I'm thinking of writing a diet book ready to tap into the 2012 market.
The "new" Atkins (so I understand) is called the Dukan Diet, and it has sold over 1.5million copies in France alone, and with Celebs such as Giselle Bundchen and Jennifer Lopez rumoured to be following it, it'll no doubt sell by the bucket load now its available in English. By the way, the Atkins Diet has sold over 15million copies worldwide.
Trouble with my "No Shit Sherlock Diet" is that it is based around the following 4 basic principles;
1. Eat less food
(as well as food that is bad for you)
2. Drink less alcohol
(as well as fizzy and sugary drinks)
3. Exercise more
(that's exercise that makes the heart rate go up, and might even make you out of breath)
4. Do this all the time
(ronseal)
It'll be hard to pad this out for a few hundred pages I must admit, but I think I'm onto something - I'll even get some solid scientific evidence to back up my new diet, as well as including recipe ideas (don't use lard, don't add cheese, cut down on the fat, don't eat ready meals 24/7) exercise plans (walk to the shop, go for a little run / bike ride / swim regularly) as well as how to watch TV of an evening without drinking a bottle of wine.
Wonder which celebrities I could get to endorse this lifestyle revolution?
Friday, 28 January 2011
Thursday, 27 January 2011
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
Polar Bear Swims 426 Miles Non Stop
Scientists studying Polar Bears in the Beaufort Sea, North of Alaska, have watched one swim continuously for 232 hours (that's nine and half days), covering a distance of 426 miles / 687km in near freezing temperatures - a marathon for an animal searching for new hunting grounds, as the ice sheets melt, and probably something its cubs are going to be faced with, as the ice retreats due to climate change.
When talking about endurance swimming, you (well maybe just me) naturally think of the English Channel - which is approximately 21miles / 32km from Dover to Cap Gris Nez - depending on tides. So our plucky polar bear has swum the equivalent of 20 channels non stop.
The furthest a human has swum continuously is 122 miles / 197 km in 38 hours or so, the distance Susie Maroney did by swimming from Mexico to Cuba. Yes the water was much warmer, but she did get stung by a jellyfish, and break her wrist on the first night in unexpected storms. Ouch.
Then there's Lewis Gordon Pugh, who in July 2007 swam 1km in 18min 50secs across an open patch of sea at the North Pole to draw attention to the melting of the Arctic sea ice. The water temperature was Minus 1.7˚C, the coldest a human has swum in. He did this in speedos, a swimming cap and a pair of googles - the challenge was conducted in accordance with Channel Swimming Association Rules.
Lewis has since swum Lake Imja in the Himalayas, created by recent glacial melting, and Lake Pumori a body of water at an altitude of 5300m on Everest. Watch his fascinating account of this, and his views on climate change from his talk at last years TED conference below.
For the record, the furthest I've swum continuously, is 4.4miles / 7.1km in November 2009 in the 25m Guildford Spectrum. It took me two hours. I was going for 300 lengths, but for a young lad sharing the lane with me, who seemed to struggle with his turns, spending most of the time under the water, almost stationary and generally getting in the way. After a while it dawned on my the dirty boy was spending his charity swim letching at women in the neighbouring lane. The coldest water I've swum in? The now legendary open air swimming pool in Malvern, the thought of which still makes me shudder.
When talking about endurance swimming, you (well maybe just me) naturally think of the English Channel - which is approximately 21miles / 32km from Dover to Cap Gris Nez - depending on tides. So our plucky polar bear has swum the equivalent of 20 channels non stop.
The furthest a human has swum continuously is 122 miles / 197 km in 38 hours or so, the distance Susie Maroney did by swimming from Mexico to Cuba. Yes the water was much warmer, but she did get stung by a jellyfish, and break her wrist on the first night in unexpected storms. Ouch.
Then there's Lewis Gordon Pugh, who in July 2007 swam 1km in 18min 50secs across an open patch of sea at the North Pole to draw attention to the melting of the Arctic sea ice. The water temperature was Minus 1.7˚C, the coldest a human has swum in. He did this in speedos, a swimming cap and a pair of googles - the challenge was conducted in accordance with Channel Swimming Association Rules.
Lewis has since swum Lake Imja in the Himalayas, created by recent glacial melting, and Lake Pumori a body of water at an altitude of 5300m on Everest. Watch his fascinating account of this, and his views on climate change from his talk at last years TED conference below.
For the record, the furthest I've swum continuously, is 4.4miles / 7.1km in November 2009 in the 25m Guildford Spectrum. It took me two hours. I was going for 300 lengths, but for a young lad sharing the lane with me, who seemed to struggle with his turns, spending most of the time under the water, almost stationary and generally getting in the way. After a while it dawned on my the dirty boy was spending his charity swim letching at women in the neighbouring lane. The coldest water I've swum in? The now legendary open air swimming pool in Malvern, the thought of which still makes me shudder.
Toy Thailand
Just when I thought I'd got tired of Tilt Shift, this came along. The little boats around the 2min mark look amazing.
I wonder if you could somehow reverse this technique to make small stuff seem big and real? It would be great for those that that have little train sets in their lofts, with tiny villages, hills and trees - then again, maybe that's not the point.
I wonder if you could somehow reverse this technique to make small stuff seem big and real? It would be great for those that that have little train sets in their lofts, with tiny villages, hills and trees - then again, maybe that's not the point.
Toy Thailand from joerg on Vimeo.
Sunday, 23 January 2011
3D Fractals
I remember as a student back at Kington Uni getting a bit of fractal generating software for my 286 PC (Windows took up half of its memory). I left it calculating and working out for over 24hours only for it to spit out a rubbish looking image that filled a tiny proportion of the big fat screen, so I stuck to playing Lemmings (I got stuck on that level with the fast walking lemming, and the slow building one. Drove me mad)
Anyway, check this weird but mesmerising 3D fractal landscape, that would have probably have taken my 286 the last 20 years to have attempted;
Anyway, check this weird but mesmerising 3D fractal landscape, that would have probably have taken my 286 the last 20 years to have attempted;
Surface detail from subBlue on Vimeo.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
The Banking System
Watched "Britain's Banks : Too Big To Save?" last night with an open mouth. It's available on the iPlayer until 25th Jan, its a shocking insight into the greed of the few, that without regulating, risk another banking crash, worse than the one that caused the global recession.
Incidently, at the start of the recession - after the run on Northern Rock, the failure of Lehman Brothers and the government bail out, I found myself at a friends drinks party talking to a couple of bankers. After a lengthy and lively discussion, I pointed out to them that they were probably (understatement) "public enemy No. 1" for the state of the economy. The reaction was shocking. "The general public are to blame, for getting mortgages without the means to repay them".
Anyway, watch this "Britain's Banks : Too Big To Save?" on the iPlayer here.
"It's more than two years since the giant banks were bailed out with billions of pounds of tax-payers' money, yet little has been done to reform or regulate these vast institutions. The BBC's business editor Robert Peston looks at how the international regulators, a little-known and secretive committee that sits in the Swiss city of Basel, have consistently failed to curb the excesses of the giant banks and how new proposals fall short of the root-and-branch reform promised after the crash.
With the fate of Ireland, brought to its knees by the excesses of its banking industry, fresh in our minds, Peston asks whether Britain would be in any position to bail out our huge banks should there be another crisis. Are the banks, once thought to be too big to fail, now actually too big to save?
The film contains the first interviews with the government's new Banking Commission, as well as contributions from Business Secretary Vince Cable, new RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton and the Bank of England"
Incidently, at the start of the recession - after the run on Northern Rock, the failure of Lehman Brothers and the government bail out, I found myself at a friends drinks party talking to a couple of bankers. After a lengthy and lively discussion, I pointed out to them that they were probably (understatement) "public enemy No. 1" for the state of the economy. The reaction was shocking. "The general public are to blame, for getting mortgages without the means to repay them".
Anyway, watch this "Britain's Banks : Too Big To Save?" on the iPlayer here.
"It's more than two years since the giant banks were bailed out with billions of pounds of tax-payers' money, yet little has been done to reform or regulate these vast institutions. The BBC's business editor Robert Peston looks at how the international regulators, a little-known and secretive committee that sits in the Swiss city of Basel, have consistently failed to curb the excesses of the giant banks and how new proposals fall short of the root-and-branch reform promised after the crash.
With the fate of Ireland, brought to its knees by the excesses of its banking industry, fresh in our minds, Peston asks whether Britain would be in any position to bail out our huge banks should there be another crisis. Are the banks, once thought to be too big to fail, now actually too big to save?
The film contains the first interviews with the government's new Banking Commission, as well as contributions from Business Secretary Vince Cable, new RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton and the Bank of England"
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Friday, 14 January 2011
Thoughts On MySpace And Facebook
The once mighty MySpace continues to slip, sadly with more redundancies this week and rumours it'll be put up for sale - the site is following in the footsteps of former giants of the Social Web, Friends Reunited, Friendster, and to a lesser extend, Bebo.
To me MySpace was simply a place that those without coding expertise could have a semi decent web presence without paying for a website - it was perfect for unsigned bands, attempting to generate interest from potential fans and labels. For the music industry, it was fantastic at making an artists popularity transparent - the amount of friends and daily plays showed for the first time whether or not there was a genuine demand for that artist, and many a band or artist was signed solely down to this. For a company like ours, the fantastic editorial team at MySpace allowed us to promote our clients on homepages, that would get them infront of millions of eyes - in our internal division of sites, the MySpace Homepage was in the Champions League. MySpace was famously credited for the rise of the Arctic Monkeys - but that's a story for another time.
And then it all started to go wrong. The underlying etiquette of a MySpace user was to add everyone as a friend, whether they knew them or not. Friend Adding software widely available for around $19 would allow you to add hundreds of friends automatically, even allowing you target your market based on gender, age, location etc. Other software allowed you to automatically add comments, and send emails - users inboxes / comments pages became stuffed with spam, from p0rn sites and over eager bands. User profiles became a minefield, lack of HTML coding knowledge and dodgy templates made looking at profiles a danger to both your eyes, and the stability of your browser. MySpace also stopped its applications and videos being embedded elsewhere, and stopped artists using the mail facility to email everyone on their lists - restricting it to 500 people at a time. We advised clients to stick to YouTube, embedding videos on MySpace to increase and focus views to one place. Then we started to notice that the homepage features weren't getting the results we'd expected. Infact, some of them, for well known artists, were getting barely anything at all.
Will Francis tweeted about the MySpace redundancies earlier in the week, posting this by the ex-Editor of MySpace Australia (see extract below). Whereas the rise of Facebook might have started the decline in Australia, I think it was already happening here in the UK - the clean, simple, easy to read, add-only-people-you-know culture Facebook was in a different league, it actually made it fun to communicate with friends in a way that other friends could join in. Anyone remember the "Your Mum Is On Facebook" campaign to highlight how uncool Facebook was? A painting still hangs on MySpace's offices on New Oxford Street. My mum isn't on Facebook, but my Dad is.
Personally, I joined Facebook in November 2006 - initially to help a viral campaign on behalf of a client, and to infiltrate Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth group - it worked - they gave it a seal of approval and sent it out to all the group members, helping the video become one of the most discussed videos of all time. (Before it was taken down due to an incorrect copyright infringement - but that's another story for another time..)
Anyway, back to MySpace. Read the full posting by the ex-Editor of MySpace Australia here
"And then in early 2009, Facebook happened.
For all the talk of the arrogance of upper management, the greed of FOX (and it’s insistence of plastering every page with ads) through to the utter lack of vision by the key stakeholders – the real reason Facebook won, wasn’t because Myspace made errors, it was because it didn’t feel the need to adapt.
Look at the odds against Facebook, Myspace had music, videos, local partnerships, mobile integration, millions of bands, four times as many users, the marketing sway of the FOX media empire, 22 international offices and $900 million in cash from Google.
And Facebook still won out. You can’t deny that is impressive.
But how did they do it? How did they set the sun on what had up until that point been the golden era for MySpace?
They did so in 5 ways and not surprisingly, all of them are product related:
1. The Stream – All your friends activity in one continuous stream, updated every minute.
2. Real Names – Facebook forced you to sign up using your own name, which made it much easier to find people you knew, rather than guess their online nickname.
3. Email Verification - They made you verify your email address, this way you got constant alerts and notifications driving you back to the site.
4. Address Book Importer – Rather than searching for friends, you could import your Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail contacts and instantly be paired with them, in effect shifting your entire network across. If you weren’t registered, they sent you an email alerting you to the fact I’d joined and you should too.
5. Built To Scale – It was designed with one central theme, to be a functional stable social network that would rival all others.
Myspace on the other hand, had no real-time stream. It allowed anyone with a fake name or email address to sign up and the only way you can find your friends on the network, was by manually typing their name in. If they had used the name ‘DanTheMan’ rather than ‘Dan Brown’ there was no way to find them. By the time Myspace had duplicated all the features of Facebook, they’d already lost ¾ of the battle.
The rest then came down to design, usability and marketing. No surprises for who won there.
Myspace was never built to have 110 million users at its peak, purely because founders Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe never envisaged it growing so rapidly. Amusingly enough, the ability to actually customize your page was a coding loophole that a user exploited originally. The company then decided to use it as the point of difference in the market. It was that very same ability to customize your profile, which would later become their downfall as millions upon millions of hideous fluro profiles, loaded with dozens of animated gifs crashed browsers around the world."
So what does the future hold for Facebook? Will it go the same way as MySpace, Bebo, and Friends Reunited? David Kirkpatrick thinks its potential is 'unlimited' and I think it'll be highly unlikely, not for a good couple of years anyway,its the second most visited site in the world at the moment, only Google is ahead of it and it has an incredible 500million active users - 70% of those are outside of the US and its still growing, adapting and evolving. I'd love to see it fully integrate with iTunes.
To me MySpace was simply a place that those without coding expertise could have a semi decent web presence without paying for a website - it was perfect for unsigned bands, attempting to generate interest from potential fans and labels. For the music industry, it was fantastic at making an artists popularity transparent - the amount of friends and daily plays showed for the first time whether or not there was a genuine demand for that artist, and many a band or artist was signed solely down to this. For a company like ours, the fantastic editorial team at MySpace allowed us to promote our clients on homepages, that would get them infront of millions of eyes - in our internal division of sites, the MySpace Homepage was in the Champions League. MySpace was famously credited for the rise of the Arctic Monkeys - but that's a story for another time.
And then it all started to go wrong. The underlying etiquette of a MySpace user was to add everyone as a friend, whether they knew them or not. Friend Adding software widely available for around $19 would allow you to add hundreds of friends automatically, even allowing you target your market based on gender, age, location etc. Other software allowed you to automatically add comments, and send emails - users inboxes / comments pages became stuffed with spam, from p0rn sites and over eager bands. User profiles became a minefield, lack of HTML coding knowledge and dodgy templates made looking at profiles a danger to both your eyes, and the stability of your browser. MySpace also stopped its applications and videos being embedded elsewhere, and stopped artists using the mail facility to email everyone on their lists - restricting it to 500 people at a time. We advised clients to stick to YouTube, embedding videos on MySpace to increase and focus views to one place. Then we started to notice that the homepage features weren't getting the results we'd expected. Infact, some of them, for well known artists, were getting barely anything at all.
Will Francis tweeted about the MySpace redundancies earlier in the week, posting this by the ex-Editor of MySpace Australia (see extract below). Whereas the rise of Facebook might have started the decline in Australia, I think it was already happening here in the UK - the clean, simple, easy to read, add-only-people-you-know culture Facebook was in a different league, it actually made it fun to communicate with friends in a way that other friends could join in. Anyone remember the "Your Mum Is On Facebook" campaign to highlight how uncool Facebook was? A painting still hangs on MySpace's offices on New Oxford Street. My mum isn't on Facebook, but my Dad is.
Personally, I joined Facebook in November 2006 - initially to help a viral campaign on behalf of a client, and to infiltrate Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth group - it worked - they gave it a seal of approval and sent it out to all the group members, helping the video become one of the most discussed videos of all time. (Before it was taken down due to an incorrect copyright infringement - but that's another story for another time..)
Anyway, back to MySpace. Read the full posting by the ex-Editor of MySpace Australia here
"And then in early 2009, Facebook happened.
For all the talk of the arrogance of upper management, the greed of FOX (and it’s insistence of plastering every page with ads) through to the utter lack of vision by the key stakeholders – the real reason Facebook won, wasn’t because Myspace made errors, it was because it didn’t feel the need to adapt.
Look at the odds against Facebook, Myspace had music, videos, local partnerships, mobile integration, millions of bands, four times as many users, the marketing sway of the FOX media empire, 22 international offices and $900 million in cash from Google.
And Facebook still won out. You can’t deny that is impressive.
But how did they do it? How did they set the sun on what had up until that point been the golden era for MySpace?
They did so in 5 ways and not surprisingly, all of them are product related:
1. The Stream – All your friends activity in one continuous stream, updated every minute.
2. Real Names – Facebook forced you to sign up using your own name, which made it much easier to find people you knew, rather than guess their online nickname.
3. Email Verification - They made you verify your email address, this way you got constant alerts and notifications driving you back to the site.
4. Address Book Importer – Rather than searching for friends, you could import your Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail contacts and instantly be paired with them, in effect shifting your entire network across. If you weren’t registered, they sent you an email alerting you to the fact I’d joined and you should too.
5. Built To Scale – It was designed with one central theme, to be a functional stable social network that would rival all others.
Myspace on the other hand, had no real-time stream. It allowed anyone with a fake name or email address to sign up and the only way you can find your friends on the network, was by manually typing their name in. If they had used the name ‘DanTheMan’ rather than ‘Dan Brown’ there was no way to find them. By the time Myspace had duplicated all the features of Facebook, they’d already lost ¾ of the battle.
The rest then came down to design, usability and marketing. No surprises for who won there.
Myspace was never built to have 110 million users at its peak, purely because founders Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe never envisaged it growing so rapidly. Amusingly enough, the ability to actually customize your page was a coding loophole that a user exploited originally. The company then decided to use it as the point of difference in the market. It was that very same ability to customize your profile, which would later become their downfall as millions upon millions of hideous fluro profiles, loaded with dozens of animated gifs crashed browsers around the world."
So what does the future hold for Facebook? Will it go the same way as MySpace, Bebo, and Friends Reunited? David Kirkpatrick thinks its potential is 'unlimited' and I think it'll be highly unlikely, not for a good couple of years anyway,its the second most visited site in the world at the moment, only Google is ahead of it and it has an incredible 500million active users - 70% of those are outside of the US and its still growing, adapting and evolving. I'd love to see it fully integrate with iTunes.
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Pixar's 3D Zoetrope
This is fantastic - would love to see this and can think of loads of uses for it :)
Thanks to Mster on b3ta.com
Thanks to Mster on b3ta.com
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
How Big Is Call Of Duty?
Fantastic infographic on Geekologie (click for larger), outlining just how big Call Of Duty has become.. I must admit, I used to prefer Medal Of Honor, not sure why I've switched - must get the new one. That said, I was one of 6 people I know that got Call Of Duty Black Ops on the day it came out - and I've yet to play the game itself - I've stuck to playing online. Gamertag is PartTimeDave if you want a game. Anyway.
"Within 24 hours, Call Of Duty: Black Ops surpassed previous records to become the largest entertainment launch of all time. But Black Ops is just one of the many successes that the Call Of Duty franchise has obtained in its seven years of existence"
"Within 24 hours, Call Of Duty: Black Ops surpassed previous records to become the largest entertainment launch of all time. But Black Ops is just one of the many successes that the Call Of Duty franchise has obtained in its seven years of existence"
Angry Birds - The Playset
I resisted the urge to get Angry Birds for my iPhone, maybe due the people that were banging on about it were the sort of people that still do quizes and games on Facebook. But during a weak spell in October, seeing it on a friends iPhone (and being a lifetime gamer) I too downloaded it, and got hooked. It's such a simple concept, smashing up those rubbish buildings and knocking over those pigs is soo satisfying!!
It's the biggest selling game on iTunes, available for just 59p, and by August last year it had sold over 6.5million downloads , still topping the most paid app on the store as I type - a more expensive version was made available for iPads has sold over 200k and it's also the biggest selling on the newly launched App Store (Mac OSX 10.6.6 Download available here) so, you can now download it for your desktop too (I'm not going to do this btw).
So, after the t shirts and soft toys comes news from toy maker Mattel at the 2011 International CES that they are to release a physical version of the game in May.. Pictures below from iLounge
Now, this seems a little flawed to me. The cashing in whilst the game remains hot is fine, but a physical version - surely a lot of fun and challenge of the original iPhone game was its unpredictability - the fact that sometimes you think you'd done exactly the same shot as before, only to get different results? (Read this article from Wired "The Physics Of Angry Birds") With a physical game, once the bird hits those fake wooden plastic planks, the whole construction will collapse - and where is the fun in that? Please, friends and family reading - don't buy me this for Christmas 2011, and I've already got Buckeroo.
Update : Read an interview with Angry Bird's Mighty Eagle, Peter Vesterbacka - make of the game (and others) on Tech Crunch here.
It's the biggest selling game on iTunes, available for just 59p, and by August last year it had sold over 6.5million downloads , still topping the most paid app on the store as I type - a more expensive version was made available for iPads has sold over 200k and it's also the biggest selling on the newly launched App Store (Mac OSX 10.6.6 Download available here) so, you can now download it for your desktop too (I'm not going to do this btw).
So, after the t shirts and soft toys comes news from toy maker Mattel at the 2011 International CES that they are to release a physical version of the game in May.. Pictures below from iLounge
Now, this seems a little flawed to me. The cashing in whilst the game remains hot is fine, but a physical version - surely a lot of fun and challenge of the original iPhone game was its unpredictability - the fact that sometimes you think you'd done exactly the same shot as before, only to get different results? (Read this article from Wired "The Physics Of Angry Birds") With a physical game, once the bird hits those fake wooden plastic planks, the whole construction will collapse - and where is the fun in that? Please, friends and family reading - don't buy me this for Christmas 2011, and I've already got Buckeroo.
Update : Read an interview with Angry Bird's Mighty Eagle, Peter Vesterbacka - make of the game (and others) on Tech Crunch here.
Monday, 10 January 2011
Fantastic Music Video - No. 1 (In An Endless Series Hopefully)
Mesmerising video here, no camera trickery, just endless diving into a pool by a huge cast of Chinese divers - although the track is sadly pretty forgettable, it's called "Holiday (So High)" by Sound System. It's a bit like those incredible Ok Go! Video - virally spread around the world, achieving fantastic YouTube views and to my knowledge, not much else.
Discovered on b3ta.com
Discovered on b3ta.com
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Amazing Partial Eclipse Image - But That's No Sun Spot!
Astrophotographer Thierry Legault traveled from his native France to the Sultanate of Oman to take pictures of the eclipse - take a closer look though.. that's no sun spot - IT'S A TIE FIGHTER!! Actually, its the International Space Station, hadn't noticed the similarity between the two until about 30seconds ago.
Full image on Discover here
By the way, its *obviously* the International Space Station - if you are on twitter, you can get updates of when the ISS will pass over head to your exact location - no really - follow it here
End Of Music On The High Street
Just over two years ago as the recession really started to bite, Woolworths went into administration - we wrote about it on our Sky News Business blog.
For the music industry, it was a sign.. only a few years earlier, Woolies was THE place to sell singles, and was one of the main distributers of CDs to other shops through its EUK business nationwide. The closure of both businesses also took a few independent record labels out with it.. Zavvi, born out of the Virgin Megastores suffered from EUK's demise, and it soon followed Woolies, leaving tens of thousands out of work. It was clear that people, especially teens, were turning their backs on physical music, opting for digital formats. Now, unless you've been asleep since 2000 (or don't care) none of this should be headline news, but it did leave only one music retailer on the high street, HMV..
So two years on, and just before Christmas HMV published their figures, It made a pre-tax loss of £41.3million in the 6 months to October 2010, compared to a £24.9m loss last year, and they saw a 10% fall in the sale of CDs - on this news, shares slumped by 20% - It sounded like the final nail in the coffin of high street music sales and this was before the heavy December snow.
Today its been announced that HMV will close 40 of its 285 stores over the next 12 months - so that's it for physical music sales in the UK, unless you count the supermarkets - and the danger with them, they only stock records that they *think* are going to sell well. That's fine for Michael Buble, Westlife, Take That and alike - but not really good for music. Singles sell well digitally, albums do not. With nowhere to buy a physical album, sales will slow even further. Only ONE album released in 2010 sold more than a million copies in the UK - Take That's Progress. What about non-mainstream music? Up and coming artists? Acts that aren't signed to major labels with healthy promotional budgets? Who is going to headline the future music festivals?
HMV published their annual Poll Of Polls yesterday - combining the polls from the likes of Q, Mojo, NME, Kerrang!, Uncut, Mixmag, Wire, The Fly, Hot Press, GQ and Time Out as well as online music sites to find out the UK critics albums of the year (I did something similar on a huge Excel Spreadsheet last year, they've saved me the trouble!!) - this list as posted on Record Of The Day here.
What is once again interesting about these polls, is combining them to sales (when I've got the figures I will). Arcade Fire won the poll of polls by a mile - but it has yet to sell 300k records in the UK.
The question is, how many of these albums will you be able to get in the supermarkets?
The BBC is also counting down to its annual acts and artists to watch this year in its Sound Of 2011 - again, how many of these will have albums stocked by Tesco's, Sainsbury's etc?
THE 2010 HMV POLL OF POLLS TOP 50
1. Arcade Fire / The Suburbs
2. The National / High Violet
3. LCD Soundsystem / This Is Happening
4. Beach House / Teen Dream
5. Janelle Monae / Archandroid
6. Vampire Weekend / Contra
7. Yeasayer / Odd Blood
8. Gorillaz / Plastic Beach
9. Caribou / Swim
10. Ariel Pink / Before Today
11. Kanye West / My Beautiful Dark, Twisted Fantasy
12. Joanna Newsom / Have One On Me
13. Gill Scott Heron / I'm New Here
14. Sleigh Bells / Treats
15. Foals / Total Life Forever
16. Villagers / Becoming A Jackal
17. Laura Marling / I Speak Because I Can
18. These New Puritans / Hidden
19. Black Keys / Brothers
20. Deerhunter / Halcyon Digest
21. Hot Chip / One Life Stand
22. Robyn / Body Talk
23. John Grant / Queen Of Denmark
24. Paul Weller / Wake Up The Nation
25. MGMT / Congratulations
26. Avi Buffalo / Avi Buffalo
27. Manic Street Preachers / Postcards From A Young Man
28. Four Tet / There Is Love In You
29. Grinderman / Grinderman 2
30. Robert Plant / Band Of Joy
31. Warpaint / The Fool
32. Big Boi / Sir Luscious Left Foot
33. Flying Lotus / Cosmogramma
34. Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate / Ali And Toumani
35. Broken Bells / Broken Bells
36. Best Coast / Crazy For You
37. Marina and the Diamonds / Family Jewels
38. Oneohtrix Point Never / Returnal
39. Edwyn Collins / Losing Sleep
40. Glasser / Ring
41. Swans / My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope
42. Field Music / Field Music
43. Zola Jesus / Stridulum II
44. Steve Mason / Boys Outside
45. Deftones / Diamond Eyes
46. Plan B / The Defamation Of Strickland Banks
47. Neil Young / Le Noise
48. MIA / Maya
49. Take That / Progress
50. Drums / Drums
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