Category: Internet
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RIP Tweetdeck
There are books and TV series to be written about how Elon Musk has reduced a moderately successful social media network, overpaid massively, and then destroyed it in months. And I’m not going to write that here. But I have long been a Twitter user, and mostly enjoyed using the platform. Key to that usage…
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Why is Everyone Trying to Sell Me NFTs?
OK. I do know why. Easy cash. But I loathe just about everything NFTs stand for. Right now we’re in a few days into the Winter Olympics – a games that I’m not overly interested in, if truth be told. The timezone is bad for Europe, the pandemic means that there are sparse crowds at…
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Podcast Moderation
Spotify is learning the tough way that while you can build perhaps the most sophisticated software platform that scales beautifully and completely redraws the revenue model of the music industry, “content moderation” is hard. Particularly when you’ve backed the person at the centre of things with a $100m investment. Spotify has finally responded by finally…
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URLs in Communications
I’m not a marketing expert, but my view on URLs that are given out in any kind of communications, for any reasons, is that they need to be as simple as possible. Of course, the ideal is that you just click a link. But if you get an advert on TV, the radio or in…
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The Pros and Cons of YouTube Music – September 2020 Edition
I’ve been a user of Google Play Music for quite some time now – almost exclusively because they uniquely allow you to upload your own music (or other audio) to their servers. You could upload 50,000 tracks to the site. Why is this important? Maybe you have music that hasn’t been commercially released? Your friend’s…
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Apple and Dark Sky
Yesterday came news that Apple has bought the company who make the mobile weather app, Dark Sky. For those who don’t know, Dark Sky is a particularly good weather app that marries great design with accurate minute-by-minute prediction of things like rain. They began as an iOS app, before making an API available to other…
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Magic Mirror
Note: Taking good photos of mirrors is very hard! This photo suggests lots of double images, but in fact they’re not visible to the human eye, and the text is nice and sharp! Nor can you see acrylic marks in the screen. Yes, the mirror still works as a mirror. And yes, I’ve intentionally blurred…
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When Things Go Wrong: aka Thank Goodness for Amazon Drive
I have a NAS drive, and it holds all my worldly digital goods. That is, it has all my photos, videos, documents and other things. I still haven’t found a cost-effective off-site backup solution beyond the NAS drive, although I do need one. Something that I can back up, upwards of 6TB of data. Amazon…
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The Premier League in an SVOD World – Running the Numbers
This week, Amazon Prime in the UK has begun the first of its streaming-only games offered to Prime subscribers. You will recall that during the last UK round of Premier League TV rights, a package comprising of the entirety of one mid-week “matchday” and all the Boxing Day games was offered. In the end Amazon…
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Space for Audio: The Internet and Streaming Radio
Yesterday I was a speaker at this year’s Radio TechCon conference, and took part in a “debate” about the future of broadcast radio. If there had to be one platform for radio in the future, which would it be? DAB+, broadband or 5G? Obviously this is not a true representation of the options. Nobody is…
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Flixster Transition to Google Play
A few weeks back I noted that Flixster would be closing soon and had written to me to say that my film collection would transition to Google Play. Well last week, that time finally came to pass. The Flixster website is shutting down in December, and I’d need to migrate my digital collection to Google.…
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Twitter’s Algorithmic Toxicity
This piece started life as a Twitter thread – ironically – which I posted recently. Read the thread here, or read on. Introduction I’ve recently come to the conclusion that many of Twitter’s toxicity issues essentially come as a consequence of their own software’s behaviour. Algorithms affect so many systems and businesses these days, that…
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RIP Flixster
At the start of this year I noted that buying a digital movie or TV series in the UK was an absolute mess. You can buy movies or TV series from a number of sites including: iTunes, Google Play Movies, Amazon, Sky Store and Rakuten. But if you buy something in one of those places,…