Wednesday, September 26, 2007

His risky 8 beat my safe 7

Me overheard yesterday,
“I can’t wait to embed a Channel 4 clip in my blog.”

So here it is courtesy of our new Unmissable Clips service on Channel4.com.

Later Note: Richard has also confessed he couldn't get his mind off the obvious 5.

Monday, September 17, 2007

R.I.P. "Getting It"

I'd just like to take a moment to mourn the passing of a once oft-used phrase "s/he gets it" (in a new media sense). For those blissfully unaware it was used as a shorthand, in geek circles, as code for people that understood the implications of the likes of RSS, open APIs etc. - the whole web 2.0 shebang.

Unfortunately, if you needed that explanation and had to follow the ubiquitous wikipedia link, you would have been deemed, at the time, as someone who most definitely didn't "get it". (Note this has nothing to do with "getting it". I think there were a number of people who quite smugly "got it" but actually, when it came down to it, didn't get any.)

We would nod and smile and point at our colleagues who "got it" and those who didn't "get it" (evinced by an addiction to the likes of AOL and/or having Yahoo or MSN as your homepage - even though we all worked for these companies - or just asking "dumb" questions in meetings) we would condemn with a shake of the head and a smirking "they just don't get it". It was bordering on the religious, this state of "getting it" grace we had, and bestowed on or denied others.

I think it may have been Facebook that sounded the final death knell to "getting it". When hoardes of people have found themselves effortlessly social networking, sharing bookmarks, sharing their online data in order to improve their experiences, and even - shudder - using RSS feeds without even realising it, there really is no need to get it.

And, ironically, being active on Facebook I imagine will be much more conducive to getting it than Last.fm or Flickr ever have been...