A few years ago, Lars Ulrich managed to make himself, according to himself “the most hated man in rock and roll” after going to war with Napster and, indirectly, Metallica’s fans. At the peak of their hate they managed to release their worst album as well as starring in the (presumably unintentionally) hilarious Some Kind of Monster documentary which made the band seem a little bit more pathetic. And now they’ve got a new album, Death Magnetic, coming out…

There is good news and bad news for the band. The good news is that whoever is doing their PR these days is clearly doing a better job. As well as putting on a show for their fans at the O2 Arena in London where they’re charging just £5 to get in (and the money that is made is going to charity, rather than the band) and that even Lars seems a bit more relaxed about the concept of the album leaking, even trying to sound almost convincing:

“Listen, we’re ten days from release. I mean, from here, we’re golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me. Ten days out and it hasn’t quote-unquote fallen off the truck yet? Everybody’s happy. It’s 2008 and it’s part of how it is these days, so it’s fine. We’re happy.”

Which all spells out a much nicer approach for the band, makes them almost likeable again.

The bad news for the band? A quite low quality MP3 leak of the album has escaped 9 days before the album is officially released. On a single torrent site, it has already been downloaded more than 5000 times with just over 1000 downloading it at the time of writing. From a single site.

All that remains to be seen now is if they react by moving the official release date forward.

It’s a pretty decent album though. Apparently.

If there is one thing that the internet is full of today, it’s Google releasing a beta of its new browser, Google Chrome. As it happens, this blog post is being typed in it and rest assured that everything about the Disposable Media website seems to work as expected from a quick scout around, which is pretty nice as it saves me mending things. 

Much as we love the internet and Disposable Media certainly wouldn’t exist in its current form without it, new browsers and suchlike aren’t something we tend to post blogs about. But google, being the clever folks that they are have managed to find a reason for us to post about it - they announced it in the form of a comic. (Which they accidentally leaked too early).

It’s not a half-hearted attempt at scoring some cool points either - it is 38 pages of explanation of what the new browser is, what it isn’t, how it works and what it wants to be. It goes into some pretty impressive detail, explaining how it manages memory, explaining its approach to stopping phishing, how its tabs work…all kinds of things. And it really should be boring, perhaps to the point of being unintelligible. But it is neither.

How does it manage it? By being written by Scott McCloud, basically. If anyone has ever read more than a couple of comics then “Understanding Comics” by McCloud is almost required reading. It explains the form brilliantly and is quick and easy to read despite being, basically, a lecture. The same goes for this Google Chrome infocomicmercial (that is never going to catch on, is it?) - it’s a lecture. And putting together a lecture takes research, something McCloud clearly did in spades, from interviewing the developers to playing with the browser itself. It treats the readers as intelligent, but still explains everything anyway. In short, it is very impressive for what it is and well worth a read.

And no, we probably don’t want comics to become synonomous with distributing corporate information and we don’t want it to become Scott McCloud’s niche either. But as a one-off, this is a work of excellence. Plus it convinced me to download the browser on day one, so it must have done something right.

The browser itself? Seems pretty good so far (the one thing that has impressed me most is a “close tabs to the right” button) but it’ll be days until I decide whether it has anything that annoys me or not…although the EULA seems to mean that Google own this post now, which is a bit odd. But they can have this one on me!