Posts by Rob Stowell
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Not exactly filtering, but wiki-leaks source in US intelligence seems unlikely to leak any more.
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the quite bizarre father of the two redhead children
is also quite the most inspirational teacher my kids have ever had.
Just to add a little balance :) -
careful and considered caution against being seduced by the rhetoric of yet-unsubstantiated change
I'll check out Turner's book. I still have one foot firmly in the skeptikal camp :)
And it surprises me personally, how little television I now watch on FTA television. It could just be me, but once the 'appointment viewing' habit is broken, it's hard to get it back. -
Claiming to be from 1969. But in colour.
Very likely shot on colour film, but broadcast at the time, of course, in black and white. Or a TVNZ cock-up :)
The fabled golden era of targeted and relevant advertising based on your current purchase patterns and life-stage is eons off being realised.
Tell that to amazon and google. They'll surprise you!
Niche advertisers rarely have enough dosh to support niche channels, especially when you consider that the cost of making a commercial can be roughly equivalent to the amount these potential advertisers have to spend on their marketing.
The cost of making a commercial can be almost nothing (nothing if you do it yourself) up to 'the sky's the limit'. That's certainly changed.
Graeme Turner's new book Ordinary People and The Media: The Demotic Turn. He argues that much of the talk about the democratisation of the media (as 'produsers' or 'prosumers') is rushing far ahead of any convincing evidence of substantial change. He also argues that many of us are colluding in the interests of established media by supplying free content for them...
I'm not sure what would be convincing. Tech-talkers always tend to rush ahead. But the trend seems evident.
And... those two arguments rather conflict: 'we' are 'colluding' in supplying free content to established media... but it's insubstantial?
Corporate players still have a massive role in media creation and distribution. And Google may end up more like Time-Warner than anyone supposes. Not sure I'd bet on it, though. -
Already many are turning off- and the Cognitive Surplus being re-deployed. When we do watch, we'll tend to watch- and make- specialised content, when and where best suits us.
Funding will tag along, a few years behind. Advertising and (in NZ) government subsidies will continue to prop up traditional FTA for some time after the ratings (which are hardly beyond criticism) disappear...
Some future NZ government will then re-invent public broadcasting. The BBC will stop their silly policy of only streaming to the UK... and NZ politicians will once again try to figure out ways to subvert the independence of their new creation. :) -
Thinking of you and your grandfather. What a blow and at such a time.
The Port Hills are wild and craggy- almost Scots, if not York- the right place to go.
Incidentally: I had a mate who used to talk about "going for a walk to the Port Hills". It took me a while to realise this meant "a short walk to the bottle-store for the cheapest possible bottle of 'old tawny port'." -
Someone has probably linked to it already- but I re-read this New Yorker article last night, and it looks as if the ebook 'market' (and the publishing business) is going to change fairly sharply in the near future- especially when Google enter.
Amazon and Apple appear to be following similar strategies- especially in terms of trying to gain a massive market share; and seeing content primarily as a vehicle for selling hardware.
I tend to stay away from purchases that put hardware/software/content control all in the same hands- which the kindle especially, but also the ipad tend to do. Other options look likely to emerge fairly quickly.
(And I like the idea of the netbook, too. More for less always sounds good to this cheapo consumer :) -
an archive which co-ordinates the digitalization of the audio past.... then making that available to the public
would be a marvellous thing- but a copyright nightmare, eh?
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I'd be happy to see Flash die
Bad luck if it's the video format itself you don't like. (VP8 looks like being great for quality and file-sizes: as good, if not a tad better, than H264.) If you don't like Adobe's proprietry ownership of the world's web-video format (who does)- this also looks pretty good- there should be free- and freely available- encoding.
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I've calculated some of it's claims based on local sales data and Information is Beautiful is only out by around 1962.8%.
If you're going to make that claim, it'd be polite (and much more persuasive) if you showed us your calculations :)