Status-Q

I spend an enjoyable but exhausting couple of days in Bath last week, at the 'sandpit' brainstorming session which distributed a modest chunk of UK government academic funding to projects working on 'Bridging the Global Digital Divide'.

It was a great experience - meeting some wonderful people with whom I had much too little time to chat - and I came away pretty impressed by the overall process. Getting 30 academics to agree on anything is a well-nigh impossible goal, and these ones came from a wide variety of disciplines and from institutions around the country and around the world. Amazingly, we managed to come up with what I think will be four interesting and valuable projects and divide the money between them in a way that seemed to meet with general approval. Bill Thompson was there and has a nice write-up. Kudos to Alan Blackwell and all of the others involved in making it happen.

Alex Lindsay of PixelCorp has some interesting things to say about the out-sourcing of media to the developing world, in this IT Conversations podcast.

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Simon Jenkins has an interesting article in the Guardian - thanks to John for the link - where he talks about how newspaper circulation in America and much of Europe is declining, while, surprisingly perhaps, the quality newspapers in Britain are seeing rises in circulation. He attributes this to the fact that in the US and elswehere, "publishers are trapped by archaic unions in a quasi-monopolistic market stripped of any zest to compete".

Well, I think he may be right, but I'm still pessimistic about the UK situation. I don't think we produce any major publication now that is of the quality of the New York Times, for example, though we have a few that come close.

And while it's encouraging to see that the fall in tabloid sales is offset (though not matched) by a rise in the quality papers, I don't think that this is because the average Brit has realised the folly of reading the Daily Mail. It's because the entire press has slipped down-market to the extent that many people who used to read the Mail and the Sun now read the Times and feel at home.

Thanks to Seb for pointing me at this rather nice optical illusion.

I'm a bit late with this one, but the new official DivX codec for the Mac came out a couple of weeks ago, and integrates nicely with QuickTime. After the trial period there's a charge if you want to create DivX-encoded movies, but the package also includes the free codec which will let you watch them indefinitely.

If you don't know why you'd need this, you probably don't! If, on the other hand, you regularly download movies created on PCs and find that they don't play, this will help with quite a lot of them. The other solution is to install the excellent VLC player, which seems to play pretty much everything, though it isn't as pretty or as easy to use as QuickTime Player.

Paul Theroux makes a comparison between Malawi and Ireland in this Sunday Times article.