Results tagged “blogs” from Birmingham Post - Business Blog

A whip cracks in the darkness of an ancient tomb. Flickering torchlight casts the shadow of our fedora-clad hero as he stoops in the gloom, his hand sweeping away ten thousand years of grime from a forgotten relic. As the dust falls away an ancient clue is gradually revealed and the secrets of a long-dead civilisation come slowly into focus.

Like practically every 20-something bloke I know, I've been swept up in Indiana Jones fever, eagerly anticipating last month's release of Indy 4 by reliving all of those backyard fantasies of fighting Nazis, dodging fiendish booby traps and snatching priceless relics from highly improbable places.

Whether watching an ageing Dr. Jones creak his way through two hours of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo was actually worth the 19 year wait is a matter for debate, but the recent tidal wave of Indy mania got me pondering our own place in the annals of recorded history.

And I came to the conclusion that we're a future anthropologist's dream come true.

Firstly, I want to point out that a proper digest of this year's SXWX interative festival is in the pipeline and secondly I want to apologise for this rather epic blog post.

The thing is I really want to convey what struck me as one of the biggest revelations at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas: Technology accelerates gossip so fast it's out of date before you even get to blog it.

My epiphany came during the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg keynote event where the Facebook CEO became the subject of probably one of the worst-received interviews in recent history at the hands of Newsweek journalist Sarah Lacy.

Many of you who follow tech news on the web would have seen the video clips of the disasterous keynote on Youtube and many of you may be wondering what all of the fuss was about. We'll nothing I have seen online conveys the sheer hostility of the crowd that day and this was something I really wanted to convey in my blog.

Unfortunately I was hamstrung by two factors. Firstly, I was caught up in a wave of mob hysteria that amplified this barely remarkable event into something approaching a war-crimes trial. Secondly, my decision to delay writing my post until the next morning meant that the legion of Twitterers, live bloggers and industry gossip-mongers present at the interview had practically burnt the hype out before Lacy had even left the stage.

So much so that I decided it wasn't worth publishing the post after all.

In hindsight, however I thought it would be pretty interesting to revisit it now the storm has blown over just as an example of the wacky zeitgeist that swept the blogosphere over one 24 hour period in March 2008.

"Of the 12,000 new blogs created every day, 50% focus on exactly the same subject - the blogger".

At least that's the claim that Sarfraz Manzoor makes in his recent Esquire feature on the New Narcissism movement that this generation that are so plugged into the social media movement has spawned. So, in light of that I'm going to keep this introductory post short and sweet and try to make it not so much about me.

The digital landscape is starting to grow up, at least out of its infancy and into a slightly more self-aware adolescent phase. Those of us who work within the digital industry are finding that along with the raft of opportunities that the latest developments bring along with them comes a need for a new, more intelligent approach.

My blog starts by issuing a pardon for the rather poor quality career advice I received when I was about to leave school. I suppose I ought to forgive them, as I'm now making my living mostly from something that wasn't invented then: the internet.

When I was a lad, TV was in black and white and we had two channels that only broadcast for part of the day.

(So there you go: anyone interested in the background of the Post bloggers can now start to calculate/guess at my age - as long as I'm not bending the truth of course.)

I remember when colour TV was first invented. Schedulers seemed to think we all wanted to watch snooker. Viewers may have shown little interest in the game before - but boy, didn't it look great in colour.