Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Joss Stone PDF backup from Guardian Talk, a direct link

http://bit.ly/gyU8V0

Oh dear, the PDf includes a form for adding to the Talk. Obviously now a complete waste os space but I don't know how to delete it. So Acrobat.com invites you to download the form, can't be done embedded in Blogger. so try the direct click.

More rescued from Guardian mess soon, not sure about the format.

#guardiantalk testing code, a techie speaks

I think the closure of Guardian Talk is a major event. It may be the point in time when a news organisation failed to transition from print to web. Time will tell.

What I think is this is a disaster. They just don't get it. @arusbridger talks about mutuality and transparency. At least he answers a tweet on a Saturday, but just to say there will be a thread on a Monday. this is after everything is deleted on Friday.

And nothing in print. We know from the phone hacking stories that print journalists have a selective view on what is news. For reporting social media the guardian is shown to be as reliable as any other paper.

They seem to think that if Tweet explanation stops there will gradually be a collective memory loss. Seems unlikely to me. How to find the Guardian on Facebook is just an invitation to go away.

Martin Belam is continuing to comment

MartinBelam
1 March 2011 10:24AM
Mind you, I think Martin has taken things in good humour, all things considered.

In fairness, I tend to mumble my job title when I introduce myself. It is fine at conferences full of similar webby types, but not so good at parties...

"What do you do?"

"I work at The Guardian"

"Oh, are you a journalist?"

"No, I'm *mumbles incomprehensible job title*"

[Tumbleweed]
Maybe that is it. The journalists don't really value the tech so the significance of deleting a server or two is not something they would realise.

I have found some backup from long ago but stopped copying recently. Blog post on Posterous. Can't get the embed code to work so the PDF is on Posterous as well. Maybe it works here



Chance of Adobe deleting content without notice, quite low you would think. but life is full of surprises.

Monday, February 07, 2011

English Sputnik Moment Continued

I wrote about "an English Sputnik moment" on a Posterous blog as will789gb. It may be that a sputnik moment story works because people want to know that a route has already worked out ok for someone else. The "first mover advantage" only works for some people, and there may not be many of them.

Peter Preston at the weekend was unhappy with the ABC numbers and other guides to when the web will work out for news finances.

Will newspapers ever make true financial sense of the web? Not until we know which figures matter, which convince advertisers – and which are mere febrile concerns.

But if the FT print audited circulation drops below 50,000 and yet it is still in operation, this could be a clue.

Then today he writes about libraries not being really needed so much today as if it was easy to work through the technology changes and realise that transition is obvious.

My best friend hasn't been near a library or bookshop for weeks: not since the whole of Trollope came downloaded free on a Christmas Kindle.........We can't embrace something fresh without leaving older ways behind.

If only he wrote so clearly about newspapers! I think it will be Printweek that offers a definitive take on the transition. see blog on IPEX for more.

There will never be the sort of financial information that shows for sure that a course of action is free of risk. But a few examples can help to build a case.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

relimarual writes sense on Guardian books blog

Today the Guardian print literary review includes some extracts from the blog. Also there is a comment from the original writer responding to the other contributions. This is not always the case with Guardian blog extracts and is rare with Comment Is Free. Some of the columnists were not consulted about online versions of their print writing in the first place.

Original story by Laura Miller on how novels come to terms with the internet. Miller appears as relimarual on the blog and claims to have mentioned science fiction. I tried to add a comment pointing out what she originally said, that writers who specialise in character based fiction have "ceded the field to authors of speculative fiction, such as William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, whose hacker and brand-ninja characters exist primarily to explain or propound ideas about bleeding-edge technology." Well, I am not sure this is actually the whole picture for SF. DavidMW has a point in claiming that SF has been largely ignored.

Anyway, it turns out that my comment is no longer anywhere near the one from rellimarual. She has the last one as first displayed (and as in print) but loads more appear as a new one is added. Still much better than Comment Is Free where comments are closed quite rapidly.

So repeating this in my own blog helps me to keep track of things. For the same reason I still like Guardian Talk. The readers can start a topic. Much better than CiF from my point of view. I don't know why Guardian staff do not join in. I have contributed to media topics on PDF and citizen journalism. Not sure how much provocation to mix in, the Guardian voice will never appear. Over the years there is less going on with Guardian Talk I think. some people move to CiF but more to Facebook etc. I would guess.

I am trying to study the plot structure of Timequake as a way to edit blog bits together. There may have been another Timequake for ebooks in the first decade of this century. Many topics just seemed to repeat. Has it ended? 2010 seemed far off for Vonnegut. I may have written about this on another blog but it seems to fit in here.

I think Laura Miller may be the same Laura Miller that Google finds as working for Salon, based in the USA. Most of the references are to novels from the USA. The Guardian in print makes no mention of this. Has the copy appeared somewhere else? My guess is that London publishing scene is still some time behind in web awareness.