The Daily Grind

In years to come, we’ll recognise the disjointed, unedited style of email pecked out on an iPhone as a distinct literary style.

I’ve been in Cardiff all week, mostly editing. To keep you happy in the meantime, see this. Gosh.

For the record, I think Flickr’s imposition of a 90-second limit on video is inspired. It doesn’t necessarily help what I’m trying to do, but somebody has to take a stand against the proliferation of turgidly long films. Flickr realising that, as a still photography site, they have the perfect excuse, and then making it a hard rule – bold and brave. Bravo!

Likes: Creative Commons video hosting. Oh yeah.

Dislikes: No downloads?

Handy little post over at FontShop on the different types of figures available (oldstyle and lining, proportional and tabular), and when each is appropriate to use.

(via Chairman Gruber)

I missed this guest post on TechCrunch last year, about how to get your videos to climb the YouTube charts. It’s worth reading, in part because it’s rather depressing, though do see the follow-up.

Still too much for you? Here’s a viral video!

Ouch.

Things to remember, though:

• YouTube isn’t the only video site that’s important. It’s merely the most visible one. It’s a very broad, unfocussed audience. Is that what your video needs?
• 100,000 views is, in the UK, minority cable/satellite channel territory. The rule of thumb for BBC2 evenings used to be that one million viewers was a bit low, two million meant a recommission. 100,000 views globally is trivially small. Hence:
• What matters isn’t volume, it’s proportion. What proportion of your target audience sees your video?

It’s entirely valid for your video to have a target audience of one. If that person sees your film, and they react the way you’d hoped, then the other 99,999 viewers are either bonus or irrelevance.

We’ve known for a while that there are people in central government who are Mighty Clever. No, really – stop sniggering at the back. After all, somebody signed off on this, not to mention this.

But now: @downingstreet on Twitter? Probably easiest to follow via the relevant Quotably page.

This may not be the sort of thing that will scale to 60 million people, but still – good on them for trying.

[Update:

! ]

The new Sterling coin designs: how much genius is on display there? I can’t begin to say how much I love this throw-out-the-rulebook take on currency tokens.

Three observations:

1. They’ve set back the cause of entering the European single currency by at least a decade. These things are just too damned pretty to give up.

2. They’ve given me hope that the 2012 Olympics might be Dashed Good rather than the UK-default A Bit Crap. After all, everyone visiting will be handing around these tokens of British modernity – how could they not be enjoying themselves?

3. I think this is the official end of Steampunk. At least until some smart artist realises that the coins are to steampunk as The Next Generation was to The Original Series.

Blimey, I missed that. April 1st 2002 marked my first post to this blog, complete with misspelling of ‘Movable Type.’ Only a day later, I was thinking of giving up.

Those of you waiting for an interesting post to come along can rest assured that, by the law of averages, you’ve probably less than a decade to go.

My first post to collect comments, by the way, was from July of that year, and concerned John Prescott. I’ve no idea to whom those commenters thought they were writing.

What’s with ‘Recent posts’ lists giving the titles of the articles that are already on the front page? What’s the point of that? Does anyone ever click those links? Quick, someone install a heat map thingy and find out. But even if they do click, wouldn’t it make more sense for the heading to be ‘Current posts’?

Now, I realise that Movable Type and WordPress’ respective widgets default to being set up like this, but it’s never made any sense to me. This is why I’ve always added offset="10" to the thingy in the sidebar doofah.

Next pet blog hate: bloggers who don’t bother with categories and keywords and tags and so on.

Oh.

Bother.

“I don’t think even Google could cope with funding an open bar in Glasgow.”
— Kevin Marks.