Whatever happened to the Colour Supplement?

Well, nothing bad, if that's what you're thinking. Although we did knock one a week out before Christmas, it was only meant to be an occasional addition to No Rock, and with the 'outbreak' of war, we also shifted a lot of attention to the warticker - this sort of thing, but dedicated to the wars on Afghanistan, Terror, Drugs, Iraq, and Syria and North Korea.* We didn't expect it to be quite five months between number six and number seven, but these things happen. Still, at least it's given Louise Wener an extended run on the front page...
 
* -Syria and North Korea new features from later this year
 
Look me in the eyes and tell me you love me

So, it's turning out that third generation phones aren't working out as well as expected. Shady about figures, 3 - the only UK service to have actually got launched yet - may have as many as ten thousand handsets out there - many, presumably, test ones given to journos who've yet to give them back.

3 is the latest brand from Hutchison, and they seem to have been given a bit of extra space to settle themselves because it was that company that came up withOrange. Mmmaybe, but let's not forget they were also behind Rabbit, the short lived attempt to create a semi-mobile phone network where the caller would have to find a 'rabbit point' and be near enough for it to work.
The reason Rabbit didn't work was because it didn't offer any real improvement on the system it was supposed to replace - if you're going to have to roam about to find a Rabbit Point, you might just as well roam about and find a phonebox; in addition, you didn't need to carry any extra equipment.

3 seems to be more Rabbit than Orange at the moment - videophoning is a bit of a novelty, sure, but having a screen to watch doesn't really fit well with the way people use mobiles - when they're moving. And unlike the early wave of cellphones - which could be used to make calls to the existing phone network, although 3 can be used like an everyday mobile phone, for the video function you need to have someone else on the network to call. And since nearly everyone you're going to call won't be, where's the sense in paying a premium for a service you can't actually use?

It might be that the ability to download short clips and play them will drive some interest - goals from the Premiership, short comedy skits - but these things haven't generated much revenue on the web yet, so how they're going to inspire mass purchases of new equipment isn't clear. And unlike the web, there's much less opportunity for users to create their own material, so there's not going to be a tempting pile of free virals to dip into.

Still, maybe these shortcoming can be brushed aside by a nifty advertising campaign? Maybe. But that's not what they've got. A logo that looks like some sort of bug is a bad starting point, but it sinks further. Given a large budget to try and suggest uses for the kit, what do they come up with?  TV advert showing a bloke telling his mate he's shagging his sister, causing other bloke to smash up his phone, with the slogan 'cowardly'. That was their first advert - great thinking: 3 is the phone used by sneaky cowards and psychotic bastards. Who wouldn't want to join that? Subsequent adverts have included a bloke down the pub being shown the large pile of washing up waiting for him when he gets back and a girl showing her mate that her boyfriend is snogging someone else. Unbelievable - why not throw in a guy pointing his phone at a bloody corpse and saying 'Terry, I've just run over your mother'? Do they really think that establishing 3  as the phone network that brings you bad news in movies is really the message they want to give out? Compare with the photomessaging adverts, which suggested you could take a snap if you bumped into Beckham in Sainsburys, or ask your mate if the clothes you were trying on were good, or invite a bloke up for a 'coffee'. Picture messages were good times. Video messages, by contrast, show you things you don't want to hear.
(In addition, the bloke down the pub advert also demonstrated how All Your Mates will peer at the message when it comes in, thereby showing the total lack of privacy option as well).

The trouble is, there isn't very much in the way of a good argument for using videophones over standard mobiles; especially since mobiles got the option to send pictures added in. Originally, the third generation of phones were going to have an always on internet connection. That, of course, would be desirable. It's also not happened yet. If 3 wants to stop itself from disappearing down a burrow, it should concentrate on that. And send a message to its ad agency: "Bad news, I'm afraid..."
 
The Party of the Poor

It has a ring to it, and if judging on performance alone, you'd say the Tories have actually gone further - they're the party of the very poor indeed. But what Iain Duncan Smith wants is to become thought of as a party for those left out of society's great grabbit and run free for all. I don't disbelieve him, either - indeed, part of the reason why the Conservatives are doing so lamely at the moment is that they're a bunch of selfish jackals lead by a fundamentally well-meaning man. But the selfsame policy he announced at the time he floated this unexpected repositioning shows just why the Tories never will be the party of the dispossessed - to fund the middle-class pleasing axing of tuition fees, he's going to abandon the target of offering university places to fifty percent of schoolleavers. In effect, then, he's paying for tax relief to the middle classes by reducing access to further education, and when the university intake falls, it's always the kids from poor families who get hit hardest. But then 'the party of people a bit like us but not quite as well off' doesn't have the same headline ring to it, does it?
 
Blogstuff

So, it may all have been a panic over nothing. There were rumours that Google had plans to kick the blogs out the main index because, for some reason, people who were too thick to use Google effectively were complaining they were getting directed to blogs rather than 'proper' websites. "Sometimes" revealed a shocked Wired "many dedicated weblog publishers are finding their blogs rank high on search results for topics that, oftentimes, they claim to know practically nothing about." Just fancy. Maybe we should also kick out websites that have lists of words on them, too. Or perhaps we should try and explain to people that doing a web search sometimes calls for a bit more effort than merely typing two words into a box, like a baby yelling "me food." A lot of searches throw up a lot of sites that aren't relevant, nothing like most of them blogs.

Then The Register took a step, and there conclusions were: that Google was going to give blogs a tab of their own and, therefore, the blogs must be about to be kicked off the main index "like deja", the usenet archive.

Erm, except it didn't, as Guardian online politely pointed out. Newsgroups are still in the belly of the search, but they've also got an extra search of their own.
So, blogs are safe for now, and about to get a Google all of their own, which is great news for bloggers. Less good news for daypop, though, as the online journalism review points out.
 
Also in the blogosphere, or blogglop, or whatever it's being called right now is the astonishing report that someone playing has paid real, actual money to buy two other player's fake, virtual cash, as part of a convoluted belief that blogshare money might turn into real money in the long run. If anyone wants to make me an offer for my popdex portfolio, drop me a line.

Can I Get A Witness?

It's interesting to watch the response to virtually any mention of Israel in the press these days - regardless of the media, regardless of the context, any touching on the subject of exactly what the Israeli government is up to causes a sudden and massive influx of complaints. (Unless, of course, the piece is overwhelmingly pro-Israeli). Normally, this will take the form of beyond degree-level semiotics about the precise meaning of words. Now, we write, and we're pretty careful about use of language, but the sheer numbers of complaints, and their over-attention to detail, suggests that there's something else going on here. We can't help but wonder if the Israelis have latched on to a subtle new way to control the press. Mad letters wailing about bias are, normally correctly, filed to one side of the waste bin. But if organisations who value their impartiality - the BBC, the Guardian, and so on - get an influx of cavilling letters raising minor points of fact, the sheer weight and costs of investigation, corrections and responses will start to make a noticeable weight on the media's balance sheet. We can't help but wonder if the hope is that, in the long term, less coverage of Israel results from the desire to avoid the army of armchair pedants. And at that moment, that would only be in Sharon's interests.

Another example of the same strategy in action was the complaint over a cartoon in the Indepenent. Nobody in their right minds would really have thought that the depiction of Sharon eating a baby had anything to do with "anti-Semitic blood libels", but forcing a paper already with money difficulties to face down a Press Complaints Commission hearing - brought by the Israeli embassy through the lawyers Mishcon de Reya - is a cunning way of censoring free speech. The case wasn't brought because they really believed it to be bashing Sharon over his religion; it was brought to warn the Independent that if they dare to criticise a leader of israel, they're going to have to burn through cash justifying themselves.

Next example? The Guardian runs an article by Naomi Klein about the death of Rachel Corrie. The busy Israeli Embassy dashes off another letter on points of fact - she wasn't killed by being run over by an army vehicle, she was hit by a bit of concrete when the mound she was stood on collapsed. How do we know? Erm, because the Israeli Defence Force did an investigation and found that to be the case. In other words, the body who everyone believes killed her didn't, because they carried out their own investigation which cleared them. Would such an obviously lame riposte have been so much prominent space were it not for the noise of Mischon de Reya tooling up in the background? The Guardian's Letters page gives room to a hugely contentious claim, and we can't help but wonder if they were choosing the path of least resistance.

Add to this the new insistence on any visitors to the Gaza Strip signing a waiver to absolve the Israeli 'security' forces of responsibility should, ahem, more mounds of earth collapse underneath them, and you start to get the picture - Israel has realised that people won't look the other way. The strategy now is to try and make looking and telling too expensive for many to support.



The Colour Supplement is an infrequent visitor, homing stuff that may have made No Rock And Roll Fun, but was off-topic, and didn't fit into the warticker's brief of watching the war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, drugs and foul language
No Rock And Roll Fun is a bit of bothsidesnow You can contact us at coloursupp@bothsidesnow.co.uk

On No Rock this week:

Eurovision act-by-act
We don't care for Jennifer
Spike doesn't slay the audience
S Club walk off the news

while Warticker looks at the battles for Private Lynch