Charles on… anything that comes along

This week’s Network features are up: Charlotte Ricca-Smith with this month’s best gadgets and my own take on Didtheyreadit.com, which also has a look at some of the errors embedded from birth in Outlook Express which won’t be fixed until Microsoft releases WindowsXP SP2.

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• FUBAR on a Mac: Powergen's web site (24 September 2004; score: 25.58%)
• Harry Potter and the pointless reviews (fear not, no spoilers here) (21 July 2007; score: 19.1%)

Some slight changes - countdown to broadband (see middle right); also comments now appear in a popup window. If this is a problem.. umm.. it shouldn’t be, surely, unless you have a hyperactive popup blocker. Try clicking on the link and choosing to open it in a new window.

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Wow, Jim Louderback really skewers (Michael Gartenberg’s totally appropriate word, so why change it) the Portable Media Center/re in Another Dumb Idea from Microsoft. Selected quotes:

“The PMC tries to be good, but it’s so full of compromises it winds up being worse than Bill Gates doing the white-boy rap with Eminem.
and:
The screen is just too darn small. Even relatively video-simple shows like Letterman will look terrible. You’ll barely be able to catch Dave’s smile, let alone pick out the gap between his teeth. But you’ll feel really emasculated when Courtney or Drew stop by because the, um, details you’ll want to see will be indiscernible from the rest of the background. You’ll never catch a costume malfunction on one of these things.

Plus the battery life is awful, and his description of how transcoding from your PC which recorded (you hope) the TV show onto the PMC is a hoot. As he points out very reasonably, why not just get a DVD-R recorder for the TV, burn the disc, and put it into a portable DVD player? Hell, why not just into a notebook? You’d save a ton of money and heartache.

OK, so I’m going on about the PMC (I’ll stop now until they ship), but people are going to spend money on it, and I wish they’d reflect a bit first. I hate it when people are betrayed by their lust for technology.

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• Bill Gates's RDF (Runtime Destruction Field) (7 January 2005; score: 61.77%)
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• Farewell to Bill Gates: I doubt we'll see his equal again (12 January 2008; score: 59.53%)

Listened to an interesting talk last week by Matt Loney, editor of ZDNet UK, who pointed out an interesting trend for online news sites: being first with the news isn’t the best, because Google News doesn’t think something is worth listing as a news story until a few sites are running it.

But then Google News puts the most recent story at the top of its list. Which means that the site that got the exclusive sits at the bottom. And, people being what they are, they click on the top link. So that most recent posting, which is just following up the rest, gets the eyeballs.

That’s a complete inversion of what journalists have hankered after for years - the exclusive, the scoop, the ‘beat’ [US]. Now, the way to be seen is to have the most recent timestamp, not the first, groundbreaking story.

So Matt said that what many sites are now trying is simply reposting their story once it’s come to GN’s radar in order to push themselves up the list. Perhaps I should start an “unintended consequences” category; I think the murder of scoops by robot would come under that.

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• Michael Arrington and the broken embargoes: welcome to journalism, Mikey boy (19 December 2008; score: 51.59%)
• Get it while it's late: my exclusive review of Tiger (you know.. that new software thing) (2 May 2005; score: 38.27%)

I get at least one “survey” - sometimes two or three, depending on the season - from PR companies whose clients think that by asking 12 visitors to their website whether they have a pressing need for Product X, which by chance is sold on that website. Or else it’s “X per cent of people think dirty thoughts during boring meetings”. Er, are you surprised by that? News has to surprise.

Surveys, in general, have become pervasive among the stuff that gets sent out, and pervasive among the stuff that gets binned. Here’s why:
1) too rarely tries to find out stuff we don’t already know
2) doesn’t seek to highlight surprising findings; instead The Client’s desires get pushed upwards
3) not representative, because they have a sample that’s too small, or self-selecting. To be representative of the UK population a survey should have at least 1,000 randomly chosen people. That’s expensive to do. Self-selecting is asking people who come to a website “Do you like websites like this one?” Probably a lot of gambling stats are built on surveys like that.
4) not interesting. Sorry, but that’s the news test. Survey finds that dogs bite men: not surprising. Survey finds that men bite dogs: surprising.

My advice: save your money for something useful.

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