Comscore reckon the average price paid was £2.90 – with US customers paying more than the rest of the world, averaging £3.85 compared with £2.22 elsewhere. Obviously this is a lot lower than the usual price of a CD, but consider how much of that money is now going direct to Radiohead and not a middleman… 100%. Plus one thing that Comscore doesn’t indicate is how many albums have been sold so far, only Radiohead and their partners know that for sure. Either way it seems that their experiment has been a success.
As an aside, In Rainbows is a wonderful album full of great songs – so go get your copy now, at a price that feels good to you.
Today is Google’s ninth birthday – as witnessed by the cute pi&ntilda;ata in their home page logo*. So that means it’s been nine years since that clean, simple page with just a logo, a search box and a button appeared and changed the way the web worked. Again.
I won’t rehash Google’s history, Wikipedia does the usual splendid job on that, suffice it to say they are still a great example, along with many others such as youTube & Facebook, that nothing is written in stone in this Internets business. That idea you just had may seem a little crazy/obvious/impossible to you right now, but in nine years time me and many others could be blogging about how your idea changed the world. Of course it won’t be ‘blogging’ then but memelizing…. coff. Excelsior!
* And no. Nothing happens if you ‘hit’ the pi&ntilda;ata unfortunately..
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all these blogs you know you should be reading – check out this video of Robert Scoble explaining how he culls his daily feed list to write his own blog. Scoble uses Google’s online reader to plow through his reading, with his only complaint being that you can’t take it offline. Well now you can, Google has used their ‘gears’ product to enable offline reading for those dull moments in airports without wireless.
Earlier tonight I was watching some hilarious sketches from ‘Smack the Pony‘, an overlooked British comedy show from the late 90s with classic sketches such as this:
Once I’d stopped laughing I realised there was something interesting going on here – the subtitles. This sketch had been recorded off a French channel so the video stream had subtitles in it, but what if I wanted Spanish subtitles? Then it struck me, that if you could put an overlay onto any video from a service like youTube that embedded subtitles you could extend the reach of any video. Maybe you could even help world peace… Maybe.
I filed this idea away for later, then about an hour later I was looking at metafilter and came across someone trying to do just this – dotSub. D’oh, beaten to the punch again. But then having reviewed the dotSub offering I still feel like there’s potential here for someone else to do a lot better. For example it doesn’t look like dotSub overlays videos from other sources, they stream them directly and embed their own pre-structured English subtitles to work from. They also don’t seem to offer a rating system for thei subtitles, which given they’re done by free from their audience seems a bit risky.
A few years back Douglas Adams made a program for BBC2 examining what he saw as the necessary future evolution of TV into two way communication – parts of it are very dated, but it’s great to see where things came from that we now take for granted. Watch it now if just for some great ‘interactive’ narration from Tom Baker. (From Metafilter)
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