Desert Island Discs archive:

This week’s castaway is an author. In his book The Wasp Factory, the teenage protagonist tortures insects, experiments with bombs and kills a brother and a cousin. But, says Iain Banks, that was “just a phase he was going through”. He tells Sue Lawley how, as a writer, he has not developed the filters that most adults do and so views the world with childlike eyes, describing what he sees. And this world, he feels, is very often a violent and terrifying one.

It’s also going to be a world where ’The Quarry‘ is going to be published on June 20th. Posthumously. Damn.

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The Rest Of My Life, by Yellowbirds - www.yellowbirdsmusic.com - Rock Show permalink - Subscribe in iTunes

Admittedly you would need an all pervasive intelligence gathering network to prove that Cardinal Richelieu said this quote, but that’s just the ironic icing on the cake:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

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Gentlemen, by The Problems - www.mikeborgia.com - Rock Show permalink - Subscribe in iTunes

Michael Arrington on the NSA PRISM story:

For my part, I don’t give a damn that Senator Feinstein and others in our government say that this is “called protecting America.” It doesn’t, it’s Orwellian and it kills liberty and freedom on a scale never seen before. It’s not a way to stop terrorism. It IS terrorism.

My emphasis, but Arrington nails it.

@PRISM_NSA

So, who else is pumped about Google Glass?

Lex Friedman:

It’s no shocker that free apps are vastly more popular than paid apps; everyone likes getting something for nothing. But it is surprising that folks consider a $3 app expensive, and a $10 app downright exorbitant. I know people who play the same iOS game every single day, but choose to stick with the free version—despite its constant, intrusive ads—rather than pony up $5 just once to go ad-free forever…

I’m neither an economist nor a psychologist, but it strikes me that too many iOS device owners fail to act in their own best interests—both in the immediate near term and in the long term—when they scoff at the thought of spending money in the App Store.

Christina Bonnington:

No matter what Mountain View says about changing user habits, though, both Now and Plus do one thing: They keep you in Google’s world. It’s a de-emphasis of content source. In other words, rather than reading Cat Fancy religiously, you’re reading the Animals category religiously — a category populated by the sites Google’s products think you’ll enjoy most. The focus is on the places, people, and subjects surrounding an article, not the brands that create them. And instead of receiving the headlines from CNN in your reader, they’re pushed to you on a Google service like Now or Plus.

Or it could be that Google really has your best interests at heart.

…I think shareholders are higher up Google’s priority list than users.

Or Sky TV more precisely.

Sources familiar with company plans have informed games industry magazine MCV that the box could include a Sky satellite tuner or act as a video recorder in the future, but we’ll also follow suit and suspect only the latter is more probable. The subscription from Sky could well be centred around an Xbox One and pre-installed Now TV or Sky Go application. Couple this with SmartGlass support and you’ve got a winner.

Microsoft want to own the living room. So why not replicate the subsidy model used in mobile to gain an advantage over the Playstation’s, Nintendo’s, and mythical Apple TV 2′s of the world?

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Scare Me, by New Beat Fund - www.newbeatfund.com - Rock Show permalink - Subscribe in iTunes

Craig Kannalley goes into exquisite, SEO-friendly hints for Betaworks addicitive iOS timed puzzle game, Dots.

‘That Puppet Game Show’ will have various specialist rounds hosted by a different puppet who is an expert in that field.

I wonder if (a) they’ll have a Eurovision Song Contest round and (b) who they could get to host it. I might have a suggestion…

Rayman: Jungle Run reviewed by me on All About Windows Phone:

Rayman never gets the credit he deserves. While Mario built up Nintendo to great heights, as Sonic the Hedgehog saves the Sega Genesis/Megadrive, Rayman has never been a saviour of anything in the real world. Like a disowned samurai warrior, he wanders from platform to platform, with a loyal following of players and publishers, but never quite breaking through to the big time. Will this Xbox Live title change that?

I note all the kerfuffle around Romnia Puga’s unsuccessful interview of Jesse Eisenberg, and I wonder why Puga and her team decided to make it a story… or even talk about it publicly?

I’ve always seen interviews as a conversation, only when they go out do they become public. But until that point they are a one to one. A private one to one. And sometimes you need to step back and think about the image you’ll put out if you air a duff interview or a hot mess when it goes wrong.

I’ve had interviews go wrong, where the guest and I didn’t click, where they are unresponsive or being uncooperative. I’m pretty sure I’ve interviewed a few big names while they’ve been high. And do you know what I did with those interviews? I didn’t air them. I tucked them into the personal archive, made a mental note of what went wrong (and how much I was at fault) and moved on. If the PRs ever asked what happened, a simple “it didn’t work, it wasn’t a good interview” was enough for them.

Rather than drop the story, Puga’s team decided to try and spin something out of the mess. Good luck with the PRs next time around, I’m sure they’ve taken a note or two about the experience.

The monetary value isn’t going away, but Facebook Credits, the social network’s universal currency of the last year or two, is being transferred into the local currency of the users. That’s probably a good thing. Facebook need to decide where to focus their energies on, and I don’t think the answer was a new currency and a 30% rake.

The answer is mobile. I’d expect the investment to carry on with the Facebook Home project and lots of iteration.