TVNZ on-demand non-Mac friendly - phooey!

It never mattered much before whether web services were Mac-friendly - until I got a Mac!

So it's interesting to see the progress so far on TVNZ's OnDemand, as reviewed by Throng.

PS: (Added the next day) Discovered the review was by a 14-year-old who found their way into the not-yet-launched service by guessing the address. Generation C, take a bow!

(Two-headed hat tip: David Farrar and Public Address System:Monitor)

'Allo world

My first foray into videoblogging. Entirely worthless except perhaps for historical value!

Mini Review: The 40 year old virgin

This was the film everyone said I should see when I began writing The Last Gribblehickey, and I know why.

Geeky guy, can't get a girl. Afraid. Well-meaning friends who don't really have a clue. Transvestite prostitutes. True love, almost trumped by a huge mistake and miscommunication.

And all done in a far more R-rated way than I would care to.

It's not that The 40-year-old virgin wasn't funny. It's just that - call me old-fashioned - if I had known that it was this close to porn I wouldn't have seen it. And it had maybe as much swearing as The Departed, which I saw last week (and loved, and haven't reviewed yet).

For all that, it had a really sweet message at its heart - that delaying sex for the sake of a committed, monogamous relationship (some call it marriage!) is a really, really healthy idea.

It's a shocking, surprising idea to come out of Hollywood, but there was plenty of the opposite ideas in the process of telling that idea. Which often happens in movies - note the number of anti-war movies that have horrific violence in them.

Thinking back to the screenwriting - Virgin is a predictable enough tale, but it's buoyed up by a lot of improvisation by some of the hottest comedic talent around. What's an aspiring writer to do with that? All the received Hollywood wisdom says that once you send your script in it'll be changed around beyond recognition anyway, unless you do the whole thing yourself.

Answering my own question: I guess the key is to find, define and own your own space, your own style. And if that style is clean (or at least slightly cleaner!) then maybe, just maybe there's an audience out there for it.

The Dawkins Confusion - Books & Culture

The Dawkins Confusion - Books & Culture

The parts I understand of this review are quite entertaining. Well done to Alvin Plantinga for demonstrating that Christians can have intelligence, humor, and grace.

"new" media???

The numbers are out for advertising revenue in New Zealand, and while advertising revenue has gone down wholesale, radio and online have shot up.

What does it mean? Here are my educated guesses:

• Advertisers are losing confidence in traditional, expensive media like TV and print. Radio has always been known as cost-effective, and maybe that message is getting through in a very ROI-conscious era.
• Radio and online are more personal in their approach, which may reflect multichannel strategies to target people by interest, demographic or psychographic and invite them into a relationship (that would be the smart thing to do, anyway!)
  
• The slow but steady rise of unaddressed mail also suggests more businesses are becoming aware of the possibilities of direct marketing.
  

And, of course, it could be the slowing economy.

But media and marketing are becoming increasingly difficult to silo these days. Right now I'm working on a feature for Marketing Magazine about "new technology" - an impossibly broad brief. In fact, I'm always writing about technology.

• When I write about TV, I end up writing about online.
• When I write about newspapers, I end up writing about online.
• When I write about outdoor, I mention TXT.
• When I write about PR, I write about blogging.

Truth is, these "new" media are about ten years old, as Steve Shearman pointed out to me yesterday. But what is new is the fact everyone's a) heard of them, and b) can see the possibilities.

Welcome to the future. Confused? You will be.

More on Generations in the workplace

I'm really enjoying Wake Me Up When the Data Is Over: How Organizations Use Stories to Drive Results. After posting the other day about Generation C, this paragraph in the book caught my attention.

It is no accident that quality of life - a second issue of the new era - is a key factor in how a mobile workforce of the 'best and brightest' chooses to live and work. As more and more baby boomers retire, there will be a period where the smaller Generation X population will not be big enough to fill all jobs. This will eventually subscide with the maturation of Generation Y, which is actually more numerous than the baby boomers. However, there will be major challenges filling key jobs in the interim, making the need to recruit and retain key talent more critical than ever.

How to interview

I normally get way too much information from my interviewees, which is usually fine, since the extra information often provides context or other story leads.

But when you're up against someone who doesn't want to give too much away, these tips may come in useful.

My favourite: hypnosis.

HYPNOSIS:
When people reach an important part of a story, slow them down and turn them into storytellers. Ask where they were standing, what they were doing, what they were wearing, what was the temperature and what were the noises around them? Then switch to the present tense, and ask questions like: What are you doing now? What is your friend saying? You and the interview subject will walk through the scene together. This technique frequently fails at first. People prefer to tell their story the easy way, in the abstract. "I drove the car off the cliff." Tell them this won't work. "I'm trying, but I just can't picture it yet. Drive me off the cliff with you." This is how you get a story, not a bunch of facts.

I would've never thought of that. But stories, not facts, are what makes the world go around - as I'm discovering through the book, Wake Me When the Data is Over.

Hat tip: Terry Whalin