Looks like Gerry Anderson’s Son is taking over his Dad’s production Company. Having grown up on the shows of Gerry Anderson, I’m delighted to hear that his father’s legacy continues.
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The Failure of the Daily Was Not a Failure of the Format but of the Content
With the high-profile failure of Rupert Murdoch’s grand experiment in iPad publishing, “the Daily”, people have been quick to jump on the “why it failed” band wagon. Needless to say some are laying he blame for the newspaper’s failure at the feet of the format. The fact that it was a digital only iPad publication is what doomed it is a common refrain. I don’t think that’s the case though. It think it’s much simpler than that. It failed because it wasn’t very good.
I subscribed to it for a while and I really wanted to like it. I wanted it to succeed, but in the end I cancelled my subscription. It wasn’t the technical problems with the app that annoyed me it was the content. It was really bad. The newspaper, if you could call it that didn’t really know what it was. On the one hand it wanted to be a hard edge newspaper, but then it was filled with tabloid like gossip columns and other such nonsense that would be more at home in an issue of hello than anywhere. But even that wasn’t the problem. It was the underlying tone of right-wing propaganda that finished it for me.
Now, I’m not trying to make this about politics or partisanship but if you look at it objectively, trying to shoehorn a subtle fox news like overtone in a newspaper for the traditionally left leaning minds of the typical iPad owner was never going to work. It’s not about politics, it’s about demographics, and the Daily was simply preaching to the wrong choir. Sure, it wasn’t as in your face as Fox, but it was there, and it was at times obvious and obnoxious.
Had Murdoch hired a staff of writers and editors who understood who they were writing for rather than try to shove its views down the throats of people who are particularly allergic to being told what to think, it might have had a chance. Selling thinly veiled disdain for the iPad generation to the iPad generation was never going to work.
Welcome to the new and improved Technology Geek
The Technology Geek has been given a bit of a makeover. If you’re reading this on the RSS feed, you should click on through to the site and check out the new look. Not only has the theme changed but the blog is now run on its own server and powered by WordPress. It’s a complete re-boot so all the older posts are no longer here. They are still online though, and you can find them on Tumblr.
If you’re new to the site you might be wondering what this is all about. “Why another technology blog?” I hear you ask. the answer is simple. I was fed up of the ones that are out there. It seems that to write about technology you must have two criteria: a) You must be sarcastic and childish about the topics you are writing about and b) you must hate Apple. Or at the very least have a healthy mistrust for the company and a dim view of its customers. Personally I find this dismissal of Apple users very off-putting on most blogs. The irony is that Apple users are often derided as fanatical and cult like, and yet the degree to which blog writers will go to give the appearance of not having an Apple bias often borders on the ridiculous. Those who dislike Apple seem to have such an ideological hatred for the Company and its customers that anything we have to say is dismissed without ever giving the arguments any merit or even a fair appraisal. After all, Apple fans are just deluded fanboys corrupted by Cupertino’s powerful PR machine, so anything they say must be deluded too, right?
I for one am sick of being pigeonholed and stereotyped like that. It’s possible to like Apple products and have an opinion, even when it comes to technology. While some will no doubt argue that this blog too has a pro Apple bias, I prefer to think of it as a pro-reason bias, or a pro-fact bias.
This is also not trying to be like Engadget or Gizmodo in any way. It’s not trying to catch every news story or every press release. Instead we present a curated, quirky and interesting collection of news and opinion. We will point out nonsense and inaccuracies in other news sources and we will happily admit when we are wrong.
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