Yet it’s the reason why this is the case, the one that’s on the tip of your tongue – yes, Wikipedia – that reading A Terrible Beauty brings to mind. The book is divided into four parts, and within these, 42 themed chapters. They are roughly chronological, but if a later development, discovery or idea fits a theme, it will be mentioned ahead of time, giving a beautiful sense of the uneven march of history. That said, so far, so traditional narrative. What’s very Wikipediary (!) about the book is that the people mentioned are all picked out in bold type when they first appear, enabling you to zip through the text and start reading when someone’s name catches your eye. Despite the fact it all ties together very well when you’re reading sequentially, it’s startlingly easy to just open the book and start reading. That’s how I first got into it; I was staying at a friend’s house, and it sat on the bedside table in the spare room.

The page I opened it at was 530, with its piece on Germaine Greer, immediately presenting one of Greer’s killer lines:

“Her book, The Female Eunuch, did not neglect women’s economic condition, though only one of its thirty chapters is devoted to work. Rather it drew its force from Greer’s unflinching comparison of the way women, love and marriage are presented in literature, both serious and popular, and in everyday currency, as compared with the way things really are. ‘Freud’, she writes, ‘is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.’”

So it continues, brisk but not hurried, economical without being threadbare:

“Greer is withering in her criticisms of how men are presented as dominant, socially superior, older, richer, and taller than their women (Greer is very tall herself). In what is perhaps her most original contribution, she demolishes love and romance (both given their own chapters) as chimeras, totally divorced (an apt verb) from the much bleaker reality.”

The conclusion to this section has stayed with me since I first read it, a sentence that completely embodies the book’s title:

“As with all true liberation, this view is both bleak and exhilarating.”

It was this line that came to me today as I read two pieces about the future of computing and the internet.

The first was Nick Carr, writing about Cory Doctorow’s negative reaction to the iPad. Doctorow raged against the iPad, and its exceedingly limited (in his view) vision of computing. It is a common view among geeks. The iPad is far more closed than a traditional computer, in their eyes, outrageously optimized to funnel users into passive consumption of pre-approved content rather than the creation of new and exciting works.

Here is what Nick Carr has to say about their position:

“What these folks are ranting against, or at least gnashing their teeth over, is progress – or, more precisely, progress that goes down a path they don’t approve of. They want progress to, as Bray admits, follow their own ideological bent, and when it takes a turn they don’t like they start grumbling like granddads, yearning for the days of their idealized Apple IIs, when men were men and computers were computers… While progress may be spurred by the hobbyist, it does not share the hobbyist’s ethic.”

And here, in his conclusion, is the terrible beauty:

“Progress may, for a time, intersect with one’s own personal ideology, and during that period one will become a gung-ho technological progressivist. But that’s just coincidence. In the end, progress doesn’t care about ideology. Those who think of themselves as great fans of progress, of technology’s inexorable march forward, will change their tune as soon as progress destroys something they care deeply about.”

The second post I read was by Clay Shirky, on the evolution of complex business models:

“About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now. To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, ‘It is not free, and is not going to be,’ Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users ‘just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online’, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said ‘Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.’

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: ‘Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.’”

Both Carr and Shirky’s conclusions feel true.

I would recommend A Terrible Beauty without hesitation; as I hope this post shows, it is an excellent book to think with, and brilliant for filling in the gaps in your knowledge.

(1) It’s pre Apple, too. Steve Jobs doesn’t even get a mention. Bill Gates and Paul Allen are limited to a single sentence.

The Guardian has a blog post up today reflecting on the radical/hippy/underground 60s newspaper The International Times, as an archive devoted to IT has just launched (although said archive appears to be down at the moment). Anyway, the Guardian blog quotes some notes I took at a talk by the founders of IT, which you can read in full here on The Wired Jester. There’s also a selection of scanned covers and pages to look through.

Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality. The video below shows 100 dancers in central London recreating the dance from Beyonce’s music video for her song ‘Single Ladies’ (which Peter Sagal called ‘a wonderful, brilliantly performed dance number set to an irresistably catchy pop tune’). As a piece of PR in reality, it holds very little value – few people would have the chance to actually see it, as it the dancers and organisers take pains for it to appear to happen spontaneously on the street. It’s over in three minutes, and few of the people who happened to be walking by would actually be able to make sense of it because it only works if you’ve seen the original music video. Indeed, the behaviour of the dancers only really works if it’s watched as a video, passed around virally on the web. It is, essentially, VR: actions in reality that are targeted at, and only make sense when experienced virtually.

Those images are mostly landscapes; Photoshopping on humans is much more widely discussed (both behind the scenes, and in front of camera, as in the Dove ‘real beauty’ adverts), but Shakesville’s series, ‘Impossibly Beautiful‘ does a good job of showcasing what, post-software, is considered beautiful.

Update: Co-incidentially, this month’s French Elle is not only Photoshop free, it’s also dispensed with make-up for its female cover stars, who include Eva Herzigova, Monica Bellucci, Sophie Marceau, and Charlotte Rampling.

[The entry has been cross posted from my work blog]

When it comes to the web, there really aren’t many ways in which to gain readers for your site. Not that many practical and legal ones, anyway – sure, I could pay a dodgy bunch of Eastern European types to knock up a virus that sets everyone’s homepage to custompc.co.uk, and I could hire a team of skywriters to put our name above London.

Increasing readership online is fairly similar to increasing readership of a magazine in real life – although at first glance this isn’t the case. The New York Times has run stories about how search engines are changing the dark art of writing newspaper headlines. Instead of witty puns, the story goes, the importance of appearing high up the Google rankings means simplicity is more important. There is a truth to this: Google drives a lot of traffic, and while humans will understand a punning, tabloid style headine when they see it on the page, when people Google, they Google in simple, explanatory language. The headline in the picture above is a good example: I know it’s about Tony Blair’s resignation announcement, but if I was searching for that story online, I wouldn’t necessarily Google “beginning of the end.”

However, while Googlers prize simplicity, the art of headline writing lives on: submit a story to online news aggregators such as Digg or Slashdot, or even to one of the big blogs such as Engadget, and you tend to find that plainly worded stories die an obscure death – unless of course, the story itself, even worded plainly, is powerful enough to draw people in. I don’t think you’ll find anyone going through these sites extolling the virtues of the headlines in the way people do for the Economist or the Sun, because I don’t think the bulk of the submitters to Digg and Slashdot have honed their skills in the way sub-editors on big publications do; but the big stories on these websites do tap into their audiences’ interests in the same way ‘Gotcha’ et al engaged the Sun’s readers in the 80s.

The reason headline writing is still important on the web is that increasing readership in the online world, as in the offline world, basically comes down to increasing visibility and word of mouth. A good headline – which is both hook and synopsis for a story – does both. It pulls the reader in (visibility) and by reducing it to a soundbit, makes it easy to share (word of mouth).

That said, while headlines are important for getting noticed on sites such as Digg, there are a lot of other considerations which go into why a story makes it big or dies. Some of them tally with media experience in the real world. Stories on Digg stand a much better chance if they have a well-known source – large US sites such as Engadget, Gizmodo and mainstream media titles such as the New York Times contribute a lot – and stories will do better when they’re back by a well known digger. Case in point, our “10 Hardest Games” feature. I submitted it and garnered a woeful 4 Diggs; almost exactly 24 hours later, another Digger submitted it using very similar langauge, and it attracted 1,234 Diggs. To some extent, this mirrors what happens in print – if the Daily Telegraph prints a story, people will pay it more attention than if it appears in Bedfordshire on Sunday.

The audience on Digg is, despite the site’s efforts to expand its topics of conversation, generally very focussed, too: iPhone stories, Ubuntu plugs, anti-RIAA pieces pop up time and time again; but likewise in print, successful titles learn what their audience is interested in and generally tap into that.

And yet all this reasonable talk, is little consolation for the fact that so few people Digg our stories – or at least the ones we ourselves submit. Perhaps it’s just the case that we just need to get Custom PC more – tough, I think, because there are no shortage of tech sites out there (although most are a load of cobblers), because there’s a US-bias to the Digg, and because there’s always something that looks obscure and dull to me that’s hoovering up all the Diggs.

Still, we need to persevere I guess. If you fancy helping out, add me as a friend on Digg

And I am so relieved. For the past 18 months or so, helping create a new website for Custom PC has been something of an obsession for me. I’ve talked endlessly about it on flights, in bars, in many, many meetings and bored the Jesteress to tears with all my ideas and frustrations. I’ve scribbled brainwaves in notebooks and written thousands of words to try and get the ball rolling and convince people/the company that what Custom PC needed was a really, truly, good website – and that what this would entail would be a very different site, organisation and approach to the one we already had.

One of the biggest problems Dennis has had (and it’s one shared by many other publishers, I think) is that when taking its print brands online, in the rush to ‘get down with this new thing called the web’, a lot of the good ways of working that we had developed on the magazine editorial side were thrown out – although they were of course accompanied along with some ones that did need to go. Baby and the bath water etc. So the creation and maintence of the sites was made largely separate from the print editorial side, etc etc. It is easy to see why; the web is, after all, very different to print. To some extent it’s true that a magazine should not work on the web – that’s why it is a magazine. A
website should not work if you print it out or disconnect it.

However, good magazines do tend to be produed by relatively small, dedicated teams who are passionate about both their subject and the medium in which they are working. In any good publication, there’s an awareness of how style, form and content can be blended together. The same is true for good websites. Make the teams too large and too dispersed, go for an approach that’s too generic, too rule-based and disconnected with what the content relates to and you get a site – or a magazine – that lacks any sense of life. So what you want is a magazine and the website to have shared DNA -
shared editorial values, perhaps some shared content
(depending on the project) and the same overall quality – but, crucially, this all needs to find a different form of expression in print and on the web. The DNA needs to create two seperate, independent, unique characters. Brother and sister, rather than two clones.

We work hard to produce a magazine that makes best use of the printed format (for instance, see this post),
and it became obvious to me that we needed to take a similar approach
online, and make a site that really, genuinely worked as a website. Not just a repository of text and picture content,
but a resource for PC hardware and news, a place for people to discuss
their computers, mods, tips and tricks: a flexible tool that could be
the hub of a techy community.

With our new site, I think we’re starting to get towards this nirvana: it’s all written by the same team as the magazine, it has both articles from the mag plus web-specific stuff (particularly the news, which my colleague Ben is doing a great job with), lots of RSS feeds, sensible URLs for ease-of-use, plus WordPress-powered blogs for both staff and readers, complete with file space, so you can chuck up your pictures, benchmarks, CPU-Z screenies and mod shots and not worry about hosting.

The next big upgrade will come when we start writing our copy using a database and then we’ll be able to do very smart things with benchmark data and tech specs. This is just one of the improvements scheduled to be added – we tinker with the magazine every issue, trying new things, improving it, honing it, and now that we’ve rebalanced the editorial team so that we all work across print and web, this should also be the case with the website.

In terms of inspirations, personally, this post by Information Architects Japan was what convinced me of the need for ‘big, clear text’ (although IA probably wouldn’t like the bright colours of the rest of our design), while the excellent Journerdism provided a constant stream of challenging, thought provoking discussions on the way print media was working (or not) online. Wordblog, Modern Life, Publishing 2.0 and MagCulture have all given me great ideas, too.

The editorial team and the project team at Dennis Interactive (DI) has worked really hard on making the site happen. The project has been a huge learning curve, because not only has it involved a lot of technical engineering for the coders and designers of DI, it’s also required a re-engineering and re-balancing of how editorial and interactive work together, and a reassessment of many, many aspects of the company’s old approach to the web. There is still a long way to go, but the new site is a good first step.

And, so without further ado, here it is. www.custompc.co.uk. I now have a work blog, www.custompc.co.uk/blogs/alexwatson, and if you want to subscribe to it the RSS feed is here.

Also, the Media Guardian has written up the site launch.

As I mentioned in my previous post about heading off to Computex with a bag weighed down with AV kit, at work, we’re really pushing on with expanding what we, technically a bunch of magazine journalists, do. When I joined, close to four years ago, I wrote articles for a magazine. In the past year, this has been expanded to include podcasting, shooting photos for web and magazine stories, and now, shooting video! Footage from the Computex trade show of some overclocking with liquid nitrogen is very neatly embedded in this news story here.

There are many decent blogs on the web that deal with the way journalism is changing: I’ve got RSS subscriptions to the fabulous Journerdism, Invisible Inkling, Publishing 2.0 and Wordblog to name just a few. It helps me keep up with what’s going on, and gives me a lot of valuable stuff to think about in terms of how my career field is changing. These sites are great and tend to avoid the position about journalism that is extremely common around the web: the assumption that pretty much anyone who writes for a print product doesn’t get the web, and doesn’t want to.

Now, this is probably true for some journalists, but most of the journalists I know can’t wait to get their hands on video recorders, cameras and decent CMS systems. I think the reason the opinion that journos hate the web is so widely held is that it appears to be true on a much wider scale, because so few major print brands have good websites. It’s a quick judgement, but an easy one to simply say – bad website = people who don’t care about the web.

However, it’s usually not the journalists – the writers – who make these websites. And being a blogger, when you want to change something, you just log in, and apply a different theme, or add a widget, or write a post. It’s great. I know, I love TypePad for that.

Can’t do it at work so easily, though – print brands (like Custom PC) are owned by large companies, large, multi-department companies that devolve control of stuff to many different teams, and when it comes to something new like the web, the structure is not all that well defined, especially in terms of who does what.

Dennis, where I work, has spent the last year trying to improve how the existing teams on the print and web side can mesh together. We are getting there, I think. For instance, my job title has just changed, so that I now have a role description that budgets 50% of my time for print stuff, and 50% for web stuff – before, if I wanted to work on web projects (like, say, the podcast), I had to find the time while doing a job that had no time allocated for non-magazine work. I still did it though, becuase I really thought it would be fun and great for us to do a podcast. Rex Sorgatz puts it perfectly in this interview:

“Big Media Is Hard. Epitaph or bumper sticker? I’m not sure, but it’s so true. Building
small little sites is so rewarding because you can build an entire new
universe in a month. But getting a big media company to change
directions is ridiculously frustrating. Big media is hard! But big
media is also influential, interesting, powerful, gargantuan,
mysterious — in a word, exciting. So my little dream right now is to
create a “small media mentality” within “big media company.”

I’m with him on both sides; that it’s hard to change, but when it does change, the opportunities are massive. The truly new CPC site is coming and it will be great, I think. I hope.

Tomorrow I’m off to Taiwan for the Computex trade show; while Spring’s Cebit is physically bigger and CES is shinier, Computex is the one that really matters for Custom PC; its main focus is on PC components, and it’s in the hometown of the big kit manufacturers. As well as being a lot warmer than Cebit (and with much better food), it’s also a really useful place to pick up background info and to get a sense of the work culture which produces so much of the stuff we spend the year covering. And I don’t just mean Engrish

It’s my 2nd consecutive year at the show and one thing struck me as I was packing just now: Last year I had only a crappy little Dell laptop borrowed from work; this year, my case is already half full just from audio equipment, and what you can’t see even in this shot is my laptop, my Nikon D40 and tripod (plus the PSP and iPod for the flights…). Despite being a print journalist, the impending launch of our new website (not in time for the show, rather annoyingly), and the success of the CPC podcast means coverage has gone a lot beyond the humble notepad – although said humble notepad is still lurking on the right of the shot. Should be a lot of fun – I’m looking forward to it a lot

Last week I went to a panel discussion on magazines; although I took notes on all three speakers, I ended up with loads from the talk by Barry Miles, co-founder of 60s underground paper International Times (Wikipedia). He talked at length about I.T.’s genesis, launch party and development, which I found fascinating. Here are my full notes. Bear in mind these notes were scribbled at pace, so apologies for any errors/omissions.

On the genesis of I.T.:

“We put on a poetry reading at the Albert Hall in 1965. It cost £400 to hire, then another £100 an hour. And bear I mind, I earned £10 a week at this time, and we had only 9 days to publicise it. But we sold the tickets and it went ahead, and we saw that we, youth culture, were a real constituency. It’s very, very difficult now to imagine how straight England was, even in the mid 60s. It was a very black and white world then.”

On I.T. being totally counter to Fleet street and established media:

“The idea of anyone from our community writing for the Guardian or the Times was inconceivable. None of the papers had any popular music coverage in those days. Our group of people needed somewhere to express themselves, so in early 1966, Hoppy (John Hopkins) and I started to put it together. We got the guy who’d been editor of Peace Times for CND, to help, too. He’d gotten freaked out and left London and gone to live in the countryside, but we got him to come back.”

On I.T.’s launch:

“We had the launch party at the Roundhouse in Camden. It had been used for storing gin, and had been abandoned for seventeen years. It was just a big space with a balcony that was apparently unsafe. But it was ideal for IT. Soft Machine and The Pink Floyd played. I remember paying them – Pink Floyd got £15 because they had a light show, and Soft Machine got £12. Although they had a motorcycle on stage, so maybe that was a bit unfair.”

On how I.T. was written and distributed:

“I.T. wasn’t properly edited. It depended a lot on people bringing stuff in. It was the same with distribution – anyone could come in a grab 50 copies, and we just trusted them to bring the money back, and then they could get some more copies. By 1969, I.T.’s height, we were printing about 44,000 copies, and it was going out every two weeks or so, unless we’d been busted or something.”

How I.T. got into advertising and staved off financial collapse:

“The first few issues had a lot of serious articles by William Burroughs about the overthrow of the state. He used it as his platform to work out his ideas. And there was Ginsberg too. All the usual suspects. When we were running out of money, I was talking to Paul McCartney about it, and he said, ‘Well, you should interview me, then you’ll get ads from the record companies.’ And I thought, ‘hey, he might be on to something.’ So I interviewed him, and then George Harrison, and then the next week Mick Jagger called up, demanding to be interviewed too. And Paul was right, we got ads from the record companies.”

On I.T. and the community:

“We’d have these happenings on Tottenham Court Road. Lots of people would come down – The Beatles, Pete Townshend. He’d pay £20 or something on the door, becuase he knew it was going to I.T. It was a community paper, our community’s paper, so people put into it. I.T. was outside normal society in every respect.”