Puffbox

I just went to the Amazon homepage… and its interpretation of ‘products I might like’ was quite interesting.

So apparently I only like books with plain yellow covers. Any recommendations, folks? 🙂

The product of Sky’s engagement with Google Video is now live, at skycast.com. But despite the site’s claims, it’ll only be ‘a new kind of entertainment experience’ if you’ve never seen YouTube. Frankly, if YouTube weren’t owned by Google, I bet they’d be considering a lawsuit. Your best starting points for now are the areas owned by various Sky channels, like News or Travel. (An eclectic choice of highlights from the News library, incidentally!)

The unique selling point, such as it is, is that ‘we will showcase our favourite ‘Clips of the Week’ on the Sky interactive TV platform and the very best home-grown entertainment will be hand picked to appear on national television.’ (The report in Media Guardian talks specifically about Soccer AM and Sky News.)

We’re in tricky territory here. Is it better to build your own community, or join an existing one? My inclination remains the latter, based principally on volumes of traffic, cost of development and maintenance, and the proven successes coming from YouTube and Myspace. Why bother… unless you’ve got something new, innovative and really substantial to offer? Granted, it’s early days for Skycast… but I don’t immediately see that compelling reason to upload my stuff to them, rather than the clear market leader.

I’m really starting to wish I’d put a few quid on David Miliband becoming the next Labour leader. I see he’s on the front cover of this week’s New Statesman, offering ‘My Vision‘. A nice photo of the chap knocking on the door of No10, too. (Shame about the Robert Mugabe photo alongside, though.)

The Miliband piece revolves around the notion of ‘the politics of “I can” ‘: ‘I am convinced that a fourth election victory, and fundamental changes to the landscape of Britain, are possible precisely because a more demanding, educated, savvy population want the power and control that modern progressive politics can offer. I believe the opportunity is as great as at any time in the past 60 years.

‘In the “I can” era, people want to be players, not just spectators. They want to be contributors, not just consumers. Technology is enabling these aspirations to be fulfilled and new institutional models to emerge. Politics cannot stand apart from these changes. A generation is coming to political maturity that expects not just high standards of provision, delivered quickly to specification, but also real control.’

Does that or does that not sound like leadership talk? It’s a clear statement of what Milibandism is all about… and for those of us engaged in the ‘blogsphere’ (to quote Michael White), it doesn’t come as any surprise. He’s only preaching now what he has been practising for a while.

Previously on these pages, I wondered openly if it was too early for him. I’m beginning to wonder again. It’s almost certainly not the timing he would choose, but you don’t often get to make a choice. And Gordon Brown’s appearance with a bunch of kids on Channel Five this Friday is a little cringey, judging by the clips shown so far.

PS: I didn’t realise it was also in today’s Telegraph. I wonder why?

Yes, the Guido Fawkes interview on Newsnight was an embarrassment. But at least Paul admits it on his own blog: ‘the live interview was definitely a mistake and against my better judgement, as was the in-the-shadows idea of the editor.’ What amuses me most, though, is the comment thread beneath the mea culpa posting on the Guido blog. Half the comments are saying that Guido/Paul came across as a bit of a prat – correct, he did. The other half are having a go at fellow interviewee Michael White of The Guardian, for being arrogant / smug / petty / inaccurate with an ultimately trivial allegation. The irony is apparently lost on them.

No doubt Guido Fawkes’s piece on tonight’s Newsnight will attract much interest. I’ve been critical of Guido in the past, but he does have a point about ‘press release news’. I’ve seen this up close, and it’s true: some of the most respected hacks reduced to transcribing Alastair Campbell’s words at a briefing. Hardly journalism. But I’d take Guido/Paul’s point about politicians failing to offer themselves up for interview a little more seriously if he put his own name (or indeed, face) on his own material. Hiding in the shadows isn’t any different to hiding behind a written statement.

Incidentally – I found it quite amusing to see ‘<managingEditor>delete-paulds</managingEditor>’ in the source code for the Guido Fawkes site’s RSS feed. There goes the anonymity, Paul mate.

Norfolk’s morning paper, the Eastern Daily Press likes to think of itself as pretty smart when it comes to innovation. They’re making a big fuss today of ‘Brian’ – which stands for Believable RSS Interactive Avatar Newscaster. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be much more than Ananova, who/which was launched back in April 2000. Whatever happened to her? Orange bought the Ananova website from PA later that year, and Ana herself hasn’t been seen in a couple of years, despite promises that she is ‘under development’. (And my memory may be playing tricks, but I seem to remember Ananova being better animated.) Sadly, she never did ‘transform the delivery of news’ – and I don’t imagine Brian will either.

Always good to see someone else having a pop at the Sky News website. This time it’s Kevin Anderson, who happens to be chief blogger at The Guardian. He’s right of course. Sky’s policy as regards blogging is most charitably described as bandwagonesque and unfocused. There’s no attempt to encourage two-way communication. Thus far, I just don’t think they ‘get’ it.

It worries me to see Michael Wilson’s new blog being rolled out like this. This habit of creating ‘skynewsX.typepad.com’ with a big, ugly custom template seems to have become an accepted formula… when it clearly isn’t right. And besides, I used to work in the same office as Mr Wilson. Granted this was a few years ago, but he didn’t really buy into the web philosophy. Or more accurately, I don’t think he considered us on the web operation to be proper journalists.

I’m eagerly awaiting the new Sky News site, due next month some time (last I heard). But the fact that they’re still rolling out more random blogs like this does not bode well.

I normally try to keep my personal and professional stuff well separated. But I mentioned last week that I was doing the Reading Half Marathon, and if anyone’s interested in how I did… I finished in the top 10%, in a time of 1h 33m 32sec. Gordon Ramsay’s name doesn’t appear on the results sheets, so I don’t think he showed up. (Chicken.)

It turns out I’m the number one search result on Google for ‘تحلل‘. I could well be wrong, but I think it means ‘disengaged’. If any Arabic speakers are reading this, please confirm?!

There’s something truly surreal about a day when the lead story on the local evening paper is actually ‘man edits local paper’. And anyway, it’s a half marathon, not a full one – but I guess that’s not such a good headline. Inside, there’s an apparently serious suggestion in the paper’s leader column that the town of Reading should be renamed ‘Redding-on-Thames’ for search engine optimisation purposes.