Does the vampire live forever?

Northrop Frye the Canadian literary academic had a theory that there are only a few plots that get endlessly recycled in different stories.    

Looking at the vampire genre  it sounds pretty plausible because there are just so many vampire story and film variations.   

IMDB actually includes 685(!) vampire-related movies dating back to the silent era around 1910 (including foreign language and ’straight to video’ releases) some of which are tempting just because of the sheer ridiculousness of their titles. Fancy ”Batman Fights Dracula’ (1967) for example? Or in an equally light-hearted ‘vein’ how about the recent  “Vampires Suck” parody complete with its ‘Team Jacob’ and ‘Team Edward’ (the two male protagonists in Eclipse & New Moon) references?   

Even if you just stick to more major titles you end up with about 284 vampire movies  (based on a list at Washington State University, Updated) made over the last 100 years. AND about sixteen vampire movies scheduled for 2011. 

Bram Stoker and Dracula’s children

Thinking back even just over the last 20 years there is an amazing range of variations on the standard vampire plot:  

• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) based closely on the the 1897 novel that really started the modern vampire film. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, with Keanu Reeves and a certain amount of thinly disguised moaning from Winona Ryder, the more sophisticated film took double its US box office takings from foreign Box Office earnings and is still one of the biggest vampire blockbusters of all time.
• other  thoughtful vampire flicks like 1987’s underrated Near Dark cowboy version or 2007’s Rise (might be described as ‘intellectual vampire movies’)
• race exploration crossovers like Eddie Murphy’s Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), itself a remake of a 1972 black Dracula movie Blacula,   (a nice attempt to re-colonize the ‘whites only’ vampiric world) or True Blood’s (2008) strong references to race issues in the American South.
• vampires in space and Alaska: 2007’s 30 Days of Night embedded in a claustrophobic snowbound world
• splatter-fests/martial versions like 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn set in a stripper’s bar, or 1998’s Blade with Wesley Snipes and its equally commercially successful sequels
• Tom Cruise’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), based on the Anne Rice novels, an imagined less European (and more American) history of vampires (“we can  have cultured vampires in America”)
• adolescence and vampirism going back to 1987’s The Lost Boys,  Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Twilight (2008)  
• combo horror with Vampires v Werewolves: Underworld (2003), and the New Moon (2009) and Eclipse (2010) instalments of the Twilight series
• borderline zombie/vampire variations (zombies are not ‘undead’ but infected with a bloodborne virus): 2002’s 28 Days Later or 2006’s Ultraviolet
• ‘bleed-through’ vampire sub-plots in TV series like Supernatural, Doctor Who, Smallville, Charmed and The Simpsons to of course being the main plotline in series like True Blood (2008) or The Vampire Diaries (2009)

Take your fangs off my wallet

Huge interest in vampires equals huge earnings at the box office and in associated merchandizing (Amazon is currently even selling ‘Bella Swan Replica Jewelery’). Box Office Mojo estimates total vampire flick box office earnings at almost $2 billion since 1978 and puts the average takings of each vampire movie at over $35m, making a vampire film one of the safer bets a movie producer can take.    

The rising tide of blood

 Based on Google Trends data (going back to 2004) the level of search interest in the term ‘vampire’ has more than doubled over the last 5 years, with significant peaks coinciding with the Twilight phenomenon (major vampire title release dates and their level of box office takings shown in green). 

Both Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and Daybreakers might well have done better had they not coincided with the two Twilight Saga release dates.   

The Twilight series has also joined another select group: that of films where the sequels have grossed more than the originals such as the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Why do we (and Bella Swan) love vampires?

No doubt having a decent looking lead actor like Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner is helpful but vampires also play to our obsessions about disease, mortality and sex. It’s a potent mix and one that will be considered in the next article in this series.

Love them or hate them, the vampire theme is important in our culture.

Posted under Reviews, Unanswerable questions

I think I lack a facial recognition gene.  Yeah, I know nobody finds it easy to recognise people or remember their names. This is not what I’m talking about.

I can remember people’s names, I just can’t tell whether I’ve met them or not.  My recognition techniques therefore include getting into inane conversations with them and hoping that by talking about nothing for a while something they say rings a bell.

My lack of facial recognition skills is highlighted in social situations because I happen to look slightly odd and am therefore relatively easy to remember. Not odd-so-you-want-to-sidle-away-and-put-a-hand-loosely-in-the-vicinity-of-your-imaginary-sidearm-odd,  just odd enough so that most people remember me.  All my life I’ve wanted to blend well into a crowd but it was not to be.

Hanging around with me on a more permanent basis can be even more trying.  My partner claims that going to a movie is a seriously frustrating experience.

“So is that guy in the blue shirt the same guy that was in bed with heroine earlier?”

“Ssshhh!”

“Ok, well just tell me if I’m wrong?”

“Shut up!”

Yep, a change of clothing can be a real problem. If a shirt falls in the forest, and as a movie-goer I do not observe it, is it the same person?

Thank god for the conservatism of studio producers. If they didn’t insist on bankable stars like Julia Roberts etc I would be in real trouble – all you would-be actors out there, your enemy is not moneymen bankrolling films who insist on a bankable star, your real enemy is the facial-recognition challenged (FRCs).

And as for cast-of-thousands epics: forget it! I might just be able to identify Russell Crowe in ‘Gladiator’ (let’s face it he’s fairly distinctively ugly) but anyone with a bit part in it was toast.

To simulate the FRC experience for yourself try walking into a supermarket in an ethnic neighborhood (whatever you consider ethnic) or just take a look at an online crowd scene for some ethnic group different for your own. Now imagine you feel like that pretty much all of the time.

If your current significant other doesn’t seem to like going to parties with you, but is always up for a meeting in a bar, it might not be that she’s an alcoholic, she just might be an FRC sufferer and prefer one-on-one dating to group dates.

If this is all beginning to sound depressingly familiar from your own experience you might be relieved to hear that there is evidence that facial recognition skills depend mostly on your genes and not your own memory issues. Admittedly it’ll probably turn out in a 100 years time, when we understand genetics better, that everything is genetic, launching a whole new century of speculation over free will, identity etc, but by then we’ll probably be manipulating the same genes at will anyway.

All is not lost however for FRC sufferers amongst us: we now have social media to level the playing field.

As social interactions become more and more electronic with the aid of Twitter, Facebook, online dating personals sites and TellMeAboutYourDaySoICanSellProductsToYouAndYourFriends.com, you can interact with people without even having to worry about their faces. I seem to have no trouble with the cartoonified faces cropping up these days in Twitter for example.

My helpful tip for FRC sufferers is therefore this: avoid going out socially for the next six months or so, get online, start texting like Gen Y, and find a decent home grocery delivery service. Everything will be fine.

Also, look out for my new iPhone augmented reality application, ‘Who The F**k Is That?’, where you point your iPhone camera subtly at people you don’t recognise and it looks them up (when I can get it approved by Apple under their app developer Terms and Conditions some time over the next decade).

P.S. For more personal relationship therapy for those challenged in the social skills department see my upcoming article ‘Why tall people in a crowded room suffer a hearing disadvantage but they’re not really deaf or stupid.’

Posted under Hate pets, Self doubt

As argued in“Online news: bloggers v newspapers”, we are entering a new era where the bundle of stories represented by current magazines and newspapers is being torn apart and being replaced by smaller publications and individual journalists/ writers blogging out there on the web.

With the aid of RSS feeds & cross-platform e-book software like Calibre (the equivalent of iTunes podcast subscriptions applied to blogs), and the e-reader of your choice like the Kindle DX or iPad,  you can now read the best blogs as a ‘personalized newspaper’, sitting feet up in the comfort of your own couch. Yep, the age of the personalized newspaper is here now, you no longer have to wait around for it to be lobbed onto your doorstep by the paperboy.

And with 100m+ odd blogs out there,  by anyone from your favourite novelist to the zany mommy-blogger types, surely there are bound to be some superb ones?

Well here comes the difficult bit.  How do you find them?

Does looking for the best blogs make sense in any case?

Arguably it’s a stupid task to begin with, because isn’t the whole point of the web the fragmentation of audience and content, letting a thousand content flowers bloom? You no longer have to write for ‘Mr Average Interest’ because there will be someone in Guatemala who even finds the drivelry on Drivelry interesting (no offence to Guatemalans). 

Surely it’s a bit like asking ‘how do you find the best music to listen to’?

Well the unlikely you can do today -  the impossible takes a little longer. It is a reasonable question to ask where to find the best blogs. We all expect that art gallery curators can put together the best art in a particular period and it also seems reasonable that you should be able to find say, ‘the best economics blogs‘ or more narrowly even the best blogs on New York theater.

Perhaps there are even weirdos out there who would like to read a smattering of  the best economics blogs out there, coupled with best cartoons, and the best blogs on the implosion taking place in the publishing industry (a dangerously close description of my own interests).

General characteristics of the best blogs for your own personalized newspaper

Even though it may make sense to start your search (more later) in your particular subject of interest, there are a number of generic characteristics that you will need in your blogs:

1. The blog will need to have full RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.  People who set up their RSS feeds to only provide the first para are not going to work for your personalized newspaper (even though it might work better for their advertising revenue). You would end up on the train with your Kindle newspaper consisting of first paras. Kinda annoying huh? When investigating a new blog go straight to the RSS feed. If it’s not a full feed, move on.
2. Blogs can’t be links to ’the best posts this week’ from other bloggers in that subject. Why bother? Again you’re after something that you can read on the run, in a plane, on the farm etc.  Sometimes it may well make sense to explore their idea of what blogs are best in a particular space - but you’ll probably end up adding that blog to your newspaper instead.
3. Blogs can’t be video blogs.  Apart from reservations that you may have anyway about  whether video suits you as an information consumer it’s simply not supported in many e-readers. Yes, it is in the iPad (albeit not Flash-based video) but that leads to a whole other discussion about whether you are using your e-reader to read (either skim reading or in-depth) or whether you are after a portable computing device. Video isn’t supported by the Kindle.
4. The blog needs to be regularly updated. One of the things you will find in your own wanderings of ‘best of blog sites’ (see below) is that half the blogs that are recommended to you were last posted to in 1996. Few bloggers heed the warning to write about what they like and you’ve got to really like your subject to keep going. For your own news service you won’t care if the blog is only published once a month (with RSS subscription software for your e-book like Calibre you can just set a retrieval interval of once a month) but once a year and you’re probably wasting your time even setting up a feed.

Best of blog directories and searches

A friend of mine who edits literary anthologies is hugely dismissive of search engines and considers that editors will always be essential and that you’ll always need an intermediary to curate information for you, “Google is useless“, she says, “it just returns so much crap!”

I have explained to her that Google partially makes decisions about what is important by looking at hypertext links created by humans to particular pieces of content (‘PageRank’) but in finding the best blogs there is an obvious flaw to Google in that ‘most popular’ – as expressed by the number of links to that content – is not necessarily ‘best’ (or we would be spending most of our time reading up on swine flu). 

Even where there is a more formal voting process for best blogs it suffers from the same issue of being driven by lowest common denominator numbers, and well known meta-blogging sites like Technorati also reflect their subject specificity (Technorati is great if you want to find out about technical blogs but not so good otherwise in my experience).

Sadly, the human-curated websites on great blogs like ‘Best of the Web’ (botw.org) or Eaton Web (eatonweb.com) seem to have a lot of out-of-date content and attempts to use these to browse interesting sites were not very successful (these days they look to me more like ‘pay to play’ linkfarms if you were going to be overly reductive).  Blogcatalog (blogcatalog.com) also seems not to live up to its home page promise “we’ve done the heavy lifting for you. Browse blogs by category to find the best in class”.

Software recommendation engines to find blogs you like

What seems logical is a recommendation engine that matches your personal subject area interests with that of others who have the same interest and which only returns recommendations to pages that are current. Two significant players in this space are Digg who introduced a recommendation engine in 2008 and an older company in this space, Stumbleupon.

A key point to keep in mind is that recommendation engines involve a hefty time investment to produce good results (you’ve got to spend time telling them what you like).  Some commentators discount Digg on the basis that their recommendation engine tends to reinforce suggestions to pages and sites that your friends like rather than finding you ‘hidden gems’  so I focused on building up a Stumbleupon profile (which you do by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to the pages they suggest).

Results have been mixed from Stumbleupon - after what I’d estimate at 5 hours of solid recommendations (much of what you will see is collegehumour.com style graphic humour) I’ve only selected 44 favourites from the pages I’ve been shown and I estimate I’ve found about half a dozen blogs that I like (yeah it’s entirely possible I’m just hyper-critical). 

For the moment I’m keeping going with Stumbleupon, to some extent out of sympathy for what is a great concept but a terrible name – stumbling is not exactly the most useful sounding activity is it?

Conclusion: it’s just plain hard to find a good recommendation source for blogs

With the emergence of e-readers in large numbers it seems to me that there is an opportunity here for someone to produce a better human-curated selection of great blogs than some of the moribund websites mentioned above like BOTW and Eaton, and possibly there is such a site but I was not easily able to find it (let me know in the comments). 

Producing a good recommendation software engine by contrast requires a great algorithm and a lot of users (Stumbleupon after several years has 10 million+ users) but when you consider that many of them would be inactive and therefore generating little recommendation data, and that they’ve got several hundred subject categories, Stumbleupon’s source of preference data looks a lot poorer (perhaps my literary editor friend was right after all).

The best source of good blogs I found in the end was via Tweets from people I follow on Twitter, so if you can get access to Twitter’s data that looks like a great source. Whilst it appears that Facebook leads sharing of content, Twitter seems to be the only ‘open’ source of information (i.e. you don’t have to be accepted as someone’s friend to see what they recommend).

Otherwise there must be someone in an organisation out there, perhaps at Google or an ISP, who has a lot of blog content preference information.

C’mon venture capitalists! With the explosion in electronic books, creating a good blog recommendation engine is a non-trivial (i.e. barriers to entry) and potentially lucrative problem to solve.

Posted under Unanswerable questions, Wait for release 2.0

The next information wave

It’s easy to hate the most over-used phrases used to describe the web age – paradigm shift, knowledge revolution, Web 2.0 etc.  

But hey we’ve all faced the tyranny of an empty page – it’s tough out there. And faced with amazing changes to how we locate information represented by Google and the other search engines it’s easy to reach for the bottle of superlatives.  

Even the growth of email has meant a phenomenal change to the way we consume and create information in the last 15 years as documents and comments flow back and forth in minutes that used to take faxes, printers, and letters hours or days.  

Despite all these examples of card-carrying “gee whiz”  moments however it looks like we are just about to be swept up in another wave.  

We are just starting to consume knowledge in another way which may result in an equally dramatic lifestyle change when compared to the growth of search engines, or the early days of the web itself.  

The on-rushing wave is the e-book (or more properly the ‘E-Reader’), with an estimated 10 million being sold by the end of this year just in the US alone and dozens of different E-Readers in the works from different companies emerging in the next 12 months – with a combined marketing budget in the hundreds of millions that will make the recent Apple iPad launch look like a hiccup.  

On the surface of it is this just another example of hyperbolic silliness? Because isn’t the E-Reader just another way to consume books that we’re already reading in hardcopy anyway, and as many have pointed out there are a lot of advantages of traditional hardcopy over the electronic alternative?  

What is interesting about E-Readers is not the ‘E-book’ part at all. Instead E-Readers are going to very rapidly reshape how we consume information on the web. This is not about a ‘new device’ it’s about a new way to consume information, because as is somewhat obvious most of the information on the web is just not available in hardcopy form at all. And that really matters.  

Backlit screen reading is hard to do (sorry Apple I know you’re trying with the iPad). It’s hard on your eyes,  it’s not very portable (try reading a laptop with your feet up), and in this information-packed age unless you’re looking at a huge screen it is hard to skim read and quickly identify the key points in screen-based information.  

This has lead to an emphasis on other aspects of screen-based information that compensate for these drawbacks of the web on a computer screen by adding new functionality: dense hypertext links to make cross referencing easy, the ability to comment and interact with authors as represented by blogs, the ability to locate and reassemble information in many different ways as represented by search engines, and in most journalism courses a recognition that writing for the web requires a specific style (admonitions to not write more than two sentence paras etc).  

But the E-Reader is changing that (read “Customized newspapers on e-books: Calibre cross-platform e-book subscription management” to see how you can subscribe to websites out there on the web on your E-Reader, via their RSS feeds,  just like you can subscribe to a podcast on iTunes).  

What happens when everything from the web is as portable and easy to read as paper?  

It’s not JUST the E-Reader: the way this is going to turn our information-consuming lives upside down is driven by a groundswell of the growth of machine-readable info feeds on sites represented by Really Simple Syndication, and emerging platforms like Calibre which enable you ’subscribe’ to any website on any E-Reader – for FREE.  

The E-book just happens to be the final crest of the wave which is about to sweep away already undermined sections of the publishing industry.  

Still not convinced?  

The only thing worse than a ‘paradigm’ shift is an attempt to predict the future so here goes with a few near-term predictions:  

1. the world of journalism is about to get vastly more competitive – journalists in a newspaper will be competing with bloggers with more specialist knowledge who previously had limited circulation because you couldn’t purchase your average blog conveniently on a newstand or read it on the way to work on the train. The blogger is providing the information for free.
2. intermediaries that seek out big stories will get more important in their own verticals (wherever those stories are) whether they are using algorithms like Google or whether they are using human curated approaches like ‘The Week’, or social media mechanisms like Stumbleupon or Digg. Try and find for example, amongst the 100m+ or so out there which are the most entertaining blogs? To some extent this question was irrelevant  if those blogs didn’t get read – but not any more.
3. new ways of consuming stories will arise – for instance ‘collaborative reading’. On my Kindle or Sony Reader or iPad or whatever why should I not be able to view annotations on a text by my colleagues, or classmates, or friends?
4. we’re not talking individual wikis – we’re talking wiki world – why buy a ‘How To’ manual for  your motorcycle when there is a completely portable version?
5. traditional publishers who are congratulating themselves on being web savvy like the New York Times or Guardian are going to come under even more pressure because E-Readers in many cases will have the effect of destroying ad revenue and their ability to really track readership. With the aid of software on an E-Reader like Calibre this is the equivalent of Tivo for the publishing world: in your Kindle DX via Calibre no javascript is active (so Google Analytics aint going to know you’ve read the story) all it knows is that someone downloaded their RSS feed (not which particular stories were read).  And fancy ads are not going to come across because people writing recipes to extract your content with Calibre simply don’t want them.  Even if you instituted counter-measures by embedding an ad image joined with a story image, it’s almost the equivalent of going back to the flat ad serving done in newspapers. 
6. even the acknowledged guru of the web commerce world, Amazon, may be shooting themselves in the foot. They want you to buy e-books from them – but why? If you can read any old PDF or niche website out there on the web from the comfort of the couch? Or a million free book titles? I bought an Amazon Kindle DX and have yet to buy a book on it (but thanks Amazon anyway for paying the wireless subscription charges).
7. if it isn’t already obvious the E-reader is going to reduce further the cost of information globally even more: expect to add value with your startup company by better locating information, or better curation, but expect an uphill road if you think it’s about unique content (Mr Murdoch take note).
8. a bit like podcasting has broken the barriers to entry for local radio talk shows your decision is not ‘which paper do I buy in my home town’, instead it’s ‘which blogs do I want to read from the entire internet?’ Publications are becoming ‘unbundled’ and publishing deadlines paradoxically may actually become less important in an age of instant satisfaction. Why should I read some crap which some journalist stitched together at the last moment to make the Sun weekend edition when I can read a combination of bloggers who only produce pearls once a month? 

Like the sound of this new world or hate it?  

Is it not going to happen at all?  This is a blog – talk back.

Posted under Kewl

With the aid of the public domain Calibre e-book management application, which enables you to automatically subscribe to any news website (via RSS) and the increasing prevalence of the open (non DRM) EPUB electronic book formats that you can dump Adobe Acrobat PDFs to, you may find that books are the last thing you read on your e-book.   Let’s face it, paperbacks are easily available.   Where e-books really come into their own (assuming you’ve installed Calibre)  is in pulling down content from the web (and making it comfortable to read anywhere without a computer), content you normally cannot get in hardcopy unless you want to run your laser printer overtime.   Documents and news content like:  

• those 140 page Annual Reports you have to read occasionally
• various frivolous and not-so-frivolous blogs that you’d love to keep up with
• mainstream news sites like the New York Times or the Economist where most of the major stories are actually carried for free online
• niche news sites you’d like to be able to browse occasionally
• 30-40 page PDFs that you have to read for work

If this sort of content appeals to you then it has definite implications for what sort of e-reader / e-book you buy.   For example, the following e-book features bear watching if you expect to be reading other things aside from books:  

• screen size: a lot of news websites and large PDFs contain tables and images. Unlike standard text, tables become meaningless when you can’t see the row labels.  You need an e-book with a 10 inch screen to handle this type of A4 content to be able read effectively, but  most e-books come in significantly smaller sizes. Screen size is measured diagonally so an average size e-book with a 6″ screen actually has a screen width of around 3 and a half inches … you won’t see an A4 width table in that – you really need at least a 5 inch wide screen (which roughly equates to a 10″ e-book screen size).
• battery life: as effectively a substitute printer you need a long battery life. You aren’t just going to be picking up your e-book as you sit back in bed at the end of an evening . Battery-draining features like wireless connectivity or colour LCD displays such as the new iPad provides need to be weighed up against battery life.
• page-refresh rate: on the Sony PRS-505 page refresh rate is about a second. This is probably the maximum tolerable if you are going to be reading a lot of content. Make sure the page refresh rate is faster than a second.
• data charges: if you’re going to avail yourself of all this valuable free content (if that’s not an oxymoron) do you really want to pay ongoing 3G charges for your reader? When you switch your machine on you will have dozens of publications to choose from all continually refreshed daily automatically by just plugging your e-book into your PC.  A current (or in the case of Amazon ‘implied’) 3G mobile data charge just doesn’t seem necessary.  Assuming you have a smartphone if you really want time-sensitive web content you can always use that.
• rich media support: closely related to the above issue, a 3G connection where you pay volume-related data charges could turn out to be quite expensive if your e-book supports rich media like video (for example the Apple iPad). Many of the news sites you are likely to use contain rich media (or in the case of blogs badly optimized large images) and you could even find that you’re paying to watch rich media ads!

At least at the moment your choice of e-readers that fit these criteria is pretty limited (a nice comparision table, from which the simplified table below is derived, can be found on the MobileRead website).  The iRex Digital Reader probably claims the high ground with a 10 inch display but has a notoriously short battery life and at over $800 is quite expensive. The Kindle DX at 9.7 inches looks better price-wise and it’s claimed it will run for 2 weeks with wireless off – but it seems likely that Amazon will impose some sort of data charge as their Terms and Conditions state:  

“You may be charged a fee for wireless connectivity for your use of other wireless services on your Device, such as Web browsing and downloading of personal files, should you elect to use those services. We will maintain a list of current fees for such services in the Kindle Store. Amazon reserves the right to discontinue wireless connectivity at any time or to otherwise change the terms for wireless connectivity at any time, including, but not limited to (a) limiting the number and size of data files that may be transferred using wireless connectivity and (b) changing the amount and terms applicable for wireless connectivity charges.”  

If you need an e-book now (and if information you read is a key part of your job it’s worth  it!)  then probably the Kindle DX is the only option (and at the moment anyway the data charges are not an issue because you can leave wireless switched off and there is no annual charge imposed by Amazon).   However if you’re prepared to watch and wait, there are other large-screen devices emerging – devices and their estimated release dates below (see the MobileRead site for more):

Posted under Reviews

Amidst the turmoil in the newspaper publishing market there is one big problem for journalists leaving the safe-ish harbour of their big name publications and starting to experiment out on their own (if you are still wondering why you should be doing this read this as to why your safe harbour aint safe).

It’s distributing your blog to your readers.

Distributing your blog

Talking about distribution seems kind of odd in a way. Kee-rist, this is the world wide web isn’t it? Surely there are no problems there?

Well of course there are.  The majority of the population rarely read blogs at all. Blogs aren’t exactly a core part of their reading habits.

On commercial sites the volume of RSS-sourced subscriptions and even email-subscription  page reads usually make up the minority of traffic (RSS is barely a rounding error) and the ever present big brother Google accounts for 75% of traffic.  And of course Google readers are not ‘regular’ readers are they? They just happen to be doing a search where your blog came up.

RSS news readers, while they are available in all sorts of flavours (dedicated desktop software apps and web based ones like Google News Reader), are still the province of the technorati or news junkies.

The big hope for bloggers is of course the burgeoning electronic book reader market. With estimates that Amazon has sold about 1.5m Kindles so far  and 6m new e-book readers expected to be sold in the US alone this year, e-book readers are fast becoming mainstream, but at this stage a lot of e-book readers seem just that:  mainly for buying books (ignoring the Amazon hype that they sold more electronic books on Christmas Day than real ones – what exactly did anyone expect).

We can all buy books in hardcopy – we obviously can’t get blogs that way.

For bloggers the Kindle and Sony Reader were still relatively problematic as a distribution method because Amazon charged a subscription for you to subscribe to your favourite blog (imagine Dell charging you every time you downloaded a web page!) and required the blogger to sign up for the Kindle program for which Amazon generously gives you 30% of the revenue they earn.

And Sony’s reader has only just gone wireless with the ‘Reader Daily Edition’ targeted at newspapers.

Both the Sony and Kindle readers rely on an ongoing 3G connection which must be paid for somehow. The Sony PRS-900 unit (currently on back-order since they’ve sold out) for example is a minimum $15 per month.

Of particular interest for would-be bloggers wondering how they are going to get distributed to a mainstream readership is an e-book which does not require you to sign up for some sort of subscription for wireless access (a notable issue at the moment given the number of competing e-readers emerging, many of which are unlikely to exist in 5 year’s time), and being able to make a blog available all the time on the device.

Calibre

The most interesting development in this regard is not the hardware e book devices at all but public domain sofware that is emerging that will enable you to keep your e-book (whatever it is) synchronized with the bloggers you wish to follow (usually via RSS).

Finally, in following up on a concept that emerged way back in the mid 90s, you really can have a customised newspaper (for free) that is just as portable as your normal newspaper.

This missing piece in the jigsaw that gets you your customised newspaper effortlessly on your ebook today is a piece of free public domain software called Calibre, which has already been downloaded 500,000 times. Calibre is cross platform – for example it supports both Sony and Kindle readers as well as others.

Calibre: free, cross-platform blog and news management for your E Book

As with podcasts, Calibre will automatically synch free RSS versions of blogs (as well as log-in versions of major publications like FT.com or the New York Times by supplying your username and password during configuration) with your e-book. All you have to do is plug in your e-book to the PC and Calibre squirts all the content across (and with the WiFi e-readers emerging like PlasticLogics it is likely you won’t even have to do that at some stage in the near future).

While the new Plastic Logic e-book for example touts about 30 news sources Calibre out of the box already supports 400 mainstream news sources for free - in multiple languages at the time of writing with more being added every day. And it is simple to add an additional news source of your own like your favourite blogs just by telling it the location of that blog’s RSS feed. Then tell Calibre when you want to synchronise (once a day at 9am for example) and you’re done!

You don’t have to wait: you can put together a customised newspaper template for yourself out of your favourite blogs today, and you can do it without paying a subscription charge with practically any e-book out there. If your e-book reader is WiFi or 3G equipped then the hyperlinks that show up in the publications that you’re reading will be active, but if you’re using say a more basic e-book like my Sony PRS-505 you are still way ahead of the non-e-book world.

PS If you use Calibre already (or after reading this article) you are reading publications where the ‘recipe’ has been written by Darko Miletic. To help him keep purchasing devices to test recipes on you can contribute here (Chip In below).

Posted under Reviews

Imagine as a small business owner you go and buy an office suite, off-plan in some big office development somewhere from those well known property developers Bodgett & Bludgett.

Now imagine that following the completion of your new office suite your property developer plasters large signs on every customer-facing entry point to your office saying  ’Building designed and built by Bodgett & Bludgett Property Developers’.

Your customers cannot avoid seeing Bodgett & Bludgett’s signs no matter which way they enter your building and if they look you up in the phone book just below your details they also see ‘Building designed and built by Bodgett & Bludgett Property Developers’.

Seems a trifle unreasonable already doesn’t it? But we aren’t finished yet.

Now imagine that as your business becomes more successful and you start drawing in more customers, a little bit of your marketing budget (‘just’ half a per cent per month or so) is continually diverted to support Bodgett & Bludgett’s own marketing efforts.

“Kee-rist,” most business owners would be saying at this point, “Bodgett & Bludgett Property Developers should be paying me!”

The analogy isn’t perfect but it’s actually what a lot of website developers do on the websites of their small business clients.

You’ve seen it yourself. At the bottom of  the page your friendly website developer places an innocuous piece of text saying something like ‘Website designed and built by Acme Developers‘.

Most web developers will place this text on every single page in your website.

But the more subtle point which the developer usually doesn’t discuss with you is that they also place a hypertext link around this text pointing back to their own website (sometimes with a stylesheet applied so that the link only shows up as a link when you hover your mouse over it).

In Google’s world a link is quite valuable – under Google’s PageRank system (all other things being equal) an outgoing link like this from your own business’s website is effectively a vote for how close to the top in the search results your web developer’s own website should rank in the search results. In particular this is also influenced by the text that forms the link, the ‘anchor text’ – which is why the web developer creates the link around the words ‘website designed and built‘ (on the basis that people searching for website developers may use one or more of these words in combination).

But the really neat bit is that as your website becomes more popular, for example as you list it in paid directories that link to it, a little bit of your PageRank is transferred to your web developer’s home page from every page in your site. The more popular your website, the more you are promoting your web developer’s site, perhaps even years after your developer last did any work for you (almost makes tied financial planners look virtuous doesn’t it).

Now that I’ve pretty much burned my bridges with all the website developers I work with here’s my suggestion about how you as a small business owner negotiate this somewhat irksome issue with your own developer.

The underlying key point is of course that you are paying the website developer to build your website to help promote your business and not vice versa (unless you want to get a suitable discount).

Your website developer will probably be surprised that you would object to their link marketing scheme - most of their other clients won’t have even noticed. 

“But we always do this,” they’ll say in a somewhat injured tone ( just like the independent financial advisers who have been selling investment advice with 50 year trailing commissions).

You can of course ask them where in the development proposal you are providing ongoing marketing services to them.

But some might regard that as confrontational (something that Drivelry.com shies away from).

Instead, remove the link (you can still leave the ’site built by’ bit) and offer them a testimonial on their own website. You’ll say that they are “the greatest”, “the best”, “the fastest”, and “truly creatively inspired”. 

And, by the way, right underneath that testimonial on your web developer’s own website you’d like a small unobtrusive outgoing link (using keywords carefully chosen by you) to your own website.

You may feel guilty, you might  feel you’ve been pushy, but it’s all a damn sight more transparent. And best of all, given the number of other client websites your developer has already leached PageRank from (which trickles in turn to your site), you’ll be significantly better off from a web marketing point of view!

Go on. Do it!

Feeling faint hearted? Need moral support? Drop us a line to @Drivelry on Twitter (ok – if you’re a developer abuse is fine too).

Posted under Hate pets

The loan your TV principle

A couple of years ago I managed to loan my television to various friends who were broke or in transient accomodation or both.

My TV-less period lasted 3 years in total.

It’s surprisingly difficult to lend your TV to people actually. In the end my TV was found wanting because there were too many other people out there also trying to loan out their TVs, and their TVs had better specs than mine, a bigger screen, built-in DVD, etc.

In retrospect I find it interesting that all of us were loaning rather than giving our TVs away. It’s as if we couldn’t cut the umbilical cord, we could bring ourselves to part with it but deep down knew that like a straying pet it would probably keep coming back to feed on our brain (if that sounds a bit ‘un-pet like’ take a closer look at your cat) .

Look out for my new venture, ‘LoanYourTV.com’: there are thousands of people out there wanting to part with their TVs if someone would just help them through this difficult transition, find a new place for their beloved TV, and not allow them to back out of the deal at the last minute.

What television and toxoplasmosis have in common

There’s some Japanese horror movie out there whose name escapes me (probably sucked out by the aforementioned pet), I think it was ‘The Ring’, where the plot involves a video that kills you when you see it.

The Ring does seem a bit of an extreme metaphor but on the other hand it’s hard not to think that television does something to your brain…

Television doesn’t always entertain – or not in the way we know it Jim

How else do we reconcile that so much of what we watch is simply so bad? We’re not just talking morally or intellectually it just doesn’t entertain. Yet, we still watch it.  

How else can you explain staying up till midnight watching an appalling Manga-adapted subtitled Asian martial arts film called ‘Crows’ largely about the hairstyles of the protagonists with westernized-looking Asian female characters saying insightful stuff to monosyllabic male characters like “am I irritating you?” 

Or what about another gem I’ve been glued and gripped by:  ‘Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles’? In a recent episode John Connor  is being supplied a girlfriend from the future to make sure he is psychologically well adjusted and not too dependent on his mother … hmm … how Oedipal. 

And then there’s the extremely dubious idea of the attractive robot Cameron (played by Summer Glau at left in the picture above) who just stands around looking …errr … attractive but conveniently has no feelings to be offended by John as the adolescent male in the series …  love to have sat in on the marketing meetings on this one. Listening to ‘On the Media’ the other night Brook Gladstone noted that the female Captain Janeway in the Star Trek series was considered too hard to handle for their prime young male demographic so they had to bring in the curvaceous cyborg ‘7 of 9′, again a case of a non-threatening good looking but ‘emotionally dumb’ girl for younger males.

Yet applying a ‘high culture’ filter to television might be missing the point. We might just be too dumb to understand what television is really about.

Sure, we know that television provides an illusion of social company for us as social animals.  Sure we know that television has the capacity to relax us – over a lifetime a 75 year old will have sat through 9 years of television at an average of 3 hours a day viewing. There aint nothing else that I’m aware of that can make anyone sit that still for that long. More interestingly there have been suggestions that we like the orientation buzz that the techniques of film bring i.e. the content doesn’t matter we simply are attentive to the pans, zooms, cuts, and jumps, even down to preferring so many per minute.

The subtle benefits of junk television

However there are other more subtle benefits to junk television which perhaps are the tradeoff for whatever it does to our brain. For example:

1. Junk television does not actually require your full attention. That’s a damn good thing. We can eat dinner in front of it or do other things.  Walk away from a television program and unlike the onstage actors in a theatre nobody is gonna care. And the way television fits with multitasking especially on the web is becoming increasingly important:  36% of UK broadband users (aged 16-55) state they have both the TV and Internet on in the same room every day. On weekdays the time when TV and Internet multi-tasking is most likely to happen is around 8pm in the evening (TNS/YouTube Media & Audience Study December 2008).
2. Perhaps for the intellectual snobs amongst us television allows us to feel superior to what we are watching on screen? Who hasn’t sat with a bunch of people watching ’social’ TV and joked about the predictability of the plot, or character cliches onscreen? Haven’t done this? Try interactive TV by talking about it with kids/friends as you watch it.
3. Or what about television’s ability to seduce the conscious part of our brains so we can avoid the trap of analysis paralysis? It’s hard to take yourself too seriously while writing and watching ‘Bachelor Party 2: The Last Temptation’, watching junk television stops you from writing something that requires someone’s full attention (because reading stuff on the web is not something anyone gives full attention to!).
4. Another subtly brilliant feature of a lot of TV plots is that they actively encourage channel surfing – it’s easy to follow 2-3 programs simultaneously. Perhaps this is actually good for the television watching surveys run for advertising purposes?  Channel surfing is a little harder with the emotional ups and downs and plot intricacies of, say, ‘Silence of the Lambs’…
5. Or what about the cultural hegemony theory: all those hours of enlightened American drama deluging the developing world have to be reshaping socially backward countries (although perhaps ‘I Dream of Jeannie’  or ‘Bewitched’ could be said to undermine this argument not to mention the way so many TV plots seem to imply that most serious problems can be solved with a handgun).

As the amount of time that we spend reading online ratchets up (according to Nielsen the average person is now spending about 2 and a half hours on the internet a day) I’m inclined to think that the easy non-committal nature of television is going to keep our loyalty.

Excuse me. I have to catch that episode of ‘Heroes‘.

Posted under Cliche watch

It’s often tempting to see changes happening around you as somehow far more significant than they are. The ‘new‘ is seductive, and we all want to feel that momentous things are occuring that we’re just lucky enough to witness.

What’s happening with internet-connected smartphones?

Looking at the current growth of smartphones where sales grew 50% in the 1st quarter of 2009 (year on year), now accounting for 1 in 4 of all phones sold, and particularly at the way that Apple doubled their share of the smartphone market with the iPhone,   it is clear there is something going on with huge numbers of people becoming ‘connected’ to the web while mobile during their every waking hour.

But what does that really mean? Is this change really significant? What is this kind of ‘always-on’ / ‘always-on-me’ technology actually used for and what kind of impact is always-on going to have on the group that uses it?

Well once people get smartphones (and particularly iPhones) this is what they do with them in Comscore’s mid ‘08 European study of smartphone usage:

• 80% of users browse web-based news sources
• 56% use web search
• 32% watch mobile TV or video
• 42% use a social networking site or blog
• 70% listen to music
• 70% use email

In the broader mobile market Comscore reckons that more than 22 million people accessed web content daily via mobile in January 2009.

Cwipes! What a scary proposition! The newspaper industry has hardly adjusted to the need to rewrite and present copy differently online, now they’ve got think about mobile as well?

What is this kind of ‘always-on’ smartphone connected world going to be like for me as an individual?

Fortunately even before smartphones came along there was a demographic that was always-on. These are the guys who were born from1980: “Generation Y”. That’s 60 million+ people in the US.

Generation Y loves phones more than any other device.

For example, how many text / SMS cell phone messages do you send a month?

30? …. 50? …. perhaps you’d consider yourself a heavy texter who sends 100 a month (roughly 3 a day)?

Gen Y teens send 2200 texts a month.

It’s an absolutely stunning number of itself but it starts to make more sense when you do a little math.

As a Gen Y’er explained to me it’s just keeping in touch with about 10 people during the day with 7 messages sent over the course of the day to each person. 

“I’d feel naked walking into a cafe without a phone,” she said,  ”the first thing I do when I sit down with my coffee is text.”

Just as the Gen X’ers had trouble explaining how they were just ‘chatting’ on the phone to their parents (who saw the phone as something you only used for a special ‘transactional’ purpose), Gen Y use text messages more like status updates which can be broadcasted to multiple people in their phone address book.

The text message also carries a relatively low level of commitment. If a social event is being planned it’s possible to give only qualified approval by text, and then, because of the multi-threaded conversations going on, preserve your options to converge with whomever of your friends make sense in just a few hours time (read short term social planning). 

Difficult conversations and conflict are avoided by text but equally you may end up maintaining more ‘low-level’ relationships (notice how on Facebook your Gen Y friends have 200 or so Friends versus the Facebook average of  120).

Gen Y’ers of my acquaintance claim that they have more problems with friends who just won’t give them ‘attention-share’. 

 ’Status updates’? ‘Social committment’? It is all beginning to sound a bit Facebooky isnt’ it? Well according to Facebook 1 in 4 active Facebookers are accessing Facebook via  mobile device anyway (or about 60 million people).

Gen Y are just at the more intense end of an always-on curve that most of us are moving along anyway (50% of internet users now use Facebook) which is why Gen Y are worth watching.

How do I know when I’m becoming an always-on digital native?

Here are some ways to tell you’re becoming an always-on digital native, and how Gen Y seems to deal with the issues raised:

1. Feel like your Twitter Followers are more in touch with you than your family? Well Gen Y have been that way for a few years (unless their family are included in their updates!). Get into your Gen Y relative’s status updates!
2. Concerned about feeling out of the loop unless you’re constantly in touch with your friends? Don’t worry, unless you’re exceeding social contact with more than 10 people a day you’re just acclimating to the environment shared by the rest of  digital natives. Despite the fact that you’ve only got 50 Friends on Facebook you need to be aware that the numbers of close friends people keep in touch with is usually totally independent of this (most Facebooker’s only regularly exchange info with 5% or less of their Friends).
3. Want instant answers to any question? Gen Y’ers have grown up with Google since it really began to make waves around 2000 (the oldest Gen Y’ers were 20). They know how to use Google’s advanced search operators and they expect to instantly be able to find the answer to any question ‘of fact’ (analysis may take a little longer).  If you don’t know for example what the [site:] operator does on Google find out. 
4. Worried about the fragmentation of your attention when you’re trying to do original work? Well at least you’re thinking about it. 36% of UK broadband users (aged 16-55) state they have both the TV and Internet on in the same room every day. On weekdays the time when TV and Internet multi-tasking is most likely to happen is around 8pm in the evening (TNS/YouTube Media & Audience Study December 2008). Be aware that not every Tweet, IM, txt or email requires any level of committed response, and your spelling or grammar doesn’t have to be correct when and if you do respond.  Put off your next bout of Facebook voyeurism till the evening or weekend when you’ve got the time. At work why not cruise through the constant stream of interruptions with an uninterrupted iPod-driven music beat, set Outlook to pick mail once an hour, and get to know the web-based productivity tools out there like Pipes or RSS readers for cobbling together streams of information in structured ways that don’t all end up in your email inbox where they have to be dealt with.
5. Tempted to send an email or IM to deal with every eventuality? Gen Y’ers for all their obsessions seem to know the limits of electronic communication (perhaps those equally endless hours of movie consumption have taught them about body language?). Remember all that non-verbal communication and get out there and actually meet people. If you’re at work, call a project meeting so you can check out the negative body language of the guy who is not saying anything over electronic channels. Use the digital native tools that are out there to help arrange ‘face time’. Online dating is ok too: 1 in 10 American internet users claim to have used dating sites even back in 2006.
6. Thinking about what other people are thinking all the time? Living in an always-on culture with an always-present peer group can make you feel insecure when you don’t receive instant positive feedback on your latest choice of fashion accessory, and let’s face it someone has to do the jobs out there that don’t come with a support group (for instance being an HR Manager in the middle of a recession). A level of concern about Gen Y ‘neediness’ for approval is easy to find on the web, and in some cases has also branched out into a belief that creativity/originality might be harder for Gen Ys. It’s a concern that arguably appears unfounded: there’s quite a lot of evidence that Gen Y’ers strive to separate themselves from the herd, and are quite self-aware when it comes to dependency on others. Do both these things yourself.
7. Worried about privacy in the always-on electronic village? This seems a harder one to deal with. In this case you have the edge on Gen Y because you can remember youthful indiscretions that did come back to bite you! Think about the implications of privacy online, and use Facebook’s privacy settings in particular. For example, you probably don’t want your Facebook profile showing up above your LinkedIn profile when a prospective employer does a search and you even may not want registered Facebook users to be able to search for you if they’re clients as you don’t want to risk offending them by refusing their ‘Friend’ requests.

Always-on smartphones. Internet 1995 all over again?

A last point worth noting is that the 3G always-on world of mobile devices is not just something that society isn’t quite ready for.  Neither are the telcos. 

AT&T’s experience with handling the surges of traffic caused by iPhones has been bumpy. iPhones are basically the bandwidth-hogging Hummer of the smartphone world which can make the experience of using 3G connections patchy as the network is just overwhelmed (try getting through the online traffic jam whilst sitting in a tech related conference session with a couple of hundred other delegates some time).

The telcos are scrambling to catch up but at the same time they are already dealing with a rapid increase in the use of bandwidth-hogging video and audio – so the backdrop for them is challenging even when they’re trying to pass this stuff down wires rather than than through the air.

Posted under Kewl

In Drivelry’s continuing mission to convert the obscure into ’scure’,  it is remarkable how some movies do so well at the box office and others do so undeservedly badly.

A great case in point is the film “The Jane Austen Book Club”. Despite the title you really don’t have to know anything about Austen to appreciate this film.

Written and directed by Robin Swicord its dialog sparkles along at a pace that it makes typical action pics look slow. With more layers than wedding cake you could watch it half a dozen times and still not pick up on all the jokes and nuances.

Ok it is a romantic comedy but it’s also a labor of love because behind a lot of the excellent jokes and gags are some serious and subtle points about relationships.

Labelled a ‘chick flick’ any man would enjoy the byplay in this film - there are a raft of muscular characters here and not just Sylvia’s gay daughter Allegra.  It is also full of surprise twists and shocks - you’d defy anyone to come up with anything so true-to-life awful as one of the opening scenes with Daniel and Sylvia in the restaurant.

Great film – terrible box office takings

 But the thing that is really most shocking about “The Jane Austen Book Club is how such a good film did so relatively badly at the box office taking only $7 million in revenue.

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” (which is a veritable pastiche compared to ”Book Club”) took $245 million….  Even Swicord’s previous film “Little Women” took $50 million.

Narrow it down to Austen literary territory and the comparisons look equally bad:

• “Bride and Prejudice” took $24 million
• Keira Knightley’s 2005 “Pride and Prejudice” took $121 million
• Emma Thomson’s 1995 “Sense and Sensibility” took $134 million
• and the  recent biopic about Austen herself “Becoming Jane” took $37 million

Perhaps one could argue that Austen fans like their adaptations as close as possible to the original based on the above but it is still interesting to ask why ‘Book Club’ did so comparatively badly (unless you think all of the above are so much better than it is).

What went wrong with this movie?

Here are a couple of guesses which have more to do with marketing than anything else:

•  why-oh-why did they call it “Jane Austen Book Club”? It’s like holding up a large sign to say “don’t come to this unless you are a) a woman and b) you ‘read’ with a capital R. Well, that’s 3/4ths of the filmgoing population gone then… What about Truths Not Universally Acknowledged? Read My Lips? The Club? Anything would have been better. Was Swicord so shocked when a producer said yes to her pitch (“I have this idea about a film about a book club…”) that she felt she had to stick with it?
• nobody seems to have really liked Fowler’s book amongst my acquaintances although I appreciate that somebody liked it in order for it to end up on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 13 weeks.  Was the film too closely tied to the Fowler book but actually aimed at a different demographic?
• did it need a more bankable star – would it have been the same movie with someone else as the female lead Jocelyn? It seems thoroughly unfair to even suggest this as Maria Bello played the role so well but would a Cameron Diaz or Michelle Pfeiffer have had more drawing power?  Would a better known male lead in the place of Hugh Dancy have delivered better box office returns – and again Hugh Dancy played Grigg’s role to perfection so it is unreasonable to suggest this on anything more than marketing grounds.
• did it need to be rewritten to appeal to a slightly younger audience? As a 16 year old said the other day “it didn’t speak to me” – with it’s acutely drawn portraits of middle age as delineated in the Daniel sub-plot did it just leave a younger audience too much in the cold?

We’ll never know the answer of course but someone should look beyond the box office results above and give Robin Swicord more money to make another film, this time with a better marketing plan.

The only strangely Austen-ish happy ending outcome of all of this was that the film was nominated for the Gladd Media Award and lost to another greatly unappreciated film which Drivelry has also reviewed, Stardust. The co-stars of the two films, Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes, announced their engagement this year.

Posted under Kewl, Reviews, Unanswerable questions