Lovely prints

Thanks to the excellent Kookymojo for this link to a fascinating site about Iris fine art (‘giclee‘) printers. I have one of Michael Light’s gorgeous black & white moon prints which I thought was made on an Iris but I now learn used another digital method called Direct-Digital Color Coupler (I wonder if they changed the method since I bought mine) and I can confirm that these prints are uncannily good. By the way, isn’t Google labs’ glossary brilliant?

For the record…

You’ll have read this in dozens of places already (like, for instance, The Hollywood Reporter and The Bristol Evening Post) but I thought I ought to mark the really quite important news that the BBC is making deep cuts at BBCi, its online and interactive division, and that these cuts will come principally from the department’s web activities – two thirds of the interactive factual and learning division in Bristol, for instance.

The Corporation is doing this well ahead of the upcoming Government review of BBCi’s activities – I understand that the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (the ministry responsible) hasn’t even finished setting terms of reference for the review, let alone appointed someone to do it.

This is, I’m sure, a tactically cunning preemptive strike. It’s almost inevitable that the review, when finally convened, would have recommended some cuts, even if only because BBCi has been allowed to grow more-or-less ad lib across multiple departments.

Hard-pressed UK media owners may also be relieved to see a bite taken out of their state-funded, inflation-protected number 1 competitor but it would be a mistake to read this as a response to their complaints. The online publishers’ puny lobby hasn’t made a dent so far.

Business idea

Movies are distributed to cinemas via satellite (or even the Internet) these days, right? I mean, I assume trucking cans of celluloid around the country is more or less finished (correct me if I’m wrong…). So, the economics of running a cinema must have been transformed in the last few years. I notice that, after a major crisis during the nineties, the independent cinemas are enjoying a bit of a revival.

So, would you visit an independent cinema showing an intelligent mixture of first run blockbusters, indie pictures, oldies and cult movies; making use of digital distribution to keep costs down and flexibility up; serving good coffee and food and maybe using its flexible space to run other events (concerts, art shows, parties)? Do you think you could spin this simple idea into a chain of cinemas (perhaps run on a franchise basis)? Could cinemas be the next urban lifestyle phenomenon?

Beats ‘win a year’s supply of Lion Bars’

You can enter a competition in this week’s New Scientist to have your mitochondrial DNA sequenced. This is one of those mind-bogglingly 21st Century things that we now take utterly for granted but would once have taken twenty technicians and a roomful of those black cubes covered in little blinking red lights about a year and a half to do. I’m certainly up for it (mind you, submitting the competition form seems to produce a fancy 404 page – “we can send a man to the moon and sequence the human genome but we can’t…”).

Butterfly about to emerge

I learn from The Guardian that Richard Wilson’s Butterfly is nearly finished and this Sunday evening at 7.00 he’ll be talking about it (among other things) in a panel discussion at The Wapping Centre. You need to call 020 7253 3334 to get your name on the list. Maybe I’ll see you there. I blogged Butterfly a couple of weeks ago and put some photos (and a movie) here. Wilson is busy editing the time-lapse film of the whole process and it’ll be on show Sunday evening (if he gets it finished) and then in the Wapping exhibition space until 21 April.

Thompson grills Lessig

Bill Thompson’s interview with Lawrence Lessig in The Guardian. Weirdly, I watched Bill record this interview and here’s a pic to prove it… Bill is on the left.

Domestic dilemma

Billie is painting, Olly is at a friend’s house for tea, Juliet is waiting in an interminable queue at Watford General Hospital to see her consultant (our third baby is due 1st May) and I am shopping for a Mini DV Camcorder. My friend Paul, who knows more about it than I do, says I should look for the these features: dv in and out, manual focus, mic-in plug, adjustable white balance/exposure, decent manual zoom and avoid the e-wizardry that seems common now (Bluetooth, email, MPEG). I like the look of this Sony DCR-PC101 and Apple are featuring this Canon MV5i. I want a really small camera and I don’t want to spend more than about ?1000 ($1500). What do you recommend?

POD at HUP

I’ll say this slowly. You may now buy print-on-demand books from Harvard University Press. They’ve made a list of 100 out-of-print classics available to be bought one at a time. And these are not crappy xeroxed copies:

“The books in this program are printed as facsimiles of the last edition,” says John Walsh, production manager at the press. “There will be no compromises to typefaces, or to font sizes and margins, and the books appear in their original trim size. Acme has carefully scanned every page of the original. The books are printed on papers that match the weight, shade, caliper, and opacity of those earlier editions. They are bound in cloth, with headbands and reinforced endpapers.”

This looks like a really important story to me but I don’t think I’ve seen it covered anywhere else (and, by the way, the printers involved really are called Acme)

Total Information Washout

This week’s Bowbrick at Large in The Guardian is about the broken dreams of the Internet advertising business. For about ten minutes back in what we’ll one day remember as the dawn of Internet time, the big advertisers – the pre-eminent engines of the ‘old’ economy – dreamt of perfect data. Their consultants and gurus had convinced them that the net’s potential was to build huge, detailed, cross-matched databases of the likes, dislikes, clicks and IDs of every customer and potential customer they’d ever encounter on the Internet.

Of course, in one way, they were dead right. That is precisely the potential of any suitably interconnected network of computers. In another – the important one – they were wholly wrong. They, like millions before them (and presumably millions after them), argued solely from the potential of the technology, totally ignoring its context. Actually doing business on the net – trying to build and deploy these databases in the real world – turned out to be a minefield littered with bear traps surrounded by quicksand. Impossible.

Every one of the projects to build big, integrated databases of personal information has either failed or been radically scaled back (Doubleclick, Engage…). Consumers, web site owners and investors rejected the collection and cross-matching of web site data outright. Billions of pounds of shareholder value have been destroyed, thousands of jobs lost. The Total Information Internet was a washout.

Alien!

Juliet’s latest column at Tigerchild is up. This week, with seven weeks until the birth of our third child, she’s having a G.E. Kane moment.