Bowblog

Steve Bowbrick
Steve Bowbrick
@bowbrick@bowblog.com
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  • I think I invented Reality TV

    At the end of 1996 I made a presentation to a TV conference and I filled it with screenshots from a new webcam site that everyone was talking about called Jennicam. I told the conference that I was pretty sure we’d soon see lots of TV shows influenced by web sites like Jennicam and that…

  • Pop culture gewgaws

    Over in Hackney (London’s Brooklyn), at the trendy Transition Gallery they’re developing a nice line in twenty-first-century wise-ass barrow-boy pop culture irony. In fact, I think Transition is likely to become the epicentre of London’s emerging twenty-first-century wise-ass barrow-boy pop culture irony scene. They even have some handsome merchandise, including some lovely ‘car collector plaques’…

  • Borrowed beliefs

    So it turns out that Michael Howard’s ‘beliefs’ weren’t borrowed from a tea-towel or a greetings card motto or the dreadful ‘desiderata‘ at all, but from the grimly pompous words of robber barron/penitent philanthropist John D Rockefeller Jnr, from 1941. Although the content has been changed, the structure is identical and Howard’s designers even chose…

  • Howard’s desiderata

    Michael Howard’s sixteen beliefs, published today, read like a National Trust tea-towel with an unsavoury, neo-liberal edge – Max Ehrmann’s syrupy, ubiquitous desiderata rewritten by Keith Joseph – the kind of thing your grandmother kept on the wall in her hallway, next to the crying clown, but with an abrasive, Thatcherite gloss. In the original…

  • Should have gone to Spec Savers

    I was looking for the CAF web site, which is at http://www.caf.org.uk and came across this handsome page at http://www.caf.org.

  • Bam, World Heritage Site

    Heartbreaking photographs of beautiful, pre-quake Bam (link from Bruce Sterling). Two-thirds of these buildings have been flattened by the earthquake. As I write the apparently well-organised Iranian authorities are announcing that they’ve already buried 30,000. You can donate online to Oxfam’s Iran appeal here (they’ll help with water and sanitation) or to Unicef’s here (they’ll…

  • New York City and all-you-can-eat

    I wanted to write about eMusic six weeks ago, when they switched off their all-you-can-eat subscription package ($9.99 per month for unlimited downloads) but I waited for some press coverage – which didn’t show up. Now I’ve been listening to my last downloads – three amazing walking tours of The Bronx in New York City…

  • Being creative

    Is it reasonable to assume that the net and cheaper, more accessible digital media tools are making us more creative? More to the point, would it be a good thing if we were? Would a more creative society be a better one – more generous (nothing more generous than sticking your neck out in the…

  • Pseudowhacking

    Listen. Googlewhacking is stupid. Dumb non-phrases that occur only once precisely because they’re useless in speech. Come on guys! Now this is more like it – a proper three-word phrase – used in a real sentence that actually means something – that occurs only once on the whole web. I’m going to call it pseudowhacking…

  • High Street Showbiz

    The Economist on the future of retail – playing out in a mall near you if you live in the United States, ever the over-heated laboratory for this kind of thing. Summary: it’s roll reversal time for the retailers. Traditionally mall-bound department stores (Sears, for instance) are moving out of town and building multi-acre warehouses.…