I think that all of us get – and recognise – the basic idea. Most of us spend/waste so very much time watching television. That’s typically pretty passive. However, an increasing number of people are doing something different.
We’re online, but not surfing. We’re making. Making videos and blog posts and discussing photos and creating reviews and all sorts of mad stuff. Here’s the man himself, explaining it all:
Regulars will have noted that things don’t stand still for too long here on twopointouch. Apart from the post count. Fiddling with new themes and plugins is almost compulsive behaviour. While I’ve only had around four long-term favourite themes over the last five years, there’s every chance that you’ll have dropped in at some point when I’ve been doing something totally different — for about five minutes.
This continual urge for dalliance when it comes to off-the-peg themes has now led me in a totally new direction. Actually making something for myself. It’s all a bit scary and random, but one of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s lots of info and tools to help you out.
I was asked to review the latest release of Xara’s graphic design software, Xara Designer Pro 6. Since I’ve been a fan of the application for a while, I was happy to oblige. I ought to disclose that Xara sent me a free key.
You might not realise it, but Xara is one of the real grandaddies of software development, having been formed in the UK in 1981. Nowadays, the company is owned by the German Magic AG group, though they’re still based in Hemel Hempstead, north of London. Over the years, they’ve produced all sorts of stuff: they made Snake, Wordwise and Space Invaders for the BBC Micro, for example, and continued to support the Archimedes range of education-focused computers over the 90s.
Blogs are dead, right? The cool kids are all doing micro-messaging and video instead? They’re missing out on a world of value, if that’s the case.
I’ve been swotting up on mobile as fast as I can — the industry, companies, technology, the apps scene, for obvious reasons. And one of my most valuable sources is Tomi Ahonen’s blog.
Over the last couple of days, a terrific debate has emerged between Tomi and Steve Largent, the president of America’s CTIA, its leading mobile association. Here’s the highlights so far:
Tomi redoubles his efforts — with a swift right-hook to Largent’s stats and a belly-punch to his argumentation.
How will Steve come back in the second round? Is the fight over for the plucky Yank? Only time will tell.
This is bloody fascinating. It’s also long-form, packed with facts and learning for people like me and basically a great testimony to the art of the blog. You cannot do this stuff in any other format.
So I met this guy called Max in the pub – he’s a pal of some long-time cronies from the now-somewhat-dormant UK laptop business ACi.
Max suffers from hayfever – he’s known as ‘snotty Max’ in some circles. He’s tried all the drugs and cures you’ve ever heard of – as you would if your nickname was ‘snotty Max’.
Anyway, he came across the recommendation of rubbing Vaseline around your nostrils. It sort-of worked. But it smelled nasty and was all greasy, as you’d expect. Max, being the sort of person he is, wasn’t prepared to settle for ‘sort-of’.
It’s nearly two weeks old now, but Nick Carr wrote an article at the end of May which caused a lot of people to stop and think, or otherwise lash out with the sort of outrage at which the Web is best – the over-exaggerated kind.
He was writing about the use of hyperlinks in articles on the Web and their effect on reading and readers. The nub of what he was saying was:
People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.
The problem, as Carr sees it, is that hyperlinks – while being very useful and convenient in all sorts of ways – prevent people from reading properly. We start reading, hit a link and *boom* there’s a good chance that we’re suddenly on an entirely different page. I think we’re all aware this happens – it certainly does to me. We quickly developed an expression, ‘surfing’, to describe the speed of movement across the web from site to site. That feeling at the end of a session that you’ve read an awful lot of things, but aren’t quite sure you remember what any of them were.
Social tools, devices and web evolution are creating epochal change in media, society and business. The plan is to hide under the floorboards till it’s all over document some of the interesting parts of that change. More….
Recent Comments