Every so often, an idea is born on the web that is elicits an instant “A-ha!” as soon as you use it. Delicious was one, an online taggable and shareable bookmark repository for the things you find interesting. I followed a link to Readability and I had another one of those lightbulb moments. I won’t try to explain what it does when screengrabs speak louder than words.
An article in the Guardian, before.
The same article in the Guardian, with Readability.
Film School Rejects, before.
Film School Rejects, with Readability.
PC World, before.
PC World, with Readability.
eWeek, before.
eWeek, after.
It only works on articles not main web pages, but when it works it makes reading on the web a pleasure again. Go get the bookmarklet, drag it onto your toolbar and whenever you see a flash-heavy page, cut out the fat.
Update: Can you use Readability on the iPhone? Yes you can!
There’s quite a quarrel between the artists and EMI so the CD’s distribution is unusual, to say the least. The package looks good, with a beautifully printed booklet with visuals by none other than David Lynch. Oh, and a blank CDR. Yes, you read that right. The CD is blank. The artists encourage you to, uhm, “find” the music online and burn it yourself. NPR is streaming the whole album but it’s available in loads of places if you know where to look.
The first time I heard the name Clay Shirky was through a post titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus on Daring Fireball. I watched his Web 2.0 presentation and was struck by his clarity of thought, the way his arguments made sense and the way I would go “Yeah!” at every salient point he would make.
Again, through Daring Fireball, I read Shirky’s latest essay on newspapers, journalism and the revolution we’re going through. This is a must read. It compares the state of online publishing to what happened around 1500 A.D., right after Gutenberg invented movable type and the printing press. Newspapers, advertising, walled-garden content, micropayments, subscriptions… it’s all there in this essay.
If you have some free time I would highly recommend reading this and then watching Clay Shirky’s videos on YouTube. Even the titles of the videos make you think! How about this one: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. You immediately have an “A-ha!” moment just reading that title!
Forget iTunes Music, forget Amazon MP3. Spotify is revolutionary.
When I first installed the free app I was underwhelmed. Another iTunes clone, I thought. But as I dug around Spotify I was more and more impressed. It lets you instantly stream any music you want, for free. You can also create collaborative playlists, and by collaborative I mean other people you share the playlist with can add tracks and it all streams, again for free. I also like the fact that Spotify is platform agnostic… Mac, PC or Linux. Just download the app, click on the link your friend sent and listen.
I know Spotify mimics some of Last.fm’s features but to me it feels more complete. If it keeps going as is, I don’t think I’ll be buying much music from iTunes.
I signed up for Amazon’s new Prime service a couple of days ago and so far it’s been really impressive. It costs around £47 annually and all orders that are in the Prime category (which is massive) are delivered the next day for free. There is also an Evening Delivery option which is a bit expensive at £14.67 per order but mind-blowing. If an order is placed before 11.30am it will be delivered the same day between 6.30pm and 9.30pm on weekdays or between 2.30pm and 5.30pm on weekends (and that’s both weekend days as well.) So far it’s only for address within the M25 and Birmingham.
I placed an order midday yesterday and it arrived this morning before 9am. Now that’s service!
Back in 1986 my brother Mahmood started a Bulletin Board Service (or BBS’s as they were known then) called Stray Cats. Remember those? 9600 baud modems beeping, handshaking and connecting? Settings like 8 bits, 1 stop, no parity? Ah, those were the days… online communities stripped to their bare essentials. Except it felt ultra high tech then.
A few years later my boss gave me access to his Compuserve account which I was very careful with. I would log on, download what I wanted and then log out making sure I didn’t spend too long “online”. The only problem was that Batelco, the state-backed telco monopoly, was billing their customers per character instead of time. Yes that’s right, per character. The bill that month was BD 1,500 or $3,980. I stopped using his account after that.
Then came AppleLink. At the time I was working for the Apple dealer in Bahrain and we used it to download software updates, email Apple Support and scour their libraries. It was, as far as I know, Apple’s first online network. It was also where I made my first online purchase. During the first Gulf War when everything was locked down I wanted to buy a fun software package that’ll skin the interface on my System 7-based Mac (it was a Mac IIci as I recall). I couldn’t get the package delivered so I emailed the developer through AppleLink, paid by Visa and downloaded the software. And that felt revolutionary.
It was only after I moved to London that I started using a new innovation called Mosaic to “surf” the World Wide Web. Those dancing hamsters were something else! And GIFs that were first blocky and then resolved themselves to images! And it was zippy fast! 56K fast!
ADSL and broadband came next. 256Kb/sec speeds and always on! No, wait 512Kb/sec now and… how about 1Meg! And MP3’s online! I can download music! Wait, the iTunes Music Store! And now I’m on 2Meg broadband! Please stop, this is going far too fast.
Virgin just launched their 50Meg cable service this month. Here’s what I want now. An online 1080 HiDef film site which sells or rents new release films as they hit the cinema. A beefed up Apple TV hard wired to a blazingly fast 100Meg+ line. A BBC iPlayer that is integrated into a razor thin flat screen that streams HD TV shows especially Planet Earth. Direct downloads from Amazon of film titles, TV shows and games. And all of that controlled from my iPhone. Now, where do I sign up?
Hi. I'm Hani and this is my blog. I also have some photos on Flickr, bookmarks on Delicious, tweets on Twitter and generalities on Facebook as well. Most of the time I can be found at Prime Focus in London, crafting commericals using Flame.
An article in the Guardian, before.
The same article in the Guardian, with Readability.
Film School Rejects, before.
Film School Rejects, with Readability.
PC World, before.
PC World, with Readability.
eWeek, before.
eWeek, after.
Conversationalists