Puffbox

Amazon is now listing a 1GB SD memory card for jaw-droppingly low £11.29. That’s a stunning amount of storage space to be carrying around in a tiny device like a PDA.

I can’t be the only one tiring of the Apple hype. It was great when they were just a niche manufacturer of computers for the graphics industry… but now they’ve claimed a market monopoly, the rules – and the expectations – have to change.

A new joint venture between Apple and Nike brings us the (fabulous looking) Nike+ ‘sport kit’ for the iPod Nano. You attach a ‘chip’ to your running shoes, plug an attachment into your iPod, and it records how far you’ve run, in what time, and talks to you as you run. It’s a fantastic innovation, at a startlingly good price… just £19 for the attachment, on top of the Nano itself. A range of new Nike running shoes is optimised for the chip, but these are optional, I think. (An early review on the Runner’s World website, if you’re interested.)

As luck would have it, I found myself outside Apple’s flagship store on London’s Regent Street yesterday. No publicity for the Nike+ gadget. So knowing it was due out soon, I asked one of the ‘geniuses’ if there was any news regarding its release. No. Nothing. Blank looks. Suggested I went to the Nike shop round the corner. So not even your own online store then, which has it for sale just 24 hours later? Brilliant.

I have £120 earmarked to buy a new Nano, and one of these. It’s yours if you want it, Apple. But I’m not sure you do.

I’m not really an advocate of capital punishment, but I’m prepared to make an exception for people on the Tube with those suitcases you pull behind you. We can no longer tolerate the brandishing of solid objects immediately below the average adult’s line of sight. I’m especially thinking of those people who take one step off the train, or pass through the ticket barrier, then stop dead to pull out the case handle. (We aren’t even going to begin to discuss people who stand on the left.) You have all been warned.

Don’t tell everyone… but it looks like Google’s ‘hosted’ domain service for Gmail is quietly open for business. The language on the signup form remains quite dissuasive, suggesting there’s a stringent approval process. But I’ve made two requests, under two separate identities, to become a beta tester – neither, frankly, with terrific justifications – and both were accepted within a day or two.

If you’ve ever felt embarrassed at having an email address with ‘gmail‘ or ‘hotmail‘ (or ‘yes-I’m-a-cheapskate’) in it, this is the service you’ve been waiting for. If you own a domain name, you can now bring it to Gmail, allowing you to send and receive email using yournamehere.com, like a ‘proper’ email service.

For a while now, Gmail has offered the ability to ‘send from another address‘ – but at the recipient’s end, the Gmail identity often remains visible. In a worst case scenario, I’ve known companies to reject my messages as spam, because the sender address doesn’t match the originating machine.

With this service, those problems are gone. And suddenly web-based email is looking a much better arrangement than using your ISP accounts. You can check your Gmail from anywhere, using any web browser – including mobile phone. If you want to keep using old-school email software, Gmail lets you do that too, once you enable it. The ‘don’t sort it, just search for it’ approach is genius, and you’ll have a hard time coming close to filling your 2GB mailbox capacity. Plus if you change ISP, you won’t need to change your email address.

Oh – and it’s all free. All you need is your own domain, and that shouldn’t cost you more than a few quid a year. I’m using Pipex’s 123-reg service, and their web-based interface gives me all the configuration options I need. Just one word of caution: like anything involving DNS, it’s a pretty ugly process, and it can take a couple of days for any changes to take effect.

What’s the most important word in project management? Is it ‘requirements’? ‘deadline’? ‘documentation’? Here’s my nomination… enough. As in:

• only writing enough documentation. If you produce something that’s dozens of pages long (and lucky you, if you have enough time to do so!), I’ll bet nobody has enough time to read it.
• understanding enough about user needs to represent those needs as you speak to the programmers; and understanding enough about the technology to steer the user needs appropriately.
• spending enough time in meetings, and no more!

but perhaps most importantly of all…

• knowing when to say ‘enough is enough‘. It’s an essential project management skill to recognise when things aren’t working as they should be; and having the confidence to call a halt.

Sky’s new News Brief blog is a real disappointment. They’ve recognised there’s a gap in the market for a forward-looking blog, and promise: ‘News Brief is Sky News’ weekday blog to keep you up-to-date with what’s coming up. Exclusives, interviews, press conferences and hot topics – we’ll let you know ahead of time.’ But the resulting content is a rather ugly bullet-point sheet. There’s no sense of personality, no character to it.

When this was first announced, I wrote about how this could be a great way to bring people into the Sky team. Remarkably, I think they’ve managed to do the opposite, reinforcing the distance between writer and reader. The anonymous and very impersonal third-person style – ‘Sky News has’, ‘Sky News is’ – makes it nothing more than a daily press release, when it could have been so much more. What a pity.

Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s director of new media and technology, earned a base salary of £281,000 this year according to the Corporation’s own website – an inflation-busting increase of 14.7% on last year. He picked up an additional £30,000 in annual bonus, expenses and benefits: although, when you lump it all together, it’s actually down on last year’s total figure of £320,000.

This, you’ll be pleased to hear, is all part of the BBC’s continuing efforts ‘to bring (executive) pay into line with the external market’, having identified in 2004 that ‘BBC executive base pay had fallen significantly below market median levels.’ And in case you’ve forgotten it from maths at school: the median is the midpoint in a series of numbers, whereby half the data values are above it, and half below it. So apparently, half the people in comparable jobs are being paid more. Er, really?

All thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded. And yes, my TV licence is due this month. Purely coincidental.

It’s no Watergate, but the Prescott-Anschutz story gets front-page treatment in today’s Media Guardian, which calls it ‘first big British political story to be driven by bloggers’.

But what makes me cringe is the sidebar inside, in which Britain’s self-proclaimed no1 political blogger Guido Fawkes decides to open up a European front in the utterly pointless war between bloggers and MainStream Media:

Go to the Oxford Union and ask our future political class who they read more often – the Times’ Peter Riddell or Guido Fawkes’ blog? Next ask them who they trust more? It is no contest. With 200,000 hits a month and rising, my politics blog is more trusted than the Times’ pompous political columnist… Big Media is going to be disintermediated because technology has drastically reduced the cost of dissemination.

Yet arguably the most significant blogging in UK politics (sorry Guido) is happening in the MainStream Media: think Nick Robinson, think Comment Is Free. Let’s concentrate on the real battle out there: it isn’t between MSM and blogs, it isn’t even between left-wing and right-wing. It’s between those who give a damn, and those who don’t.

Microsoft’s announcement of a tool to bring the OpenOffice file format into Word 2007 includes a quote from Andrew Hopkirk, director of the UK’s National Computing Centre’s e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) Programme:

Electronic document translation between different fixed formats is always going to be somewhat inexact. Like human language translations, concepts and specifications will differ in detail. This tool promises to be a very significant development in the trend towards practical open document standards and, critically, customer-friendly means to move between them. It can only be good for the IT industry’s customers and product and service innovators.

Of course, the really customer-friendly thing to do would be embrace the open standard, rather than developing their own, regardless of the apparent reason for doing so. A weak standard universally adopted is still better than no standardisation at all. But I’m not naive enough to think that’s going to happen. (Likewise, wouldn’t it just be easier for IE7 to adopt the Gecko layout engine?)

Oh, and before you rush off to download the tool, be warned: if you aren’t running Word 2007 and .NET 2.0, you’re stuck with a command-line version for now.

Delighted to see my old mates at Sky News going deeper into blogging. From a press release today:

From Monday 10 July, Sky News will be publishing, News Brief, a news blog looking at the day’s news agenda every weekday morning at www.skynews/publicity (sic) (for the press) and www.sky.com/news (for the public)

This idea has a lot of potential. My conclusion from my two (brilliant) years working at Sky News was this: the viewers want to be ‘part of the team’. There is a very large segment of the audience who consume news almost as a hobby. They actively choose to watch the news, instead of feeling they have a civic duty to do so. (I say ‘they’, I mean ‘we’.)

This blog could be a great way to bring people into the newsroom, and into the brand. Tell them about the nitty-gritty of the morning editorial discussion. Tell them what you’re expecting to happen later in the day, and (importantly) when. Share a bit of the office banter. There’s almost an argument for someone to work on it full-time through the day? – community management takes effort.

The BBC’s new Editors blog goes some way towards this, but it’s crying out for Sky’s characteristic ‘lighter touch’.

They’ve also announced that the channel’s resident geek, Martin Stanford will take over the 8-10pm weeknight slot – with a promise of ‘an interactive ingredient to include viewers’ experiences and reaction to the stories covered’. They make optimistic noises about people contributing via 3G videophone or webcam… but they’ve been soliciting this sort of material for ages, and I have yet to see it being used in anger.