Media on Graeme's

Taylor Swift on Apple Music - translated

Mon, 22 Jun 2015 05:41:21 +0000

As Taylor Swift seems to have difficult saying what she means, so I thought I would provide a plain English translation of what she has to say about Apple Music.

The real purpose of DRM

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:45:25 +0000

Ian Hickson, maintainer of the HTML5 specification, argues that the real purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage over device manufacturers. Although this is true for some applications of DRM, in many cases the purpose is to lock customers to particular devices and services, and to raise barriers to entry against new devices and services.

Free, media experiment - final week

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 02:57:31 +0000

The last week of my experiment in consuming only free media for a month came to an end yesterday. It has been a huge success as far as books are concerned, and reasonable with regard to video. Music was harder to find (apart from classical).

The build a platform and squeeze business model

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:16:50 +0000

A business model that excludes competition, reduces consumer choice, and creates monopolies is the anti-thesis for free markets, but this is exactly what threatens both software and the distribution of media (ebooks, video, and music) over the internet, and much more.

Free books and media - days 22 to 25

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 08:49:29 +0000

Less than a week to go, and I broke my rules for the first time. A tweet with a link to an extremely funny Catherine Tate video on Youtube was too much for me, but, other than that, things continue to go well.

Free books and media - days 18 to 22

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 03:16:20 +0000

Longer than I realised since the last post. I have not done a lot of reading, nor watched much video, but I have realised, once again, that there is more out there than I thought, especially in terms of films.

Free books and media - days 10 to 13

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 03:33:24 +0000

A long hiatus because a lot of distractions prevented me from reading very much, and watching any films at all. It still goes well, just a bit slowly.

Free books and media – days 8 and 9

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:56:39 +0000

Another uneventful days as far as the books go, but music is going better than I expected.

Free books and media – day 7

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 06:41:00 +0000

A full week gone, and things are going well. I am still reading SF, and found more films/video worth watching.

Free books and media - day 6

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:08:48 +0000

An uneventful day. No video and just one book finished.

Free media only - days 4 and 5

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:29:07 +0000

Not much happened, just more good books, a burst of SF and fantasy, and a surprisingly good comedy film.

Free media experiment - day 3

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:03:49 +0000

More great reading and some interesting discoveries on video (although I did not actually watch anything on any length) yesterday.

Free media experiment - day 2

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 06:00:25 +0000

The second day of my experiment in reading, watching and listening only to free stuff went fairly well. I discovered one author I had not appreciated, and watched another OK video.

Free ebooks and video, first day

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 08:50:59 +0000

Yesterday was my first full day of consuming only free media, Its a day and a half since I started. So how is it going?

A month of only free content

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 11:59:26 +0000

For the next month (i.e. from 16th July 2011 to 15th August 2011) I will only read/watch/listen to legally free media (audio, video, books, whatever). The biggest changes will be reading only free ebooks (something I have been doing a lot of lately, anyway) and listening only to free music.

Are newspapers content farms?

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:37:18 +0000

I disagreed with a recent blog post by Alan Patrick which described the Huffington Post as a content farm. I do not think that the alleged lack of original content at the Huffpo is any worse than at many newspapers: so I concluded that it is not a content farm. It could be interpreted the other way: newspapers are content farms too.

The Huffington Post and AOL

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:14:34 +0000

The Huffington Post may not be a bad buy at the price AOL is paying, but that does not mean that AOL is right to buy it.

The internet as an instrument of control

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:46:44 +0000

Conventional wisdom has long been that the internet (and IT and modern telecommunications) are hard for governments to control and empower anyone willing to use them — activists and protesters in particular. I have long been sceptical, but I think its now clear I was right.

National Portait Gallery and everlasting copyrights

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:44:05 +0000

I had not intended to blog about the National Portrait Gallery threatening to sue Wikipedia over the latter’s publication of copies of paintings in the gallery, as I thought it would be obvious to anyone that this is a blatant attempt to use physical possession of a work to get around the expirations of copyrights. Tactics like this can effectively extend copyright indefinitely.

Why blogs are better than newspapers

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:35:08 +0000

Here is an example. It is readable (even if you skip the calculations), explains the argument for expecting a strong recovery, and why it may not happen.

Here is the news: and its going to get better

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 04:58:57 +0000

Alan Patrick has a rather dismal take on mainstream news media’s loss of audience to bloggers. I am considerably more optimistic: I think Alan both over-estimates the quality of newspapers and TV news, and under-estimates the quality available from blogs.

Newspapers deserve to die

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 01:46:25 +0000

We all know newspapers are slowly dying. Competition from the internet may be one cause, but newspapers hardly help themselves by simply being so bad. The Guardian has a great example in Zoe William’s whine about how her baby is more affectionate towards his father than to her.

Glib beats insightful

Tue, 13 May 2008 07:16:30 +0000

Paul Graham’s essay, Hackers and Painters, is very popular with some programmers. I just found a hilarious refutation of it, called Dabblers and Blowhards.

The interesting thing for me is that Paul Graham’s audience are just as enthusiastic (if not more so) when he writes rubbish about things he knows nothing about, as when he writes insightfully about things he is an expert on.

The end of academic publishing

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 07:20:17 +0000

It has been clear to many analysts (including myself) for years that publishers of academic journals were facing the slow death of their business. Despite the view of publishers and the more optimistic analysts that peer reviews journals were irreplaceable, the evidence continues to emerge for a slow, but certain, decline.

Nortel demonstrates how not to do PR

Wed, 23 May 2007 11:07:08 +0000

Nortel has prevented a former subsidiary, Blade, from buying from a rival. The resulting publicity is far more damaging to Nortel than the original, far less widely read coverage, of Blade’s choice of a PBX from Fonality (based on the open source Asterisk) over Nortels own products.