iPhone musique conrete: Simon's been enjoying the iPhone RjDj app, which records the sounds around you and makes real time electronic/sampladelic pieces from them. At times, quite ravishing.

Everyone's picking up on the Web 2.0 activity around this week's horrendous attacks in Mumbai, among them Forbes, the Guardian and Wired.

Nice little piece in the NYT about the "rise" of slow blogging. Not our strength, must be said.

Charlies Brooker gets on the last word on the daft Ross/Brand affair.

Our friend Nick Reynolds on the BBC, morality and John Stuart Mill: "If the BBC stopped making entertainment programmes it would be saying: Moral questions are only for people who watch Newsnight."

It's 40 years since Doug Englebart developed the mouse at Stanford. There's an interesting throwaway line in here about the length of a patent's life...

And forty years sine Apollo 8 astronaut took the iconic Earthrise photo.

Ben "bad science" Goldacre exposes the poor research and thinking behind this week's influential Channel 4 documentary about more parents deciding to go through with the birth of Downs Syndrome babies, which they're simply not.

This brief but extraordinary post on Wired's blog this morning looks at the social media activity around yesterday's horrific attacks in Mumbai, which include this mind-bendingly up-to-date Wikipedia entry.

We've never really got Second Life. With Reuters now pulling out, the hype might actually be coming to and end.

Russian games developer Russobit-M is apparently about to release a game pretty obviously based on the recent  Russia-Georgia war. Naturally enough, Confrontation: Peace Enforcement features Russian protagonists and Georgian enemies - backed up by NATO.

From the Guardian: an amusing audio precis of Gladwell's Outliers by Jim Crace.

Channel 4's exit from digital radio is still in confusion.

No idea whether this is even vaguely relevant/useful/indicative, but former MTV  "exec" Courtney  Holt has been named as Head of My Space Music.  Like we say, possibly doesn't mean anything at all, but it certainly feels weird.

Universal are crowing about half of Q3's revenue coming from "digital". Meanwhile, Bob Lefsetz is sceptical.

The Guardian talk to Peter Gabriel about his recently-launched ad-funded music download service, We7. He talks a good game, but we have to say that so far, the offer looks a bit weak to us. Still, all experiments are welcome at this point.

We've been working with the great Sir Ken Robinson of late, and in amongst all our research into, er, thought leadership, the name Seth Godin keeps coming up. From a UK perspective that's interesting as it's fair to say he's less well known in the UK.

Anyway, by sheer coincidence, our favourite music industry, er, thought leader, the frequently pusillanimous Bob Lefsetz, posted this nice little nine-point plan to success in the contemporary music industry, based on some of Godin's thinking in Tribes. Here are the headlines...

1. Who Is The Leader Of The Tribe? 2. The Key (It’s the music, stupid.)

3. The Format

4. Tools For Spreading The Word

5. Establish Community

6. Play Live

7. Make It Affordable

8. Tie-ins/Sponsors

9. Innovation

Check this piece out in full. As ever, it's a really engaging and thought-provoking read.

For all the discussion about niches in the context of the Long Tail, there's rarely any talk about movements or activities which are considered "niche" only because our mainstream media overlook them... certainly not because of their actual size or popularity.

We call them "mega niches".

Simon's been exercised about it for ages; it's a heavy metal thing. Metal is huge, worldwide and in the UK specifically, but you'd never think it from the UK media coverage. Oh for sure, there will be ironic or knowing "respect" given to, ooh, ACDC or Metallica or even Maiden, but as for the shit the kids are really into - bands that can sell out the Brixton Academy without trying - it's completely off the radar. It's like the opposite of the Pete Docherty phenomenon, where an act's name can be known to everyone but its music to all intents and purposes ignored. So we were reminded of the mega niche on a couple of occasions recently.

The Times blog reported on the MTV Europe Music Awards and were surprised that Tokio Hotel scooped the live act prize ahead of the Foo fighters and Metallica. Well yes, that is a surprise until you learn that - and this from Wikipedia - "The quartet have scored four number one singles and have released two number one albums in their native country, selling nearly 5 million CDs and DVDs there". So actually, their award  in only really a surprise if your world view is entirely formed by the UK media.

Next...  and this is better... a purer take on the mega-niche... Our thanks to our good friend Kate Lawrence for bringing Geo-caching to our attention. For those who are as ignorant as we were about it, geo-caching essentially revolves around tiny gifts or clues being hidden in containers and then hunted for with the aid of clues and GPS. Think Masquerade or Perplex City... except as a community activity. Treasure Hunt for generation i. So far, so geeky, you'd think, except that (again)according to Wikipedia " Today, well over 800,000 geocaches are registered on various websites devoted to the pastime. Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries round the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica."

Now that's some niche activity. No doubt, right now, some zeitgeist-obsessed film exec will be dreaming up a hokey plot with a geo-cache as macguffin. Actually, there are probably half a dozen films in development along the same lines (remember the year when at least three major films - Casino Royale, Breaking and Entering and, er, Flushed Away all featured parkour - like, wow, edgy!)

But for now, geo-caching remains a fine example of the mega-niche. And from DS's point of view, a salutory lesson in not keeping up...

We've been enjoying the nifty little Typealyzer, which runs a site's or blog's content through a a Myers-Briggs-related algorithm to analyse said site's creators personality.

Its creators claim that it shouldn't be taken too seriously, but we were amused to find that while the overall Double Shot website portrays us as "ENTJ - The Executives", our blog apparently reveals us to be "ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers".  So now you know.

Amusingly, although Harmonix, the developers behind  Rock Band have announced a Beatles game in development, albeit not actually a Rock Band game, it seems that there's still no settlement in sight over the whole Beatles/Apple/'t'other Apple/EMI iTMS mess. Macca seems to be claiming that it's about Apple Corp and EMI, but whatever, certainly seems to say something about the  relative import of games and recorded music.

The rise and rise of IP-delivered video continues  with the YouTube Screening Room premiere of Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska. Wang is almost certainly the highest-profile  film maker to premiere a feature-length film on the web, so that's a marker, of some sort.

That said... at the moment it's US only, so we can't tell you whether the film's any good (although an arc that goes from Smoke to Maid in Manhattan should probably give us a clue).

In the meantime, if you're quick enough, you might catch the World Service discussing it on their daily arts show, The Strand.

Simon's in New York as he writes this... which is relevant.

We've spent a lot of time this year talking to large UK-based arts venues, perhaps most significantly the Barbican and The Royal Opera House... very fine people all.

Anyway, as a result, we've done a lot of thinking about what makes an arts venue's website really work, and always trying to avoid being seduced by aesthetics and instead worrying about functionality. (Our challenge to arts bodies has always been: is your website as easy to use as the Mean Fiddler's?)

Now then, I think it's traditional for we Brits to have a slight inferiority complex when it comes to some media stuff. Yes, yes, we 're bizarrely arrogant when it comes to TV (go figure). But we can feel a bit under-par compared to the US when it comes to a discipline like web design. And often fairly.

But Simon has to report that in trying to get along to the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater to catch a rare screening of Michael Snow's 1968 minimalist classic  Wavelength, he had to use their website, which, it must be said, is a fright.

Yes, they've got the problem facing dozens of large arts organisations: a plethora of venues, programmes and sub-organisations, but really, this site is an object lesson in non-User-Centred Design: non-standards compliant, all-over the place in Firfefox on the Mac (hardly a minority platform) and shockingly bad IA. Simon reports that just finding an address for the cinema was an uphill task.

So there you go. We hope that the current significant physical renovation of the venue(s) is accompanied by an uplift in their web presence.