Stuart Dredge

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.

I think I've solved my crashing iPhone 3G problem

Ever since I got my new iPhone on launch day, it's been crashing on average once a day. And I don't just mean turning itself off - I mean proper crashing, back to the silver apple reboot screen and unable to even turn on again. I've been having to put it into recovery mode, wiping it and then starting afresh each time.

I think I've sorted the problem now, touch wood. I went for the nuclear option, the strongest possible 'wipe the phone of everything and start again' option on the device itself. It took an hour to do, and since then it's been fine.

The crashes came whenever I was installing new apps, whether from iTunes or the App Store on the phone itself. Since a lot of my work involves reviewing (and thus installing) apps, it wasn't great.

Anyway, top apps so far: Facebook, Twitterific, Last.fm, Typepad and WordPress on the Web 2.0 side of things. For games: Bubble Bash, Platinum Solitaire, Galcon, Aurora Feint and Critter Crunch. And I've been messing about lots on BeatMaker, the music sequencer, creating rubbish banging techno.

All good. And even better now I don't have to start from the beginning after crashes in all those games...

Sample Music Ally Bulletin

Every day I write a bulletin for music industry consultancy Music Ally, which is sent out by email to their paying subscribers. It's a digest of the latest news in digital music and related areas, which is in people's inboxes by 9.30am every morning.

Since it's not archived online, I've reproduced a recent one below, so you can see what it's like. You can sign up for the Music Ally service here (it also includes a fortnightly report that goes into more depth). The sample bulletin is from Friday 1st August 2008, although the real thing is more nicely formatted in HTML.