Simon Crisp » Interwebs

International Kindle: Okay e-book reader, good e-newspaper reader

Simon Crisp — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:39:26 +0000

It’s been a couple of weeks since an intrigued UPS guy delivered my shiny white Kindle “What are these things?” he asked, “I’ve been delivering loads of them all morning.”

When I told him, he instantly lost interest, “So it’s just for reading books” he muttered as he disappeared down the corridor, carrying another two familiar brown Amazon boxes — I couldn’t tell if he’d recognised this meant he wouldn’t be carrying any more heavy books to these addresses.

Okay so first things first. Yes Amazon should have released it in the UK far earlier. Yes it is beginning to look like dated technology and yes they have crippled the ‘international’ version by removing features like the albeit rather crappy web browser (unless you are addicted reading dubious facts).

It’s also annoying buying everything in dollars, especially when you are as mathematically challenged as me and the pound is doing belly flops off the high-diving board.

If that wasn’t enough Amazon have obviously noticed the little ’sucker’ stickers we Brits have on our foreheads and added 30% onto the price of the books they are willing to sell us. By which I mean the measly selection of the ones US customers get to pick from.

While this can be navigated by a proxy server, downloading to your computer and transferring by USB, you will be hard pushed to do that in the magic 60 seconds a certain Mr Bezos keeps going on about.

You might think you can tell where this review is going… but no, I am loving my Kindle.

While I have only bought one book from Amazon, I uploaded 50 classics I have been meaning to read, (easily downloaded from Feedbooks) and anyway, for me the killer feature is getting newspapers delivered to me each morning.

I love newspapers, but I rarely buy them. For years (while working as news editor at NTI) I had every national sat on my desk when I got to work. Since then I have grown to begrudge handing over cash for a paper filled with content which is free online.

But the idea of getting them on the Kindle kindle appealed to me. Each morning I could have a newspaper sat on my bedside table waiting for me to wake up (add a coffee machine and I could marry it). To an extent this is what I got, though annoyingly the international version means newspapers are stripped of pictures.

Either way I have spent more money on newspapers in the past few week than the past 12 months — and as a hack that can’t be a bad thing.

Badda Bing – Surprising amounts of traffic

Simon Crisp — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:40:50 +0000

I have been pleasantly surprised by the new Microsoft search engine Bing – not that I have used it much myself – but it has been bringing me more traffic than I expected.

It is now two weeks since the site was launched and one of my sites (newslite.tv) is now getting almost as much traffic from Bing is the big G.

Obviously this doesn’t mean Bing has surprised everyone and displaced Google as the king of search, but that NewsLite is just performing particularly well, especially on the news side of the search.

That said it will be interesting to see how Bing does in the future, especially if it keeps bringing me traffic.

Who needs two accounts on Twitter…

Simon Crisp — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:48:22 +0000

In an idea shamelessly pilfered from Pete Ashton I have set up a second twitter account to follow all the kind people who put up with my mundane witterings.

On my main account I don’t like following more than about 100 people – I can’t keep up and tend to ignore Twitter altogether.

But as Pete says if people are interested enough to follow me it stands to reason that I would also find them (at least some of them) interesting.

So I will be using @simoncrisp2 as a sort of overflow account and dip in and out of it to read what people who follow me are up to and use it to help me find new people to follow.

It also gives people a way of sending me a DM, though I will respond from my main account.

Until we get groups on Twitter I can’t think of a better solution, while I tried Tweetdeck it was no use for me on my phone which is where 80 percent of my twittering is done.

How and when do you tweet?

Simon Crisp — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 18:02:15 +0000

I have only been using twitter for a few months which I understand still makes me a twitter toddler, as such I am constantly looking at how I tweet.

There seem to be so many different approaches to tweet etiquette, people who lurk following lots but saying little, others who update every time they as much as sip a coffee, and those engage in long @conversations.

Personally I am too easily distracted to follow more than about 50 frequent twitterers, too lazy to tweet too more than a couple of times per day and too insular to engage in too many public conversations.

And now I have a chart to prove it.

This Twitter Chart maps when I have tweeted over the past couple of months and whether they have been straight updates @replies or direct messages.

Something it has made me realize is that I need to @reply people more, I may not be the most social person in the real world but that doesn’t mean I need to be a hermit on Twitter. I also plan to start adding more links, this is what I enjoy in the people that I follow, so I honestly don’t know why I am not doing it already.