The BBC's chief operating officer, Caroline Thomson, is in The Guardian today talking to 'media executives' about 6 Music. Her point - sit down before you read this - is that 37-year-olds (37 being the age of 6 Music's average listener) are catered for by commercial radio. She goes on to make some good points about the BBC's critics but Christ alive the idea that everybody aged 37 (or any age) enjoys the same type of music is so ridiculous that it would be funny were it not coming from the mouth of someone who actually has some control over the BBC's new strategy.

You have to admire the spunk of someone who can stand up in front of media execs and claim with a straight face that someone who currently spends all day listening to Broken Bells, Vampire Weekend and French Horn Rebellion (all of whom, we feel compelled to point out here, are shit) on 6 Music will in any way be well catered for by the commercial sector, but let's be serious here: 6 Music's listeners will be no better served by the commercial sector than a man with no arms would be by a lifetime's supply of mittens. This is stated quite clearly in the Steve Lamacq story we linked in today's Newsdump, in which a former operations director (ie bigwig) at GCap Media (now Global, who run Capital, Heart etc) says that "commercial radio can never replicate 6 Music's cultural value – it's not viable for us to do so. We will gain nothing from this closure yet the music industry will lose much".

So that's 6 Music, but the other thing we would like to mention today (and we really will stop banging on about it after this) is that anybody who claims that Radio 1's mainstream output is replicated in the commercial sector is similarly mental. This is where the world's greatest website comparemyradio.com comes up again. Let's compare what Radio 1 played last month with what Capital FM (to pick an example out of the air) played last month.

Most of Radio 1's critics - mainly people who never listen to the station or any other mainstream radio and think Radio 1 is just 24-hour Chris Moyles - simply have no grasp of how the station operates after 7pm, or how well it caters for new music across multiple specialist genres. Even in daytime, taking the playlist into account, Radio 1 is hardly as 'OMG Cheryl Cole' as the station's more clueless critics seem to imagine. As comparemyradio.com puts it:

We're not saying Radio 1 is perfect but, as with 6 Music, its critics should at least know what it is they're criticising because otherwise the whole debate is just a complete shitshow.

 

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the DMCA.

On the one hand, as an author, I like that it gives me a way to stop illegal copies of my work being distributed in the US, so ensuring that I can continue to make a living without having to get a proper job. On the other hand, as an occasional journalist, I hate that it can also be used by trigger-happy lawyers to prevent certain embarrassing documents entering the public domain.

Thus conflicted, it was with some trepidation that I received news from the old country that Gordon Brown’s government is getting ready to enact its very own version of the DMCA. Called the Digital Economy Bill (DEB), the new statute aims – amongst other things – to halt the rising tide of intellectual property theft on the Internet. But unlike the DMCA, its reach won’t be limited to national borders: any site anywhere in the world that’s accessible from the UK needs to obey the law or else it’s liable to find itself blocked from the entire country. I’m not kidding, this is China-level enforcement.

Paul Carr presents some interesting comment on the Digital Economy Bill which the government are doing all they can to push through. Crucially though, he seems to have read it (unlike most moaning commentators), and points out that it isn't as bad as people think. Most important of all, instead of just shouting about it, he suggests constructive improvements! Well worth a read of the full article.

David Mitchell

Reading literature makes you a more well-rounded individual." That's what an author told me once. Notice he didn't say "watching literature.

Click the link to tuaw.com and read the whole article - a great take on how Penguin seem to want to use the iPad to decimate their heritage.

Watch in HD, it's much better. Beautiful video of New York, no models involved, just clever shooting techniques.

The BBC has lost confidence in its own vision.

The BBC has been able to innovate and experiment because of its unique funding and remit. At a time of great uncertainty in the media industry, people look to the BBC to take a lead, and it continues to do this with initiatives such as Project Canvas. But ironically it seems that Mark Thompson does not ‘get’ digital in the way that even his much-maligned predecessor John Birt did. And while consumption of media continues to evolve with the rise of on-demand content across different platforms the BBC’s response seems lacking in conviction. Where the BBC once led fearlessly, it now seems fearful and curiously out of step.

Again, read the whole article if you're interested, but in this case the quoted paragraph stood out for me.

The following is an extract from this article. Go read the whole thing!

Still, even if 6 Music were to be killed – which would be a shame – it would hardly spell the end for BBC Radio. But imagine if BBC Radio’s budget were cut, not by 1.5%, but by 25% – that’s £147 million. Here’s what they’d have to chop:

• Radio 1
• Radio 2
• Radio 3

and they’d still need to find £2 million to make up the shortfall. A 25% cut would cripple BBC Radio.

Or let’s look at TV, which the BBC spends £2.335 billion on. A 25% cut would require savings of £584 million, and for that, you’d need to axe:

• BBC 2 (including Horizon, The Thick of It, Mastermind, University Challenge, Songs of Praise, Newsnight…)

Alternatively, you could kill everything other than BBC 1 and BBC 2, which would mean saying goodbye to:

• BBC 3
• BBC 4
• CBBC
• CBeebies
• BBC Alba (BBC Scotland)
• BBC News 24
• BBC Parliament
• BBC Red Button
• BBC HD

Either way, the BBC’s TV operation would be devastated.

The BBC's Budget (click to zoom in)

Thankfully, no-one is proposing 25% cuts in TV or Radio. No, they’re just proposing it for BBC Online.

A really good article on why the BBC's Strategic Review's biggest threat is the proposed cuts to Online. I recommend clicking the link to read the whole article.

Excited already. I'm totally cool, right?!

I'm not advocating piracy (I rather like my legit DVD collection), but this is the most compelling description I've seen yet of how the studios screw the consumer and then complain when the consumer goes elsewhere.

An interesting article on new features that the iPad has which Apple should bring to the iPhone. Very interesting that the iPad allows file synching in a USB Mass Storage style way, but whilst maintaining the application sandboxing of the iPhone. And the ability for the system to launch 3rd party applications to display certain file types (much like a PC/Mac does) is nice too. Seems like the iPad is shaping up to be an interesting device...

Update: More info from AppleInsider.

Most of the iPad reactions I've read have been negative, but I have been completely satisfied with what Apple announced. iPad is exactly the product I've been wishing for ever since I wrapped my mind around the iPhone and its constraints. While the rumor mill was churning with all kinds of crazy possibilities for the Apple tablet, I mostly rolled my eyes, because I felt strongly that all Apple needed to do to revolutionize computing was simply to make an iPhone with a large screen. Anyone who feels underwhelmed by that doesn't understand how much of the iPhone OS's potential is still untapped.

I spent a year and a half attempting to reduce a massive, complex social networking website into a handheld, touch-screen form factor. My goal was initially just to make a mobile companion for the facebook.com mothership, but once I got comfortable with the platform I became convinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that was actually better than the website! Of all the platforms I've developed on in my career, from the desktop to the web, iPhone OS gave me the greatest sense of empowerment, and had the highest ceiling for raising the art of UI design. Except there was one thing keeping me from reaching that ceiling: the screen was too small.

At some point I came to the conclusion that Facebook on iPhone OS could not truly exceed the website until I could adapt it to a screen size closer to a laptop. It needed to support more than one column of information at a time. I couldn't fit enough tools on the screen to support any kind of advanced creative work. Photos were too small to show off to my far-sighted parents. The web required too much panning and zooming to enjoy reading. Beyond just Facebook, most of the apps I used most on my iPhone also suffered from these limitations, like Google Reader, Instapaper, and all image, video, and text editing tools. The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors. We just have to invent them.

Opportunity

iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you're a developer and you're not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.

True, iPad 1.0 has a lot of limitations which make it hard to be compared to a laptop today. We're not there yet, people, but does it really take that much imagination to see how we will get there? Apple clearly wants to increase its investment in iPhone OS and reduce its investment in Mac OS X. At some point in the near future, Apple will adapt iPhone OS to even larger screens, add multi-tasking, and release something like a laptop or iMac with the OS. When it happens, it will make perfect sense, because by then there will be orders of magnitude more iPhone/iPad apps on the App Store than there ever were for Mac OS X and Windows.

A Closed Platform?

Given my concerns about the way Apple runs the App Store, you might expect me to jump on the bandwagon screaming about how Apple is evil and iPad is the death of open computing. Nonsense. My only problem with Apple is the fact that they insist on pre-approving every app on the App Store. The store may not be open, but the iPhone/iPad platform itself could hardly be more open to tinkerers of all ages.

The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app "closed" is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can't just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.

As a developer, it's a bit sad losing the ability to come up with crazy plugins and daemons and system-level utilities, but I believe it's a tradeoff worth making. What people are overlooking is that the Internet is an integral part of the iPhone OS, and it is the part of the OS you can tinker with to your heart's delight. If you want to invent a new scripting language or background service or something, you're still totally free to do that, but you're going to have to run it on a web server. If you want total freedom on the client side, then write a web app. You're simply no longer going to be able to tempt users into installing software that corrupts their computer.

So, in the end, what it comes down to is that iPad offers new metaphors that will let users engage with their computers with dramatically less friction. That gives me, as a developer, a sense of power and potency and creativity like no other. It makes the software market feel wide open again, like no one's hegemony is safe. How anyone can feel underwhelmed by that is beyond me.

NEW shiny thing make everything all better, say clever science man yesterday.

Science man say shiny thing is telly and books. And good for seeing photos of you and everyone, and also naked people who do mucky things.

Science man say shiny thing 'changes game' and now all the other science men must go away and be sad.

Science man say: "All things everyone have are rubbish. Look! Telly and books! That will be £400 please thank you."

Nikki, a girl who has had 27 birthdays and works in a big building, say: "Oooooooooh. It do telly. I will see telly on it and make it help me buy nice hats.

"And look! It fit in bag where I have keys and little talkie box and red goo I put on face."

Tom, all grown-up man from busy place, say: "I very busy man who need see telly on big metal tube that take me to busy job.

"But look! It also play game! I play noisy game on metal tube and be happy."

And Bill, really, really old man who sits in chair all day, say: "It make words happen by pointing at it. Oooooooooh.

"I will make it help me say clever words to newspaper about gypsies and Pakistan.

"AND IT DO TELLY!"