April 2003 Archives
April 30, 2003
Thinking long term
I'm a sucker for long range thinking like this note on the relative durability of storage media from Slashdot (thanks to Brad De Long for the link).
Thinking long term, I just renewed my subscription to the indispensible Future Survey, "a monthly abstract of books, articles, and reports concerning forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future", from the only-slightly-kookie World Future Society.
April 29, 2003
Britain's biggest flow chart magazine?
What's a flow chart? "A method for showing how information flows around a system using stylised boxes and arrows which show the direction of flow?". "A pictorial summary that shows with symbols and words the steps, sequence, and relationship of the various operations involved in the performance of a function or a process?" No. You fool. It's a teen craze!
(click the little picture for the whole cover of Mizz Flowchart Magazine)
Two 9/11 books
Michael Tomasky reviews William Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center in the New York Review of Books. Langewiesche was the only journalist to be allowed access to Ground Zero for the whole of the cleanup process, conducted by the City's previously obscure Department of Design and Construction, so this is a book about inventiveness and public service rather than epic heroism and sacrifice.
Maira Kalman's Fireboat is a kids' picture book about the New York City fireboat John J. Harvey, brought out of retirement to fight the fires at Ground Zero on 9/11. It's beautifully made and very moving (we've all been sobbing round here). Maira Kalman is a designer/illustrator and generally super-creative person. For thirty years she was wife and business partner to the legendary Tibor Kalman who died in 1999.
April 28, 2003
Memory at the British Museum
Bloggers will love 'The Museum of the Mind', a new exhibition in The Great Court at the British Museum: odds and sods assembled to support a larger purpose – a sort of physical semantic web. The show is a clever window onto the museum's vast collections focused on memory in all its aspects. Materials from just about every collection in the building are gathered together, in a well-organised single-room show.
There's a gorgeous (and specially made) Mexican Day of the Dead shrine to the museum's founder Sir Hans Sloane, an amazing twig-and-shell mnemonic device used by Pacific navigators, ancient Roman and Greek memorial statuary and a Ghanaian coffin carved in the shape of a Cadillac.
The paradoxical thing about clever, information-rich shows like this is that they can only undermine the case for retaining the huge Western hordes of looted artefacts. Once you wrap the object in its human context – making connections – its status actually declines. It may be a beautiful, haunting object but here it's just part of the information mix – a plaster cast would work just as well. Retaining the originals just seems like more indefensible Imperial greed.
There's also an instructive comparison to be made between the ancient artefacts, most of which were looted, and the more recent items, most of which were probably bought on the open market or commissioned from their makers: the expropriatory economics of empire vs. the consensual economics of trade.
The accompanying book, by the museum's top ethnographer, John Mack, is also pretty good.
April 26, 2003
Building Magazine on why construction needs migrant workers
Gordon Brown's announcement of a larger quota for desperately needed overseas construction workers is cue for a good piece from Building magazine about migrant workers on UK sites. The article focuses on the experience of workers on the huge Paternoster Square development, next door to St Paul's Cathedral in The City – from Italy, Hungary, Zimbabwe and Germany. This is the kind of access only a prestige trade title like Building could get but it's crying out for a longer treatment – five workers from four nations on one well-run site is hardly an in-depth survey.
The magazine's coverline sums up the UK building trade's attitude to migrant workers: "The indispensibles: why construction needs migrant workers".
Planet Parent
Juliet's latest Planet Parent column is up at Tigerchild. It's about the remarkable ability of our 4 year-old Oliver to get spontaneously grubby.
April 25, 2003
Better Writer
12 or 13 years ago I used a Mac Word Processor called Nisus Writer. It was fast and cheap and it easily fit on a 400K floppy. I think I sort of assumed that Nisus had fallen beneath the wheels of the Word Juggernaut (like WordPerfect) but it's just popped up again, in gorgeous OS X (proper Cocoa) beta form with a very clean UI, good integration with OS X, super fast performance and some geeky things like PERL scripting (like I know what that is). The native file format is Rich Text Format but it reads and writes Word files (a bit buggy in the beta). I'm not an anti-MS zealot but I did take some pleasure switching from Powerpoint to Keynote a few months ago and I reckon I'm going to enjoy dumping Word too.
Google buys another company
Azeem explains Google's acquisition of a search tech business called Applied Semantics. He also seems to think I should understand this well enough to provide some kind of commentary. Sadly he is wrong. Anyway, Applied Semantics sounds like something from a William Gibson novel.
And the winner is...
Jonathan Bell, who looks after the excellent Things weblog, got an email off to me quicker than nine other people in response to this entry so he gets to read the LRB for nothing for the next year...
Book trade snippets
From The Bookseller.
Ten (that's all ten) of the current top ten bestsellers in the Children's Non-fiction category are by the same author. They're all from Terry Deary's series of 'Horrible Histories' for secondary school kids, with names like 'The Terrible Tudors', 'The Barmy British Empire' and 'The Rotten Romans'.
The thinning out of the legendary strip of bookshops on the East side of London's Charing Cross Road (one of London's most important cultural resources) continues – both branches of Zwemmer's Art Bookshops were this week repossessed by their landlords, the non-profit Soho Housing Association. Zwemmer's claims all is well and that the eviction is just part of a particularly tough round of lease negotiations. Ian Shipley, who runs the excellent Shipley's Art Bookshop in the same block, obviously isn't so sure: "There used to be bookshops all the way from the National Gallery to the British Museum. If this lot go, what's the point in me staying?" (free subscription required).
One third of British adults didn't buy a book in the last year and 20% neither bought nor read one. 54% classify themselves as either light- or non-readers (survey of 2000 people - free subscription required)
April 24, 2003
A Pomfret at Blacks
Lunch today with Andrew Swift (not pictured), big fish at Price Jamieson, top recruiters to the media and marketing communities. We talked about Barcelona, weblogs, the crash and recruitment advertising. Very interesting. Nice Pomfret, too.
April 23, 2003
Blue collar thrills
There's a village in the flatlands of South Northamptonshire called Podington. Nearby is what used to be a US Airbase. In 1966, some locals decided to introduce the frankly weird and unsuitable US sport of drag racing to the abandoned runway and, in honour of its American roots, they called the track Santa Pod Raceway – borrowing some glamour from all those hot, dry Californian salt pans and desert strips, I suppose.
The school holidays are almost over so I took Olly (4) to Santa Pod's 'Easter Thunderball Pro Fuel Shootout' on bank holiday Monday. A meeting like this is a kind of working class Henley Regatta, a huge family picnic with candy floss, an aerobatic display, dodgems, a Wall of Death and chip vans – all set to the utterly impenetrable howling and grinding soundtrack of the cars themselves. Whole conversations are conducted in mime. Hot dog vendors lip read.
The noise is the main thing. The only thing, really. It's more than a noise. It's a big shock the first time you hear it. Less like the rumble of a big engine than a huge, percussive grunt or crash with no apparent source – the gates of hell come to mind. It's so huge and so physical (stuck for adjectives: acute? Cataclysmic? Shocking? Visceral?) that it makes you want to cry (like the opera).
Most races last 5 or 6 seconds. There's a persistent smell of exotic substances (methanol, nitrous oxide) and burning rubber, the track is continually sprayed with an acrid degreaser ("cover your children's eyes, ladies and gentlemen. Just a mild irritant"), a single run will use 40 litres of fuel. Crashes and engine failures are routine (although hardly anyone gets hurt).
Drag racing is the pursuit of a simple, 1940s teen pastime to its logical (but entirely unreasonable) conclusion. It's all about prosperity, abundant free time, permissive traffic laws and cheap gas. It has to be the least environmentally-friendly pursuit on earth and it's a total anachronism (I feel a bit dirty talking about it). The kids who raced their Chevys and Fords between traffic lights in little post-war Californian towns can have had no idea that such a rich and strange culture would result (huge in Norway, apparently). I think I'm addicted.
(tip: get some ear defenders for your kids. They sell them at the raceway).
Click on the small nine-frame pic above to confirm that I really didn't manage to catch a dragster in a single one of those nine photos!
Some links: Some of those mind-blowing sounds from the US (although they're a pretty pale reflection of the cacophany at the raceway). Some great and evocative pics of drag racing in the UK in the 1960s. Lots of pictures and videos of more recent UK drag racing. The Santa Pod site plays a sound when you load it and I think it might be the first one I've ever approved of.
April 22, 2003
Wanna free subscription to the London Review of Books?
As a subscriber to the LRB I'm allowed to give a free subscription to a friend but, since you can't have more than one freebie, my candidate friends are all ineligible. So, if you'd like to get the LRB for a year for nothing (and you're sure you've never subscribed before), send me your name and full (UK) address.
April 21, 2003
Emerging Man
Comedian and geek Samuel Johnson Danny O'Brien has put together a happening of such perfect, involuted cleverness that it takes the breath away. It's basically a sleepover for people attending O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference (and you have to provide your own tent) but, if you get your skates on, you could find yourself singing campfire songs in Danny's garden with some of the top geeks of their generation.
It's meant to marry the social experimentation of Burning Man and the geek credibility of Emerging Tech – events of such sizzling contemporaneity that you'll probably actually burst into flames (appropriately) if you attend. I'd love to go myself except for the scheduled arrival of EmergingBaby in our house on May 1. (Oh, and it's a Wiki).
What's a Mook?
The Guardian is promoting a new partnership with postal video rental outfit Movietrak. I tried it out and got Martin Scorcese's Mean Streets, a movie I haven't watched in a decade, the next day. The DVD is beautifully packaged in a bag that doubles as a post-paid return envelope. The whole concept is very well thought out. Isn't it remarkable that, in a home like ours, with broadband, dozens of movie channels on digital TV (including a 'near video on demand' service) and a perfectly good video shop half a mile away, services like Movietrak's can still find a niche?
Ten years ago I'd have told you that Mean Streets was my favourite movie. These days I wouldn't. The film is much too ragged. But those ten years have obviously added something else to my perspective. The courage and energy needed to push through a first feature like this one, to marshal those resources (De Niro, Keitel, New York City...) and to keep the whole thing moving at such a pace are unarguable and breathtaking. If I get a chance to create something half as good, half as authentic, just once in my life, I'll die happy.
April 20, 2003
The Anglosphere defined
This is what I pay my licence fee for. Dennis Sewell with Jonathan Freedland from The Guardian, Anne McElvoy from The Evening Standard, Stephen Pollard from stephenpollard.net and Michael Gove from The Times on the BBC's
(I think you have until next Saturday 26 April to listen to the programme before the archive is overwritten – how stupid is that?)
Is this what they call an 'experience brand'?
Brands can be complicated things. This one may be a business but it's also a national sporting figurehead wired tightly into the Italian psyche, a rich man's plaything that most of its fanatical fans could never afford to own and the most erotically charged engineering in history.
"In the agony, it seems, was the ecstasy. Ferrari's appeal turned out to be something subtler than a simple thirst for victory. The suffering was the story. Once the Ferrari team turned into a steamroller, the passion lost its intensity."
(this Guardian article was written before Schumacher won the San Marino Grand Prix and permitted Italians to breathe again).
April 17, 2003
A temporal web?
The semantic web is a powerful thing but it's... well... semantic. Trying to imagine the net in the future, it becomes obvious that we're going to need a temporal web too. Living, as we do, in the first moments of the web's existence, we haven't needed to think much about time. It's as if everything that's taken place so far all happened in a single, cataclysmic moment.
Once the web's lifespan starts to stretch – across generations and centuries – we're going to need an accessible historic record. Something that's 'online' (as in 'not offline in a tape library') and preferably 'inline' (continuous with the current content). In this article for The Guardian I visualise this as a 'giant rewind knob for the web'.
My example is the war in Iraq. Imagine the benefits to humanity in the future of being able to rewind to any point in the rolling popular history we call blogging and take a snapshot of the state of the war and opinion about it. More to the point, with so much information, conversation and collaboration moving onto the net, imagine a future without it.
In the article I also wonder if we, in the UK, shouldn't be pressing the BBC to take on this task. Lots of people think the BBC's proper role on the net should be to boost connection and participation (and there is some ambitious work going on already). Perhaps, as well as promoting communication, the Beeb ought also to be promoting recollection.
(Maybe the techies out there can tell me if this kind of work is already going on. I'm pretty sure Kahle's Way Back Machine is going in the right direction but it's a long way from being fine-grained enough and it certainly can't present historic content 'inline')
What every impoverished, campaigning magazine needs: a millionaire editor
Turns out The Ecologist magazine is edited (and underwritten) by millionaire and eco-fanatic Zac Goldsmith. I just came across the magazine myself and thought it good enough to subscribe. They even have a reasonably open web archive so should get some inbound traffic from weblogs.
3G debt and gross vanity
Crushing debt and an evaporating market: it must be bracing working in the 3G arm of a mobile operator these days. A couple of good features from yesterday's FT (I think you can still see them for nothing for a few days). The first discusses the difficulty of raising money for 3G infrastructure investment post-crash (one Portugese licence holder has been waiting nine months to close a loan for 3G build-out). Worse, according to the second, customers don't want the early, clunky, battery-hungry 3G handsets either. You evidently need balls of steel to push forward with investment in a 3G business these days.
Fascinating article about the horrendous Richard Scrushy, thoroughly disgraced (but still rich) CEO of Health South, a huge US health care provider. Scrushy was so vain that he had statues of himself put up at the schools he sponsored. Predictably, these statues are now meeting the same fate as Saddam's. The FT calls the Health South scandal 'grosser than Enron'. Here's a useful special report from Scrushy's local paper, The Birmingham News from Alabama.
April 16, 2003
And watch out for those pea-soupers...
Strange 'insider tips' from The Economist's London City Guide that came through my letterbox the other day, apparently cut and pasted from a 1950s travel guide:
Table manners are keenly observed as a sign of good breeding. Never talk with your mouth full; never reach across the table; do not wave cutlery around or yell "I'm done" to the waiter. The British are less politically correct than their American counterparts. Wittiness often means an agility with sexual innuendo, with a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The woes of public transport are a sure-fire way of reviving a flagging conversation.
Ironic? Out of touch? You decide.
April 15, 2003
"a striking new bird for the future"
The last time Penguin gave its Puffin kids' imprint a new logo was in the year I was born, 1963. In the same year Puffin published Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and The Opies' Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes – a good year. The old logo is evocative – it rushes me back 35 years to a small shelf of carefully organised Puffins in my bedroom. The new one "bears a stronger resemblance to its ornithological roots. It is a softer more curvy design and the lozenge and the tone of the colour version tie it much more strongly to the Penguin logo" according to this press release...
April 14, 2003
Things are getting better
Will Hutton's a pretty stern critic of the Blair project but you'd be hard put to read this article from The Observer as anything other than an endorsement of Labour's record on public services. To quote the standfirst:
"Things are getting better in health, education and the fight against crime – we've got the figures to prove it."
Phones that go bling
Nokia are betting they can create a super-luxury mobile phone brand. It's called Vertu. £15,000 buys you a pretty ordinary GSM phone (called an 'instrument') in a hand-tooled platinum, white gold or silver enclosure. They're borrowing explicitly from the vocabulary of hand made mechanical watches and they come with a one-button concierge service for helpless billionaires.
I guess it's logical to expect this kind of luxury segment to emerge as the market matures, in fact, Frank Nuovo, Nokia's California-based head of design, tells the FT (subscription) that they're now designing phones "...for six separate product categories: Premium at the top; Fashion ("stylishly provocative and creatively trend-conscious"); Classic; Expression; Active ("healthy active sports and leisure"); and Basic. He believes these categories will grow more diverse".
Moore's law doesn't apply in the world of timepieces, though, so unless the Vertu 'intruments' can be upgraded continually into the future it's hard to see them becoming heirlooms. The Vertu is more LA bling than Zurich swank. It'll fit in nicely on the dash of that Escalade you've been thinking about.
April 13, 2003
No no no no no
Er, excuse me for blurting out my first reaction but have you lost your mind? An Apple takeover of Vivendi Universal Music will inevitably be a disaster. Much as I love the cat-among-the-pigeons potential of a tech counter-strike deep in the heart of showbiz-land, we now have decades of evidence that mega-mergers like this one almost always destroy value (and sometimes wipe out the merging businesses).
Here's an idea: resist the mechanical logic of a merger – "we got a platform, they got content" – the kind of logic that produced AOL/Time Warner. Leave Vivendi Universal to dispose of its music division to some old school media mug and spend that cash pile on technology, design and marketing – stuff that will more directly produce high margin sales which is what a 2% market share luxury goods player like Apple needs most. Thanks to Jack Schofield at Online Blog for the the link.
SARS links, scary and otherwise
Azeem provides the scariest SARS link so far. The cold statistics show the ineluctable progress of a disease vector. Global SARS cases are doubling every 14 days:
"There will be 100,000 cases on about June 20, 2003. A million cases will be reached on about August 6, 2003, and ten million on about September 21, 2003."
The graph plots current daily WHO data and can't take account of longer term changes to the trend that accompany any epidemic so it's very unlikely, even in the worst case, that the actual numbers will approach these but the lesson is pretty clear: many more will get ill before the outbreak is contained.
New Scientist is building a very useful SARS page with about a dozen SARS stories and links, including a useful FAQ (you may need a subscription or a free trial to see these stories but it's probably worth it).
April 11, 2003
Said on the war
I supported this war. I did it in a queasy, compromising way – like all the pro-war lefties I know. I have a phrase: "...conditional support". I don't feel any more comfortable now than I did before the invasion began but my support holds, although I'm keeping open the possibility that I've made an enormous mistake. It'll probably be a brilliant article like this one, by Edward Said, a man I admire hugely, that convinces me I have:
"This is the most reckless war in modern times. It is all about imperial arrogance unschooled in worldliness, unfettered either by competence or experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unrepentant in its violence and the cruelty of its technology. What winning, or for that matter losing, such a war will ultimately entail is unthinkable. But pity the Iraqi civilians who must still suffer a great deal more before they are finally 'liberated'."
Many good design-related links here...
About fifty good links on this page from the New Things weblog. I won't bother trying to highlight any. I suggest you just wade in (thanks to Sense for the link).
A distributed business
Up many flights of stairs to the not-very-glamorous offices of brainy trend-spotters Sense Worldwide. Jeremy Brown, Tom Savigar, Raj Panjwani and Inma Martinez run an unusual business, employing only 8 staff but with on-demand access to about 1,000 other people from a global email network of egg heads, designers, fashion victims, people watchers and journos (Sensers, they're called). Very contemporary, very distributed, very cool. Sense recently spawned a clutch of pretty good new weblogs too.
Pilger vs. Lloyd in The New Statesman
Absolutely compelling war writing in this week's New Statesman. John Pilger's article is bitter, Messianic, despairing stuff. For him, the actual conduct of the war confirms everything he said and thought in advance: "...a glimpse of fascism". John Lloyd – one time editor of the magazine – is a pro-war Blairite. His angry article is the last he'll write for the anti-war Statesman.<(You can now buy a 24 hour pass to read New Statesman articles online for a quid. Very clever idea and a pioneering effort for a small, impoverished political zine. Admirable)
April 08, 2003
Radio stars
To unlovely Shoreditch via lovely Liverpool Street Station with its disfiguring retail warts (the station concourse and train shed remain beautiful but only if you hold up your hand to block out the ghastly sediment of Sock Shops and Soup Shacks up to about first floor level) to meet Matt Hall (pictured), head of radio for Somethin' Else and Tamsin Hughes, top radio producer, to talk about... a radio programme. What else?
Somethin' Else is a success story of the post-independent-production-quota broadcast landscape. Despite the economic slowdown and the recent dot.com unpleasantness the firm still produces hundreds of hours of TV and radio for the Beeb and other outlets (including British Airways jets). They're responsible, for example, for one of the BBC's biggest external commissions, Jazz on 3 and for Channel 4's Black Like Beckham.
An Athens by the Central Line
So UpMyStreet – apparently a latterday Athens peopled entirely by cool, fun people who worry about things like geo-encoding their web site – has gone bust. Over at NTK the shock was so great they announced a total cessation of sarcasm for a minute to record the company's simultaneous slashdotting and receivership. Elsewhere, no one can find a bad word to say about UMS.
The thing is, this wasn't supposed to happen. While I was running another.com, we thought the UMS guys were golden. They were supposed to have survived the bust, they were supposed to have a bullet-proof (at least not chewing-gum and string) service-based business model with recurring revenues. They had groovy, meaningful technology and excellent people who weren't running-dog dot.com opportunists. What happened, guys?
April 07, 2003
Word out (but not up)
Word is a worthy and probably doomed attempt to tackle books, cinema, music, art... everything really... for literate middle-brows in one monthly magazine. It's the first project from the stellar Development Hell team, edited by Mark Ellen and with all sorts of top names popping up throughout: David Quantick, Paul du Noyer, John Naughton. It's even brainy enough to need a New Yorker-style front cover flap for extra copy lines and tasters.
I wish the mag well but they must get some kind of story archive onto the web sharpish. There's enough clever, topical, unpretentious writing here to produce a lot of inbound traffic from thousands of media junkie bloggers and, these days, that could make all the difference between a hit and yet another sad fourth issue closure.
Beeb to Charter renewal opponents: 'give up now'
According to Dan Milmo and Maggie Brown in The Guardian:
"The BBC has begun a three-year battle to secure its future and retain the £2.5bn licence fee by appointing a team of 50 to work on a new royal charter."
Most UK businesses and many of the corporation's most important competitors, especially online, employ fewer than 50 people in total. Forgive the crass analogy, but the Beeb is preparing the media equivalent of 'shock and awe' for opponents of the licence fee. Resistance is futile.
testing moblogging
Thanks to Robin I can now moblog properly! Pictures and words direct to this page from anywhere. Cool.
April 04, 2003
Churchillian in more ways than one
Ed Richards, principle advisor on Telecoms and new media to the Prime Minister until he took a job at Ofcom last week, reveals Tony Blair's decisiveness on Broadband Britain:
"First, I want you to tell me what this broadband thing is. Second, I want you to tell me why it's in crisis, and third, I want you to sort it out..."
Take-up for broadband is pretty impressive now, even from a very low base. According to NOP, a quarter of UK Internet households will be on broadband by the end of 2003. Blair's Churchillian approach might actually be working.
April 03, 2003
Mars please...
Oliver Morton, who wrote the excellent Mapping Mars, says in Wired that we should scrap the shuttle and head straight for Mars. I'm in.
Blogger injured, cameraman killed
On Monday night I blogged BBC Producer Stuart Hughes' excellent Northern Iraq weblog. This is from the BBC the following day:
"A cameraman working for the BBC in northern Iraq has been killed after stepping on a landmine. BBC correspondent Jim Muir and producer Stuart Hughes, who were working with Kaveh Golestan, were also injured in the explosion. The incident happened when the three men and a local translator were driving near the town of Kifri."
His last post before the incident is scarily prescient. Matt sent me the story.
Journos
To Blacks for lunch with Mike Nutley, editor of New Media Age (forgot to take his picture!). We talked about blogging (what else?). I don't know how he does it exactly, but he's been in charge at New Media Age through both boom and bust and managed to keep the magazine healthy and interesting throughout.
Then on to The Guardian to meet with Vic Keegan, Guardian veteran and editor of Guardian Online. Vic's been at The Guardian since before I was born and used to be the paper's chief leader writer before he started the Online section. Twenty years ago he started the pioneering Computer Guardian section and was responsible for bringing near-legendary Jack Schofield to the paper. He still writes a leader 'most days'. Also got to meet Vic's deputy, Neil McIntosh, briefly. Neil writes Macintosh pieces and is a regular contributor to the Online blog so I always read his stuff.
April 02, 2003
Fax help!
Somebody sent a fax to my J2 account (why?) and it has a .efx file extension and I can't open it on my Mac (OS X.2). Does anyone know if there's a way of converting it to TIFF? (and, yes, I have changed my J2 settings to TIFF for future faxes).
Hyper-real panorama
Hans Nyberg's latest 'QTVR of the day' is a suitably hyper-real spherical encounter with a public hearing of the 9-11 Commission in NYC, assembled by Jook Leung. These images are very unsettling. There's something about this totally immersive (and totally mute) imagery that can make even a snapshot of bureaucrats at work strange and enthralling.
(don't even try to load this page in Mozilla on OS X – your machine will lock!)
April 01, 2003
Google hacks
I blogged Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest's Google Hacks at the weekend and decided it was important enough to write up properly for 'Bowbrick at Large' at Guardian Unlimited.
Innovation in weird snacks
The ingenuity of British manufacturing industry continues to impress, even if its timing doesn't. The FT reports on an upmarket extension to the defiantly trashy Pot Noodle range from Unilever – and I mean upmarket. We're talking Wild Scottish Salmon, Kobe Beef, Caspian Caviar and Tuscan truffles. Apart from being a bit weird, this is textbook product innovation and a real sign of vitality in the sector but would you launch a new convenience food in the middle of a war? (The Confectionery Early Warning boys over at Snackspot have already issued their verdict, naturally).
Update: of course, I clocked this one as an April fool, no problem. Honest. To be really honest, I'd read the FT front to back and satisfied myself that there were no April Fool jokes in it. I think I'd convinced myself it must be something to do with the war...
Video phones and weblogging from a warzone
Stuart Hughes is a BBC journalist keeping a real weblog from somewhere in Northern Iraq. He's posting words, pictures and some audio and, amazingly, he has time to surf the web (how does he do that? Via his satphone? That's where my license fee is going, then...) so it's from Stuart that I got this link to a Slate article that answers my questions from the other day about these videophone gadgets. I learn, for instance, that they achieve the 128Kb necessary for a reasonable picture by lashing together two satphone lines.