download - TheWayoftheWeb

The end of the VCR generation

January 27, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Don’t worry, I haven’t slipped back 10 years to the launch of the DVD.

I’m just thinking about the speed of change in technology and business – inspired by an incredibly depressing trip to my local Blockbuster rental store on Saturday.

Two rows of rentals, a few racks of bargain-priced pre-owned DVDs and games and a few new releases for sale.

And while I’m a huge advocate of making content downloadable online, and services which mail DVDs to your door (like Blockbuster, Lovefilm and Netflix), so that you can forage in the Long Tail, I couldn’t help feeling sad at how the rental store has declined.

It’s probably showing my age, but I remember a time before Blockbuster showed up. The first local video store was a real ‘mom and pop’ type shop, and had a tiny selection, but for a young film fan whose family had just got their first video recorder, it was amazing.

Then I experienced Blockbusters. So many films under one roof that my first trip was almost accompanied by the kind of golden glow you’d see in TV adverts as I wandered down every row, checking out every possible title vying for my attention (Something I’ve never quite kicked, which is why I tend to get left to browse in record shops, video stores and computer games emporiums – few friends and family members have to make sure that they’ve checked every possible option for entertainment).

Sadly, the decline has been noticeable for a while, probably demonstrated by the fact I hadn’t paid a visit to my local store in at least a year.

I’ve got films on Freeview (whoever first put adverts in the middle of films and live sporting events should be shot, by the way), I’ve got films on demand via my Xbox 360, and I’ve been a happy subscriber to Lovefilm. And that’s despite UK broadband speed and data limits meaning I’ve been a latecomer to downloading films via PC or Xbox (TV via iPlayer is another matter!).

I’m not saying that DVD rental shops should be saved for any reason – the only possible solution I could envisage keeping them going for a while would be a Print-on-Demand service to burn a DVD of any catalogued film for those who don’t yet have the bandwith – but that’s a stopgap on the way to extinction.

It’s just rare sometimes to hear anyone advocating a digital revolution/evolution admit that they might feel bad about the end of a dying medium, and without a rational explanation!

Buffer

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bandwith, data, Digital TV/Video, download, dvd, online, rental, speed, uk broadband, video, video on demand, xbox 360

How to back-up your Twitter account and contacts

August 20, 2008 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

As fast as we’re twittering, new applications are appearing! Just last week I suggested to a friend we should work on a system for backing up Twitter information – this week there’s already a choice of two applications.

Tweetake will back up your Friends, Followers, Favourites, Your Tweets, or Everything from your Twitter account. It does warn that you’ll need to exit certain Twitter clients, like Tweetdeck. Within a minute or two, I had an Excel file with 19 days of my last Tweets, and a list of people with their name, id (number in which they joined Twitter), description, location, last status update, avatar location on Twitter’s servers, and whether their updates were protected. The only thing I couldn’t find was an indication of which ones were followers, and which ones were friends. So you really need to export your friends as a separate list.

It’s a nice quick system, but it relies on you regularly backing up your lists. One benefit is you can see how many people are on Twitter within your friends list – mine started with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone at 12 and 13, and went up to the highest number at 15,160,529, although there were about 20 people with strange id numbers.

Twittersafe, like Tweetake, requires you to sign in with your Twitter username and password. It takes a while to log in, and you’re presented with a red ‘Back Up’ button and a couple of sponsorship adverts. Click to Back Up and everything goes quiet for a while. There’s a blank bar, which I presume should be a status bar. And that seems to be about it.

There claims to be an option to download an Excel copy, and future features will possibly include one-click restoration of your followers, which might be handy. But unless someone else has more success, it’ll have to be Tweetake and manually re-adding people!

Buffer

Filed Under: Tools, twitter Tagged With: back-up, contacts, download, excel, export, followers, friends, store, tweeple, tweetake, twitter, twittersafe

Plurk sidebar tool for Firefox 2 and 3 already!

June 5, 2008 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

One of the great things about the current web revolution is that as soon as a website/application appears, someone clever figures out ways to tweak it to improve on it for their needs.

And so, as many people are discovering Plurk, TwisterMC aka Thomas McMahon, has already created a sidebar plugin for Firefox 2 and 3, to use the simplified mobile version of Plurk.

It comes with the Plurk logo of a headless ‘thing’ and a keyboard shortcut. The actual functionality of the sidebar is down to Plurk, and it’s being download right now for a test.

I’ve seen a couple of rumours that Plurk’s creators are too keen on third party applications being developed – perhaps down to Twitter’s downtime problems and the fact 90% of requests to Twitters database comes from external applications. But we’ll see…

Dan Thornton on Plurk.

Julius Solaris on Plurk

Want to keep up to date with the latest on microblogging? Subscribe via RSS here.

Buffer

Filed Under: Plurk, Tools Tagged With: application, download, firefox, firefox 2, firefox 3, free, mobile, plugin, plurk, sidebar, tool

Hitting the Nine Inch Nail with social marketing…

May 6, 2008 By Dan Thornton 4 Comments

Following on from the time-limited free download of the last Nine Inch Nails album, frontman Trent Reznor has made the latest 9-track record, Slip, completely available under a Creative Commons licence.

Aside from the announcement getting Dugg over 8000 times at the time of writing, the download allows better than CD quality, with a PDF of the artwork, and the following message:

“the slip is licensed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license.

we encourage you to
remix it
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc.

It’s the perfect use of loyal fans. NIN aren’t the kind of band who would generally get billboards and mainstream radio attention – but these way loyal fans will seek out the most relevant people to distribute the music and message to, with the added benefit that any remix will increase the chances of a NIN, or NIN-derived track becoming a hit – and meanwhile vinyl and CD junkies get a physical release in July, and NIN get more money from live performances and merchandise.

Just like in business, where small companies are able to get social media, and implement it far more easily across the board than Global Megacorp Inc, individual bands are way, way ahead of the music industry. As are intiatives like Slicethepie.com.

Buffer