This morning, Robert Scoble, who is currently at LeWeb in Paris published this picture to his Flickr stream.
It is a shot taken by him of the audience, and is the answer to a simple request, for people to hold up their iPhone – just take a look at the full sized shot and count quite how many there are.
Back before the iPhone launched, Nokia and the other big players in the market were bullish. The mobile phone market largely consisted of largely similar devices, and Apple coming in with something that didn’t conform to what everybody else was doing wasn’t going to make an impact was it? They seemed to think that doing it different meant that the iPhone wouldn’t sell – everybody had been doing the same thing for years and the consumer would stick with them.
From a personal point of view, I had spent years being largely dissatisfied with what the established players had been producing. I’d bounced back and forth between Nokia handsets, Sony Ericsson, and even a Motorola handset at one point, my general feeling is that despite promising much, they’d generally failed to deliver, with annoyingly quirky user interfaces, buggy firmware, and a generally frustrating experience all round, hence why I’d ended up changing phones pretty frequently. The best mobile device I’d owned was still the venerable Psion 5mx…
When I eventually got my hands on an iPhone, it proved to be a game changer – finally someone had actually managed to produce a mobile phone that was nice to use, and one that was a reasonable substitute for a desktop web browser. With the later addition of applications it became even more of a useful device.
The impression I get in tech circles is that I am not alone. At a couple of tech events I’ve attended recently by far the largest number of people had an iPhone – people who had been die hard Nokia fans, or had developed Windows Mobile apps for years had bought one, and weren’t planning on switching back. Now the numbers being used by non-techie friends is impressive, and the competition is struggling.
I really don’t think this is the way he wanted it when he started collating stories of the demise of the SPCK book shops, but by capitulating to the heavy handed “remove everythingâ€? approach from Mark Brewer, Dave Walker has indirectly given the underlying cause massively more publicity than they ever had before. By succeeding in silencing the story in such a dramatic way on CartoonChurch, Mark Brewer has blown the story massively bigger than it ever was before, as a growing number of people highlight it on their own blogs. (I don’t know why, but the whole thing reminded me of a rather famous moment in Star Wars…)
For example, the Facebook group in support of Dave Walker is now significantly bigger than the original SPCK Supporters group, and people who maybe had a passing interest in the demise of the SPCK shops are much more focused on what is going on – and I’m including myself in that, if you look back through my site, prior to this I don’t think I’ve even mentioned it.
“Thank goodness that we have this one, last bastion of free speech – the Internet. The internet, in particular, is the only truly free �press“ we still have.�
This certainly is a salutary lesson to anybody to be very aware of everything you have said online, as even if you delete the site and the posts completely there are numerous places that the quote can live on indefinitely – for example I can use the same sites to track back to postings I made in the early 1990’s, over fifteen years ago. Here, a quote Brewer made in a campaign eight years ago takes on a whole new light…
Perhaps what is driving the campaign, and why Sam Norton and others aren’t backing down is trying to resolve the content of the original posts, with the accusations in the cease and desist. The whole collapse of the SPCK book shop chain over the past couple of years has not surprisingly raised a good deal of emotion, not least amongst the staff caught up in the middle of it all – indeed one staff member took his own life following his redundancy from the Worcester shop. When you read the posts, Dave spent a good deal of time trying to moderate those reactions in order to thoughtfully report events that he believed should be of concern to a wider audience. As a relatively high profile site he primarily acted as a central resource for collecting together information from the geographically diverse chain. Care in what was written was uppermost, even when emotions grew – you can easily find points where he calls for cool heads, and where he removed comments that he himself deemed were close to the line. Certainly an approach from Mark Brewer asking for specific points to be removed would I’m sure have been met with much less of an explosion of anger in the blogsphere than the cease and desist attempt to close down the whole story has produced, (further enhanced when the pages include attempts to financially support redundant former SPCK employees) – to be honest edits to existing posts would be unlikely to be noticed, but seventy-five posts vanishing overnight set the whole snowballing story into motion. And of course, like his quote eight years ago, all of this will live on in the archives…
So any lessons? Watch what you write – once published on the Internet it’s very difficult to remove. Also think before you e-mail – MadPriest has something that he hasn’t posted yet for example. Also, watch what other people write. If you work in PR for any sort of organisation, set up some searches on sites like technorati and Google to monitor for stories – it’s a lot easier to address a story when it first appears, rather than trying to shut the whole thing down months after it has got going. Whatever your opinions on the current situation, and however much you might want a set of posts removed, after this much time it’s too late to close the stable door.
The current list of supportive posts stands at sixty four items:
[Update: 23/07/2008] SPCK Watch – Gagging attempts by Mark Brewer – SPCK Watch. (Somewhere in Europe). Whole blog devoted to SPCK saga.
[Update: 23/07/2008] Elizaphanian – We are all Dave Walkers now – Sam Norton, Rector of West Mersea, Essex. Suggests that we reposts Dave’s ex-posts from Google Cache
I know, I’m a total sucker for glittery user interfaces, but isn’t this 3-D flyby of my Flickr Photostream just a really cool way to browse through the pictures?
The tool that is producing the interface is called PicLens and comes in flavours for Mac and Windows, and supports the major browsers on both platforms. It’s also not limited to working with Flickr – it can do the same party trick on Google searches, Facebook galleries and a load of other sites as well, and you can even set it up your own site to show slide shows of your own pictures using the same effect.
Over the past couple of days I’ve been giving ReadBurner a try. The concept is pretty simple, once you’ve pointed it at your Google Reader shared items (mine can be found here) it looks at your items along with the items everybody else has shared and creates several aggregate lists showing the current most popular linked items, the items that are getting a lot of recent links, a straight list of recently linked items, and a couple of longer period popular item lists.
Of course it’s not a new idea, there are a number of other popularity sites, Digg probably being the best known example. It’s also not the first attempt to do something like this with Google Reader, as the Facebook based FeedHeads does the same task. However the big advantage that both these have is that they just piggy back on the existing shared item feeds, as a user I have to to nothing else. The advantage that ReadBurner has over FeedHeads of course is that it doesn’t need you to be a Facebook user to use it. Also, ReadBurner seems a lot more reliable at picking up on shared items – FeedHeads quite often needs a shove to update.
ReadBurner is currently only operating with a relatively small number of source blogs, and is under development by only a single developer. Having said that, it does have the potential with enough linked shared item feeds to be quite an interesting view of the kind of things that people find interesting. Perhaps the biggest question though is why Google themselves haven’t added similar features…
Update: Typical – I write a post, and then find another one aggregating shared Google Reader items – check out Shared Reader which is doing the same sort of thing as ReadBurner, but with some variation in features.
It has to be said, I’ve not been massively excited by the past couple of Macworld Keynotes – either they’ve been things I’ve not really been interested in buying, or things that weren’t available outside the USA, or both.
It’s a bit different this year. The keynote included for key announcements, all of which were interesting to some extent or another.
First off there was Time Capsule, which is effectively the Apple take on Network Attached Storage, and is closely tied in to the Time Machine backup utility that shipped as part of Leopard.
Now it has to be said, that I couldn’t see a pressing reason to upgrade to Leopard, despite all the glowing reviews that were quoted (even from a PC magazine). Although Time Machine was a nice idea, I wasn’t looking to supplant my current backup solution which uses SuperDuper! to produce a fully bootable clone of my main drives. What I wanted to do was use a network attached storage, but although my current solution, a Buffalo Terastation worked fine for a PC, the claimed Apple support was absolutely lousy – and no amount of hacking around has seemed to improve it.
In typical Apple fashion, the Time Capsule is a plug-in and go solution, just turn it on, tell Time Machine, and off it goes, automatically backing up the drives over the network.
I suspect of all the new kit that was on show today, this will probably be the top of the list – the Terastation will remain for the PC backups, but an upgrade to Leopard and a Time Capsule will almost certainly be on the shopping list pretty soon.
Next up is the iPhone updates. Now however fantastic the user experience is with the iPhone, from my point of view it still needs to be 3G. Having said that, keeping a regular phone and having an iPod Touch as a PDA seemed to be a possibility – more so now, as alongside the new toys on the iPhone, Apple have released some of the extra applications onto the iPod Touch. Chief amongst those is the mail client – which will make a big difference, but they’ve also included the new iPhone version of Google Maps. The main feature that doesn’t work is the my location – but that is pretty ropey even on my regular mobile, but in terms of usability with the multi-touch gestures that the iPod Touch supports it is streets ahead of the client on any other mobile device. Suffice to say that when iTunes offered me the upgrade to my iPod Touch tonight, it wasn’t really much of a choice to install it, and I have to say as well, having played with the other applications, a 3G iPhone is looking a really attractive proposition compared to the current competition.
After that we had Apple taking a second stab at the Apple TV. Now it’s fair to say that this is one product that hasn’t been a massive success up to now. Certainly when I first saw it I wasn’t enthused. For take two, Apple are taking on the movie rental market. The requirement to have a computer is gone, effectively all you need is a TV, the Apple TV, and a broadband connection, and then you can rent movies, get TV shows, music, pictures from Flickr and videos from YouTube. If you’ve got a computer, the box will also sync up media with that as before. The real boon though is that they are renting high definition copies of the movies, and again, it’s all just point and click – compared to current solutions where it seems to score is the ease of use. Of course in UK terms, it will really come down to the quality of the available content, so it’s a definite wait and see on this one.
The last big announcement was not the much predicted touch-screen MacBook, however it was a new laptop, and one designed to slot in between the consumer MacBook line and the professional MacBook Pro, filling the gap left by the missing ultra portable pro laptop that was the 12“ Powerbook. What was shown was the Macbook Air, the worlds thinnest laptop. On a purely technological level it is impressive how thin the laptop actually is – amazing compared to most of the laptops people lug around. However screen wise it’s a reasonable size – 13â€?, the same as the MacBook, it also has a decent sized keyboard, and comes with an 80gb hard drive and 2gb RAM. What is amazing is quite how thin it is – a wedge shape 4mm at the front, and 19.4mm at the back, and it weighs in at just over 1Kg. With the same graphics as the MacBook it’s not going to be great games wise, but as an easy to carry laptop it’s great. Price wise it’s not too bad, at just under £1200 for the basic model – although that shoots up to over £2000 if you want the solid state disk option. Alongside this, the laptop introduces a lot of the gestures that appeared on the iPhone and iPod Touch – so it definitely would be a tempting package if I were in the market for a laptop – especially as just like all the other Apple machines you can dual boot into Windows too.
So in terms of the coolest thing announced, it’s certainly the new laptop, but from a personal practical point of view it’s the iPod Touch update and the Time Capsule that are probably what I’m going to end up using… Having said that, it certainly was a great keynote. The whole show is now up on the Apple site so you can ooh and aah along with the Apple faithful, and also proof that in even the best prepared presentations things don’t always quite go according to plan.
Alternatively, if you haven’t got ninety minutes to spend – this is the whole thing compressed into sixty seconds:
This morning, Robert Scoble, who is currently at LeWeb in Paris published this picture to his Flickr stream.
