Sue Unerman in her Media Week column this week talks about the success of the BBC iPlayer and how it is paving the way for us to all watch TV on our laptops, and concludes

The BBC is teaching us to watch TV on our laptops. It is also arguably hastening the decline of viewing as a family. While this represents a minority of viewing in our house, and is largely programme-led (Dr Who, The Simpsons, Soccer AM), we still gather on significant occasions to watch and discuss TV shows.

Chez Waldman, the iPlayer has no role. Once the children are finally asleep, it is bad enough that we both sit with laptops while watching TV, but the idea of sitting with laptops on our laps without the TV on, and with us both watching separate things…hell, that’s practially social meltdown!

We want to believe that media is becoming more social. And in many ways it is. But with individuals able to get what they want, when they want it, there is an equal and opposite process making media into something  inherently less social.

As I sit there on the train watching The Shield on my iPod Touch, I have not only completely removed myself from my surroundings, but also carved out a bit of media consumption that is mine and mine alone.

But here’s the flip side - A few weeks ago, I saw a family of four sit down in the Starbucks in Cobham on a Sunday afternoon. They all pulled out their Nintendo DSs and  sat in silence playing  a game against  each other. Is that  the new form of family bonding?

• John Naughton: How Flickr developed into a classic Web 2.0 success | Media | The Observer
  So let us raise a glass and toast Flickr’s fourth birthday. And marvel that Yahoo was able to acquire it in March 2005 for a mere $35m - which was not only the bargain of the century, but may also be part of the reason Microsoft is so desperate to acquire
  (tags: flickr yahoo photography)
• Peter Preston: When news is free, who pays the journalists? | Media | The Observer
  Thousands of students want to be journalists - and most still want to be print journalists. But they don’t buy papers; they’re used to getting their news free: from TV, radio, the net, the freesheets. News costs them nothing, but they still plan a career
  (tags: newspapers journalism)
• ADrive Offers 50 GB Free Web Storage
  It’s certainly no secret that we love free storage around here at Mashable. So it’s hard to deny the allure of ADrive’s offer of 50 GB of free storage. That’s definitely the biggest we’ve seen yet without costing users a dime.
  (tags: storage productivity)
• The world’s 50 most powerful blogs | Technology | The Observer
  For some strange reason they seem to have missed me out…
  (tags: blogging)

• The Coming Death of Paper as an Information Storage Medium - ReadWriteWeb
  (tags: print)

I’m a terrible book reviewer. So this isn’t a review. It’s just a bullet point burst through what’s in my mind having just put the book down having galloped through it over the last 24 hours.
So - my plus ponts

• He’s terrifically readable, and very quotable. I found myself making marks in the margins of all the bits that I’m planning to drop into presentations etc. That doesn’t happen that often these days.

• We’ve had most of the examples before: Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter, Trent Lott, Flashmobs et al (more on this later), but he weaves all of this together with a pretty compelling narrative grounded in reasonably accessible economic and sociological theory.
• He’s obviously a great believer in the world he describes - but he’s not blind to its shortcomings - eg open source software projects that fail, the ‘poor quality’ or some blogs etc. In fact, rather than paper over these issues, he explains how they’re an integral part of the phenomena.
• The chapters most relevant to media/ journalism - ‘Everyone is a media outlet/ and ‘Publish first, filter later’ should be required reading for pretty much everyone currently sitting in a newspaper/ broadcaster. It’s certainly the best thought through thing I’ve read on this, and the comparison to the decline of the scribes when the printing press came in is really well draw.

• My big, big take away (but by no means the biggest point in the book) - is how some of the most remarkable phenomena of this era - Linux, Wikipedia, Blogger and (although he doesn’t make the direct point) Craigslist have started with remarkably small ambition. Not big ideas. Not vision. Just a ‘I thought I might…’

• Good for him for playing down the importance of his original essay on power laws at work in blogging, which kicked off so much thinking.

And my not-so-plus points

• Like lots of these books, by the end you feel it’s flagging and repeating itself just to make it to the required 300 pages. It’s not like a Seth Godin book - where you can get all the good stuff just from the intro and the rest is exposition that you can take, leave or just dip in and out of; it’s worth persevering with - but it could have been 50 pages shorter and no worse.
• This rehashing of the same examples is starting to grate a bit. Linux, Wikipedia etc - we’ve been chewing over this stuff for a while, we need fresh meat!!!
• * I think at times he’s a little too forgiving of Wikipedia - in particular the way that a single credible but erroneous fact can make it into there, be overlooked and then be replicated. Once it’s discovered, then the whole credibility of Wikipedia as a serious research tool starts to be undermined. My personal hunch is that we still don’t know whether Wikipedia is going to make it from being a phenomena of our times to a widely trusted resource.

Some of my favourite quotes

I like this

Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.

And in a similar vein, on the way some professions face threats..

Sometimes those threats are also threats to society; we do not want to see a relaxing of standards for a surgeon or a pilot. But, in some cases, the change that threatens the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press; even in these situations the professionals can be relied on to care more about self devense than about progress. What was once a service becomes a bottleneck.

Anyway - I could go on, but you really should get hold of a copy.

Buy it at Amazon. Read the blog. Watch the video.

Every day I pass this newsstand at Waterloo , which carries all the celebrity mags.

I have to admit it has a strange pull over me. I have to stop when I walk past it. Who is Lily Allen’s other man? [poor Ed, I say]. And is it really divorce for Ashley and Cheryl? [or isn’t it?] And where the hell is Kerry Katona this week? [Phew - here she is]

I never actually buy anything off it - that’s partly because we get Grazia and Heat delivered to the house; but also because rather like scanning headlines in a newsreader, these screaming coverlines are a complete read all in their own.

I feel I should take a photo of it every week and then publish all the photos in a book to provide a chronicle of celebrity Britain - the weekly travails of who’s getting together and breaking up; who weighs too much and who weighs too little; who has a stunning new look and who is in meltdown; whose boobs have been made bigger, and whose have been reduced; who’s pregnant, nearly pregnant, thinking about getting pregnant and who has shed their baby weight within a week.

And no, I don’t know how Monocle ended up on their, either; and Nuts (or is that Zoo?) in the bottom left looks a bit out of place there as well.