• Unseen Japan

Very cool collection of photos from a photography competition. My favourite. Via Trivial Pursuits

• Kurzweil Reader

Interesting collection of articles by Ray Kurzweil on a variety of topics including AI, VR and life extension.

• del.icio.us/rss/tscrace

Thought I might as well post my del.icio.us RSS feed. Occasionally I put things of interest to me there or things I might want to find again.

I spend a lot more time on the internet than I do watching TV so maybe it’s that I’ve been spoiled by technology like Google, RSS, del.icio.us and tagging but it seems to me that the Sky TV Guide (you know, the one that comes up on the screen when you press a button on the remote) is sorely lacking in features.

The number of channels we have in the UK (a few hundred) might not quite qualify TV as a true example of the Long Tail (yet) but some of the lessons we learn from Long Tail enterprises can be applied here.

The main lesson should be that massive diversity of choice without filters is just noise. Amazon is the classic example of a Long Tail business. One of the reasons they have been so successful is that they’ve made niche media available to a mass audience. But that on its own is not enough; in order to turn its huge catalogue into a success Amazon has had to be inventive in creating ways for customers to find what they want in its huge jungle of products. They’ve implemented features like search, recommendations, reader reviews and so on in order to filter out the noise and help the customer get the stuff they are interested in.

None of this has been implemented in the Sky Guide. There isn’t even the most basic search. All it can manage is to categorise the channels into predefined groups such as ‘entertainment’, ’sports’, ‘news and documentaries’ etc. These categories don’t even shift dynamically as the channels’ content changes; the category to which a channel belongs remains static regardless of what it’s actually showing.

I realise that interactive TV will probably always lag a way behind the cutting edge of filter and search technology but I think it’s about time Sky made a bit of an effort to catch up. Basic search and dynamic categorisation would be a good place to start.