This seems like one of those things that everyone must have seen by now. I feel like I must have just missed it all over the blogosphere. But Stefan sent it me, and it's fantastic so I must share it.
It's a kind of battle of the album covers and you can watch it here. Directed by Ugly Pictures. Animated by Man vs Magnet.
All this retail talk reminded me of one of my favourite stores ever. ranKing ranQueen. I spent ages poking around the one in Shibuya station (and it's not that big). It's an idea of simple genius - they sell the Top 3, Top 5 or Top 10 of things in a huge variety of categories. Frequently updated. Based on sales from various stores across Japan. Because that is how lots of people think about buying things. Some people want to buy the most popular thing, some the third most popular. Some the second least expensive wine.
Clear? Surely this would work in other places. You could use this data. It's got to be useful for something other than depressing people in meetings.
The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters is a brilliant idea. (I think it might be M&Bs.) A limited number of subscribers get to order the book installments. Lovely, lovely installments. It's a brilliant way to introduce some specialness into a publishing event. Genius. The music industry should learn from this. Specialness comes from exclusivity and from some appealing physical object. Most music has had all this stripped out. The website's nice too. (Though I suspect I may be just too late to tell you all about it. The online subscription might run out today. Sorry.)
Browsing in Borders after dinner I noticed that Penguin seem to have at least three different edtions of The Day Of The Triffids out. And all the covers say very different things about the book. It's like they're trying to cover all the bases; whatever you want from a sci-fi book they've got you covered. Sadly none of them really conjour up the strangely proper and polite 1950s dystopia Wyndham actually writes about. 
Gollancz SF are doing these re-issues of classic sci-fi. Good covers which succesfully appeals to the completist collector tendency. Though they seem to be making it hard to find a complete list of titles online.
I think this might be taking the internet too far.
The record industry has never been good at selling music. (Meaning retailing music.) They've mostly just allowed people to buy. Sometimes. Most mainstream stores are just massive warehouses with all the products filed alphabetically. Imagine if most consumer products were sold alphabetically, shows you how dumb it is. There's a prefunctory attempt at segmentation by genre but there's no real thought given to the way that people actually think about their music in the real world.
But maybe HMV are starting to get it right. They've introduced some little islands in the warehouse which introduce an editorial note, a little bit of expertise. The best one is 'if you like this...you'll love this'. It's not genius but it's a start. I wonder if this is influence of Jon and Quiet Storm.
Alternatively, you could shop at these places.
We went out for dinner today. It occured to me that it's been a number of years since we had a meal without the accompaniment of several Star Wars characters.
hello Han
hello Arthur
A bunch of new faces at coffee morning today. Jason and John made a rare West End appearance (normally they're at Canary Wharf).
Matt came up from Brighton.
And Paul and Marcus (who was over from Munich). Lebowski also made a late but welcome appearance and Tim was in the house (sort of on his way from New Zealand to Belgium) but I seemed not to have taken photos of those two. Sorry. I always feel like I should report on the sparkling repartee and witty exchanges but it's not really like that. In fact I spent a lot of the time talking to Jo and Matt, about how it is really just coffee and chatting and what makes it fun is the lack of pressure, agenda or frankly any decent hosting on my behalf. Same time next week. I hope.
You'll see a third column has arrived over on the left. This has been a two-column blog for a long time so it looks a little odd to me, but change is good and it seems to work on ebcb so I hope it'll work here. The idea is that it'll be a place where all of you lovely people can get notices and things posted - conferences, jobs, questions etc - and where I can keep track of some of the ongoing projects like Post Of The Month. It's an experiment. We'll see.
Neil Gershenfeld has been a hero of mine for a while. I like people who like making things.
