Everyone wonders why Amazon recommends particular books ("You’ve recently read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. You might also be interested in Steven King’s The Shining and Gordon Ramsay’s The F-Word") or, in the US, why Tivo recommends particular TV shows – watched a documentary on the Korean war recently? Maybe you’d like to watch Lost then… No? Okay, we’re foxed…
But now YouTube’s recommending videos. And I’m wondering why, out of all the vast range of videos on offer on YouTube, the only one that’s recommended for me is the title sequence to 1970s kids show (that I never watched) The Double Deckers. What’s up there? And what does it say about me (be kind)?
I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
