Just tried this out for a Techland article. Amazing. Actually works, smooth and slick experience. UK retailers will be all over this, and not just for phones.
Spoke to this guy. He was very friendly and perfectly happy to chat, even though he knew I was a journalist and not a customer.
Looking back on his first year as a freelance tech journo, Bobbie Johnson writes:
Second, it taught me that most of the hard work of freelancing is pitching. Editors can be fickle, fragile prey, who are hard to tempt with your ideas and even more difficult to keep satisfied once you’ve got them to take your bait. I think I’m a fairly adequate writer (sometimes even reaching the heights of “not bad”) but I think I’m still just a mediocre pitch artist.
Yes oh yes oh yes oh yes. Even after 10 years (10!), I’m still rubbish at pitching.
At points, the story is mired in Victorian banalities, mainly those describing a large Hungarian man and his erotic adventures at an Insane Clown Posse concert.13 Violent death follows leadership follows violent death follows leadership, and in this manner the bizarre Byzantine cycle continues.14 Also, Miss Havisham just fucking hates men.15 Queens never seemed ghastlier.16
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(Here’s a piece I wrote about the Amazon/Kindle/Orwell debacle a few weeks ago, for my PA column. The column has to be written very simply, avoiding jargon and technical mumbo-jumbo, which is sometimes quite a challenge for a technology article that’s only 250 words long. Anyway, I quite liked how this one turned out, so here it is.)
Amazon (amazon.com) is the biggest online retailer in the world. It’s also leading the pack with ebook technology. Its Kindle device – not yet on sale in the UK – has impressed many people with its high quality screen and long battery life.
But some of them were less than impressed when they woke up last Friday and found that certain ebooks had vanished from their Kindles overnight.
Amazon had reached out across the internet and instructed all Kindles with copies of George Orwell’s “1984″ and “Animal Farm” to remove those texts. Customers were refunded the cost of each title deleted.
But it’s not the money that people are upset about, it’s the principle. Affected Kindle owners were horrified.
It all turned out to be a ghastly mistake. The Orwell titles should never have been sold as ebooks in the first place; a third party had added them to the wrong list in error.
At the heart of this is the nature of ebooks. Customers think they’re just like paper books, but electronic; that they are “owned”. But some folk in the publishing industry consider them more like a library loan; something “rented”.
The Kindle is a clever bit of kit for sure, but ebooks still have a long way to go. And in the meantime, everyone’s going to have to reach some agreement about what, exactly, is being paid for.
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Recording what Russell Davies calls ambient speech was by far the most interesting and challenging aspect of creating The present sounds of London for The Morning News. Since I was only using my iPhone (for reasons of forgettingness), I had to try and get right up close to the people I was recording.
In cities it’s not hard to get close to people, because there’s often a big crowd to mingle with. But it is hard to get close to the people who are saying something interesting, or saying something dull but in an interesting way, and point a phone in their face without them noticing.
So what I did was put on my most innocent lost-tourist face, and stood as close as I could get to the talky people while looking left, right, and down at my phone, over and over again.
I hoped I gave the impression of being someone who was consulting his phone’s mapping software.
I also hoped that none of the people I was recording would notice me and offer directions.
And that I wouldn’t get mugged for my phone, which I was stupidly waving round on busy London streets, Tube stations and passageways.
Consequently, the recordings that ended up in the finished article are a fraction of the total. I recorded quite a few that didn’t work – mostly because I just didn’t get close enough, or didn’t point the phone in the right direction, or because something else happened to ruin the recording.
In Waterloo station, for example, there was a drunk woman singing her heart out. I moved in closer (still doing the innocent lost puppy face), but two police officers reached her first. She stopping singing and the conversation was then shielded by the police officers’ bodies, so that didn’t work.
It was also impossible to record conversations while moving. I spent time walking up and down some busy streets, listening in to couples or small groups walking and chatting. I could hear them, but couldn’t find a way of pushing my phone in front of them and getting away with it. I had to wait for them to stop walking – which is how I managed to get the two Americans talking about how far away from the Barbican they were. They’d been talking all the way down the street, and suddenly stopped at a pedestrian crossing. During a pause in the roaring traffic, I grabbed that snippet of speech.
Armed with some more professional equipment – a proper digital recorder, a fluffy microphone on a stick – I’d have got much higher quality recordings, but people would have, you know, noticed. It was great fun, in a sort of Famous Five sense of the word, to be sneaking around and recording in secret.
Quite addictive, in fact.
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Ulysses 2.0 is out, and it's quite interesting to return to its plain text simplicity after getting comfy with the razzle-dazzle, do-everything, rich-text smorgasbord of Scrivener. They are both great apps, but it's clear after a few hours with Ulysses that it's a very different beast, and will appeal to very different sorts of writers.
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This is what copywriting smells like.
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Dopplr’s new iPhone app is now available for free in the iTunes App Store.
Tom Taylor, Tom Insam, and Matt Biddulph have been working on it for some months now. It’s really good. Open it up and it can tell you where the nearest good stuff is. If you’re in a new city and you just want to find somewhere good to eat within 10 minutes walk, it will tell you in seconds.
And it’s an interface to Dopplr too: if you find somewhere cool that isn’t on the map, you can add it. Just tap on the blue location icon and fill in the details. Next time you access your info at dopplr.com, you’ll be asked to confirm your additions.
The app also knows where your Dopplr fellow travellers are, and where they’re planning to go next.
I’ve been doing various bits of work for Dopplr in recent months; my contribution to this was small. I wrote the copy for the app home page, and helped put together a handful of words inside the app itself.
Hope you like it. Tell your friends.
For the Morning News, I wrote Mr Bowyer’s Fantastic Machine, a piece that combines science, geography, science fiction, profile piece, and mulling on the theory and practice of journalism. All in just under 1300 words.
I’m chuffed to tell you that my essay for The Morning News, A writer by any other name has been printed in The New Writer’s Handbook Volume 2, which you can buy from Amazon UK if you fancy it.
As you can imagine, it’s a handbook for writers. Most of it is short pieces culled from the web, as mine was. All of them contain practical or whimsical advice for writers, either professional or amateur, and most of them are much funnier and more entertaining than my contribution.
Still, it’s nice to see something from the Morning News getting a wider audience, and comforting to think that the piece would never have been picked up by the Scarletta Press editors had it not appeared at TMN in the first place.
While the book was going through production, editor Philip Martin asked me to provide a short bio to go with my article. Since the article is entirely concerned with the pain of writing short bios, I was delighted that he was happy to print my suggestion of: “Giles Turnbull is a — well, you know all that now.”
