Tag Archives: media

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Skype founders launch Joost online tv

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Chinatown- Roman Polanski’s classic available for free onlineHaving sold VoIP stalwart Skype to Google Ebay (and being paid more than they should have for it), founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have been quietly working away on Joost, an online television program. This week the program went free to all interested downloaders (previously you had to be invited to the beta). The content available depends on the region but the UK gets a great selection of films from Paramount including Star Trek Insurrection and the absolute classic Chinatown, which I think has one of the best screenplays of all time. There’s also content from Aardman Animation, Happy Tree Friends, CSI and scifi show Lexx, among others.

[via BBC technology, image from Wikipedia, story updated to correct buyer]

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Is science fiction still a distinct genre?

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Promotional build for Neal Stepheson's Snow Crash in Second LifeVia a number of places (though I saw it at Posthuman Blues first) comes a post at Mondolithic Studios which asks (rhetorically) whether science fiction is still a distinct genre. To quote:

I think what confuses some people is the fact that Science Fiction isn’t really a distinct genre unto itself anymore. It’s mutated into dozens of sub-genres and movements, liberally exchanged genetic material with Fantasy and social satirism and burrowed into the internet in the form of hundreds of thousands of scifi and fantasy-oriented blogs, galleries, fanzines, vlogs, podcasts and short story webzines.

Given that you read Futurismic (which is a paying market for fiction, and will continue to be one just as soon as we can get the site aesthetics fixed up so as to present the stories the way they deserve), it’s an easy to assume that you’re in alignment with that opinion. But maybe not – what do you think? Is there still a definable body to science fiction, or is it more of a conceptual bundle that various forms of entertainment partake of in varying degrees? [Image by Hiro Sheridan]

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Mixed messages: Wired in two minds over Estonian “cyberwar” story

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For me, the most interesting thing to come out of the so-called cyberwar DDoS attack on Estonia back in May this year is the different ways that different media have approached the story. Nowhere is this more obvious than with Wired; the magazine ran a long and beautifully written piece that completely overstates the issues for the sake of sensationalist warnings about potential risks to the US, while blogger Kevin Poulson cheerfully dissects and deflates all the hyperbole while sitting in an office at the same company headquarters.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that bloggers are inherently less prone to sensationalising a subject … but I’m increasingly finding the web is a better news source, precisely because I can get a broad selection of angles on a story with ease. How about you?

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UK women spending more time online than men

A survey suggests that, as a demographic, British women in their late twenties and early thirties actually spend more time online than men of the same age group. I wonder what effect this will have on the sort of adverts we see deployed on popular sites, especially as it’s becoming increasingly plain that television is losing its former status as the preferred media platform for many people? But if further evidence of this ongoing trend is needed, I humbly submit the phenomenon of people registering domain names for their children long before they’ll be old enough to bash out their first blog post.

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Is it time the print media stopped printing?

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newspapersAn article on the Business Week website suggests that some of the bigger American newspapers should stop printing physical copies and withdraw to publishing solely on the web – maybe not right away, but within the next year or two. It’s hardly a new suggestion, but it’s gaining more weight as time goes by – the logistics and overheads of print media are making it a tricky business in which to make a profit, and we’re consuming more media online all the time. The UK’s Guardian already lets you download the latest editions in PDF form, to print or not as you choose. How long will it be before all periodical publications are electronic? [Print Is Dead]