The thing I as a customer would like to see is some form of classification / genre grouping with supporting information.
One of my major gripes with the music industry now is that newcomers / unfamiliar bands are caught in a trap.
I may be tight-fisted but paying £££ for a new band I've not heard is a risk so I'm stuck with buying stuff which is relentlessly plugged on the radio (and which, to my tastes at least, is mostly bland dross catering to the "safe" markets beloved by the 'suits') OR sticking with "old favourites" which mean that the survivors of the 60s, 70s and 80s occupy a disproportionate part of my collection.
Offering small (possibly lower quality) samples for rapid downloading, together witha genre/"sound like..." listing would encourage people like me to experiment. I'd happily pay to download new stuff If I knew what I was buying - especially if it supported the smaller, independent music sectors.
I once thought this guy a Luddite but now...
on
Information Obesity
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· Score: 1
Some years ago I worked with an old guy who didn't want to have e-mail on his system.
I asked why and he started one of those "wise old uncle's fireside chat" sessions.
In it he said that 20+ years ago we had typewriters and carbon paper. Mistakes were difficult/impossible to correct. You could only make at most 5 copies. The upshot was you thought long and hard about WHAT you wrote and to WHOM you sent it.
Then came the photocopier - you could easily copy a memo and send it out to 20 or 30 people - so you did "just to be sure..."
Now we have e-mail, it's easy to write/edit and easier still to send it to the world and his wife. The upshot is that ALL communications get devalued as mass mailings of half baked ideas become commonplace [and that is before we even get started on the subject of spam].
Looking around the office I can see that there was a lot of prescient wisdom in his comments. E-mail (and the way we use it) is a fine way to create DATA but to destroy INFORMATION. It's all to common for person A sending a potentially sensitive item to person B to cc it to his/her boss. Person B does likewise and now there's 4 copies of the original data with precious little chance of change or document control. And that's just a simple case - scale it up and it's frightening!
Just by pure coincidence I submitted a posting about 2 hours before this, asking if anyone had done a comparative study of e-mail providers and Spam.
I created a Hotmail account specifically for product registrations. It's NEVER been used in newsgroups (or to send out an e-mail for that matter), yet within hours it stared receiveing junk mail.
I've not had that problem with my main e-mail provider
Does this mean that
a) Hotmail is a prime target for people generating "random" names for spamming
b) Hotmail / Microsoft have weak security
c) MS are selling or leaking addresses so that they can publicly clean up later and gain credit
d) I'm just unlucky
Personally I favour Napoleon's dictum that we should not attribute to malic that which can adequately be explained by incompetence (in other words, favour the cock-up theory over the conspiracy)
And how much do we pay for "free" TV? - you don't think that the advertisements appear gratis (free as in beer) do you? Someone pays for the creative team, the account execs, the accountants at the TV station, the ad agency, the product being hawked... then there's the lawyers.
And don't even think of the "free as in speech" argument - no commercial station in the world is going to criticise its major sponsors; very few will dare to put out programmes with a small target audience because the advertisers won't like it. There's an implicit censorship from big business, just as insidious as any government interference.
I watch very little commercial TV in the UK because, compared with the BBC it's generally (not always) poorer quality and driven to the lowest common denominatior / aimed at the highest market share (to gain advertising revenue).
You may carp at the licence fee if you watch little or no BBC output, that's your choice - I don't go around bad mouthing the supermarkets and the various products on offer, demanding that they reduce their prices by the percentage spent on adverts I don't watch.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing I as a customer would like to see is some form of classification / genre grouping with supporting information.
One of my major gripes with the music industry now is that newcomers / unfamiliar bands are caught in a trap.
I may be tight-fisted but paying £££ for a new band I've not heard is a risk so I'm stuck with buying stuff which is relentlessly plugged on the radio (and which, to my tastes at least, is mostly bland dross catering to the "safe" markets beloved by the 'suits') OR sticking with "old favourites" which mean that the survivors of the 60s, 70s and 80s occupy a disproportionate part of my collection.
Offering small (possibly lower quality) samples for rapid downloading, together witha genre/"sound like..." listing would encourage people like me to experiment. I'd happily pay to download new stuff If I knew what I was buying - especially if it supported the smaller, independent music sectors.
Some years ago I worked with an old guy who didn't want to have e-mail on his system.
I asked why and he started one of those "wise old uncle's fireside chat" sessions.
In it he said that 20+ years ago we had typewriters and carbon paper. Mistakes were difficult/impossible to correct. You could only make at most 5 copies. The upshot was you thought long and hard about WHAT you wrote and to WHOM you sent it.
Then came the photocopier - you could easily copy a memo and send it out to 20 or 30 people - so you did "just to be sure..."
Now we have e-mail, it's easy to write/edit and easier still to send it to the world and his wife. The upshot is that ALL communications get devalued as mass mailings of half baked ideas become commonplace [and that is before we even get started on the subject of spam].
Looking around the office I can see that there was a lot of prescient wisdom in his comments. E-mail (and the way we use it) is a fine way to create DATA but to destroy INFORMATION. It's all to common for person A sending a potentially sensitive item to person B to cc it to his/her boss. Person B does likewise and now there's 4 copies of the original data with precious little chance of change or document control. And that's just a simple case - scale it up and it's frightening!
Just by pure coincidence I submitted a posting about 2 hours before this, asking if anyone had done a comparative study of e-mail providers and Spam.
I created a Hotmail account specifically for product registrations. It's NEVER been used in newsgroups (or to send out an e-mail for that matter), yet within hours it stared receiveing junk mail.
I've not had that problem with my main e-mail provider
Does this mean that
a) Hotmail is a prime target for people generating "random" names for spamming
b) Hotmail / Microsoft have weak security
c) MS are selling or leaking addresses so that they can publicly clean up later and gain credit
d) I'm just unlucky
Personally I favour Napoleon's dictum that we should not attribute to malic that which can adequately be explained by incompetence (in other words, favour the cock-up theory over the conspiracy)
And how much do we pay for "free" TV? - you don't think that the advertisements appear gratis (free as in beer) do you? Someone pays for the creative team, the account execs, the accountants at the TV station, the ad agency, the product being hawked... then there's the lawyers.
And don't even think of the "free as in speech" argument - no commercial station in the world is going to criticise its major sponsors; very few will dare to put out programmes with a small target audience because the advertisers won't like it. There's an implicit censorship from big business, just as insidious as any government interference.
I watch very little commercial TV in the UK because, compared with the BBC it's generally (not always) poorer quality and driven to the lowest common denominatior / aimed at the highest market share (to gain advertising revenue).
You may carp at the licence fee if you watch little or no BBC output, that's your choice - I don't go around bad mouthing the supermarkets and the various products on offer, demanding that they reduce their prices by the percentage spent on adverts I don't watch.