the BBC has taken. Everything has been thought through, down to online Programme Notes.
The Tim O’Reilly piece I referred to below also got me thinking about the whole approach to delivering public sector services and to what extent some of the ‘Web 2.0’ models have applied. There’s a longer piece here that needs to be developed but it seems to me there are a number of questions that could usefully be asked, bearing in mind the experience of the last 10 years:
• What services should Government be delivering end to end or in part?
• What has Government actually proved itself good and bad at delivering to date?
• What’s the intersection between the two questions above?
• Given that as a result of answering the above questions an obvious focus should emerge, what more non sensitive information could be made more widely available to other providers to use?
• Hardly at the cutting edge of Web 2.0, but is there an Amazon/Google API model that should be provided to allow others to tap into and make best use of ?
• How can this be helpfully linked to other initiatives? (See this link in today’s Guardian for example)
Hardly an exhaustive list, but the grains of some ideas to be developed further perhaps?
Tim O’Reilly is clearly on a roll at the moment. I mentioned his excellent article on the Hierarchy of Web 2.0 applications yesterday. To this is now added a preview of what he will be talking about at Oscon. Hope he repeats this at the European event, which I hope to go to.
Also, slightly less seriously, an article about some improvements to GMail. Some people have already responded to the article pointing out that the first two are available to Firefox users, which reassured me as I wasn’t able to check my Gmail account at the time and thought I was imagining things!
There is an absolutely excellent article by Tim O’Reilly here. One of the very best things on Web 2.0 I’ve ever read.
As Press releases go this is really quite interesting.
Could Peter Carey win the Booker a third time? If that could be countenanced, this is surely the book to do it. It seems to me he gets stronger with each novel, and is absolutely in his prime.
In Theft he has taken some very similar themes in many respects to his last book My Life as a Fake but developed them differently. Like the earlier book, this book too is concerned with the arguably necessary selfishness of the artist, the bending of a talent to something unlawful and damaging, the human consequences of that and also the artistic status of what has been created, but the exposition, the result and the aftertaste are not the same at all.
In fact, it’s a very similar feeling to that I had reading Slow Man after Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee didn’t win the Booker a third time with either of those, to go back to where I started.
And what writing. One example of many is below. James Wood calls this passage the ’sweetest artistic confession’. He’s surely right. There is something pervasively, deep rootedely authentic about this, which for all its magical language is impervious to a potential audience. This is how it is, Carey is saying.
Then I invaded ultramarine blue with a force of sweet burnt umber, thus giving birth to a new black as warm as a winter blanket for a twenty-thousand-dollar horse, and then I stained my cotton duck with a very fucking diluted dioxane purple, so watered-down it was a pearly grey . . . On the last day, very early on a dew-bright morning, I made a series of washes, 9/10 gel, and these I lay, lighter than a river mist across the blacktop. As for the work itself, you can see it, finally, years later, in a serious museum, and I will not treat you like some dickhead day trader in an aeroplane who wants to know ‘Should I know your name?’
