It makes me proud to be British when I see something as simultaneously wonderful and hilarious as a middle-aged woman brow-beating a government minister into changing government policy.
Joanna Lumley is a treasured British asset - a ludicrously posh but much-loved and fearless actress - and she has been spearheading a campaign against the government for its treatment of Nepalese “Gurkha” British Army fighters.
Just look at this video in which Lumley speaks and then stares at immigration minister Phil Woolas just daring him to contradict her. The finest traditions of a British Battleaxe. He cowers under her summary and then embarks on a droney, bureaucratic explanation of how it all works and why the government hasn’t just made a complete arse of itself. I think Woolas’ political career is over.
I love my Kindle. It really is a great machine. The Kindle 2 made all the right changes to the original Kindle, which is why I forked out a hefty $359 for it. It contains literally thousands of books - which has completely changed my reading habits (more reading, less lugging around of books). It is glorious and if you are a serious book reader you should invest in it.
Now so sure at the moment though about a new Kindle that Amazon just announced - the Kindle DX. It’s the same as the Kindle 2 but with a much bigger screen - just a little smaller than a magazine. I get the logic straight away - a bigger screen is much, much better for reading on. Particularly if you are reading PDF documents or magazines. It doesn’t matter with books - you want something you can shove in your bag and pull out.
But clearly Amazon has found out that alot of people are using their Kindle to read documents - probably work documents - on a device that doesn’t have a backlit screen and which doesn’t require you booting up a computer. I can see the logic, although I’ve not go into this habit yet.
So one of the many questions rolling around my head, particularly since living in the United States, has been: was is American beer so bad?
It really is bad. I know Brits get mocked for flat, warm beer (I love it - taste is terrific), but American beer - your Coors, Buds and Millers - really is absolutely dreadful. Tastes of nothing at all, doesn’t refresh or quench. Just about the only thing it does is get your drunk if you can stand to drink enough of it.
Well, I have found out the answer. There was a History Channel documentary on US brewing history at the weekend and it was easy to define from that this peculiarity that an entire nation loves drinking rat’s piss while everyone else in the world has spent centuries savouring their beer.
For the past year, the company that runs the UK’s Internet registry has been the unlikely location for a corporate soap opera, complete with scandals, villains, twists and turns, allegations of corruption, resignations, grand plans thwarted at the last minute and some nasty in-fighting that had left people alternatively amazed, entertained and worried.
The dust finally began to settle in January this year when a second director resigned (loudly) from not-for-profit Nominet and ever since the management team has been frantically trying to tidy up. In an effort to avoid the same problems emerging further down the line, a big spring clean was ordered and an independent expert brought in to assess what had gone wrong and what needed to be done.
Last week, that expert – Professor Bob Garratt - delivered a surprisingly frank and blunt assessment. In it, he told Nominet – and Nominet’s members – that they had to sort out a list of issues, and they had to sort them out fast.
In effect, he gave Nominet three months to live. If the warring tribes can’t find a settlement before then, Garratt warns, the UK government is going to step in and Nominet as it has existed since 1996 will cease to be.
It now rests on the shoulders of Nominet’s CEO, Lesley Cowley, to make enormous progress within an extremely short period of time, and persuade groups that were until recently at war with another to come together and rebuild the organization.
Here’s what needs to be done and how Cowley says she is going to do it.
Twitter has just hit a crucial milestone for becoming a long-term viability rather than an Internet flash-in-the-plan: it has started generating its own sub-market.
Part of Twitter’s beauty is the fact that it restricts posts to 140 characters, forcing you to have to be economic with your words and making it easier to quickly digest others posts. The problem with the domain name system is that it produces long Web addresses (URLs) so if you want to point people to a certain webpage, you lose almost all the room you have just posting the URL, leaving little or no room for an explanation of why people should click on the link.
URL shortening applications have been around for years but they tended to be used only for ridiculously long web addresses that could often break in emails and IM messages. Twitter has given them a new lease of life.
And this was made clear this morning when the usual URL shortening site that I use - Tiny URL at http://www.tiny.cc - stopped working properly due to demand. The website wouldn’t load. More crucially someone Twittered me to tell me that an earlier link I had posted was now pointing somewhere completely different.
So I had a look about and found a new service: Trim, found at http://tr.im/. This has several advantages over Tiny URL. For one, it produces shorter URLs - the name of the game. But also it lets you lets you create an account, plus post directly into Twitter, and it provides stats on how many times the link has been clicked on.
Interesting judgment from the United States Supreme Court earlier today: you cannot say the word “fuck” on TV. Well, you can, but you’ll be heavily fined by the FCC. The same goes for “shit”.
Unfortunately, we did not get a Peter Cook and Dudley Moore-style explanation (”a cock in the hands of Pinter”), as the Supreme Court chose to render fuck and shit as “the F- and S-Words”. Nonetheless, it decided that the FCC decision to remove the one-fuck-for-free rule on TV broadcasts on US networks was neither “arbitrary” nor “capricious”.
It’s not just these two words either - the FCC rules cover anything that denotes “sexual or excretory activity or organs”. Bono has yet to yell out that winning an award made his sphincter vibrate (it was Bono that created the new rules by saying it felt “fucking brilliant” when he won his Golden Globe a few years back) - it would be interesting to see how the FCC reacted to that.
It will cost $359 - still very expensive - and will be available from 24 February. If you are based in the United States, you can pre-order one now. I just have.
One thing I’ve always disliked about US tech journalism is the willingness to get drawn into corporate hype to the extent that even the possible news of a new product is deemed worthy of news articles.
But that said, it does look as though tomorrow in New York, Amazon will announce a new version of its ebook reader, the Kindle. And, I have to say, I am looking forward to it for the simple reason that the Kindle is what will finally break the ebook barrier to mainstream use and that will bring with it a fantastic revolution in book and information consumption.
A press conference is being held at the Morgan Library and Museum (although I haven’t been able to find an official press announcement of it), and in the past week pictures of a new Kindle have leaked out onto the Net (which is hardly surprising as to do such a big launch of a new product, the images would have had to have gone through at least one PR agency and have a wide distribution internally). I’ve grabbed the pictures and posted them below.
According to onlinereports, the expected launch date is 24 February.
You know it’s bad when you start to feel sorry for the person on stage. Hal Bailey must have wondered what the hell happened. Coming to DOMAINfest Hollywood as the man in charge of AdSense for Domains, Hal was here to tell the assembled masses that Google was going to allow them to make money while sitting on their arses.
This incredible gift was going to come with some rules though: domainers would have to clean up their game. They would have to post original – i.e. not stolen - content on all the domains they owned, and they would have to provide a valuable informational service to their fellow Netizens. If they did that, they would find Google warm in their embrace; if they did not then Google would not help them and they would be out in the cold.
You can imagine Hal planning out this gentle lecture in his head before taking the stage with fellow Google employee Matt Parry: tough love but they would thank him for it later. It didn’t quite pan out like that.
Instead, the one-hour “Google Perspective: Winning over the Advertiser and Optimizing Site Performance through Analytics” was a lesson that Google executives would do well to learn from. Customers are customers and not just grateful users of services – no matter how much market share you have.
We first learned that the domain name market was far from stable around eight years ago when the dotcom crash turned a booming market into dust in just a few months.
Over the years, that market has grown in strength: its stability saw people invest in advanced systems for buying and selling domains, and the never-ending demand for Internet sites, coupled with the fact the the number of top-level domains stayed the same and so the domain space became smaller, meant that prices increased steadily to the point where tens of thousands of domains became worth tens of thousands of dollars.
Well, the DOMAINfest domain auction has just demonstrated that the domain name space may be more stable but it ranks alongside art, rather than houses, when it comes to property.
In short, the auction was a bit of a wash-out, with none of the 200+ domains available exceeding expectations; most hitting the bottom-end of their estimated value; and a very large number meeting no bidders and being pulled off the floor.
I love my Kindle. It really is a great machine. The Kindle 2 