Ice sheets seen on the way to SFO

This was a pretty inspiring sight...

Shortlist for top picks of 2007

Hi pop pickers. I've got some down time on a flight to San Francisco and want to line up the contenders for the 2007 top picks. So in no particular order here they are:

• Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
• Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare
• Bloc Party - Weekend in the City
• Justice - Cross
• Editors - The Back Room
• The Good, the Bad and the Queen
• The National - Boxer
• Radiohead - In Rainbows
• LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
• dntel - Dumb Luck

It looks like I'm doing a slightly better job of keeping up this year as only one of those albums is desperately out of date ;-)

I'm going to reacquaint myself with them over the coming week and then the countdown starts here.

Photos from the South West Coast Path

It was an amazing holiday.

One step forward and two steps back...

So there's been lots of chatter about the Kindle from Amazon. Engadget review here.

I haven't used one. I probably won't use one for a while, but I'm not going to let that stop me opining. I've heard that it's kind of big, kind of slow and that 'it looks like ass'. These are all the sort of version 0.1 comments you'd expect. The ebook is a big problem and it's going to take a few iterations before we get to a solution. Fair play to Amazon for tackling it head on.

What surprised me (and many others it seems) is that if you want to reada blog on the Kindle you've got to pay $1 per month. Per feed. This sounds like a joke right? But it isn't.

Worse that that, according to Seth Godin, there is no way for a feed owner to opt out. Either you're on the platform and your readers get charged or you're not on the platform.

I understand Amazon needs to turn a profit on the device and the cost of delivering the content, but there have to be better ways...

Greatest hits

I just added Mothership, the Best of Led Zepellin to my Amazon wish list.

I am a little schizophrenic when it comes to these greatest hits type compilations. On the one hand I feel like they don't really have a place in today's consumer driven, web-augmented digital music marketplace. On the other I end up buying quite a few (especially for 'classic' bands like Zep).

So, why do I think they're outmoded? Well it's not the format. I think the compilation is a great way to discover the music of a band especially if it's designed in a way to lead you from the hits to the hidden gems. I mainly object because I feel like my best of Led Zep should be somewhat different from yours. I love Kashmir, you love Whole Lotta Love. I love The National, you prefer Arctic Monkeys. This information and a lot more besides should shape the experience that Led Zepellin want to give us; the particular avenues of their rich musical history down which they want to lead us.

It seems as though this should be the bread and butter of last.fm or pandora, but for some reason it ain't. They tell me who's popular, which of their songs are the most popular and they even recommend generically songs I might like. But they won't tell me which Led Zep songs are just right for me...puzzling.

What I'd love to see is a band launch its 'best of' exclusively in conjunction with one of these services. You have to log in to get it and each user's compilation is automatically tailored to their specific musical tastes. Imagine t how much better an experience that would be. Imagine the PR a band would get. Imagine the follow on sales from listeners that understood the exact portion of their back catalogue to dive into.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Thinking aloud

So it's been a couple of months since I decided to give this blogging malarkey a serious shot. I set out to write 3 posts a week (12 - 15 a month) and my archive shows me I did a good job back in October but am a bit behind in November (I guess that's holidays for you!)

Excitingly, according to Feedburner I'm saying hello to whole 6 new readers! (All things start somewhere and I really appreciate your subs!)

I'm really enjoying the experience on a few different levels. First off, I've never been much of a diary keeper so it is novel for me to be able to look back and are what kind of things were on my mind and what my immediate reaction was to an event.

Another big thing is (re)learning how to write. As a guy who took an astrophysics degree, worked in banking for 6 years, and is now pedalling his excel skills at a big old internet firm, I have become king of the bullet point. But I love writing, and although it is sometimes a struggle, I think I'm slowly finding my style.

The biggest plus though is the platform that this blog gives me to think aloud. It's such a good way to help organise my thoughts on a topic or to determine exactly why I love a band. I'm hoping that over time this will be supplemented by more feedback from and interaction with you, dear reader ;-)

Anyway, I'll have to up the post rate this coming week if I'm going to keep my promise. I'll try and keep the quality up too!

2007's Top Finds - the Kick Off

It's almost that time of year again. A time when the nights are closing in and evenings are filled with seasonal merriment. A time when all of us reflect on the past year and contemplate the defining moments. A time when I pick out my musical Top 5!

Overall I think it's been a good year. There's been a lot of decent albums from the like of The National, Arctic Monkeys and Arcade Fire. There have been some notable disappointments such as Air's rather bland Pocket Symphony and the second half of Bloc Party's Weekend in the City. I don't think anything quite reached the glory of last year's ultimate winner The Eraser, but all in I've had a happy musical year.

So the form is: any record I discovered in 2007; 5 posts in reverse order; one sampler track per post; number one declared before Christmas Day.

I'll also seek out some competing lists from the blogging world and link to those.

Let's go!

Friend or feed?

If, like me, you read a lot of blogs I'll bet you do it via feeds in some kind of feedreader. Maybe you are even reading this blog that way - I hope so!

My preferred tool is Google Reader (I know, it's another plug, but I just can't help it). It's a great tool for organising the blogs I read into nice categorised streams and accessing them wherever I want (mobile, iGoogle, Reader, even offline). By using feeds and Reader I reckon I have scaled my reading list by a factor of 10. It means I can stay on top of industry news in downtime on the train or get a quick fix of science at my desk and I can't really imagine a world without it.

The benefits of feeds though are not just for consumers. As a blogger I love my feed too. Firstly because having a subscriber choose to add it to their reading list is such a strong endorsement and getting a new subscriber is a great kick. Secondly because I administer it through Feedburner who let me measure anything I could imagine and add all sorts of cool stuff to it.

So I guess it surprises me when blogs I read do things that tell me they don't love their feed. The cardinal amongst these sins IMHO is the dreaded 'preview' feed. Basically this abberation delivers a tiny snippet of the article into your feedreader and tries to get you to click through to the actual blog to read the full thing. Switching to this kind of feed is the fastest way to get yourself unsubscribed from my Blog Roll (and I bet I'm not alone in that). It's the absolute opposite of what I want from feeds. It slows me down. It doesn't work everywhere. It doesn't work offline. If you want people to read your content don't hide it from them!

So I got to thinking 'Why do well respected bloggers (like the chaps over at freakonomics) do such a crazy thing?'

Immediately two things sprang to mind. The first, as is so often the case, is money. You've got a nice website for your blog (like the new home for aBlog) and you've optimised the various ad placements to get a bit of revenue going and tour a happy bunny. All of a sudden you realise that there are a chunk of readers that are not seeing any of your ads. All those people on your feed are 'eyeballa' that you could monetise, if only they'd visit your site. So you switch to the preview feed and make sure all your feeloading subscribers pay for their consumption with their undiverted attention. I'm pretty sure this is the conversation that happened when freakonomics switched their Blog to the NY Times site. With all that expensive display inventory it must have been too tempting.

This is so wrong, I don't know where to start. First off just because there isn't viable monetisation for feeds today (despite some interesting first attempts) doesn't mean to say there won't ever be. Just ask yourself what is more valuable: someone who has sucked your content into their private mailbox through expression of wish and who will also receive every one of your future posts or a fleeting 'impression' of your site? Secondly the freakonomics team are in the business of spreading economic wisdom and selling books, every decision they make should be prefaced by a discussion about whether it could harm their subscuber base. Anyway the main point here is that on any level for a blogger it's subscribers and not impressions that matter.

The second reason for favouring your site over your feed is a little more understandable but, in the end, no less damaging. This reason is that your blog contains all sorts of other information that you want your readers to see. Mine has friendfeed, last.fm, my blogroll etc. And I really want readers to see that too. It's not bling, it's content. Here again the overriding factor should be respect for your readers. Tempting though it is to think that your widgets are important they're getting on fine without them. If it ain't broken...

That said I think there is a big market for the deed aggregator that let's me (and importantly my subscribers) choose what additional content is packaged into my feed. Tumblr are doing something like this by aggrgating various feeds, but it needs more controls publishers and crucially the ability for subscribers to opt in and put of carups elements of someone's feed. At the moment the process for publishers and subscribers alike is too complex. So let's see someone (feedburner?) come in and fix it.

Long old post that - sorry. Sometimes it's just good to get it off your chest.

A new home

Over the weekend I decided it was time to move aBlog to its own domain - how grown up! Truth be told, I was a little concerned that this would be a massive headache; moving a blogger domain requires access to the DNS settings on your domain and in my experience the cheap web hosters I've used before don't give you that.

So I decided to go with the Google / Blogger approved process and I have to say that Google hit the ball out of the park. The domain registration was cheap and easy (facilitated by eNom) using my Google Checkout account. Best of all the new domain came wrapped in a nice Google Apps sheep skin coat. This means that not only did I get a great Google powered UI for managing the domain (my number one gripe with the likes of streamline.net), and of course access to all the DNS settings I could need, but I got the added bonus of up to 100 4GB gmail accounts and access to hosted versions of Calendar, Google Docs etc.

Within a few minutes, this Blog was at it's new address, as was Pippa's, and as a bonus we both had shiny gawley.org email addresses.

I'm a big fan of google products (and yes, I know I'm biased) but this was one of the best user experiences I've had in years on a process I expected to be a clinky nightmare. Simple cheap and filled with nice surprises.

I hope you like aBlog's new home (and it's slightly cleaner look - I took the opportunity to clear out a few gadgets and tidy up the formatting). Pippa and I are now using our gawley.org emails and I'll blog some more about our exoriences with Google Apps in the future.

Best explanation of Credit Crunch yet!

Hiatus

Have been on holiday for the last week or so, so I've had a bit of a break from posting. Good news is, I've had lots of ideas for new little posts so they should be coming thick and fast over the next week!