Month: August 2010

Categories
Media Shoddy Journalism

Logic

Curious article here from the normally sane Charles Arthur in The Guardian, which opens with:

The invitation to Apple’s event on Wednesday at the Yerba Buena centre in San Francisco shows an acoustic guitar, with a soundhole in the shape of the Apple logo. Seasoned watchers of the company know that this is the time of year when the iPod gets a refresh, yet there’s a shadow over the digital music player that turned Apple from an also-ran computer company into a force in the technology world.

The latest sales figures for the quarter to June showed 9m sold – the lowest quarterly number since 2006. In short, the iPod, launched in October 2001, looks to be in terminal decline. While Apple is unworried – sales of its iPhone and iPad are booming – the drooping figures for the digital music player market are a concern for another sector: the music companies.

Some slightly disingenuous logic there, I think. I don’t see how you can consider iPod sales in isolation and use those as a basis for doom and gloom pronouncements on the state of the music industry as a whole.

For starters, you can’t just take iPhone sales out of the equation and pretend like that doesn’t matter, given that it is essentially an iPod with phone functionality. Why would any of those people contributing to the booming sales of the iPhone bother buying an iPod too? Surely no one loves Apple that much…

But more importantly, what does a decline in sales of the iPod have to do with downloads anyway? Isn’t this an issue of market saturation? There are only so many people in the world after all. How often does Charles Arthur think you need to replace your iPod?

But as iPod sales slow, digital music sales, which have been yoked to the device, are likely to slow too.

Why? My chunky 2005 vintage iPod still does a perfectly good job of playing music downloads.

Just because there are fewer and fewer people left who don’t own some form of iPod, it doesn’t mean that digital downloads are doomed.

Of course the small matter of whether people choose to download music legally, and whether they choose to pay for it is another issue entirely…

Categories
Australia Media Politics

Oh Look, The Alliance of Australian Retailers Got Hacked…

When I saw this ad on the TV earlier this evening, my first thought was that the “Alliance of Australian Retailers” (seen here campaigning against the Australian Labor government’s proposed introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes) would almost certainly turn out to be a front for some tobacco company…

…and of course it is, as The Age confirms (BAT, Philip Morris and Imperial, to be precise).

But then I went to their website, to read that “this campaign has ended”.

Really? That’s odd, I thought, given that I had just seen their ad on TV (and I spotted a massive billboard promoting their message just yesterday).

Even stranger, for a campaign supported by three tobacco companies, was the “What We Stand For” page, because apparently they stand for:

# Emphysema
# Coronary artery disease
# Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary disease
# Bladder and kidney cancer
# Stomach cancer
# Bronchitis
# Peripheral artery disease
# Acute myeloid leukemia
# Colorectal cancer
# Abdominal aortic aneurysm
# Kidney cancer
# Liver cancer
# Prostate cancer
# Pancreatic cancer
# Erectile dysfunction in men
# Pneumonia
# Cataracts
# Periodontitis
# Cervical cancer

Very true. But I wasn’t expecting quite that level of honesty from the tobacco giants… Were they planning a new direction of truth in advertising, I wondered?

Elsewhere the site told me that:

You can find links here to information about why smoking is bad, common smoking myths, and why Tobacco companies love to pose as Associations

I wondered if someone had set up a fake website to counteract the campaign, but, as the whois database confirms, www.australianretailers.com.au is indeed registered to the lobbying organisation behind the campaign (“The Civic Group”, a 10 employee company without much of a website of their own).

And then, as soon as I’d finished writing my post they were back on message, with the site reverting to the version I’d found in Google’s cache.

How very odd. I guess someone hacked into their website and made a few subtle changes. I wonder who was behind that little bit of internet japery (and how long it was live…)

Categories
Australia Politics

So This Guy Basically Runs Australia Now

I love a bit of politics, me. And normally I love elections. Give me a bit of round-the-clock, through-the-night, staying-with-it-till-the-results-are-in Dimbleby and I just can’t get enough of that coverage. I’ve stayed up through the night to watch the US elections unfolding before, and I happily had the BBC coverage running in the background at work as the results came in in the UK back in May.

But something about my first Aussie election left me a bit cold. Maybe it’s because although I’m a Permanent Resident here, live here, work here and pay my taxes, my lack of Aussie citizenship denies me the right to have a say in who gets to run the place (bit unfair, that, I reckon, given that Sal got to vote in the UK when we lived there, by virtue of having been born in the Commonwealth).

Or maybe it’s because the narrow range of issues that dominated the campaign seemed like issues so far removed from my own life, and the race to the bottom by two parties eager to tell the electorate what they thought they wanted to hear left me not really agreeing with either side (but just hoping whatever happened that the winner wasn’t going to be the budgie smuggling mad monk they call Tony Abbott…)

There was much discussion, for example, of “Boat People”, the unpleasant catch all term for refugees travelling overland to seek asylum in Australia. You wouldn’t know it from the predominant political narrative, but the places they arrive in Australia are really very, very far away from where most of the population of Australia lives and there are really very few of them–far, far less than the numbers of “plane people” who migrate here each year like I did, or the number of “womb people” who add to the population on a daily basis (although neither group rated a mention in this campaign for some reason). My own view (that all nations have a moral responsibility to be treating asylum seekers with dignity, rather than locking them up in offshore processing centres and treating them like criminals) unfortunately wasn’t one that was shared by either of the main parties, who competed between each other to tell this nation of immigrants how tough they’d be on these unfortunate new arrivals.

So I couldn’t get excited about this election at all. That was until it all changed on Saturday when things suddenly got interesting. Proving once again that this place just can’t help taking its cultural cues from the old dart, the voters of Australia, like their counterparts back in the UK, basically voted for no one.

Well, probably. As I understand it this thing is so close that it could be weeks before all the votes are counted, but what we do know is that no one won.

And since neither party will get the magic 76 seats it needs to form a majority government, they’ll need to sign up the 3 nutjob independent MPs and one greens MP (who unseated the Labor incumbent here in Melbourne) who have suddenly been thrust into the spotlight as kingmakers…

So, in essence, this guy now runs Australia:

Bob’s on the job. We live in interesting times indeed…

Categories
Blogging

Moving House

Ok. So I’ve been awfully slack on the whole blogging front lately. Well, to be honest since we left London and travelled across South America and moved ourselves over to Australia in fact, my blogging efforts haven’t quite been the same.

But.

I think it’s time for a change and time for a bit of a new project, so as a sort of mid year resolution I’m moving everything over to this also rather neglected domain (well, it’ll all be here eventually, when I figure out a nice easy way to export all the old posts) and we’re going to start this up again.

But.

You know what it’s like when you move house: everything’s a bit of a mess for a while and it takes you a little time to get things arranged how you like them.

So.

Keep calm, stay tuned for updates and do not adjust your set…