Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
Chromecast is a little HDMI dongle with built in Wifi connectivity to allow you TV to be part of your network and play videos and media from other devices on your home network. Of course you’ll need to buy into Google’s ecosystem with the Chrome browser or an Android device to make the connection, but for many people there’s enough value in being able to use a large screen TV that offsets the elements of privacy you give up to Google.
While this is the fifteenth airline leg so far this year, the current episode of ‘Where’s Ewan This Week?’ has nothing to do with the Eurovision Song Contest (okay, almost nothing, Manga are in town and I might bump into the boys in a Turkish bar). I’m en route to Austin, Texas, for my ninth trip to South by Southwest. This is actually a strange feeling. The last few trips (Finland, Estonia, and especially Latvia) have felt like real adventures, to new locations (or in the case of Helsinki, seeing far more of the city and the surrounding suburbs than
Nathaniel Mott, PandoDaily: Anyone intending to compete with iOS or Android ends up relying on Web technologies, he said, and that depends on the improvement of open standards. Companies like Apple and Google try to create “walled gardens” to lock their customers into their ecosystems; Mozilla is trying to create an open field in which Web developers can frolic without fear of being tied to one operating system or another.
Christina Bonnington: No matter what Mountain View says about changing user habits, though, both Now and Plus do one thing: They keep you in Google’s world. It’s a de-emphasis of content source. In other words, rather than reading Cat Fancy religiously, you’re reading the Animals category religiously — a category populated by the sites Google’s products think you’ll enjoy most. The focus is on the places, people, and subjects surrounding an article, not the brands that create them. And instead of receiving the headlines from CNN in your reader, they’re pushed to you on a Google service like Now or Plus. Or
Just think of all the publicity my album will have. It’s a brilliant opportunity because 120 million people watch that show.
From The PA Report: But let’s get back to the general ecosystem out there: How do sites justify running longer, in-depth stories that won’t bring in the huge page views? I have bad news. They write shit. Popular shit. I stopped getting mad at the “Top Ten Japanese Panties I Jerked Off To Last Night” stories on certain sites when I realized that the hundreds of thousands of page views those articles received helped pay for a writer to spend a week gathering sources and do original reporting for a feature. The “Sexy Cosplay” galleries are worth an epic amount
