Couple of weeks ago I bumped into James Brown in the West End. He's always got something new to enthuse about. This time it was something he'd done with his Sabotage Times venture which was, he promised, "the end of podcasts". I wasn't very sure whether for most people podcasts could ever have been said to have begun but I had a look. It was a bunch of people (nine is the limit at the moment) chatting about football on video with James as moderator. Technology was a bit clunky but you could see what they were getting at.
Back at the office I told Fraser and he looked into it. Turns out it's a Google + product called Hangouts. The point of telling you this is because Fraser's sign-off resounded in my memory. It is, he said, "just another thing".
Just Another Thing. If the world could be said to need a further book about the internet it ought to be called Just Another Thing. Every month along comes a new way of slicing our attention and dicing the material. It always promises to be transformational. You hurry to install it, you show it to a few mates, and then you consign it to the digital equivalent of the loft where it can gather dust alongside the nerd equivalent of the rowing machine and the bread maker.
While tapping out this post I've got an email from Lefsetz. It starts with this line. "Playlists. They're the new radio." It's more likely that they're Just Another Thing.
The thing about Bob is that no one enthuses quite like him, and of all the email in my inbox, I do tend to read his first. The mantra of hard work and high quality product being the only way to achieve longevity is an excellent one, but finding out about these new acts is difficult because the facade of music as portrayed by the major players is just sterile. So a playlist formatted by someone you trust has to be a good thing.
ReplyDeleteBesides, Bob told me about The Dunwells, and they are ace. And he likes Yes, so leave him alone, there aren't many of us left!!
My feeling with technology is if a new idea has any sort of traction it will almost certainly do two things...
ReplyDelete1. Get cheaper
2. Get better
That's why I tend to be a late adopter. Now, I'm just going out to check out one of those new-fangled mobile phone thingies. Folk tell me they're all the rage. They just might catch on.