Found my old photobucket account earlier today, forgot I even had it. Better yet, I found some of my old sketches from school…
If I remember rightly (and in no order in particular): Sam Guthrie, Bobby Drake and Joseph. As well as a few nameless made up fellas.
1997. I don’t even know if I have these sketch books any more, damn pleased I took photos.
If that’s what you’re called.
I got this today:
Here’s a question: what do you think of Zune?
I’m going to make a few assumptions (and do please, correct me if I’m wrong); if you’re a Zune user – aka ‘a Zuner’ – you’re probably American and you may’ve even bought, and perhaps even still use, the original Zune machine handheld thing that was never launched over here in the UK.
However, you may also be a Windows Phone (WP) user and/or an Xbox owner. All of these things I expect to influence your response to this following, secondary question:
Is it actually any good?
Now please. Before you move forward with your answer (either in the comments field below or in fact perhaps, with your own blogged repost) please take into account that your opinion may bias towards the positive as you’ve made such a chunky investment (especially you original Zune hardware owners). So please, give full and valid responses – warts an’ all, if you will.
Why am I asking this question? Well, I am an Xbox Live Gold subscriber, soon-to-be Windows-Phoner and avid Spotify fan. The latter of the three costs £9.99pcm and allows me all sorts of awesome music-based fantasticness. Treats such as:
Understand that your answers will help inform my decision on whether or not to drop Spotify for Zune (when WP finally launches on Nokia’s devices). As it stands, I’m reliably informed that Spotify is coming to WP with the next software update (aka ‘Mango), but because I like things to just work – I’m tempted to move for the full Zune offering.
Friends, Zuners, fellow tech-heads and audiophiles – it’s over to you.
Shot on the N8, edited in iMovie’09 – turn it up to 720p
First Wolverine, now Spidey. I’m detecting a theme… 
If, like me, you’re a Flickr photo nazi, then you’re probably one of those people who goes nuts when images or videos aren’t tagged correctly or you get minor headaches when certain uploads aren’t placed in the right sets etc. Right?
One bugbear of mine (that I’ve recently solved the problem of), is that of my photos being out of order within my Flickr photostream.
Simply put; Flickr keeps users’ streams in order of DATE UPLOADED not DATE TAKEN. This can be annoying at best and at worse, quite possibly the most frustrating thing in THE ENTIRE WORLD.
To put this into context, a couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I went to the rather awesome Big Chill festival. We took a multitude of imaging equipment (admittedly, mainly phones), and between us we must’ve shot about 2-300 photos.
If, when we got back home, we uploaded these to the same account one after the other, then that is exactly how they would appear. One set, after the other. But what if I don’t want them like that? What if I want them ALL in chronological order?!
Question – “How do you change the chronology of your Flickr photostream?”
Answer – You use h4ppier photos
With this handy app you can go back and change ALL of your photos date by using one handy little button.
To get to this point, first select ‘Very h4ppy’ at the top of the page, then put in your upload dates and then hit the search button. Once h4ppier photos has found the images it’s looking for, this button (amongst many others) will present itself.
Yes you need to let the app to access your Flickr account. Yes it can be dangerous. But I’m telling you; this is by far and away my favourite 3rd party Flickr app, ever.
Use it. Today.
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At this point I kind of feel obliged to point out that Flickr isn’t all bad. In fact, most of the time, I absolutely LOVE Flickr. When they introduced some new UI changes recently it was quite possibly the coolest… oh wait, hang on – just watch this -
Sometime ago now, some friends of mine asked if it was OK to film a short interview piece discussing the future of the shopping experience – aka – the purchasing journey.
I don’t know what happened to the footage (if I find out I’ll see if I can upload it later), but what I do know is that the thoughts from that day still rattle around my head like it was only yesterday:
In today’s super-connected society, how can any one activity (be that marketing, advertising or PR) truly claim to be the sole driver behind product sales?
Let’s take a look. Using the analysis of one of my own purchasing journeys; Split/Second, a new racing game for the Xbox360.
The first part, the very beginning, was when I saw a tweet from a trusted friend saying “This looks awesome!” with a link to a game trailer. It was so long ago now that I forget who it was, it might’ve been Kev or Joe but I’m not sure. Anyway, like I said, that tweet led me to YouTube, where I watched the trailer. Then I watched it again. In HD.
It was a Saturday morning, the girlfriend and I were getting ready to go out and I stopped her to watch it with me. It was that good. Excitement. I am a fan of Burnout, a similar arcade-style racer. I’ve finished both Burnout 1 & 2 for the Gamecube and I’m very close to finishing Burnout: Paradise City on the 360. Split/Second is very similar (but in the same breath very different), so this game spoke to me.
Interesting.
Next, came the research phase. When was it out? What could I do to find out more? My Firefox history tells me that it was May 1st when I saw the video above. At that point, I was in game-buying mode. I tweeted:
A few things came back, but nothing that really grabbed me. I waited. A week later I saw this tweet from Nik Butler:
Nik played it. He liked it. I went to bed thinking about it and, the following morning, I wake up and download the demo. It’s one car, one track, one race. But I like it.
A few days after that it’s holiday time. Dubai. Beautiful, relaxing, sunny Dubai. I buy Edge; the thinking man’s games mag. What’s inside? A review of you guessed it, Split/Second.
They said:
Ultimately, much like a summer movie blockbuster, Split Second offers thrills galore, but there’s a hint of glossy superficiality to it, too. Large-scale explosions distract from a lack of tactical depth for a while, but the game’s lifespan would have been improved, particularly as far as multiplayer is concerned, with a more comprehensively involving strategic element. Yet there are few games in the genre that create quite so many sharp intakes of breath and instances of unintentionally barked profanity as this one, and sometimes that’s what racing gaming is all about.
That quote there, that last sentence even, was what finally clinched it for me. The journey was long but on May 31st, a full month from my first encounter, the game arrives.
It started with a tweet, then a trailer, then trusted referrals, a demo of the game and finally an official games review (in print no less).
The purchasing journey can be long and winding with many different touch-points. I hear conversations about acquisitions, downloads and click throughs and I despair. The modern day ROI model cannot be put down to just one thing. There are many routes to my wallet and none of them are exclusive. They live and breathe around each other and, it’s only through that understanding will we ever really make an impact.
Notes:
Modern technology helped my map the data; Firefox history with viewing the trailer, my Xbox Live account with my demo downloads and of course Twitter, time-stamping my progress. This stuff can be mapped, it’s just knowing where to look.
Also, massive thanks to the cool cats at Edge who, after I managed to lose the copy of their magazine that I wanted to quote from (see above,) kindly emailed me a PDF of the original article I needed. Rockstars.
I’ve been using the iPad for around two months now I guess and, although my thoughts on the device have been percolating since February… I think, at last, some words have finalised themselves in my head;
The iPad is a high-end, luxury disposable device. An oxymoron. Social, yet non-committal.
Social, is the key word here and it’s this, as well as the whole damn anthropology of it all that brings me to our conclusion.
Flat and, like table top space invaders of old, it just works. Around the home, in the pub or even in the office – the iPad is handed ’round like it’s always just been there.
I like the iPad. It’s a social consumption machine and there really is nothing else like it.
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- – - Drawn, written and posted, from my iPad
I repeat, the iPad will not be the death of print.
Props to Rolling Stone, Steve Waddington and Jon Mulholland; three voices of sanity in a sea of madness.
Technology is a wonderful, wonderful thing. But people always seem to forget the practicalities. The feel of a good book in your hands, the smell of a fresh off-the-shelf comic book, the joy of being able to pass on that knowledge-imbibed article to the next suitably eager set of hands.
I think it was Russell Buckley, now a VP at Admob, who quite rightly pointed out that although mobile vouchers were indeed ‘the future’, nothing could prevent the person behind the till forgetting their glasses that day. The iPad overheats, it reflects poorly in bright light and it, just like every other new piece of media technology of recent years, is just another medium.
As Steve puts it quite rightly in his blog post:
The iPad will no more spell the end of print than any previous generation of technology. Radios, TVs, PCs, CD-ROMs and the internet were all at one time set to hasten the demise of print.
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The iPad is simply another device in the ongoing narrative of an industry reeling from the shift towards advertising online, the internet as a low cost real time distribution platform, and competition for consumer attention from screen based media.
For the record, I quite like my iPad. But the death knell for all paper-based ocular consumption it is not.
