Puffbox

You can now get a 2GB SD memory card for the frankly ridiculously low amount of £8.78 from Amazon’s marketplace (or £11.77 if you need the peace-of-mind of buying from Amazon itself). We’re talking a serious brand in Kingston Technology here, not a fly-by-night you’ve never heard of. I can’t help thinking that, by the time we finally get the Apple iPhone here in the UK, its 4GB or 8GB of disk space is going to seem not only paltry, but cheap. And don’t start me on the 2MP camera.

I used to take great pride in knowing what was happening in the pop charts. Gradually it stopped being instinctive, and became something I had to make a conscious effort to do. I remember deliberately memorising the names of everyone in S Club 7 (er – Tina, Jo, Rachel, Hannah, Jon, Paul, Bradley… and that’s without resorting to Wikipedia!). Then, at some indistinct point round about the time McFly emerged (and I’m not necessarily blaming them, but…), I just stopped caring. And the worst thing is, I suspect I’m not alone.

But we could actually see something interesting happening in the charts this weekend, with an unsigned band looking set to make the Top 40. According to Tech Digest, Essex ‘pop punk / rock / punk’ boys Koopa made it to #33 in the mid-week chart, with 97% of their sales coming through 7digital. (Their Green Day-esque take on the Proclaimers’ 500 Miles is cute… hear it on Myspace.)

Two ways to look at this. One, it’s the birth of a new wave of musical freedom, a return to the punk ethic of the late 70s, without even having to manipulate the record business. Or – and this is the theory I currently prefer – it marks the end of the pop chart as a valuable concept.

Tragically though, a piece on their website announces that the father of the band’s Stuart and Oliver Cooper has died following a heart attack at the weekend. ‘Obviously (dad) Martin was an avid supporter of his sons’ music and it is a great injustice that he is not here to see the current media interest and the continuing rise of Ollie and Stu’s band KOOPA within the music industry. Can we please request that Ollie and Stu are left to mourn in peace, and also kindly ask you to not e-mail them unnecessarily during their bereavement?’

OK Apple, we love what you’ve done with the iPhone thing. You haven’t let anyone down, and if anything, you’ve maybe even exceeded the already excessive expectations. Shame we won’t see it in Europe until October at the earliest, by the sounds of things. Loads of pictures live from the launch event, courtesy of Flickr. Thanks to MacRumorsLive for the excellent ajax-powered text commentary.

I’m amazed how much coverage is being given in the mainstream media to tomorrow’s big speech by Apple boss Steve Jobs (5pm UK time). We’re at the point now where, if he doesn’t announce a new mobile phone touched by the hand of Jonathan Ive, the world has a crisis on its hands.

I’m not a huge Apple fan, but I do admire their ability to – generally – just get it right. The evidence is there: my iPod Nano can sync data from Outlook, although I don’t really have any need for it to do so. There’s a very real chance that I’ll be getting my credit card out tomorrow evening. I’m just bored of my current Windows-powered mobile phone(s)… it’s a pain being forced to use Outlook, when online solutions like Google Calendar or 30boxes would be much better for me.

Incidentally… coolest thing I’ve seen in a while is the 30boxes view of your Flickr photos (and other dated content). Try this.

‘Citizen journalism’ isn’t necessarily about citizens becoming journalists. Thankfully. I sat through an edition of BBC News 24’s new show ‘Your News‘, and found it excruciating. The raison d’etre seemed to be: we’ve got all this material coming in to us, most of it admittedly mediocre in quality, and we have to do something with it. It was, quite literally, amateur.

It’s now hard to imagine live radio without email and text message contributions, with the BBC’s own Five Live being a perfect case study of how to integrate them into the flow. Television just hasn’t found a good way to incorporate viewer contributions yet. Fingers crossed for Sky’s Green Britain thing next week. The signs are encouraging; but Sky’s track record is patchy. (I know, I was there.)

But ‘citizen journalism’ can also be a collaborative thing. A piece in the Online Journalism Review describes an ideal opportunity for this. An article in the Los Angeles Times queried the pricing policy at Amazon. OJR writer Robert Niles suggests that readers who participated in Amazon’s affiliate scheme could contribute the data from their sales commission, to help work out what Amazon’s pricing formula actually is. As media uber-blogger Jeff Jarvis points out: ‘They just need a way to do that.’

It’s another argument in favour of having a ‘guerrilla’ technical development team (even a team of one) as part of any online news operation. A competent developer, with free and unfettered access to a live server, could probably throw a rough-and-ready database application together within a few hours. Contributors could be invited to chuck their data into that database. With luck, many would. And suddenly you’ve got a much stronger story with a second day of shelf life.

I really like the idea behind this website, which compares the BBC News website’s selection of top news stories which you should read, against the stories which people are actually reading. Yes, the top stories are highly likely – although absolutely not guaranteed – to be among the most popular (which implies there’s still a high degree of linear navigation from the homepage). But the ranking order can be very, very different. If you were a rival news service, with a commercial imperative, there’s food for thought here. 😉

A few interesting facts in today’s Media Guardian piece on BSkyB plans to offer ‘video on demand… through the use of additional recording capacity on the hard drive of newer boxes.’ They reckon five million viewers are now using the service, with two million active boxes out there. Homes with Sky+ watch 12.2% of their TV in ‘timeshift’, with blokey channel FX scoring just short of a third of its total viewing in non-live conditions. But people don’t want delayed news, with only 0.6% of news viewing being non-live. Makes sense.

Plans to ‘force’ a package of preselected recordings make sense, too. I’m just surprised it’s taken so long. I wonder how they’ll make judgements on what constitutes ‘a selection of the week’s top programmes’?

Comments by the country’s acting Prime Minister, nominal deputy PM John Prescott, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

Frankly, to get this kind of recorded messages coming out is totally unacceptable and I think whoever is involved and responsible for it should be ashamed of themselves.

Unacceptable? Shameful? Sir, this is the modern world and you’ll have to get used to it. You can’t command the tide to turn. And I simply don’t believe the countless thousands of people searching for (and finding) blogs and other websites carrying the raw footage will feel the slightest bit ashamed.

Besides, if you send your troops into a country with the (explicit or implicit) aim of overthrowing the regime, and having done so you hand over the former head of state to the local authorities, who enforce the death penalty, which was always on the local statue book… then, er, at the very least you’re an accessory to the killing.

On Saturday, we see a carefully choreographed, dignified procession of a condemned man to the gallows. Neatly edited news footage, crucially without a soundtrack. On Sunday, we see a very different perspective, courtesy of a mobile phone. Posturing, bickering, chanting of rivals’ names… it comes across like a penalty shootout rather than an execution.

The world of news management is dying. Too many people, with too much kit, in too many places.

Incidentally, well done to the BBC for publishing its policy on images of the execution. But it implicitly sets an interesting precedent. If we can show gruesome images on News 24 because it’s an active choice, an opt-in thing – and incidentally, I think that’s the right approach – then it becomes harder to justify not publishing the most gruesome images (if you have them) in the ultimate opt-in medium, namely video-on-demand. Genie, bottle, etc.

I have to hand it to Sky News – suddenly, out of the blue, they’re making some interesting – albeit still a bit rough – moves to improve their much neglected website. Perhaps most interesting of all is their Green Britain initiative:

Starting on Monday, January 8, Sky News will spend a week creating a snapshot of climate change in the UK. We’ll have a series of special reports, exclusive interviews, and lots of practical advice on how you can make a difference. And you can help us! We want your videos and photos to add to the big picture!

OK… so far so good. So what can we expect? Well, judging by the fact that there’s an internal-only link (to ‘http://cma/’) on the project’s only page, not a huge amount. (Frankly that’s unforgivable on a page receiving regular on-air promotion, and a spot in the primary navigation. Robert Nisbet’s clip is actually here – and I don’t think the camera crews need fear for their jobs just yet.)

But there is the promise of a ‘special climate change map’, which – one suspects – will follow the (rather clunky) example set in their Ipswich murder coverage. Users willing and able to generate content are invited to submit their masterpieces by email – oops, not very sysadmin-friendly.

Clearly this isn’t to be the first example of BSkyB’s cosy new relationship with Google, which promises:

a multi-platform User Generated Video (UGV) portal powered by the first global deployment of Google’s syndicated video content tools. The site will allow users to edit, upload and share their own video content, including the facility to upload and download from a mobile phone.

Actually, as mentioned here previously, I reckon Sky could be extremely well-placed to surf the wave of user-generated material, arguably better than the Beeb. At the very least, this Green Britain project should be a useful learning experience along that road. But I’m intrigued to see just how much decent material they actually receive. It’s no effort to knock a blog together… but editing rough video footage into something watchable is another story.