One day I’ll get through all 4CDs of Lullabies to Violaine. But probably not today. Those Eyes, That Mouth comes from their 1986 EP Love’s Easy Tears.
The homepage for allmusic has been redesigned and it’s much nicer. I guessed something was up given they were tweaking other parts of their website over the past month.
It’s time that I posted something positive. Aside from music that I like and good things happening with work I don’t write that much about what makes me happy. The reason for this is that I have an overwhelming expectation for things to be better than average. Services or products that are just ‘okay’ aren’t worth writing about and nothing progresses if it has no innovation or passion. To redress the balance, here are some things I like or love that I don’t usually write about:
MySpace irritates me. Perhaps more than any other living thing on this planet – if you can categorise this immensely popular social network site as ‘living’. There’s nothing wrong with the concept behind MySpace, but it’s the execution and evolution of MySpace pages, its content and page relationships that’s hideous. The design of members’ pages ranges from bad to hellish, the content components are bad, and the content itself is frequently full of ‘sub’-txt message jibberish pinging. It’s a seething mutating virus of awfulness worshipping itself through an orgy of incompetence. And some of my favourite musicians have their own pages. Spot the irony.
The New York Times has written about the unprofessionalism of MySpace, and there’s a website dedicated to the worst pages on the site.
One Slashdot user asks ‘does it really matter?’ Well, obviously not to the 60 million users of MySpace. Robert Scoble reckons it is popular because it’s not professional. I say it’s despite this. You can be professional and approachable. Otherwise, we’d all be staring at badly designed magazines, articles, advertisements and it wouldn’t make a difference. True, design isn’t everything. But in the case of MySpace there’s no design and little competent content. Those who have something to say write blogs, those who don’t use MySpace.
Ah, but what about those who can’t design and/or haven’t got the skills to develop and maintain blogs? That’s why there are hosted blogs. That’s why people publish themes. What about those who can’t pay for hosted blogs? Here’s the deal: spend a little more on on-line presence at the expense of some of the ephemeral materialistic piffle that gets written about on MySpace. In any case, WordPress is free.
Seth Godin goes shopping for mattresses and writes about Harry Acker, the billionaire owner of Sleepy.
When I was in my final year of university (at UMIST, which has now merged with Manchester University), each student took part in a group project. Each project required some level of technical innovation and was to be managed as in ‘real life’, with budgets, schedules and oversight. A senior university lecturer was assigned to each project to provide assistance when required and to make sure that everything ran smoothly and we weren’t going off on the wrong track.
For many of the projects, the lecturer became heavily involved in the work – in some cases providing management and technical leads that should have been the responsibility of the students. Our lecturer didn’t. He did however guide us in the early days of the project and point us in the right direction when he felt we were doing something wrong. Most of the time he didn’t get involved. We’d sometimes spend a week working on the project without seeing him. Much of this was probably due to his other responsibilities, but it was nice not to be badgered every 5 minutes.
Often, when he came to see us, he’d poke his head round the door to our lab and ask us if everything was okay. If we said ‘yes’, he’d smile and go away, if we said ‘no’ he came in to help us. He trusted us with the responsibilities and knew our skills. He was a Harry.
And they call themselves the Design Museum. I guess the emphasis is on museum, because it’s certainly not on design, judging from the design of their website.
Let’s face it, The Guardian’s online version isn’t great. It appears to be stuck in the age of the First Internet, much like earlier versions of the BBC’s website. Compare this to the recently relaunched New York Times, and you’ll see the difference.
However, in 2003, The Guardian launched their Digital Edition, which provides exact digital renderings in PDF and text of The Guardian. See the demo.
The Digital Edition allows people to browse through The Guardian section by section, and page by page, clicking on articles that may be of interest. The text of each article appears, and you can read this and/or download a PDF or press cutting. It’s an innovative solution to the problem of reading a newspaper online. But it’s not the correct solution: when you’re online you behave differently and you access information differently.
Look at the front page of The Guardian in the demo and you’ll see the problem. Apart from the headline of the main article, everything else is illegible. The teaser articles at the bottom of the page don’t link to the full content, so you have to resort to using the navigator on the left hand side column. That’s of course providing that you were sufficiently interested to poke about randomly, which is a contradictory possibility.
An alternative is to download the PDF. One page at a time, then scroll up and down as you read each article. This is lunacy. Even more so when the article you are reading appears on facing pages.
Later this month, The Herald will be launching a digital edition. It too will be a facsimile of the printed version, but requires the download of Press Reader, an application that provides navigation, searching and full-text versions of the content. It includes facilities to zoom in and out, scroll up and down, to read the content. Great. Except, once again, it’s the wrong solution.
In recent weeks a number of users of last.fm have complained about the lack of updates to their overall charts. As it happens, these charts are being updated, but sporadically and infrequently. The complaints have often become heated, with users of the service arguing angrily with each other about the issue.
An explanation which is currently on the last.fm system status thread reads:
We’re working on a completely new method of charts processing which will replace the current one and should be complete within a week or two. We are not working too hard to patch up the current system when we’re working on the new one.
It’s good to report status information to the users, but there are a number of problems with this specific information:
”..free roadshows across the Highlands and Islands, on support for new products and processes”
Does this actually mean anything:
Throwing Muses:
Sweet nothing
Sweet dreams
Serene
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