Good news: William Gibson is back

Only just found about this, but William Gibson’s new novel has been announced. It’s called ‘Spook Country’, and this is the very Graham Greene/John Le Carre-esque UK cover (the US one is a bit more “cyber”). As you may know from past posts, I am a huge Gibson fan, so I’m rather pleased it’s out on my birthday, according to its Amazon UK listing.Update: The Amazon US page has some info on it. The drugs stuff is interesting – it’s reminiscent of the” ticking clock” of Case’s nerves used in Neuromancer…

“Book Description
Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer. Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn’t exist yet, which is fine; she’s used to that.
But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It’s odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn’t; she can’t afford to. Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn’t survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can’t say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim’s very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms. Bobby Chombo is a “producer,”and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.”

Bloggers versus Mainstream Media

"Print media is what it is. I can’t imagine anyone will be printing news on paper twenty years from now in the industrialized world" – the infamous Mike Arrington.

The bloggers have been tearing lumps out of the "mainstream media" again today, after rumours of trouble and lay offs at the San Francisco Chronicle hit the web. It all strikes me as pointless and just plain stupid grandstanding. Fine, so in 20 years time we’re not going to be printing newspapers according to Arrington – and many other people. But in 20 years time, can you say for sure we’re going to be reading blogs, RSS etc?  There’s a lot we do now that we won’t be doing in 5 years, let alone 20…. a fact that excuses no-one – bloggers, print journalists, politicians, celebrity chefs, polar bears – from preparing for that future. So enter now Robert Scoble to prove himself king of the dunces with his astonishingly dim witted post, graciously entitled ‘Newspapers are dead’:

"The industry has NOT invested in its future. It is reaping the rewards of that.

How many future journalists are being trained for the online world?

I can tell you how many: zero."

You can tell me, can you Scoble? I started University nearly 10 years ago and joined the student paper; the first thing we did was upgrade the computer systems, buy a very early digital camera and stick a web server in the corner. Fine, it wasn’t very good, but I learnt the HTML and PhotoShop skills I still use today. I wrote for student orientated websites as well as the student paper. I’ve worked for websites and currently I work for a print title; but we have a website, we’ve just launched a podcast, and we’ve got videos on YouTube. We might be taking it a little slowly compared to some web businesses, but we have limited time and limited resources and it’s all a learning process.

And we’re hardly alone; look at the top 100 podcasts on iTunes [UK], and where are they from? The vast majority are from the BBC, as you’d expect, but there are several from The Guardian, The Times and Stuff Magazine, all originally print titles, all with really impressive web operations. In the specific categories, such as, say… ooooh…. technology, you’ll find Stuff (again), along with our good selves Custom PC, and the FT. As a whole, you can certainly make the case that print titles are not fully embracing the beautiful creative and technical possibilities of the web; but are the bloggers? Is Scoble’s ropey design and dumb posting the best we can expect? And while TechCrunch has its value, would anyone seriously stand up and defend the lunk headed, poorly written rag that is Crunch Gear? These are the guys who bring you this sage analysis of the news that Microsoft has sold 20million licenses of Vista:

"The increase over XP isn’t very surprising since there is such a greater number of PC users now as compared to this time in 2002. "

Wow! Insight +1! Now that’s journalism.

Blogging is a great idea with tons of potential, no doubt, but blogs are one piece of the puzzle of how to make the best use of the web. Print isn’t dead either; it will just change; it will become either a freebie – because when there’s so much information for free, how else to compete? – or it will become a luxury item – because when information is free and virtual, it’s important for real things to be nice things, to be good quality things, to be a guaranteed brilliant use of the reader’s very precious time.

Change is the only constant.

 

Diary of a T-shirt early bird

Katamari T-shirt

Tuesday: Email from Threadless. Your T-shirt has shipped!
Wed: Lovely new Katamari T-shirts available from Panic (see above).
Friday: Threadless t-shirt arrives.
Saturday: Email from Panic. Katamari shirt in the post!
Sunday: Temperature plummets. Light Hail.
Monday: SNOW.
Tuesday (AM): Spent the morning looking ruefully at new Threadless t-shirt, before covering it with many layers of jumper.
Tuesday (PM): Blog about lovely new Katamari shirt. Fear it won’t see daylight til June.

The evolution of blogs

What’s it all about, Alfie Alex? I’ve been using a lot of Twitter recently, and in the process have been thinking about what this blog is really for. Over the years, it’s consistently evolved – originally it was a place for storing and sharing my photos, but Flickr’s taken that over; I used to put interesting links up, but let’s be honest, there’s a million linkers out there, and Delicious is easier to use and more flexible when it comes to storing neat things. The Wired Jester’s not a bad place to keep links to my journalism, and the books I read, but it’s starting to look pretty barebones now that Twitter threatens to usurp this blog as a place to note down/communicate what I’m actually doing. Many of the blogs I still read tend to be morphing into online magazines – Engadget, Jean Snow etc – so I wonder, if I’m going to keep this place going, do I need to be writing  article style posts? I tried it last month, and have to say that despite the time it took, the response wasn’t overwhelming…  I guess we’ll see :S

Preparing for F1 2007

5) In The Lead

The new Formula One season starts properly tomorrow ; I’ve been a fan for a very long time, partly, I think, because it’s the sport that so neatly dovetails with my love of games and interest in technology: the first website I ever made supported a Fantasy F1 game; I remember being blown away when Igot about three hundred entrants from places as far off as India and New Zealand, and I ended up needing to write my own Fantasy F1 results software to process all the data.

Anyway, before I turn into the grandad from the Werther’s Originals ads banging on about the old days, let’s get back to the present day. The new season is looking very exciting – no Schumacher, and world champion Alonso has switched to a new car, the McLaren which didn’t win anything last year. There’s a host of new, exciting drivers and the usual buggering about with the rules doesn’t appear to have anything terribly stupid. There’s a wealth of good resources on the web for preparing for the new season – not from the official F1 site of course, which wants to charge ÂŁ68(!!) for its mobile text and picture update service… First stop, this super F1 2007 season iCal, which has all the race dates and info you’ll need. Secondly, the Guardian’s got an F1 podcast and they’ve put their excellent 68 page guide (which came free with Monday’s paper) on the web, here. Richard Williams, one of my favourite, favourite journalists, is an F1 fan, and his intro to the season, complete with excellent Rumsfeldisms, is well worth a read.

However, the best way to get into Formula One is, by far and away, the obscure but brilliant French board game, Formula De (pictured above). It is the finest boardgame known to man, taking in all the key concepts of F1 – especially the strategies of balancing speed with conserving your car, and mastering cornering speed. I’ve put up a Flickr set, which goes into more detail of how the game works. Once you’ve fallen in love with it, you’ll need to hunt down a copy on Ebay – it’s rare, and most copies will have mutliple bidders!

The real championship is a tricky one to call, but I think I’m going to go for Alonso as champion, but with Ferrari winning the constructors’. Alonso just because I can’t see any of the others managing it – Kovalainen sounds great, but it’s his first year, and the same is true of Lewis Hamilton. Of the established drivers, I’ve never rated Raikkonen that highly – he’s fast, but that’s about it. Massa is better than most people thought he was when he moved to Ferrari, but world champion? Difficult to imagine. That said, Massa and Raikkonen are the strongest pairing I think… Anyone beg to differ?

Can the PlayStation 3 do anything right?

Like many tech journalists, I’ve certainly done my fair share of Sony hating. What makes Sony such an exasperating company for me is its past: Sony used to make technology that was genuinely interesting, inspired even, and it was worth buying. Its stuff used to be so good. I wrote a review of an all-in-one Sony PC a couple of years ago that touched on Sony’s background:

"Not all PC manufacturers aspire to ÂŁ499-plus-free-printer-scanner-kitchen-sink ignominy… It should not come as any surprise that Sony also considers itself above the vast swathe of beige PC builders. In John Nathan’s biography of the company, former CEO Norio Ohga talks about its approach. ‘Sony must always be extraordinary,’ Ohga says. ‘I always asked myself what was essential to the company. I find myself thinking about the Chinese character san, which means to shine dazzlingly like the sun. It’s not simply a matter of brightness. San means an extraordinary radiance.’"

These days of course, Sony usually comes across as bitter (why else would it stick Rootkits on customers’ PCs?) and out of touch (claiming people should work extra hours for a PS3!). Nothing embodies the fall of Sony like the PlayStation 3 – it comes across as overpriced and not very innovative, but having seen Sony’s presentations at GDC, I’m feeling perhaps all is not lost for the Japanese giant. In fact, I’m really surprised PlayStation 3 Home, LittleBigPlanet and the SingStar stuff haven’t garnered more praise.

Matthew Ingram, whose blog I really, really like (and respect – he’s a tech journalist *AND* he keeps his blog updated with smart posts daily, which is more than I can do) rounds up and summarises much of the criticism in a a post entitled ‘Can Sony Get Anything Right?‘ He focusses on the fact that PS3 Home is a bit of a Second Life rip-off, but lacks the open and flexible nature of the original:

"It sort of looks like a really nicely designed shopping mall where you can only buy things from one company… As for the likelihood of success, Tony Hung has a great phrase in his post at Deep Jive Interests, calling it “charming, desperate and futile.” I couldn’t have said it better myself."

Now, I do agree with the first bit, and on its own, i think Home would be an underwhelming riposte to Microsoft’s decent Xbox Live, but with SingStar and LittleBigPlanet, Sony is showing that it really *gets* online, and perhaps in a more radical way than Microsoft and Nintendo do.

Let’s compare SingStar with the upcoming Xbox360 version of Guitar Hero 2. I’m a huge GH fan, and the biggest, biggest problem with the PlayStation 2 version is the songs. There’s some good ones, some bad ones… but what you get on the disc is all you get. Clearly, when we have Emusic and the iTunes store, that’s hopelessly old fashioned. Yes, you can mod new songs into the game, but not easily or officially: what most Guitar Hero players want is a huge and deep catalogue of songs to explore, whose wares are cheaply priced and delivered instantly over the net. The Xbox 360 has the technical infrastructure, but it’s not there. From Koatku’s preview, the 360 version sounds
identical to the PlayStation 2 version, but shinier. Now SingStar for the PS3 (a roughly comparable music performance game) sounds like it delivers online functions like Mariah Carey delivers diva behaviour and high notes: in spades. 

Secondly, check out the video below for the PS3’s LittleBigPlanet: awesome physiscs, totally customistable levels, including the abilities to import your own stuff, and a way to share them: it’s basically Flickr for games. And that is awesome: fun, collaborative, competitive, inspiring: a complete other world.

I’ve posted before about how awesome GamesIndustry’s editorials are, but this week’s hit the nail on the head when it comes to Microsoft’s online approach:

"For all that Microsoft talked the talk about customisation and user participation when the Xbox 360 was rolling out, the company hasn’t really walked the walk. Xbox Live is beyond a doubt the most robust, consistent, fully-featured, user-friendly and generally brilliant online service we’ve ever seen… but Allard’s proud boasts that the HD Era would be all about user customisation seem to have been reduced to snap-on covers for the console, downloadable skins for the interface and the ability to play your own music in games."

Xbox Live is good, but it’s basically a store for buying games, a shared leaderboard and a way to hook up with friends for a game. it’s basically Steam + XFire + TeamSpeak/MSN/Skype wrapped up in one slick package. Which is good, but it’s not the be all and end all of online. Sony has got some neat new ideas, bright shiny ones. Watch the last 5 minutes of the LittleBigPlanet presentation and then see if you can honestly say Sony can’t get anything right.

It’s never a good time to buy anything (aka, damn you the Nikon D40x)

D40X

I’ve just finished writing my column for the latest issue of Custom PC, and was focussing on how many e-mails we get from readers who want to know when the best time to buy a graphics card is. It depends on how you look at it, I wrote: if you want the most speed for your money, then frankly, tomorrow will always bring a faster, cheaper card.

Having seen a lot of technology come and go, I think the best way to know when to buy tech is to consider what you want it do: or at least, to balance this consideration with objective benchmarks and tech-specs. After all, if you buy a graphics card to play Oblivion or Command & Conquer 3 on your 20in widescreen TFT, and you do research and it can do this, does it really matter if a slightly faster one appears next month? If you’re buying something just because it’s the latest-n-greatest, then of course you’ll be disappointed when it becomes obsolete.

Turns out I get to eat a nice dose of my own medicine, because today Nikon’s announced a new dSLR, the D40x, boosting it from 6 to 10 megapixels. Does it, as Engadget snidely says, make the D40 seem totally out of date? Not for me: I only got my D40 a month or so ago, but it’s a great camera, and it’s been great for what I wanted it for: a light, small budget beginner’s dSLR with a great kit lens. It was that yesterday, and it’ll be that tomorrow.

Buy tech to do something, not be something.

Fun with feeds

The wildly, slightly implausibly successful Custom PC podcast (I say this because at one point, we were higher in the iTunes chart than Jamie Oliver) introduced me to the rather awesome Feedburner. It’s an absolutely excellent service, and TypePad, which hosts The Wired Jester, allows you to use Feedburner for your blog’s RSS feed. So that’s what I’m now doing, and I recommend having a look at it – as well as all the usual posts the Wired Jester feed now includes links, as I’m splicing them in from my Delicious profile.