Month: December 2011

R & I have been gripped by the Danish crime Drama “Forbrydelsen” or “The Killing” as it’s dubbed on BBC4. We got the DVD boxset over christmas so we could watch season 2 and generally savour what is, in our opinion anyway, one of the best crime drama series in the history of tv. But the question remains, why is it so good? After all, there’s a rash of scandinavian crime fiction out there and some excellent tv series and movies based on Laarson’s Millenium trilogy and Henning Mankell’s ubiquitous Inspector Wallander. It seems we should be tired of the glut of “nordic noir” but the BBC audience figures (800,000 excluding iPlayer) and Bafta win are astonishing for a subtitled show set in a country that the typical English viewer associates with a Shakespearean play and a lager? Is “Forbrydelsen” Denmark’s greatest export? Probably 🙂

Here’s my attempt at analysing what makes it great without giving away the plots for those watching it on iPlayer, DVR or boxsets. In no particular order:

1. The are no “big name” stars & hence no psychological baggage that we bring into our understanding of the characters. In the non-Danish viewers mind, Sarah Lund and Sophie Grabol are one and the same person with not cognitive dissonance between this and other roles that she may have played.
2. The show has its own formula, visible over both series, where it mixes large scale themes of political corruption and the imperfection of justice systems with small scale and intimate views of the suffering of a single family. Both are given equal importance and blended deftly. There is a unifying metaphor. The fate of a city or country are decided based on personal agenda and relationships. Grand ideologies eventually crumble at the smallest of challenges, the cough, the wink.
   Continue reading ““Forbrydelsen” er fantastisk – something fresh from the state of Denmark”

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says FB don’t compete with Google for advertising dollars. This is utter nonsense. The issue is simple economics. They’re both offering you ads and your time is a limited resource. The more time you spend on FB, the more of your data it gathers (rather than Google) and the more ad revenue is being diverted away from Google. There’s a clear correlation between network value and time spent. Planning a paper on this topic in early 2012 but the 100Bn dollar (or less) question is what FB’s IPO value is.

The more content you add to facebook instead of the “open” web, the more value you’re diverting value away from the web, in turn diminishing the value of a tool that generates wonga based on searching the open web for stuff. FB is huge, pervasive and it’s effectively creating a social overlay on the web, transferring value from Google to FB in the process. That’s why Google hope that G+ gains significant traction. Social was Google’s lacuna & they can’t afford to be left behind.