lloydshepherd.com

Tron Legacy Trailer on Vimeo (via Vimeo) - Olivia Wilde! In 3D!...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:20:21 +0000

Tron Legacy Trailer on Vimeo (via Vimeo) - Olivia Wilde! In 3D! To the Imax, and don’t spare the horses! (Sorry, Lou).

"Consider the case of Maureen Evans. A grad student and poet, Evans got into Twitter at the very..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:59:52 +0000

“Consider the case of Maureen Evans. A grad student and poet, Evans got into Twitter at the very beginning — back in 2006 — and soon built up almost 100 followers. Like many users, she enjoyed the conversational nature of the medium. A follower would respond to one of her posts, other followers would chime in, and she’d respond back. Then, in 2007, she began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed to 140 characters. She soon amassed 3,000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to one another or even talking to her. “It became dead silence,” she marvels. Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.”

- Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity | Magazine

"When media events came out of a clear blue sky and made a pleasant distraction from the daily tedium..."

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:57:11 +0000

“When media events came out of a clear blue sky and made a pleasant distraction from the daily tedium it’s conceivable that you might want to get the inside track on a press release. That is no longer the case since boredom was banished and we now compete in an attention economy where distraction is a permanent state. It doesn’t really matter who you are, Universal Pictures or somebody trying to get a gig listing for a newly-formed indie band; you are no longer entitled to anybody’s attention. Not the public’s and not the media’s. Whatever attention you manage to get you have to earn.”

- And Another Thing: The media professionals will be the last to realise the media has changed

Haiti photo gallery - Meet some of the young people Merlin put...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:31:12 +0000

Haiti photo gallery - Meet some of the young people Merlin put on the road to health - the hand holding the adult finger makes me want to cry.

Football | The Joy of Six: FA Cup quarter-finals | Rob Smyth |...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:52:22 +0000

Football | The Joy of Six: FA Cup quarter-finals | Rob Smyth | Sport | guardian.co.uk - Football in the 1970s. When Men Were Men.

"So why the certainty in that story? My contact noted: “There are going to be more and more..."

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:19:56 +0000

“So why the certainty in that story? My contact noted: “There are going to be more and more stories like this as the collapse in online advertising has pushed sites into e-commerce and they need the links from [the Guardian] to push them up the [search] rankings. There are quite a few mobile phone so-called bloggers already in the UK who are actually little more than affiliate channels for the mobile phone operators. That’s often how they get their stories. Watch the links when you click through, it’s often quite instructive. There is, for instance, a very well respected UK mobile phone blogger who gets a lot of very good Orange scoops. Of course he does, my mates at Orange point out, the other half of his business is a retailer for Orange so he finds out about new phones at the same time as the rest of the channel. Is that journalism? Who knows these days.””

- Picking facts from speculation on iPad launch prices and dates | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Previous Image (via BBC - Earth News - In Pictures: Sperm whale...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:09:30 +0000

Previous Image (via BBC - Earth News - In Pictures: Sperm whale surprise

)

"there are only around half a dozen German full-time professional SF/F authors … just one of..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:31:26 +0000

“there are only around half a dozen German full-time professional SF/F authors … just one of whom earns a living writing SF.”

- CMAP #4: Territories, Translations, and Foreign Rights - Charlie’s Diary

This seems like an extraordinary number. Can it be true?

It's A Girl Thing

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:58:13 +0000

It's A Girl Thing:

Shared by lloydshep
In my experience, there is a direct link between the Obsessed With Buying Useless Shit From Paperchase gene and the Total And Utter Queen Bitch From Hell At Primary School…

Backing Up a Wordpress Blog to the Cloud Using Amazon S3

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:58:13 +0000

Backing Up a Wordpress Blog to the Cloud Using Amazon S3:

We posted yesterday about Wordpress.com founder Matt Mullenweg and his view that cloud computing is marketing speak.

The conversation followed a significant Wordpress.com outage. In our…

Watch video - Say hello to ePad - E4 - E4.com

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:30:26 +0000

Watch video - Say hello to ePad - E4 - E4.com

listening to "Golden earring - Twilight zone"

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:42:45 +0000

listening to "Golden earring - Twilight zone":

Now playing at a US chair lift near you

Podcasts preach to the converted. That's why I like them. It may be why advertisers don't

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:41:16 +0000

Podcasts preach to the converted. That's why I like them. It may be why advertisers don't:

I love podcasts. I love listening to them. I love doing them. There are times when I think they’re the most perfect form of media ever invented. Gather a few people with views on something around a…

listening to "Thea Gilmore - Cover Me"

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:41:06 +0000

listening to "Thea Gilmore - Cover Me":

Love her voice.

listening to "Twilight Zone - Golden Earring"

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:35:44 +0000

listening to "Twilight Zone - Golden Earring":

Naff but great. Playing at every ski lift in Colorado *right now*

CMAP #2: How Books Are Made

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:37:04 +0000

CMAP #2: How Books Are Made:

It is a common misconception — to paraphrase a commenter in the previous post on common misconceptions about publishing, that “the only two people that matter are the author and the reader (one…

"It is certainly true that Cameron has so far produced nothing more than mood music. But mood music..."

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:37:12 +0000

“It is certainly true that Cameron has so far produced nothing more than mood music. But mood music matters. It doesn’t tell you what the musician will do, but it does give you a window on his or her soul. Cameron’s soul seems to me perfectly congruent with the Burkean, Whig-imperialist strand in British conservatism. It was Burke, after all, who saw the “little platoons” of civil society as the places where “public affections” germinated; and there is not much doubt that Burke would endorse the vision of a big society, rich in civil associations and governed on a light rein. I also suspect that it chimes with the mood of a people tired of incessant badgering by bureaucratic busybodies. Instead of re-fighting the battles of the 1980s and trundling out the mouldering corpse of statist collectivism at every opportunity, Labour would do well to battle with Cameron on the ground he hopes to make his own. As Anthony Crosland used to say, the party should never forget that anarchist blood runs in its veins.”

- New Statesman - In search of electoral El Dorado - very good this, but still doesn’t engage with the central question: if this is the Cameron project, is he even half-capable of describing it, let alone selling it? The fact that the question is there shows why Cameron is no Blair.

Miliband and Miserablism

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:33:14 +0000

Miliband and Miserablism:

David Miliband delivered a really rather good speech at Demos this afternoon. He puts his finger on the incoherence of the Conservative Party, which might explain why Labour is creeping up…

"Another complicating factor is that I can’t accuse Moran of orchestrating the hate campaign against..."

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:42:59 +0000

“Another complicating factor is that I can’t accuse Moran of orchestrating the hate campaign against me. After all, she doesn’t instruct her followers to retweet her remarks. It’s entirely voluntary — and the reason they repeat them, I suspect, is because they think they’re funny, not because they have any particular animus against me. (I may be flattering myself there.) And, let’s be honest, they are quite funny. This whole experience wouldn’t be so painful if I was being insulted by a bunch of morons.”

- Columnists | The Spectator - Toby Young unwittingly supplies perhaps the most cogent piece of social media theory we’ve ever seen from a print “journalist” (of course, he’s not a journalist, he’s just a knob with a questionable gift for aphorism who somehow gets commissioned by other knobs)

"Britain was built by powerful city government, but we have got the balance wrong between..."

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:29:59 +0000

“Britain was built by powerful city government, but we have got the balance wrong between universality and dynamism in the last fifty years. That is one reason I favour in the next Parliament a referendum that is not just about the Alternative Vote for the House of Commons, but also about local government, fixed term Parliaments, and the House of Lords. Call it a Reset Referendum.”

- Today’s Conservatism looks more and more like a toxic cocktail of Tory traditions - David Miliband - The Labour Party - really quite startlingly good speech by Miliband, laying out the principles of the Labour proposition at the next election. Compare the intellectual capacity of this with the sheer wrongheaded triteness of the Tories.