Stuart Dredge

I bought a Toshiba NB200-123 netbook (but TNT won't deliver it)

This is (probably) the most self-indulgent post I'll ever write on this blog. But I'm so angry, and this seems the best place to let off steam. If you want to skip the long ranty version, essentially I bought a new netbook online, direct from Toshiba, but TNT won't deliver it to me.

The longer version: I ordered the netbook - the NB200-123 since you ask - on 19th December. I wasn't counting on getting it before Christmas, but on 21st I got the tracking number for the shipment with TNT, and their website said it was out for delivery.

What I've been up to lately

This blog needs a bit of love - I'm supposed to do this for a living. But doing it for a living seems to get in the way of doing it for self-promotion...

Anyway, this is just an update on the kind of stuff I've been writing, and who I've been writing it for. My two main jobs at the moment are still Music Ally and Mobile Entertainment, with additional freelance work for Pocket Gamer, Recombu, What Mobile and recently a few pieces for the Sunday Times.

Such as... for Music Ally, I've been working on their subscription-based daily bulletin and fortnightly report, while also blogging about Google, MySpace and Facebook's music plans, Nokia's Comes With Music subscriber numbers, Spotify's new music-buying features, and the new Sky Songs music service.

Internet mob 1, Lily Allen 0

Actually, it's less 1-0 and more of a cricket score – the kind of merciless pasting only seen in schoolboy football nowadays. But anyway.

The background: Lily Allen spoke out against music piracy, then set up a blog to vent her own views and those of fellow artists. Then she got accused of plagiarism, cutting and posting a story from Techdirt without proper attribution. Then she got accused of hypocrisy, having stuck a couple of MP3 mixtapes of other people's tunes on her site early in her career. Then she got hundreds of abusive comments, and now she's shut the blog down.

That's the summary. And it's actually made me angry. Proper ear-steaming anger. Anger at the mob mentality that's squashed a site that could have fostered a constructive debate around this whole thorny issue of file-sharing.

I did have a rant about it on Music Ally's blog, but to avoid clogging that up – and because these are my personal views – I've come back to it here.

What I do, and who I do it for

Today is a bit of a reboot, work-wise, so I thought I'd quickly explain.

I'm starting a new freelance retainer editing the website of Mobile Entertainment magazine, focusing on news, interviews and analysis of the mobile content and apps industry.

It's an exciting role, covering everything from games, music and TV/video through to social media, apps and 3D holographic augmented reality location services. Well, most of those.

I'm continuing in my role handling editorial duties for Music Ally, the music industry consultancy. That means their daily news bulletin, blog and fortnightly report.

I have my own new project too. It's called iPhone Games Bulletin, and it's a daily news and analysis email for the iPhone games industry: developers, publishers, tech providers, VCs, analysts... It's free to receive, so if you're interested in the area, sign up here.

Gmail just launched Facebook Connect features

I've just noticed that Gmail has started offering Facebook Connect within the site itself. While reading an email, a box appeared with that person's details, with an option to connect in Facebook.

And there's also a box at the top right of the Gmail screen letting me connect to view and update Facebook status messages from within Gmail itself.

Nice! Is it brand new, or has everyone else been using this for a while? EDIT - Oh, I think it may be to do with Xoopit, the image plug-in thing I installed and forgot about a while back, not Gmail itself.

Update on me, myself and I

I really am not much cop at updating my own blog. No excuse really, apart from being wall-to-wall with other stuff.

Anyway, as you may guess from the photo, there's a new addition to the family: Alexander was born earlier this month, and I'm currently nearing the end of my paternity leave (ie in freelance terms, two weeks of not getting paid for anything). All going well so far, Alex seems v chilled - he's sleeping in my arms as I write this on an iPhone. That's modern fatherhood for you.

Work-wise, I've been doing the next PocketGamer.biz report, which is due to be finished in the next couple of weeks. Music Ally has been busy with lots of big stories, and I'm also going to be contributing to the new mobile-focused site Recombu, which is being launched by Andrew Lim here in the UK soon.

That's about it really, I should think of more stuff to say on here, and even a proper purpose for it. One day...

Pain in the back-end

Life was easier in the days when I just had to write words, but was it more rewarding?

I realised the other day that I frequently spend as much time fiddling about with my stories in various publishing back-ends as I do actually writing them. Even a simple ten-minute press release write-up can involve a further ten minutes of digging through sites for links, inserting said links, resizing and uploading pics, setting categories... And that's without mentioning the follow-up promo tasks on big stories.

Sometimes it's hard not to wish I (or rather the sites I write for) had someone to Do This Stuff For Me. Imagine how many stories I could do a day...

But most of the time I realise this is just what you have to do nowadays - part of the skillset of an online journalist. There are thousands of bloggers to whom it's second nature who'd do it if I got arsey... Although some of the tasks listed above can be a bit of a grind when there's another story to move onto, nailing a story with all of these elements and seeing it go live does feel rewarding.

As long as the back-end is working properly, of course, and doesn't fall over losing all those (hopefully) well-crafted words that kickstarted the process. Buy that's another post...

Bebot - Robot Synth proves the power of word-of-mouth

If you've got an iPhone or iPod touch, go and download Bebot - Robot Synth now. Right away. It costs £1.19, and is the funnest (to borrow Apple's lingo) musical iPhone application yet. The demo video embedded below shows why, but basically it's a synthesizer music-making app, except the fully-tweakable synth sounds are personalised by a cute cartoon robot. It's fab.

I'm in the Music Ally office today, and it's just been brought to a standstill by the app, as people gathered round for a go. They're all off to buy it now. Well, those who have an iPhone anyway. And it just showed the word-of-mouth buzz that can build around a cool iPhone application - even (or perhaps especially) those without any real use.

Distant Shore is another example - an app where you wander up and down a virtual beach reading messages in bottles written by other real people, and sending your own messages off in return. It's another cheap, fun app that's building a big buzz - not just through in-person demos, but on Twitter as well (in fact, Twitter is how I found out about both of these).

It's been suggested that iPhone owners are natural show-offs - any opportunity they get to whip out their handset and demo something cool, they'll take. I'm fitting that pattern so far... But it's good news for independent developers coming up with interesting, innovative and unique apps that might not have found a mass audience before.

Is the Kindle 2 a gadget too far?

Amazon announced its Kindle 2 e-book reader yesterday, and it's been getting rave reactions from all the major tech sites. Slimmer, nicer screen, basic web browsing and MP3 capabilities, and more books and newspapers. Oh, and Stephen King.

The geek in me really wants one. And if it was being sold in the UK, I might have had an Apple moment last night and stumped up for one there and then. Thankfully, Amazon is keeping it US-only for the moment, so I've got a bit of time to check my bank balance and wrestle with my  inner spendaholic.

I love gadgets, and I read a lot of books, so it should be an obvious purchase when it does eventually cross to this side of the Atlantic, right? Yet I can't help wondering if its a gadget too far. I already walk around carrying an iPhone, a BlackBerry, an Eee PC and a PSP (hopefully muggers in my area aren't voracious blog-readers) - would the Kindle replace any of those?

No. Well, not unless it gets a decent port of Football Manager Handheld, anyway.

As tempting as the Kindle sounds, I can't help thinking that I'm happy reading stuff via my RSS feeds on iPhone and the Eee PC, and that dog-eared charity-shop paperbacks will continue to see me well for any physical book-reading needs.

And yet... That Apple-like spur-of-the-moment purchase may still happen, depending on the Kindle 2's price in the UK and whether I can convince myself that someone will pay me more money to write about it than it costs, thus making it a sound investment (this logic tends to apply to any gadget I'm dribbling over).

If this thing is really going to do for literature what the iPod has done for music, it would be nice to be in early - or at least as early as us Brits are able to. Better try to get some more work in before they announce the UK launch...

Saving the music industry: one album at a time

Don't worry, this post won't be as pompous as the title makes it sound. But I have been buying albums - four in the past four days - which is strange to think, given that I spend half my professional life writing about the problems the music industry is having getting people to pay for recorded music.

Only one of them was a CD - the Hot Leg album, ordered from Amazon. The other three were all digital purchases from iTunes, and were impulse buys to varying degrees.

I bought the Franz Ferdinand album from iTunes on my PC after reading an interview with the band, then grabbed the Lily Allen album (also on PC) this morning after hearing The Fear again on the radio.

And then while in the Music Ally office today, Juan played me a riff from the album by The Answer, and I bought that on the spot through my iPhone.

Well, it was a GREAT riff.

And it's made me realise that actually, technology has progressed to the point where buying an album - for me - is an impulse purchase, just as it was in the days when I had to walk past Virgin Megastore on the way to work. A few clicks, or taps in the case of the iPhone, and there it is.

Without really noticing it, I've almost lost the need to own physical copies, and kicked the fear of my iTunes downloads not working on any other device ever. Even if that's still (a bit) true.

It's quite a thought. But I'm just as pleased about the fact that I'm really excited, for different reasons, about hearing all four albums. I was starting to worry that I was jaded - either through 'nobody new is as good as my old favourites' old-fartedness, or by the sheer availability of music online.

When you can listen to anything you want whenever you want, do you stop getting excited about it? Thankfully not.

Anyway, that's my week's home-office listening sorted. Impressions so far? The Lily album is ace - smart, interesting and proper pop music. The Franz album is going to take a bit more listening, but has the makings of a grower. Hot Leg just puts a smile on your face, even if the odd novelty bit does grate. And I'm shocked it's taken me this long to find The Answer, given their blend of the Black Crowes, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. A wonderful idea indeed.

Hopefully that's not too pompous - I'm not that good at writing about music itself, rather than about the business or technology around it. Anyway, this post marks A New Start for this blog - I'm determined to write something every day about something, rather than just lists of links to stuff I've written, or apologies for not posting for months.

Another long break between blog posts

As a vaguely rubbish excuse, I've been blogging / writing lots for other people, but that's not really an excuse for neglecting your own blog, especially when it's supposed to be a professional shop window (of sorts).

So, as a quick update. I've been hard at work for Steel Media, writing features for Pocket Gamer, editing/writing their new PocketGamer.biz industry site, and editing the latest issue of the Pocket Gamer print magazine, which goes out in three separate editions for T-Mobile, Vodafone and 3 UK, with two more clients joining for the new issue.

Meanwhile, I'm also doing more work for Music Ally. Besides writing their daily bulletin (sample here), I've been working more on their fortnightly report - in both cases covering the latest developments in digital music (both online and mobile).

Plus I'm still doing the odd freelance feature - recently including a piece on mobile usability for New Media Age, and a piece on ad-funded mobile content for Mobile Media. And I'm contributing some posts for PopJunkie, a new music blog set up by Ashley Norris (ex Shiny Media) and some friends.

It's a busy time, in other words! If I'm lax in replying to your emails and/or voicemails, that's why, and I apologise. What with all that work, driving lessons and a cheerful toddler who's just learned which room in the house his dad works in, keeping on top of communications can sometimes slip.

Solved my Google Chrome installation problems

Phew, for a minute I thought my PC was going to refuse to install the Google Chrome web browser, as it threw up this error message while trying to install it:

"Installation failed: Component ChromeGears failed to install"

However, I found a solution on the internetweb. Just do a search of your hard drive for 'chrome install' and you should find a file called chrome_installer. Double-click on that, and it installs fine. Whoop.

Do British bloggers have an inferiority complex?

My heart sank this afternoon while reading this TechCrunch UK article and its related comments. Written by Ashley Norris, my old boss at Shiny Media, the post itself is an interesting look at the challenges facing anyone trying to build a UK blog network. But the comments swiftly descend into a.) Shinybashing and b.) tech blogger infighting.

I'll keep out of the latter, since I know and like all the people involved. But I do have some thoughts on the UK blogs v US blogs thing. Mainly: why do we beat ourselves up for this so much? US blogs and blog networks are bigger, have much more traffic, and make much more money. Why? Because they've been doing it longer, have more internet users to target, and have more VCs flinging cash their way.

So what? Comparing the younger UK blogging market to that can only ever make us feel inferior. Yet we still do it. When I was at Tech Digest, I got sucked into it myself - comparing ourselves to sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, and fretting over how they got so much traffic, and why their stories got shedloads more Diggs than ours, and generally feeling a bit down about why we weren't closing the gap faster.

Leipzig-bound

Just making final preparations (i.e. arranging 700 interviews in a panic) for the Games Convention show in Leipzig next week. If you're a mobile games company attending, do pop me a line if you fancy saying hello.

Also starting work on a feature for New Media Age on premium mobile services - are consumers still associating TV voting and/or content subscriptions with being ripped off? Are there still rip-off merchants out there? Should the mobile industry be doing more to stamp them out? And so on.

Have also just been sent this link today - Ping.fm - apparently lets you update all your social networks from one place, so you only have to type in 'my cat is sleeping and I'm eating a ham sandwich' once. It's The Future! Maybe.

Hot Leg Review (the second one ever?)

Went to The Proud Gallery in Camden last night to see Hot Leg, the new band featuring Justin Hawkins out of The Darkness. I realise that's maybe an unpromising start to a review for some people, but bear with me.

The gig was very good, some of the songs weren't as immediate as the best Darkness songs, but others were. The venue was rammed too - and weirdly we bumped into lots of people who we used to go to Darkness gigs back in The Early Days, which was nice. Oh, and Naboo out of The Mighty Boosh was there too, which is the only celeb spot I have to report.

The band did mostly their own new songs, plus an encore of 'I Believe In A Thing Called Love', and then they did two covers in a row - both of 'The Power Of Love', except one was the Jennifer Rush version, and the other was the Huey Lewis and the News version. Here's a clip of the first of those:

Why is this the second review ever? Pauly has beaten me to it.