Shoreditch's sparkle smokescreen leaves BBC journo 'tech-struck' “I haven’t felt so good having spoken to a businessman for ten minutes in about 25 years. That’s not normally how I feel! So thanks very much!” And thanks to you, BBC presenter Fi Glover, for sharing the feel-good factor with us. Glover was bringing the miracle of Shoreditch’s internet companies into the nation’s living rooms …
Dear Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris,
Now that the prophecies of Nathan Barley Series 1 have come to pass and the idiots have in fact risen, the time for Series 2 has arrived. There seems to be no shortage of material for you. Please get to work.
Now time for my 'Ape Hour'
Together with her accomplice Gideon Coe, the fragrant Ms Glover presented the best ever show on the best ever radio station. Geeks of a certain age that lived in or around London in the mid 90s will recall the weekly visit of Dave Green to Glover and Coe's breakfast show in the halcyon days of GLR.
Why isn't radio that good still around?
I listen to R4. Glad I missed that!
The "Internet" doesn't make ANY money...
Replacing old Skool mail order catalogues advertised in Magazines with Sales of the SAME stuff simply using the eCommerce as a Tool makes Money. Buy Shares in Couriers not dot.com bubbles.
Selling Advertising space on visited websites makes money.
Selling instant downloads of Music, Software, eBooks makes money. (Video possibly the best model is instant streaming of lower quality and a DVD or Bluray in the post till everyone has Fibre and there is an infrastructure to support it,)
How many Facebook/Twitter/Googles are there? Also they make their money from adverts and being near monopolies. You will lose your shirt trying to copy them.
I too listen to R4 but unlike you i did catch the programme. i spent about ten minutes shouting at the radio as each and every bongism was trotted out. finaly i crashed through anger into a blissfull efortless sense of.moral and intelctual supeiority. poor figlover bless!! and the bongolite she was interviewing (some kind of hi tech scalper) Was tres droll. even managing to work the 'fail hard fail often' mantra into his outpourings.
One thing i did learn... hi tech. i thought that was people like nasa or intel. turns out it was web designers with delusions of relavance!
Go figure.
By that logic, FedEx and UPS also have no product and rely on using others' content without paying.
Counting every Nth-level sale as the product of the internet is absurd, but not much more absurd than cherry-picking out-of-context attributes to get in another lash at the in-crowd's whipping boy du jour.
"Auntie has a reluctance to address technology bubbles – as demonstrated by this extraordinary Newsnight. When unicorns have been sighted, the Best Bits get Censored.
Why could that be?"
Beyond other reasons cited, maybe:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17217042
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/28/bbc.television
Best Bits Censored - as for the rest, question's are not being asked either. Top it off with watertight oversight and you have the most trusted news monopoly in the world.
And that's how you REALLY hold the powerful to account. Ask the front runner for the next DG. With her, it's genetic.
Looking out off the coffee shop window over the so-called 'Silicon Roundabout', I can see Inmarsat, Content and Code (a sharepoint shop), a bland building filled with Amec (an engineering company), cafes, shops and a few pubs.
Where are all these cool, revolutionary companies supposed too be? Or are they, as I suspect, a couple of guys with a Twitter account peddling vapourware?
"like the famous 'more canals than Venice' made up by someone in Birmingham's PR dept."
I remember reading somewhere that that had nothing to do with Birmingham council, by the way. Although it is also true. Moreover, taken from Wikipedia:
"Counting water volume and taking into account depth measurements, Birmingham has more cubic meters of water pass through its canals than any other city in the world."
... anyone seen a report by Rory Cellan-Jones? He was in Shoreditch a few weeks ago on radio 4 going on a one day programming course. He built a website. He was then heard reporting quite breathlessly that he was proud that his website contained HTML, CSS and some Java apps. Wow, well done...
Now, reporting on the rise of programming awareness in non-coding environments is a good story (his course partners were all marketeers trying to understand the workload that goes into building a website) and there's a good tech story there - but Rory, as usual, bypassed it through apparent ignorance about the subject.
Compare anything by Rory with reports from the Beeb's science correspondent David Shukman, or medical correspondent, Fergus Walsh, or defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt. Since Tomorrow's World died a death, the BBC hasn't bothered with science or tech news at all...
<blockquote>Why is Auntie (literally, this time) in bed with Google?</blockquote>
[emphasis added]
Fi Glover is your aunt? Congratulations! You wouldn't have her phone number handy, I suppose?
The obvious answer to your question is because she's doing a web search, and can't be bothered to get up, I should think.
Having lived through the first 'net bubble and watching this one continue to inflate, I can say with some certainty that these incubators and the pseudo nerdgasms in the mainstream media that go with them are simply there to nurture the parasites that feed of the genuine innovators and those who put real work into technology. Along swoops either or both of some hipster luvvy or a JV managed suit with an MBA and there goes the farm. Meh.
I love the UK - the only place where you can have a fig lover visit shore ditch. I mean, really, how does it even happen? Who goes to live in a place called 'shore ditch'?
I mean, I'll sometimes cast aspersions on the developments and towns called stuff like 'Far Mountain' or 'Longview' or 'pleasant valley'. But hey, what are they going to call it? "Medium Hump"? Who's going to move to "Noview"? And it's going to be hard to attract business to 'Revolting Valley'. But it seems like the UK actually USES those kind of names - and yeah, every place has its edge cases ('Intercourse', 'Sugar Notch', and 'Fishkill' come to mind here) but it seems like English town names range from a bit morose to self-flagellatory.
Really - Shore ditch? Are there school team mascots like in the US? "Go, go, Shoreditch Ducks!" I don't see it.
Now, Moody, Alabama - there's a town name. The whole place is filled with small-town-requisite businesses, all dutifully following the townName.businessType formula. I drove through the place and nearly went off the road from laughing - which wouldn't have been good, because I would have needed to go to Moody Collision.
It's not as bad as having to live there, though. Your son turns emo because he goes to Moody High. Your daughter cries because she got a badly-fit prom dress from the Moody Seamstress.
Your dog needs to see the vet, but you're too scared to take him to the Moody Animal Clinic. And your teeth go bad - it's probably better than having to go to Moody Dental.
The worst thing is that every visitor probably makes fun of your town's name. Whenever somebody comes into the Citgo, it's, "Ha ha, I got some Moody gas! Is there another kind?!"
It'd be enough to piss -anybody- off.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
