adambowie.com

Category: Misc

  • How Retail Works… I Think

    Judging from my inbox, this how retail works towards the end of the year: October Only x number of days to go. Buy now. November Offers. Buy now. Black Friday (Actually a full week) Cyber Monday (Another full week) December Buy buy buy. Offers. Twelve days of Christmas (despite 12 Days of Christmas being after…

  • Administrative Note

    I’ve just updated my WordPress theme to make it responsive. There may be the odd thing broken around here. If there is, then I apologise. But do feel free to drop me a note if you find anything that seems a bit odd. Hopefully I’ll be able to use some slightly bigger pictures and generally…

  • Bad Visualisations

    There’s a really interesting piece to write about Taylor Swift, Spotify and iTunes revenues, and the music industry in general. But this isn’t it. I’m writing this because TechCrunch has an interesting piece about European Spotify earnings overtaking iTunes earnings. The piece reports that Kobalt, a publishing company that collects music royalties on behalf of…

  • Payments and Data

    When Tesco first introduced its Clubcard in 1995, it was to enable it to capture data on its customers. Most people who use loyalty cards realise this. In return for the retailer being able to tie specific sales to an individual, that individual earns some kind of loyalty points. It seems to be a win/win.…

  • The SEO of Titles

    I’ve moaned for a long time about the lack of imagination in television programme titles – particularly in one-off documentaries. The producers’ theory seems to state that if you don’t adopt the “Ronseal” approach, then nobody will know what your programme is about. We browse EPGs rather than use the Radio Times or newspaper television…

  • These Words Are Mostly Meaningless and Wholly Untrue

    (Repeated from a Tweet a few days ago, but still true)

  • The Worst Place in the World for a Big Live Global TV Audience

    In a nice piece from Marina Hyde in today’s Guardian, she links to a New Yorker piece from a few years ago that disavows the idea that a billion people might watch the Oscars. Starting from the fact that only 15% of Americans watch their own movie awards, it seems incredibly unlikely that the numbers…

  • Things I Can Live Without in 2014

    Life’s too short. So in 2014 I will mostly* be living without the following: Awards Ceremonies I exclude any awards that I might be nominated for- unlikely though that is. What I means is Oscars, Brits, Grammys, Comedy Awards, Television Awards etc. The only one I’ll miss is perhaps the BAFTAs although the fact that…

  • Is There Room for Horror on UK TV?

    I mentioned that I’d enjoyed Mark Gatiss’ version of The Tractate Middoth over Christmas. And although that is certainly more of a ghost story than a horror story, it made me wonder why we don’t get more horror series on British television. Series like American Horror Story, and arguably The Walking Dead, prove that there’s…

  • Saturday Night Primetime TV Pitches

    Here’s a question: if it takes years of dedication and hours of practice to become decent at a particular activity or sport, why do we believe that a celebrity can become good at it in just 12 weeks? I mean, I know Malcolm Gladwell popularised the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of doing something…

  • Migrating from Movable Type to WordPress

    For a long time now, I’ve been very frustrated with the blogging platform I’ve used since I started properly blogging here back in 2002. At the time, Movable Type seemed to be the “go to” platform. And it was fine for many years. I’m in no way a web-developer but a lot of Googling meant…

  • WordPress Up and Running

    I’ve migrated my blog over to WordPress. With luck most things should be working fine, including feeds – the main way that people see this blog’s writing. You shouldn’t have to do anything, and old links should redirect accordingly. However in the short term, feed readers may re-present some older updates on a one-off basis.…

  • King’s Cross Square Open

    This morning King’s Cross Square was finally open. For many months now, King’s Cross has been a construction site as first they built the new concourse, and then dismantled the ugly 1970s facade. Now the original frontage has been revealed. There’s still a bit of “snagging” to complete – workers rush to finish the last…