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I've got a new phone, and it runs Google's Android OS which is a first for me. It's an HTC Desire, and I've had it less than 24 hours. So these are just some intital thoughts.

I previously used the company's Nexus One phone, and essentially this is the same phone as Google's own phone. There are some subtle hardware differences in that the Desire has an FM Radio (no RDS), while the Nexus has a noise cancelling microphone. The Desire has improved camera software with face recognition. The Desire also has the HTC Sense UI sitting on top of it.

Synchronisation with my Gmail account is a breeze, and with links to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, most of my social media life quickly gets hooked up. Like INQ phones, the phone grabs Facebook imagery for my contacts.

One thing I do know about these phones is that my days of getting five days on a single charge are numbered for a bit. I've not tried a complete 24 hour period without any kind of charging, but the combination of WiFi (at home and at work), GPS and 3G obviously takes its toll on the battery.

The phone feels lovely, and the keyboard responded better to me once I'd been through the callibration tool as someone online suggested.

I've obviously gone mad downloading lots of recommended apps, but I'll thin what I use later. I still think Google Sky is the coolest app around, although Layar is also great.

Because the phone is linked to my Google account, that also means Google Checkout, which could be dangerous over the long run!

I'm on Orange and they're an operator who can never help fiddling with a phone before letting it go, and there lies my only gripe so far. Yes the phone has an Orange logo on the back of it - but I don't really care about that. And yes, they install some of their own applications on the phone including an alternative "App Shop" to the default Android Market (which is so rubbish that when I launched it in a WiFi zone, it gave an error message because it only works over 3G, and promptly crashed completely requiring the removal of the battery to fully kill the application). But you can quickly move these icons around and hide them from the main screen.

There are some game demos that seemingly can't be uninstalled which is a bit annoying. But the most annoying thing is that Orange has seemingly removed Google Talk.

A bit of Googling around Android and smartphone websites reveals the fact that Orange has done this before. I remember that previously when using an Orange Windows Mobile device, they removed the Messenger application.

More recently, Orange removed Gmail, YouTube and Google Talk from their version of the HTC Tattoo.

This time around, they've included the Gmail and YouTube applications, but Google Talk seems to be missing (I say "seems" because it could be there somewhere, but I'm not sure where). The thing is that Google Talk is there somewhere in the background. If I go to Settings > Applications > Running Services, the phone tells me that GTalkService is running in the background and starts up when the phone starts up.

Somewhere in the depths of the internet, I found the Google Talk apk for the Tattoo, but while that installs it fails to run. I guess I need to wait until I find a similar version extracted from a Desire ROM.

Is this all a deal-breaker? Not really. I know that in due course, should I want to, I'll be able to download a generic HTC Desire ROM from somewhere and fully expunge Orange's additions. But I'll leave that for now. Why Orange does this, I really don't know. They have their own IM application, but it doesn't work with Gmail, so I'm not interested.

It does annoy me, and if you happen to know how I can restore Google Talk please do let me know below.

But I won't let that small gripe detract from what seems to be a really nice device. The camera takes pretty decent quality pictures (see above for an example), and I was also pretty impressed with the video capabilities. The sound's poor on this sample movie, but I was impressed by the way it handled the changes in contrast.

Make sure that 480p is selected for best quality.

I'll write in more detail once I've used it more in the real world.

Today comes news that the BBC has had to delay its mobile phone applications until the BBC Trust has taken a close look at what it's doing. That obviously includes iPhone apps, but other operating systems are available, and the BBC was developing for them too.

The announcement that the BBC was developing applications came in February when Eric Huggers, the BBC's Director of Future Media & Technology, made the announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The first application for BBC News had been expected next month.

A lot of newspapers in particular had been enormously unhappy at the move. In particular the Newspaper Publishers' Association (who don't seem to have a website of their own), had complained to the BBC Trust.

Well it has come to pass that despite the fact that most mobile applications - and almost certainly the BBC's News app - are just fancy front ends to news stories already available in browsers, everyone was kicking up a fuss.

Also complaining were third-party developers who'd made available a range of applications - many of which were paid for - which directly used BBC news stories and streams.

In Media Guardian's podcast a couple of weeks ago, Emily Bell and Matt Wells got particularly upset at the prospect of a BBC News application. While admitting that they were in competition with the BBC with their own Guardian app which is paid for (and very good it is too), I'm not sure that I agree that this stacks up. Why shouldn't the BBC be able to put an application "wrapper" around something you can already see on mobile phones.

To some extent many applications are pointless wrappers of web editorial. Taken to a logical extreme, we're all going to end up with mobile devices with hundreds of applications each working with a single website, a bit like you might have a long list of bookmarks in your browser.

Certainly you can do some clever stuff with applications - perhaps using location based information to provide relevant data, as well as the push side of things (As an aside, the BBC Breaking News Twitter feed is one of the few I let send me a direct text to my mobile because unlike most organisations, they use it fairly sparingly. Sky News' Twitter account "breaks" just about every story that comes down the wires, and as such is less useful. The Guardian's Twitter news feed similarly pumps out too many stories a day.).

The BBC has for years made a mobile version of its news website available to mobile devices. Should this be allowed?

There are always going to be applications that simply use the RSS feeds of sites like BBC News to power them, and there's little that can be done to stop their creation. Indeed, if you look beyond the iPhone platform, anyone can write anything they like for platforms like Android and there's very little anyone can do to stop them.

It's an artificial distinction. And those kinds of distinctions just don't work on the web.

From a user's point of view, a delay in making available a BBC iPlayer application is not a good thing. Consumers are expecting and even demanding that programmes are made available via mobile devices. Whether or not the mobile networks can cope with widescale video and audio streaming usage like this is a separate - but important - question.

In the end, it was probably foollish to believe that the BBC Trust wouldn't need to put its oar in before these applications saw the light of day, but its viewers and listeners who will lose out. The idea that mobile is an area the BBC shouldn't be in will be utterly absurd in even 12 months' time. That's if it isn't already.

These are my own views, and they do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, not that we're really in the mobile news application game.

Yesterday's Observer had an interesting piece on Spotify that included a little more substance about whether or not Spotify is making money.

I tried to find out as much as I could about Spotify ahead of Radio at the Edge a few weeks ago, and put everything I determine into a short video.

As I said at the time, there are conflicting numbers published about Spotify which can muddy the waters a bit, but yesterday's Observer piece cuts through them as best as anybody can. The Swedish news that Lady Gaga's Poker Face only earned around £100 from Spotify in that country.

The most interesting information comes from Rob Wells at Universal who explains that although record companies have a stake in Spotify, it doesn't get better terms as a result. Moreover:

And the revenues are flowing, he stresses. In revenue terms, Spotify Sweden is now Universal Music Group International's eighth largest business partner, out of 1,400. "Watch this space. Those guys are absolutely on fire, you are going to see some amazing developments over the next three to six months."

Yesterday I was at the excellent Radio at the Edge conference 2009 (my notes are here).

My major contribution to the conference was a series of "factoid" videos introducing different sessions. If you were there and the statistics flashed by too fast, then I've put them on YouTube. My "ecelctic" music choices also saw some discussion.

Anyway - have a look. All the stats should be sourced, and there are a few numbers here which weren't previously in the public domain.

I expect that they'll also be up on the Radio Academy's excellent website where the audio from yesterday's event should also appear shortly.

But in the meantime:

Digital Listening

Youth Listening

Podcasting

Spotify

Mobile

iPods - Other MP3 players are available

Miscellaneous Interesting Facts

[Disclaimer: I work for Absolute Radio, and I was able to supply some of these figures because of who I work for. Editorially, however, I had control over what's presented here.]

As Peter Mandelson continues to show us that he completely misunderstands the nature of the internet, a general failing of "content-owners" can be seen when you try to do something very simple that you should be able to do in this day and age but can't.

At the weekend I thought I'd try to get hold of a nice Hammer film to watch. (NB. I dislike the over-Americanisation of Halloween, but still enjoy the odd horror film, and Hammer films are a guilty pleasure).

We live in a world of instant gratification, but not always that instant.

The thing you need to bear in mind here is that I like to watch films on the big expensive device that monopolises my living room. It's there to serve precisly this purpose. My iPod or laptop aren't as good.

Amazon had the film in stock, but I'd have to wait until Tuesday to get it. Where else can one buy legal films on the internet to downlaod? Not Amazon who only currently sell music. Basically I was going to be stuck with iTunes who do have a great selection.

But there's a problem. I can't then watch my purchase on my TV. That's not entirely true. I can plug my laptop into my TV. But the quality is poor. I need either an HDMI cable (by TV isn't HD), or an S-video cable, and audio cable.

I wasn't about to pay for an inferior experience. I'd prefer to be able to burn to DVD. But I can't. I had a look around the web to see if there were any workarounds, but they all involve screen-captures of the movie played back on the laptop, recorded and then converted to DVD.

Apple lets you burn your music to CD - it even let you do this when it had copy-protection included. But you can't burn purchased films or TV programmes onto DVD.

What I can easily do is go online and find a DivX file of the film I wanted, download it, and play it back in my DivX compatible DVD player. Or I can use my Xbox to play the file direct off PC wirelessly.

In other words, downloading an illegal copy is much easier for consumers. And that - very simply - is why entertainment companies are losing so much money.

Of course the amounts being lost are nonsense. If all illegal activity was shut down, you'd be a fool to believe that the money to buy the films and music that's being shared or stolen would suddenly appear from nowhere. It's being spent on legal games, and music, mobile phone bills and satellite packages.

William Gallagher was recently extolling the virtues of Lou Grant on the excellent UK DVD Review podcast recently. Yet it's never been released on DVD. I can pay for it and download it on iTunes, but I can't watch it on TV. And while portable players offer a certain amount of convenience, I still like to watch proper dramas on a proper TV.

I actually spent a little time searching around the internet to find out any other legal downloading initiatives. The only UK specific service I could find was from Lovefilm who seem to offer a limited number of digital films online to buy, which each come with a free DVD which is then mailed to you.

But nobody seems to offer a service that lets you download a film or TV show, letting you either play it back online or burn to DVD.

Another lost opportunity from an industry so scared of piracy that they're cutting their nose off to spite their face.

...but people seem to do all the time just now.

Please don't do any of these things. You just look a bit sad.

10. Mention on Twitter how many followers you now have. I don't really care.

9. Produce an iPhone version of your site, but not bother with a generic mobile version.

8. Get overly excited about any new product that Apple launches.

7. Get overly excited about any new product that Google launches.

6. Use URL shortening services on websites. There's no need.

5. Spout trite inanities about social networking and call it useful information.

4. Tweet about a TV show without using the appropriate hashtag so I can exclude your musings from my screen should I desire (e.g. #xfactor).

3. Compare whatever you're currently watching with The Wire (e.g. The Cube with Philip Schofield)

2. Tweet a link without so much as a hint as to what it might be about - especially if you've used a URL shortening service.

1. Publicly beg for a Google Wave invitation.

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood, and have read a few other lists like this in the last couple of days.

A couple of weeks ago Ofcom published its annual Communications Market Report which nicely distils lots of UK media research into one place (albeit a 334 page "place").

The report noted that social networking is "growing more slowly than previously." This isn't perhaps all that surprising since at some point services like Facebook run out of new sign-ups.

But the piece of research that really caused some ructions was that summarised as follows:

Social networking is also maturing - literally. Use grew fastest among 35-54s - up by eight percentage points since Q1 2008 to 35%. Among 25-34 year olds use grew by six percentage points to 46% but it actually fell slightly among 15-24s - by five percentage points to 50%.

This couldn't be true could it?

Fewer 15-24s are using social networking than previously?

Then there was that widely quoted "research note" written by a 15-year old Morgan Stanley intern (Seemingly, nobody at Morgan Stanley had previously bothered speaking to their teenage sons and daughter to find out how they were using social media). That report said that 15 year olds didn't use Twitter. That might be true for that particular teenager, and it's certainly true that Twitter appeals to older people, but taking one person's experience at face value is always dangerous.

Well let's have a look at some of that Ofcom report in a little more detail.

First of all, while the Ofcom report does indeed show a drop between Q1 2008 and Q1 2009, the 15-24 age group has the highest penetration of any age group.

Over the same period, the 25-34 age group has leapt from 40% to 46%, while amongst 35-44s the jump is even more marked going from 28% to 35%.

But the question remains: are the underlying figures accurate?

The source of the data is Ofcom's Technology Tracker. Unfortunately, full results from this research don't seem to be available, and although the source gives the sample size at around 6000 per sweep for Q1 2008 and Q1 2009 (it's significantly lower at a mid-point sample taken in Q3 2008), we don't know how many are 15-24s.

Supposing that the sample is split relatively evenly in line with population, there should be no doubt that the figures are accurate and the margin of error should be minimal.

The jumps around and changes in levels suggest something a little broader - perhaps people's defninitions of a "social networking site" are changing, as well as their behaviour.

Interestingly, Comscore came out and pretty much refuted Ofcom's findings in a press release that highlighted continued growth in the sector between June 2009 and June 2009 amongst 15-24 year olds. Facebook again shows excellent growth.

Now ComScore certainly employs a very different methodology to derive its figures to those of Ofcom. Some have poo-pooed Ofcom's numbers because they're based on information from as long ago as Q1 2009. That's an eon in social networking terms! But I'm not inclined to agree. Yes more up to date data is always preferable, but this is only a few months old, and it's not enough to have made a difference, except perhaps, to Twitter.

On a broader level, it seems clear that different age groups use social media very differently. Conventional wisdom doesn't regard instant messaging as a "social media site" and very few 15-24s would probably regard it as so. Yet it's vastly popular in this age group (TGI suggests that 45% of all instant messager users are in this demo, and I suspect that account for the vast majority of the messaging), and it's certainly "social."

The younger you are, the more your "social network" revolves around people you see very regularly: at school, college or socially. But even then, you still use these sites a lot.

Then you get older and lose touch with some people - you might find them again via Facebook, or stay in touch professionally via LinkedIn.

Much of the debate seems to be focused around how Twitter is slightly older (not that old if you're a 62 year-old, former reality TV contestant and newspaper columnist). That's because it's something more than just that status update bit of Facebook. Yes - you stay in touch with friends via it, but you probably also have a wider selection of people you follow who are feeding you stuff that interests you.

It can take some time to learn this, which is probably why so many Tweets are babble. Of course one person's "babble" is another person's interesting bit of information.

And once you understand how Twitter works best, you don't just subscribe to anybody's Twitter stream. I'm only likely to subscribe to people I'm interested in, and those who have interesting things to say (in my eyes at least). So the signal to noise ratio is much better for me.

Indeed one clear element in the "babble" research by Pear Analytics is missing: we don't know how many people followed the tweets that were sent. The research considered 2000 tweets pulled from the public timeline. How many followers those tweets had was not considered.

Somebody who just tells the world at large what they had for breakfast probably isn't going to get a large number of followers outside their close circle of friends and family. Indeed, if you only participate to that level, you're likely to find Twitter unappetising and become part of that other oft-quoted stat - the number of people who leave nearly as quickly as they join Twitter (or plenty of other social networking sites).

The tweets of more interesting opinion formers are seen by vastly more people. And they probably value those messages a great deal more. Put simply, one tweet by Joe Bloggs is not equal to one tweet by Stephen Fry. Not all tweets are alike*.

You can see the whole paper here, although as I say, I believe it's flawed in its conception.

I'm not sure what my conclusion overall here is, except that you should always be a little distrustful of statistics unless you're able to look at the full picture.

* In fact, Pear Analytics did understand this, and referred to a Gizmodo blog post and accompanying visualisation that noted that 75% of tweets come from 5% of the Twitter community. But they just didn't actually make use of this information in their own research.

I see that the Webby Awards have been announced, and thank goodness, because I'm bored to tears with them.

The problem is that they still have this daft "People's Voice Winner," voted for by the public, in every category alongside the "Webby Award Winner" which is voted for by the illustrious sounding "The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences."

The awards are judged from those that enter. That, like most awards, means an entry fee. And over 100 categories mean lots of potential entry fees (over 10,000 entries in 2008).

Although the "Webbys" [sic] are seemingly global, nearly all the nominees seem to come from the English speaking world. Now perhaps we're that much ahead of the rest of the world, but I find it a tad unlikely.

Then there are all the ways you can buy your awards, certificates and nominations. Awards are always a profitable business. And it's not clear to me whether the Webby Awards are profit-making enterprise, or whether they have some kind of charitable status.

But I suppose my main criticism is the People's Voice category for each award. This is the public vote, and once your site has been nominated, it's then a bring-out-the-vote affair. The group that enables their audience to vote the most wins. And if you decide you do want to support the site that you visit and give them a vote, you're also asked to vote for other categories. But have you really been to all those sites nominated? While you're not forced to vote in other categories, you might well be inclined to vote for the larger more popular groups. Look in any category, and the "People's Voice" winner will tend to be the most trafficked site. And of course, those sites tend to keep on mentioning that they'd like you to vote for them. It's nearly enough to drive me away.

Public votes are always a mess. The recent BAFTA TV award determined by a public vote went to Skins - the series with the audience most likely to be digitally enabled and get out the vote.

I suppose we should all understand that it's a popularity contest, but it's a bit like awarding the Best Picture Oscar to the film that had the largest box office (2009 is looking like it'll be Monsters v Aliens at the moment, but we're only just entering blockbuster season).

Google Streetmaps has launched in London, and I was keen to see if I featured.

A few months ago I saw the Google car taking photos:

But sadly, it wasn't taking pictures on Glasshouse Street where I saw it.

View Larger Map

The above photo was taken in front of the Jewel nightclub at the back, just next to "Donuts."

What is clear is that Google has painstakingly blurred out anyone identifiable in their photos.

A potential moment of fame gone forever...

So the big question: is Google's new advertising initiative actually as bad as Phorm? Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn't like it, and neither do I.

Do I really have to visit this site from every browser I use to opt out?

That's not something I appreciate.

This site is also worth visiting.

I understand how advertising works and how it supports many of the sites I visit and use. But I prefer to see adverts on the basis of where I visit rather than on the basis of where I've been.

One of the most interesting documents likely to be published in the UK in the next few months is Lord Stephen Carter's Digital Britain report. The draft report is due to be published by the end of this month, and it's likely to cover things like public service, broadband and digital radio. The recent DRWG report has been passed to Lord Carter's team.

But the leaks are starting now. Today's FT has a report that details what is likely to be the highest profile element of his report: universal broadband access.

Currently 40% of households don't have broadband access, and after years of growth, the increase has slowed.

The Digital Britain report proposes that every household in the UK should have access to at least 2 megabits per second download speed. This would be either via fixed wires, or via wireless 3G technology in rural areas.

What isn't clear from the FT's reports is how this would be funded, and how much it would cost householders. If 40% of homes have yet to subscribe to broadband, many are obviously in areas that can receive broadband currently. So are they not subscribing because it's too expensive? Or do they not have PCs? There's not really a "pay as you go" broadband offering - you're generally tied into 12 month contracts which some find either unaffordable or otherwise unviable. And of course, not everyone owns a PC or other device that would make use of the internet.

Without universal access to the internet, we are already becoming a two-tiered society. So giving access to all is important.

More on Digital Britain once the draft report is published, including much about radio...

Let me first apologise for mentioning Christmas while we're still in November. I take no pleasure in bringing forward a retailing period that's already appearing far too early, and is very occassionally considered a religious festival (for goodness sake, a man died today in a stampede at 5am in Walmart in New York).

As someone who does more and more of his shopping online, I usually don't mind if the retailer emails me regular updates of special offers, perhaps based on my previous shopping habits. But I've noticed it getting worse and worse of late. Last year, in the run-up to final postal deadlines to receive goods in time for Christmas, all the major retailers were sending me at least one email a day. This is overkill.

This year, as a recession looms (unless we're in it already), it's already getting silly. My inbox is daily filling up with mail advertising that day's offers. More often than not, they're not really targeted at me based on any previous purchasers. The retailers effectively see it as free non-spam. I've elected to receive their email and they're going to make sure I receive it.

Well let me tell them that they're walking a very fine line. There is no reason for them to send quite the quantity that they are, and if it significantly increases from the current level, I'll be unsubscribing. At that point - they've lost me.

Email is not a replacement for other forms of media. It's more intrusive, but it's also something I can control, when I turn on the radio or television, or buy a newspaper, there's little I can do to determine whether or not I see the ads (PVRs excepted). But I can and will take too much junk email into my own hands.

So HMV, Argos, WH Smith and even Amazon - you better watch out. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's getting fed up with the bombardment.

There's a new series of The IT Crowd starting this week on Channel 4. Hurrah!

In the last series, one of the episodes opened with Roy and Moss sitting down to watch a DVD. We then saw a brilliant mock DVD piracy advert to warn viewers of how bad the criminals you're supporting are if you buy pirate DVDs.

We all hate these things - and they only ever show up on legal DVDs.

Anyway, I grabbed the video and put it on YouTube. It's 45 seconds long, and it's been there since September last year. Of course it's not mine, and there are loads of other versions of it online as well. Writer Graham Linehan obviously touched a nerve.

So how amusing today to get the following email:

Dear adambowie00,

Your video "Video Piracy" is still available because Channel 4 does not object to this content appearing on YouTube at this time. As long as Channel 4 has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video's page.

As I've said, before, I'm happy that Channel 4 has an enlightened attitude to using YouTube like this.

But I can't be the only person to see the irony of the situation here...

BTW - I do of course own a copy of the boxset of Series 1 and Series 2 of The IT Crowd which are authored brilliantly! I would still advocate that an elightened attitude leads to more revenues in the long term.

These are interesting times for Kanagroo - the BBC Worldwide/ITV/C4 joint venture that, simply put, is supposed to do for commercial (and commercially sold) TV, what the iPlayer does for the BBC.

Last week Ashley Highfield quite the consortium after four months, having moved across from the BBC mothership to take charge. And a long piece in today's MediaGuardian suggests that the project has been ridden with internal politics.

It's also true that the venture has been knocked off its timetable by a Competition Commission investigation which attempts to identify whether the consortium would be monopolistic.

The problem with all of this is that it feels a little like the record companies all over again. I suppose the organisations are at least talking, and know that they have to do something and make some money. But exactly how and what seems to be the question.

In the meantime, iTunes steals a march on video as it has done with music. With its technology being locked to a single, fantastically popular, device line for music, it now has a say so over everything the music industry tries to do. They have to accept Apple's pricing or not be on the platform. They've lost control. Other players have attempted to use Microsoft's format which works with a wide range of non-Apple devices, but they have small market share and are clunky in their usability (see James' piece on his attempts to load some video on a WMV player recently).

The various MP3 offerings might be able to take this on, but they tend to be hampered by not having full offerings - the majors are missing from eMusic, Play.com's MP3 service offers only a subset of what's available on CDs without all the majors on board, and Amazon's MP3 service simply hasn't turned up so far this year despite promises to the contrary.

So iTunes has the whip hand.

And now the same is happening with TV. If you want to go out and download a film or TV show, you really only have one choice - iTunes. Certainly all the broadcasters offer their own services to a lesser or greater extent. But they're messy - usually streamed - and the user experience is not nice. Only the iPlayer can really compete - and it was actually a latecomer to the market with most of the other broadcasters long having since put their offerings live. The iPlayer has been well marketed - with catch-up reminders accompanying every trail on-air as well as bespoke trails for the service.

There's nowhere else to go. It's not even as though iTunes is actually that good for film and TV. The TV is largely US fare with a limited amount of British TV. That's one of the reasons the Competition Commission got involved of course - one gets the impression that ITV and C4 are holding their programming back to a certain extent. And films are slow to arrive on the platform, often only being available to buy in the first instance, with less profitable rentals coming later (This is unlike Blockbuster, who needs to recoup the cost of each DVD - so multiple rentals on release make sense, as well as offering the copies for sale. Apple on the other hand, does not need to "recoup" a download's cost, so it prefers to "sell" at a higher price rather than "rent" a digital download).

For a strong and healthy marketplace, we need more than one major operator, which is why it's important that Kangaroo gets off the ground. Of course, ir's important that programming is not limited to one supplier - I want to able to choose buy the new Indy film (or not) in HMV, Zavvi, Sainsburys or ASDA. But delays in getting the project off the ground just makes Apple stronger. As it did for music, it has already positioned itself in a good place for portable video with DRM attached (and that, sadly, is going to be necessary in the short-term). That's not to say that other deals can't be done - the Sony PSP is an obvious route to market as well as Windows Media video devices. Deals with mobile phone operators would be good, although the manufacturers and networks tend to want you to use their own offerings rather than those of third-parites. But don't mess around - and get cracking!

We do now hear that a trial will launch in January following an alpha next month. This is ahead of possible approval from the Competition Commission in late January next year or early February. The sooner the better...

I got invited along to the launch of a mobile phone the other day - the INQ1 (pronounced "Ink"). But just calling it a mobile phone is a bit harsh - it's more of a communications device than anything.

It comes from a new company who are looking to target people for who iPhones, Blackberrys, and Nseries Nokias are out of their price range (or desire). These are great, but expensive devices, and that means that the bulk of the market aren't interested in them. (I, of course, am interested in them, and currently quite like my Nokia N82).

What INQ has done is produce a device that serves a purpose and does it well. This, if you like, is the Facebook phone. Indeed we got a pre-recorded message from Mark Zuckerberg (a bit wooden, but then he's not an actor), telling us how much he loved it. Facebook is essentially built into the phone, along with Skype, eBay, MS Live Messenger et al. What is very clever, and has been done nowhere else, is the way it imports your contacts from these social networks into the phone.

So your Facebook contacts are now your phone contacts, along with photo profiles, and other data. The phone grabs similar data from your other networks and then lets you merge the various people together. You have to do this because in one system I might be "Adam Bowie", in another "A Bowie" and in another... well something very different.

The always on nature of the phone along with the built-in all-you-can-eat data seems good value, and it means that your Facebook updates ping the phone as they come through.

This is a basic phone, but at a reasonable PAYG price point or free on contract, it's going to appeal to a lot of people who don't need all the bells and whistles but just want internet connectivity wherever they go.

What is clear is that INQ and Three do seem to understand the market, and where there's a gap in it. I think that this could be pretty popular.

Disclaimer: I was invited to this launch presentation, and was given a memory stick, a poster and a t-shirt. So I think I'm being impartial!

Apologies upfront for the rawness of this text. I'll tidy it up later.

To Radio at the Edge (where there's some free WiFi), to hear about the latest goings on in the audio world.

After introductions from James Cridland, and an opening from Nick Wallis, a familiar face - to me at least - Clive Dickens, presented the changes that have been made as Virgin Radio changed to Absolute Radio.

This included the Google Trends information as well as details about our ongoing advertising campaign.

Finally, Clive talked about Open Mic, a new initiative to talk to the Absolute audience about what the station is doing right, and what it's doing wrong.

DAB - Dead and Buried?

James Ashton of the Sunday Times introduced the session reading out a series of stats about the state of play with digital radio in a basically very factual manner including set sales, and recent things that have happened with Channel 4 Radio and the question over what Global will do with Digital One.

Tony Moretta of the DRDB opened things up with a "defence" of DAB radio - one in three households have a device, with 14m people listening a week. And these people listen to more services.

He confronted what he called urban myths noting that it was the "only" way to hear stereo Absolute outside London (not strictly true if you listen via TV or online, but very important, certainly). He said that 88% of people rated audio quality as good to excellent. "DAB doesn't work in cars" - well it doesn't if you don't have an in-car DAB, he pointed out.

He also said that the internet isn't the future of radio; it'll be part of the ecology, but DAB will be the mainstay. The iPlayer's great, but it won't work in the car, walking around or even in the kitchen.

He concluded that it was very healthy at the moment, and he urged people to focus on things that will appeal to a wide variety of products. Add in colour screens, EPGs, PVR functionality, and WiFi.

Paul Fairburn of Smooth said that GMG weren't "rabid enthusiasts." They'd see how it went, although they saw the costs as very high. He said that they were on all the usual platforms - and indeed they may withdraw from the odd one if the costs didn't add up. But they'd be stupid to drop DAB. 8.5% of his listening comes from DAB. He talked about cars being important, but while screens might be nice, he didn't want to have to stump up to pay for additional "bits."

There were a couple of references to some "machinations" within the digital radio industry - and he wouldn't say what platforms they would come off. The emaill had gone out however...

Mark Friend at the BBC referenced a recent fall in listening off a high in 2004. He said that we can't just rely on internet or similar. He said that contrary to what some people seem to think, the BBC doesn't deliberately degrade its signal online [who's suggesting that?]. There have to be a wide choice of devices and wide choice of listening options.

Multicast and WiMax will be critical in the future, but key is the cost. The killer at the moment, he said, was analogue and digital dual cost. He asked, rhetorically, whether we should pull out of DAB as Finland did, but referred to all the sets in the market. Universality is key to the BBC and DAB is part of that.

He said that a switch off of the national networks on FM was part of a possible future and that the BBC is working with the DRWG to determine whether and when national networks might be moved across.

Ashton asked if the BBC could lead the "Freeview moment" for radio. But Friend said that it had been a unique case, and he wasn't sure what it actually meant in terms of radio.

He said that the BBC's share of digital listening was the same as analogue listening. [That's not quite true - particularly for DAB where it's more like 65% of the market compared with 57% of analogue listening. I think that commercial radio is strong in the digital realm in spite of this].

Peter Davies of Ofcom also addressed the "Freeview moment" and pointed out that there were only 600,000 ITV Digital/OnDigital devices when Freeview launched. DAB's much further down the path. He talked about new launches of digital radio internationally - and acknowledged that different tehnologies were being adopted in places like France and Germany. But these differences didn't matter, because the overall standard that had now been agreed allowed for this.

He said that the DRWG was very important with everyone sitting down at the same table. But DAB has problems structurally, with cost, and the downturn of the commercial radio market. He said that restructuring talks were ongoing and nearing a conclusion, although Channel 4 radio had obviously changed things during the process.

Ashton asked if licencing D2 was a mistake. Davies replied that it had been driven by the market, with everyone except Gcap being keen on it.

Handing back digital licences is tricky, with most analogue stations having taken 12 year rollovers. If a station hands back its digital licence they'd probably lose their analogue licence. He said it would be unfair not to enforce those rules even if lots of people did it at the same time. It'd be unfair on other stations who hadn't adopted DAB.

He said that there were probably structural issues as to where and how services were placed with national stations being carried on local muxes but that perhaps that left local muxes short of services. The picture is not quite how it might at first appear.

He was asked about the possibility of a hybrid national/local multiplex. He said that it wasn't wasy as at the moment nationally you can't offer local advertising opt outs on the national mux because it's a single frequency network. So quite how the restructure might work is not straightforward.

Darryl Pomicter of Ressen Design talked about internet radio from a prepared statement about the strengths of internet radio.

There was then something of a discussion about various numbers - particularly in relation to downloads.

There was a strongly made point from the audience about how the two real reasons for many still being in DAB is the 12 year rollover and the profits accruing from owning multiplexes.

Peter Davies refused to be drawn further, but said that stations didn't have to get into DAB when they had. It was however, argued that the picture had been different five years ago.

Nick Piggott asked about what the costs for IP radio delivery would be. Mark Friend said that he'd not looked at it in cost terms. Peter Davies said that DAB was cheaper nationally than FM, but that the problem was dual broadcasting.

Paul Fairburn said that last time he'd looked at the numbers, it was vastly more costly to reach everyone with a stream than using broadcast technology. Pomicter said that it was more a complementary medium.

Tony Moretta said that we shouldn't hold out hopes on WiMax which will need the infrastructure of mobile phone networks, and few would be investing in that kind of technology.

From the audience, Matt Degan said it was great if you had an FM licence, but hours generate cash, and of all the platforms, hours come digital radio. He said that we should look at some of the Asian services that know their markets very well to make them work.

A commenter said that if you actually look at the more niche services like 6Music, Planet Rock or even Five Live Sports Extra, the numbers at the peak were relatively small and they could use IP as a cost effective alternative.

Mark Friend said that if you didn't use DAB then even fewer would listen to it.

Bits, Bytes and Boats - Kelly Shepherd
BBC World Service Future Media

Shepherd began her presentation with a number of stats: 183m listeners and a combined 13m users per week for the website of the BBC World Service.

They decided last year that they should put audio at the heart of their redesign. This was done by creating a community to help carry out redesign. It was relaunched in December 2007 and removed many of the feeds that the previous site had been a mish mash of.

Currently they offer podcasts of 35 programmes - predominantly in English. They've had a podcast offering since 2005.

[Like Absolute] the BBC WS realises that iTunes is an important place to get podcasts.

An important part of the offering is mobile. All the sites either are, or will be available in mobile form. There is also a JAVA application for updates available in several languages.

And like other parts of the BBC they're embedding video into their sites. Arabic has already had a huge impact in the first few weeks. Persian is next up.

The language video content is now also available on YouTube in their own channels.

The audience also wants to know about the presenters and the site has individual video introductions to them all.

Shepherd said that the title of her presentation in part refers to a project based around a Bangladesh river journey looking at climate change, but using blogs, inertactive maps, Twitter and so on.

The BBC WS sites also have user generated elements. There are messageboards in a variety of language, and they even offer virtual keyboards to let people use languages in internet cafes.

There is also a "global conversation" in multi-lingual debates. People have been able to submit audio and video using services like Odeo to capture it. These elements have in turn ended up in programmes.

The BBC WS sees it as important to change as the audience changes.

Getting Intimate with the Audience

Fi Glover's chaired this session with Iain Lee (Absolute Radio), Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC) and Dan Heaf (C4).

Iain began by getting upset (!) when Rory started using Twitter from the stage.

Fi wanted to know what the "hot ticket-est" stuff that Heaf was doing now that he couldn't have done five years ago. He said that it was using data that's now available, and what it now meant to be someone's "friend".

Rory said that it was all working, but said that he didn't think he was working. He's been blogging and putting videos on YouTube. He said that he's been Twittering like mad. He then get out a piece of paper (!) with things that people had said in response to a question that he'd earlier asked the Twitter audience.

But is it a good use of his time to "broadcast" to his thousand followers instead of talking to many millions on the Today programme.

Iain Lee said that he still thought it was worth talking to his audience online rather than using a broadcast on the radio.

Heaf thought that if you have a large audience, you should make sure that you don't give a disproportionate amount of your time to a tiny subset of your audience.

The discussion moved on to paid-for options for podcasts, with discussions around Danny Baker's podcast. Iain Lee mentioned that only Ricky Gervais had made it work although Stephen Fry was moving that way. He said that if he charged for Shindiggery then he'd only get about 10 subscriptions and they'd share it with their friends anyway.

Heaf thought that a Russell Brand podcast might do quite well just now.

Rory says that you have to be cautious with online information. He suggested that you start by disbelieving it, and then see if you can verify it. The BBC also has problems with impartiality. If someone's on Facebook should they talk about their feelings towards political figures.

Iain Lee spoke about how he's learnt his lessons about what you can and can't say on-air, and he can be looser online. He said that you can try stuff that might not work on the radio and if you fall flat on your face, then so be it. It's not "better", it's "different".

Heaf thought that there aren't enough people in the UK creating their own content and we should do more to encourage them.

Fi Glover wondered if there wasn't an element of the emperor's new clothes about it all. Do a small number of people have disproportionate impact? Cellan-Jones said that you have to be wary of that, and there are special interest groups that can try to bias you.

Asked whether it changes the way you listen, most said no. Most people listening to a phone in can't be bothered to text or email in. Lee says that he'll happily shout at an idiot like Jon Gaunt, but he won't bother phoning in.

Heaf said that, for example Twitter, was more about content discovery than what someone else had for breakfast.

UGC, says Cellan-Jones, is a long way in, with the phone-in programme on the radio being the best and most mature example. Perhaps, he thought, there'll be less one-size fits all stuff, but he wasn't sure that there'll be much more in the way of getting more stuff online.

It can be useful for chasing down case studies. But there is a fightback from some staff asking whether they should be using it all the time. Should someone's mobile phone photo be used ahead of a professional image of the same thing.

Heaf thought that the rise of on-demand media is going to change the nature of editorial and also the distribution mechanism.

Glover wondered if this was a generational thing. Most of the audience had grown up like this, but with on-demand media, younger listeners might expect things very differently. Heaf thought that while you might want live news in the morning, the daytime could be very different.

Lee thought that radio stations will be primarily radio stations. He said that Tommy Boyd was trying to set up a radio station that was all pre-recorded for self-scheduling. He said that he listens to a lot of radio on-demand, but not necessarily live. But he thought that there'll still be people who want live programmimng.

Glover wandered if Lee downloaded things he didn't like. He said that he tried stuff and would give it a chance. He talked about people who phoned up and said that they didn't like him. He asked why they listened?

In response to a question Cellan-Jones said that there was a certain crisis of confidence when people spent too much time looking at the most read items e.g. man marries goat.

Are Rory's followers ambassadors to his audience? Definitely. He said he uses at a sounding board and a resource. But it is a promotional mechanism. He'll advertise forthcoming stories and get instant feedback when they air. But it's "dangerously seductive."

Glover wondered about the time constraints on him. He said that it is very time consuming - he spent a lot of the weekend on this.

A respondent wondered about Fi's own stuff - with Facebook profiles and blogs for Saturday Live. Glover said that they'd responded to a specific need. The blog has been less successful but Facebook has worked really well some of it down to the nature of the programme and to "feel the love when we weren't on air."

A question from the audience asked about reaching hard-to-reach audiences using these technologies. Heaf thought that some of these tools offered the single most useful mechanism to allow feedback, but are these organisations listening and engaging.

There was something of a discussion about the Brand/Ross affair, and the difficulty in responding to it, and the level of what would be appropriate.

- Lunch -

Death by a Thousand Cuts: More Choice = More Noise

Nick Wallis chaired this session about personlised music, with representatives of the BBC, Sony (not SonyBMG any longer) We7 and last.fm.

Jonoas Woost of last.fm which, of course, is all about personalisation. He explained how last.fm works and scrobbles your music to determine what you might want to listen to.

Frederico Bolza of Sony has a job discovering how to stay relevant in the new world. He said that his job was to find artists and then to get the music to them. Last.fm, We7 and the radio are all channels for them to get their music out to listeners.

He said that 90% of their revenue comes from the sale of recorded music with most of the remainder coming via PPL from radio. These new areas don't yet pay very much.

"Choice doesn't necessarily help you find things." Discovery is important. Without it, you're left with infinite choice you have no choice..

Steve Purdham of We7, which launches tomorrow, said that it can be like a needle in a haystack. He said that having found something in particular, people then get lazy and want to go back to the radio model. So you get into the recommendation phase via either friends, automated systems or radio producers. He said that We7 were trying to harness those choices. He said that he had to offer something that was better than the pirate options.

When asked how it was better than last.fm, Purdham said that it was a different model. It was up to the consumer to determine what the preferred model of consuming music would be.

Woost said that there were still lots of different methods of delivering music.

We7 works on an audio advertising basis, whereas Joost relies on display advertising. Both sites sell music too via third parties or otherwise.

Chris Kimber of the BBCpointed out that most people still find out about new music via the linear radio. "John Peel was a filter," as is Zane Lowe. It's how to filter this music perhaps using useful web apps. He said that the BBC wanted to be able to tell you more about what you've just heard on air. Until now, you've had to go hunting around the web, and he saw that as crazy. Similarly, if you discover someone online, what programmes should the consumer listen to in order to hear more?

Kimber's worried about staying ahead of the curve. He felt that they've fallen behind it to some extent - there's no personalisation currently.

The currency is still the artist said Bolzo; that's the starting point. The band is the brand. "Don't wait as long as we did" - he said that Sony was slow. He said that the old model was broken - and the bigger part of the challenge now was the mindset and how it can work. Technology wasn't the real problem. He said until now, it's still easier to do the usual radio plugging. Bolzo sees all these technologies as complementary. He'd love the ability to press a button to feed back what the audience thought of a track.

Kimber said that the Now Playing info was easy if you're limited to 300 tracks played on hard disk. 57% of Radio 3 output is non-standard CDs, so without employing people to type in details live, it can be hard to provide up to date information all the time.

Purdham said that radio has to get onto the conveyer belt sooner rather than later. You should be able to get more information about any track you hear online or on the radio immediately. Technology allows us to do that now he said.

Purdham: "We've been doing this for 18 months and we have no idea how we're going to make money out of it."

He said that we don't yet know how large the pie is.

Wallis wanted to know how radio stations were going to get a cut of it. He wondered if Apple hadn't already walked away with it. Purdham said that in some cases it could be easy, but that didn't work on the tube.

Woost wasn't sure what the battle actually was. What pie is commercial radio wanting a slice of he wondered. Where is the Zane Lowe of commercial radio, he wanted to know. He said commercial radio had to take risks.

"I don't trust a single commercial radio station in this country," he said.

Bolza pointed out that the last.fm application was one of the most successful applications on the iPhone.

Kimber pointed out that there was no point to the BBC doing a last.fm type thing. "Zane Lowe is going to give you something that the wisdom of the crowds isn't."

He thought that there was a big opportunity here for doing something more mainstream. Most music discovery services are still quite "geeky." The BBC would be targeting that mainstream.

Wallis wanted to know about futurology. What was going to happen to that great live moment when you know that 4m are listening. Kimber thought not - we'd have both. There are still going to be times when you just want to put the radio on. And there's the boredom aspect that means on demand services don't offer - serendipity.

In the future listeners will listen to on demand and live services thought Kimber. He also said that programmes will have to be broken up so that someone can get, say, everything about the Killers.

Purdham says that they have to chase the fans' desires and "feed" people as they want to be. Technology will make this easier. It all comes back to the consumer he thought.

Wallis wondered how music might suffer from all this as a result. Are all bands going to sound the same - losing regional identities. Bolza said that you can't hold it back. He said that record companies have to work harder and be more attentive. A fan's attention has to be earned and deserved. Fans will go wherever the hell they want.

Woost saw more of the same in the future as they're a media company. At the moment, their audience is still quite geeky but is changing. Amazon is mainstream and that's what they need to be. But the social context of last.fm is important.

There was a question from the audience about the use of the data. Everyone was concerned about privacy issues.

Another questioner wondered about competition from mobile operators such as Nokia's Comes With Music initiative. Perhaps it'll compete with us, thought Woost, but he wasn't too worried seemingly. The audience can already get it free. Kimber thought that 1m tracks on a mobile phone was scary. Bolza said that it was to do with the editorial controls and filters.

Matt Wells at The Guardian wanted to know about the BBC's personalisation plans. Kimber said that it was about using experts in their fields to provide recommendations. He said that he didn't see the option to listen to specific tracks on demand being on the BBC's roadmap. He said that it wasn't about the BBC offering that track. Purdham pointed out that the links could come out of the BBC elsewhere.

Visualising Radio - John Ousby of the BBC and Robin Pembroke of Global

John Ousby began by presenting something that was remarkably similar to a presentation I saw him give at The Digital Radio Show last week.

But it's a good presentation with demonstrations of TV, online and radio visualisations. He demonstrated a recent experiement the BBC recently had with Scott Mills being webcast from his flat.

He also ran through various other experiments with different BBC networks including Adam and Joe on 6 Music and Radio 4 as well as user generated animations.

He then did a live demo of Radio 1's Band in Your Hand. And it worked - well worth trying yourself if you have a Windows PC and a webcam.

Ousby reminded us of the Lobster - a mobile that was available via Virgin Mobile that for a while allowed you to listen to radio (and watch TV - but few did) on a mobile using DAB.

He talked about the opportunities from Slideshow on DAB devices, as well as what's available on DTT and cable.

Finally he showed us a possible way of pulling in and displaying a variety of information on appropriate platforms.

Then we moved onto Robin Pembrooke's presentation - he trailed an exciting new iPhone application that we'd have to wait to see.

At a tough time for commercial radio, Pembrooke thought that some of the ideas that visualisation brings could be a "game changer."

The key information is still what's playing. He said that the last 10 played tracks on Heart's website accounted for 40% of traffic. "That might say more about Heart's website."

He highlighted some research that shows that audio and the web work well improving clickthroughs. And of course commercial radio is able to monetise those clickthroughs.

But of course commercial radio doesn't have the resources of the BBC. It can be labour intensive (although he pointed out that Chill's data was excellent), but the can also be bandwidth intensive. And it can make things more memorable than we might wish (we saw a still from YouTube of Brand/Ross).

And of course, users don't always want to see everything visualised.

He pointed out that mobile streaming isn't scalable and that it kills battery life. He hopes that DAB will be paired in a slightly more elegant way than currently.

The Pure Evoke - I didn't win one in the draw - is mentioned and the congratulated.

"Black and yellow is a step forward."

But it's still a clunky interface.

"Audience = £" read a big slide.

Pembroke then move onto his new iPhone App. Previously they'd been the first to offer streaming, and now offered additional functionality with now playing, news etc and commercial opportunities.

It looks quite smart and allows tagging to come back to the information at a later date. This allows them to buy the track via information and allow commercial opportunities to link through to advertisers' websites.

Overall commercial radio can't afford the "specials" but there are options for visualisation.

The Chief TwiT Speaks - Leo Laporte

Possibly the most technically challenging thing ever attempted at a Radio Academy event was the session with Leo Laporte session via Skype. Needless to say, all wasn't smooth immediately, but eventually we got online.

Leo began by letting us know who he is and where he comes from.

TwiT reaches 175,000 - 250,000 downloads a week by unique IP addresses. He mentioned the various other shows he produces. Co-hosts get paid and then there's advertising co-op money. In total 470k a month in reach in the US and 50 hours a month.

He said that the advertising was all US only. Although the companies are usually global, they're not able to monetise a third of t he audience as it's outside the US.

Then he spoke about the video service he's launched. They've got as high as 10,000 simultaneous people watching live. Last night's TwiT was 5,000.

He said that it's all relatively cheap with the bandwidth being the most expensive with various dedicated lines for them.

The downloads are the hardest part with 4-5TB of data downloaded a day, but nearly all the revenue would go towards this if they weren't able to do deals. That could be as much as $40,000 a month otherwise.

So far, Laporte says that advertisers are fairly conservative. At first they charged around $35 cpm but it's now closer to $70 cpm. This is big premium over radio which is at around $5-10 cpm (cpt).

Although the prices are high, they're maintaining good usage. They're now earning between $500 and $15,000 an episode in revenues. They know that a downturn is coming. But they know that they're reaching the right audience. And with costs so low, they can continue on, and by the time advertisers are back, audiences will have grown and they'll be in a good place.

He sees NPR as some of the biggest competition at this point. He sees more mainstream media coming into the market. As a result he sees smaller players falling by the wayside.

Asked about how the video is able to make money - Laporte replied that it had grown audiences by about 10%. He said that it also increased the engagement of that audience.

"Our audience take pride [in taking down] any site we mention."

He says that so far they've not charged extra for video. But they've tried product placement. He gave the example of an energy drink which they drank on the show. They've also tried selling clothing.

He pointed out that he has explain the metrics to a lot of advertisers and education is important.

Asked about whether he'd give up his regular radio gig, he said that he wasn't going to give it up as it allowed cross-promotion, and in any case was his primary source of income.

When asked whether or not it would work in other subject areas with non-tech areas, he thought they could. It was all about providing content that was otherwise unavialble.

Finally, when asked about the future of radio in the US, it was clear that it probably isn't HD. He says when asked this by radio executives he gets out his iPhone and demos one of the apps on it from radio operators.

Newspapers are a real challenge; radio less so.

He sees radio over IP as offering a challenge to terrestrial. It won't necessarily takeover. Radio has to create a community, and that's more than request lines and phone-ins.

Overall, it's a competitive challenge and radio could come out better in the end.

Collings and Herrin

I'm not sure it's worth me blogging this, as it's obviously going to be a podcast (as is much of the rest of the day). So I'll leave it there. A very good day. And Ben's asked me to say that his session was best. Where's my fiver?

This is a kind of "sister" post to something James Cridland wrote earlier this week on his blog. He was talking about the email that my employer is currently sending out to people who are still using our old virginradio.co.uk domain.

But of course he's only seeing half the story. At work, our IT department has set up the mail system to email us everytime we get an email (and shh, don't tell anyone, but we do actually get copies of the emails even though the bounced mail tells us we don't - it just persuades individuals to update their contacts and start using the correct email address).

In fact, I find those additional emails a little annoying, so don't tell our IT department but I wrote a couple of rules. One to move them out of my Inbox, and another to instead flag emails being sent to the old domain.

But this takes me to the crux of this blog entry. The bulk of the emails that are still being sent to the old domain are automated mailing lists and newsletters. Those bounce-back emails are disappearing into a black hole, and it's up to me to update the lists that I want to carry on receiving mail from.

This should be easy, but of course, it's ridiculously hard. Some email doesn't have any update or unsubscribe options at all. More commonly, there's just an unsubscribe option. That means that I probably have to re-register, which is, of course, time consuming, and also makes it very easy for me to not bother at all - something that most of these companies would rather didn't happen.

Then there are the companies that require you to remember what password you used when you set up an "account" simply for the purpose of registering for their newsletter. If you're lucky, they have a "forgotten your password" option. And if you're really lucky, you'll actually get an email back from them with either a reminder or a reset option within the same hour. Top-tip - make sure these services send out email instantly, otherwise you might lose me as a customer altogether.

Some of these emails come from trade publishers who offer a wealth of newsletters for a variety of magazines. It's far easier if I can make one change that affects their entire portfolio rather than lots of separate changes. Ironically, many of these magazines cover marketing, yet their list management software is poor.

Google Alerts are actually more annoying than they should be. I have a number of alerts (including the obligatory vanity alert) that are sent to my Gmail account. But I also have a set of work-related searches that I have to adminster "outside" the environs of Google because there seems to be a single email address for all. Perhaps their recent RSS feed option for these searches is the way to go? My only solution is to delete all the current alerts and re-create them with my new email address, ensuring I'm logged out of Google at the time.

Changing addresses is never easy at the best of times. The Royal Mail has a forwarding service for you to use for snail mail - but that's not always possible if you move jobs or ISPs. So given that we're all going to want to change our details from time to time, there's really no excuse for making it hard for the user to administer.

A couple of weeks ago, I started playing with Geode - a Firefox plugin that allows your browser to use geolocation technology to determine whereabouts you are.

When you reach a Geode compatable site, a bar at the top of the browser asks you how much information you want to pass to the requesting site - Exact, Neighbourhood, City, Nothing.

When I tested it, I decided it could have my exact location. Now I was trying this using a WiFi laptop sitting at home. A Google map appeared and I was shocked to discover that it had my location within perhaps 10 metres.

My laptop has no GPS to position me, and it isn't connected to a cell-network for triangulation via cell towers. So how did it locate me?

Geode currently uses Skyhook who essentially maintain a database using GPS, cell tower locations and, importantly, a reference list of WiFi websites that are geocoded.

Mine is not the only wireless network in the flats where I live. I can see eight or ten other networks to one extent or another. And my neighbours are technical enough to have security enabled their networks (I discovered this when I was between routers and tried to find someone to leach from before my replacement router arrived). It's entirely possible that someone else's router is registered to Skyhook.

I assume that this is how my location was determined. I have a fixed IP Address and my ISP does know where I live, but it doesn't know whether or not I have WiFi, so I don't think that there's any data it could be selling on about me. In any case, if I beef up my WiFi security to the maximum, there's no way to discover my IP Address simply by sniffing my router.

But I would like to know for certain that one of my neighbours has registered their router, and my location is not somehow coming from my own router. While I'm sure that Skyhook's privacy is strict, I like to be in charge of my own data.

I was thinking about that when I was looking into another technology - satnavs. At the weekend, Something For The Weekend, the Tim Lovejoy vehicle, had their regular gadget review. A lady came on to demonstrate a couple of new pieces of technology. One was a TomTom satnav that included the usual mapping and traffic information, as well as things like local petrol prices.

Lovejoy asked a very fair question: how did the satnav know the prices? "From the satellites" came the answer. He tried again: he understood how the device knew where it was, but where was the petrol price information coming from. Satellites was again the answer. Eventually he gave up and moved on.

It was a fair question, because of couse, the only information coming from GPS satellites is location information - or more to the point, information about the satellites' positions to allow the device to triangulate its position on Earth. GPS satellites do not transmit UK petrol prices.

So how was it getting its info? Many devices have traffic information - usually provided by Trafficmaster. This is broadcast in the UK using RDS TMC technology on the FM network. Classic FM, the only national commercial FM operator carries the data and so as long as your satnav can receive Classic FM, it can pull that data down and use it to plot alternative routes etc. A separate system

But that's not how TomTom is getting either its traffic info, or its petrol price info. The petrol price info actually has to be downloaded via your home PC. I guess you just plug your device in regularly to keep it up to date. You're not storing your satnav in your glove compartment are you? TomTom buys the data from a third-party company.

But it's their HD Traffic I'm more interested in. Devices with this technology have SIM cards fitted, and we're told that the system uses 16.7m anonymous mobile phones. By capturing location detail from these phones, the system is able to monitor traffic flow - and you can be sure that these devices also contribute to that information. TomTom is, of course, keen to point out that this is an anonymous service, and you can't be tracked with it (there are mobile phone tracking services out there elsewhere mind you).

But given that the technology is fairly new, whose 16.7m phones is it using, and do the owners of those phones know?

The initial Dutch data utilised the Vodafone network, and it's that network that's also being used in the UK.

So if you're a Vodafone subscriber, did you know that Vodafone is monetising the data they collect about your location? To be clear, that's essentially data about which mast or masts your phone can see when it pings them. I'm sure that buried away in the terms and conditions you signed when you took our your contract, you agreed to let them use said data. But I feel uncomfortable about this.

Far too much has been written about Kerry Katona and her behaviour on This Morning a couple of days ago. I can't be bothered to go into it, and if she is ill, I'm not about to link to YouTube clips of her being ill on national television. That's despite whatever I might think about someone who lives their life in Heat and Zoo magazines. If you feel that your interviewee is not fully with it, curtail the interview and either go to a pre-recorded piece or a commercial break. Don't dwell on it.

But I think some of the post-rationalisation has been interesting. First of all we had Philip Schofield defending himself and ITV on Chris Moyles because she'd actually arrived at the studio really late.

I don't doubt that Schofield is an honourable man, but I find ITV claiming to care about Katona's welfare somewhat questionable when my weekly ITV.com email dropped in my inbox today:

"Watch Kerry Katona on This Morning..." said the subject line.

"Watch Kerry's dramatic interview.

"Kerry Katona caused a stir on This Morning this week.

"Did you see the controversial interview? Watch it and see what all the fuss was about."

For which read: it's not fair that YouTube gets all the traffic. We want some of that action.

That's clearly the most important thing happening on ITV this week, because it's the only headline story on the email.

I expect that even now, executives are eagerly poring over their analytic programs seeing what kind of uplift the Katona footage has had.

We made a video for work the other day at Abbey Road studios. I thought I'd share it here too:

There really are some poor Google Ads kicking about at the moment, and the worst of them seem to be appearing in Gmail (for me at least).

Here's the latest example of something that's thoroughly misrepresentative on many levels.

"Eastenders is Axed"? No it's not. The link is to a strange site called "just-the-issues.com/eastenders".

If you click through you're presented with the following:

Seemingly this is a "BBC Poll" - which I suppose could mean that it's some research commissioned by the BBC (Obviously it's not), or their get-out might be that it's a poll about a BBC programme.

It's strange that someone not connected to the BBC is paying Google to get some response their question of the day. Still, that's what advertising's there for, and if I want to find out the answer to something via research, I'm likely to need to pay someone to get me the answer.

Curiously, the links to both "Yes" and "No" in their "poll" are identical. Hmm.

Clicking through takes you to a random "shopping" site. Goodness knows how I'm supposed to win one their 23 "prizes".

In other words the whole thing is just a traffic driver, and a not very good one at that. Yet Google lets this sort of thing through. I just think that as Google and other online advertisers become bigger, this kind of non-advertising causes me to lose trust in Google as a brand. The top of my email is prime real estate, and it feels like the centre-break of the News at Ten has some kind of Dellboy advertising. It wouldn't happen on ITV, and shouldn't happen on Google.

No doubt if I go through the frustratingly hidden process of reporting the advertiser to Google, I'll eventually get the ad pulled, but since Google makes that hard, I wonder how interested it really is. Yet it should care, and I shouldn't see garbage like this.

Gmail's spam filter works pretty well, but then I get served spam as advertising!

Radio Pop was something I first saw at last year's Radio At The Edge conference.

It describes itself as "social radio listening." Once logged in (and it uses Open ID - which might be good if it was ever made clear to the broader public how it should be used), you start listening to a BBC radio channel and the system logs your listening by network and by show and you get presented with a nice set of charts.

Then you add a few friends, and you can see what they're listening too as well.

Future iterations will include tracks so that you can actually specify pieces of music and highlight them for your friends. Strangely, I think the delay in the implementation of that is less to do with technology than some quaint internal rules.

As well as monitoring your own listening and that of your friends, you can also see what everyone across the system is listening too.

I can get a nice badge for my blog, but because I'm trying to keep things clean, I'm going to just put it in here.

I've just been listening to a very strange jazz rendition of Bowie's 'Life On Mars' on Late Junction (the new schedule for The Geoff Show means that I won't have to choose between these two now). Robert Sandall's presenting a rather fabulous programme of cover versions. Sandall was a co-presenter of Mixing It, once broadcast on Radio 3, but now to be found under the guise of Where's The Skill In That on Resonance FM. Because I liked it a lot, I gave it a "Pop".

The "Pop" records the date and time so that, iPlayer willing, I can go and listen to what my friend enjoyed so much about the show.

The charting is exceptionally fine and it all looks wonderful.

At the moment, the player is a little basic, and because it can only monitor listening via its own player rather than the BBC's rather more fully functional player, there's no opportunity to measure on-demand listening. That's particularly a shame because that's how I listen to most of my BBC radio online.

I suppose the only other problem is that I have to keep making my friends over and over everytime I sign up for something. Once for Facebook, again for Flickr, then again for Twitter, Pounce, YouTube etc. While I might want to keep my "professional" Linked In colleagues well clear of my Facebook profile (I've got nothing to hide - honest), for the most part I just want to maintain one list of friends. But that's a separate issue.

Still it's a fine development worth watching. I seem to remember that when it was presented at the conference last year, there was talk of other - commercial - stations being able to get involved. The fact that the URL sits apart from the BBC makes it interesting. Maybe it's something that Absolute Radio could get involved in?

You may notice that it all looks a bit different around here. On the otherhand, you may well be reading a feed in which - hopefully - nothing's changed.

The look and feel of this blog has basically been unchanged for nearly six years. So with great trepidation I've finally completed an overhaul started nearly a year ago. If you don't like the header image, then holdfire, there'll be another one along in a minute - 25 to choose from!

I suspect that all sorts of things are broken, so do feel free to let me know if something's not working, or if some kind of feature doesn't work properly on Safari or whatever (like I'd care).

Here's hoping commenting works, otherwise it could be a little silent.

We all know that internet advertising is booming, and much of that growth is coming from "search" - that is, advertising that you see dependent on your search terms on Google, Yahoo, MSN or wherever. But to what extent should the advertisers be checked out by Google and its ilk before that advertising goes live?

I ask this because I've seen some "interesting" ads recently on Google services. A recent search via Google Shopping for a particular model of camera threw up one online store that offered a suspciously cheap camera. I searched around, but couldn't easily find a contact at Google Shopping to report the dodgy site to. The service is automated and Google explicitly explains that you can't get a position on the service via payment. Fair enough, although it'd be nice to at least get a human to check out suspicious sites.

Then this morning I saw this sponsored link in my Gmail:

Photoshop CS3 for £29 sounds just a little suspicious. Amazon charges £500 for the same product!

I decided against spending £29 in pursuit of my investigation. I suspect that they're either selling trials that can otherwise be downloaded free from Adobe's site, or cracked versions of the software.

Is it fair for me to ask whether or not Google should be at least running cursory checks on their advertising? Such is teh size of the market, that it would be expensive, but should they still do it? Expense or not, Google has a reputation to maintain, and being used to advertise pirated software is not smart. I work in commercial radio, and as far as I know we've never run an advertisement for an illegal product. Indeed in radio and television, there are services to check through adverts to see that they adhere to all the rules of the land and aren't liable to offend or distort the truth. We also credit check new advertisers when they come on board to ensure that they'll be able to pay for advertising, although this is largely because we charge in arrears and want to make sure they don't run off without paying. Google usually takes money up front but I've got to tell you that finding the right place to complain was not easy.

Eventually, after quite a bit of searching, I came to this well-hidden page and submitted a complaint. It'll be interesting to learn if they follow up my complaint, although difficult to prove either way since it may be unlikely that I see another ad from them anyway. I also contacted Adobe.

It's important that complaints about advertising are taken seriously by the likes of Google. If I distrust ads that I see served, then that's counter to my belief in the whole medium as a place to advertise. I'm sure Google will take my complaint seriously and stop this infringer. But the process should really be simpler, and even if Google has to employ more people to check the veracity of some of its copy then that's a small price to pay.

Earlier today, someone on an email group I'm in asked if everyone was having trouble with a specific site or whether it was just him. Quick as a flash he was directed to downforeveryoneorjustme.com which does exactly what it says on the proverbial tin.

So when I came to look at Flickr a few minutes ago, I wondered if I'd immediately get a chance to try it out. But the site was working yet not all the images were showing - indeed I was seeing hardly any of them.

Twitter to the rescue! Search Twitter for Flickr (they bought Summize yesterday!) and hey presto:

has the flickr database gone down??!!??!?!???!?!?!
Flickr is down
what's wrong with flickr? farm4 blocked?
What's up w flickr? I can't view any image that isn't already in my browser cache. Something down @ yahoo? Bah.
and flickr appears to be somewhat hosed.
anyone noticed any problems with flickr today?
Flickr is being very naughty right now.

And so on.

So I guess it's broken, or at least farm4 is.

Orange has announced its LiveRadio - effectively an Orange branded Wi-Fi radio. You pair it up with your wireless router and away you go listening to internet radio from around the globe.

So far, so normal. You can buy a cheaper device elsewhere. But the Orange LiveRadio does allow you to purchase music from the Orange music store (I assume music that's played on specific Orange music streams). And the inclusion of downloading podcasts to the radio is nice.

But £99.99 is too high. Seemingly Orange has sold 10,000 of these devices in France (where at 129 Euros at the current exchange rate, the price is actually slightly higher than it is in the UK!), so perhaps it'll do well, but I think these things need to come down to less than fifty quid before they really hit the mainstream.

I do however note that very nearly the first thing you read on the LiveRadio purchase page is a note to say that the radio is unsuitable for people who have a 2 GB cap on their monthly downloads. And it further tells customers that they should switch off their radio when it's not in use to prevent consumers contravening fair usage policies.

Who would have a 2 GB cap on their downloads? Well, if you're on a free Orange broadband package, you might. Orange's basic plan these days has a 6 GB cap on it, but that's a paid-for plan. When they originally offered free broadband to their mobile customers, there was a 2 GB cap.

And I find it plainly bizarre that something using as little bandwidth as internet radio could leave me liable to contravene any ISP's fair usage policies. I'm a heavy radio listener, and playing around with a 32k mp3 stream of Virgin Radio in Winamp, I can see that I'd be using 14 MB an hour. So listening at work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for a 4 week month would result in me using 2.2GB a month. And if I upped that to the 128k stream (8.9 GB a month on the same basis), I can see that I'd be in serious trouble if I was even on Orange broadband's most basic paid-for service...

ITV is dipping its toe in the iTunes water by making available some of its back catalogue on the iTunes television store.

This is no bad thing, but I think that it does again highlight some of the issues that dealing with Apple can introduce. Despite some of the series being over forty years old (The Saint - series 4), the price of each episode is fixed at £1.89. That's just too much.

Last year the Daily Mail actually gave away the whole of Brideshead Revisited, so charging £1.89 an episode feels steep. Certainly there are savings to made by buying the whole series, but at &17.99 its still a couple of quid more than the boxed set on Amazon. The DVDs, of course, work in many more places than in iTunes and on an iPod. They're also in higher resolution, and come with various extras all of which are lacking from the iTunes store version.

Now I don't want to poo-poo this venture, as it's genuinely a good idea to get these programmes out into as many places as possible. But it's quite telling that no current programmes are being made available. The most up to date show that has been released so far (and to be fair, today's day one) is Lewis - series 1, obviously. Wouldn't want to let series 2 out of the gate just yet.

I think the problem really still lies with iTunes insisting on a fixed price for a programme, be it a brand new one hour drama or a decades old half hour comedy. Retailers should be able to adjust their prices as bricks and mortar retailers do. It may be that you can sell this week's Headbangers for 49p, but Foyles War should cost £3.50.

It's undoubtedly an experiment, and ITV is to be applauded. But what we're all waiting for is Kangaroo - the joint BBC Worldwide/ITV/Channel 4 service that Ashley Highfield is leaving the BBC to run. Kangaroo is going to try to effectively be a commercial version of the iPlayer. While details remain unclear, I'd expect both paid and ad-funded models to be tested. Video DRM is always going to be more of an issue, but even if all the service does is put everyone's programming in one place and playable with one piece of software, then it's got to be better than the piecemeal channel by channel approach that's taken place so far.

Of course a cynic might wonder whether Kangaroo is the reason that only archive programming is being made available to iTunes at the moment. If I can buy Foyles War on iTunes for one price, and on Kangaroo at another price, then there's true competition. But ITV doesn't want the service it owns part of to be undercut by someone else. Nor does it want Apple to run away with a nascent market before it's had a go itself - that's something the music industry has come to regret on an enormous scale.

By the way, if all this talk of Brideshead Revisited makes you want to watch the series again, there's a free route: ITV.com has the whole series available to stream on demand. It tends to only work with Windows and using Internet Explorer, and it's ad-funded. But there it is, free of charge.

In fact ITV.com has a great deal of classic drama, comedy and kids programming available to stream including Press Gang, The Jewel in the Crown, Rising Damp, Cracker, Morse, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Prime Suspect and much more. The interface is clunky, and it's hard to work out what's there, but they've got a great deal.

So what are we to make of the new look BBC News homepage that launched this morning?

It's quite possibly my single most visited site - even more so than the Google homepage since I search from within my toolbar - so I guess it's always quite a significant change to me when the BBC update it.

I like the use of screen real estate. You tend to find with every website update that the pages get wider and wider as the average user's screensize increases. But I'd like to think that the space would be used a little more fully.

The top "BBC bar" has a search box and low graphics/accessibility, and that's it. There's vast space being wasted, and I find it especially wasteful since it used to contain links to radio and TV directly from that bar. The BBC recently revamped their overall homepage, but I never actually visited that. The news page is my default homepage and I expect to be able to get to the major parts of the BBC's website from it. Indeed a consistent set of tabs along the top is just useful anyway.

I really miss these.

A lot.

The "BBC News bar" is also full of wasteful space. It contains a single link to the live BBC news feed (e.g. News 24, or Breakfast News) and that's it. So there are two "wasted" blocks which could contain useful info/links or just reduce the amount of scrolling that you need to do. "Above the fold" is incredibly valuable real estate in newspaper parlance, and it should be on websites too.

The comments to the BBC Editor's blog highlight that links to Weather are missing. By mid-morning, a link had been restored but like Sport, the link is under "Related BBC sites" which feels very poor.

I'd like to see "full" links to both sport and weather from the main tabs. Sports news is news after all. It's part of the on-air news programmes and bulletins, so it feels a little as though the news website is disowning it even though sport does seem to warrant three headlines on the right. And what news bulletin doesn't also include a weather update?

Overall, the front page is a lot more spaced out, but the extra real estate hasn't been used to provide any more stories or links. Indeed with links removed, it feels that there are actually fewer things to do.

It may be that this is a work in progress and more "bits" will emerge over time - I certainly hope so.

As a follow-up to RAJAR's recent research into podcasting, the US based eMarketer.com has just released some forecasts for podcast revenues for the next five years.

The full report retails for $695, so you'll excuse me if I limit my notes to the findings they publish on their blog.

They suggest that total audience for podcasts in the US in 2007 was 18.5m. RAJAR had a UK figure of 4.3m. So the US listenership is 4.3 times the UK one. Considering that the population of the US is roughly 5 times that of the UK, this seems quite reasonable - particularly as the UK has faster internet access than the US.

When the active audience is examined - those who've downloaded a podcast in the last week - the figures are 6.5m in the US and 1.9m in the UK; a factor of 3.4 times the size in the US. Again, I find this broadly believable.

What RAJAR hasn't (and wouldn't) been able to provide, is the value of podcasting market. eMarketer considers "advertising" to include sponsorship. I assume that also includes podcasts made to order for clients. The 2007 value is $165m which if we extrapolate, would equate to $38-50m for the UK market (using the multiples above) - or £19-25m.

Is this right? I don't know, although I suspect that the proliferation of BBC programmes available as podcasts might suggest this is a bit high, albeit that these same podcasts are available to US consumers as well.

The report also predicts some significant growth in the next five years, with revenues rising to $435m by 2012, representing an increase of 264%. Let's hope so!

Finally, they list some of the factors they believe are driving growth:

A number of factors are driving the growth of the podcast-user base:

• Greater ease of consumption for podcast content
  
• Growing awareness of podcasting
  
• Terrestrial radio’s use and promotion of podcasting
  
• Increased penetration of portable players
  
• The evolution of smart phones and proliferation of affordable mobile data plans

I wouldn't disagree with any of those areas. What closer analysis of RAJAR's research has made me consider is that for a lot of people, getting podcasts onto their portable devices is still actually quite tricky. They don't understand what "subscribe" means, and beyond the iPod and iTunes, there's not a user-friendly system for the non-tech minded consumer to use.

As a result, many people now have mobile phones that are perfectly capable of playing back podcasts, but they're not using them.

RAJAR's research told us that more people play back their podcasts on their PC than anywhere else, and while a PC will always be convenient for many, I believe that this is more because consumers don't know how to get podcasts onto their portable devices.

To continue growing the uptake of podcasts, radio stations and others have to provide clear explanations of how subscriptions work, and methods for getting podcasts regularly updated and onto their listeners' devices as easily and painlessly as possible. Only then will podcasting become truly mainstream.

*As ever, these views are mine, and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer, Virgin Radio.

If you're going to produce a print CSS file for your blog entries (nicely formatting a print version, and removing unnecessary page furniture), please include the comments!

The two guiltiest candidates that I've come across - i.e. blogs that I read but don't conform - are the BBC's, and those of Guardian Unlimited. If you try to print the entry out, you'll only get the initial authored piece, and none of the comments below. Yet as often as not, the blog is positively inviting comments, and part of the raison d'etre of having a blog is to allow commenting. Comments very often drive the conversation forward, and are often as important as the original entry.

But I'm not able to print those comments out! Try as I might, short of using a really old browser that ignores CSS code, I'm left to copy and paste comments into a word processor and print from there. I can't tell you how frustrating that is. if someone knows how to disable CSS in Firefox that'd at least be a workaround, but personally I consider it poor design that I can't print comments.

Obviously I know that I shouldn't be killing more trees than need be by unnecessarily printing things out, but the average blog entry and associated comments makes for a far better read than the dreadful free "newspapers" handed out by London tube stations for the commute home.

"Pandora's ex-customers in the UK will be wondering why the service they want can't be catered for by the recording industry. And they are not alone - for what are the millions of illicit peer-to-peer file-sharers, but a huge potential market? Internet users are showing the industry how they want their music in the digital age."

From the New Statesman

This week EMI makes between 1500 and 2000 employees redundant.

Is there a link? Discuss.

Last night the Radio Academy held an event in London to talk about podcasting. It was interesting to a point, although whether or not we learnt a great deal, I'm not so sure.

You can listen to a podcast of the event at the Radio Academy's website (I'm pretty sure registration isn't required).

Some points we heard:

• A nice lady from the BBC did blurt out a few stats from an upcoming RAJAR podcast survey that are currently confidential - look out for them at the end of the month.
• Matt Wells at The Guardian is awfully annoyed that the BBC has so many podcasts - something like 150, especially considering that some of them have some very low take-up.
• Matt Wells also doesn't consider what he does as being "radio" - others dissented.
• There is money to be made, but advertising agencies are slow in believing in podcasts, and perhaps the more immediate cash comes from podcasts made for clients.
• Some were annoyed that video was considered more.

There was more, but as I say, I didn't come away thinking wow! I did have a short list of new podcasts to try however.

I'd disagree with some of Matt Wells was saying though. To be honest, even working in a commercial radio environment, I wouldn't be too fussed if Radio 4 podcast their entire output. As long as it didn't take a producer/editor too long to chop put the audio together (and much Radio 4 output is delivered as a final 30 minute piece of audio anyway), then there's simply no harm in making it available as a podcast however low the take-up is. If there's one thing that we've learnt from podcasting, it's that quite esoteric subjects can support podcasts because of the global nature of the available listenership.

And while I wouldn't want to get too hung up about the terminology - of course podcasts are "radio." I think we just need to redefine what we believe "radio" means. Once upon a time, it was a live broadcast, with just about everything being done there and then - so no recorded music, just relays of live concerts, live plays and the news read live. Then it became lots of pre-recorded music interspersed with live DJs and live(ish) news. These days, I can Listen Again or download programmes as well.

It stands to reason that the most technically adept podcasts are made by people who've been groomed in radio production techniques, and that includes Matt Wells' own podcasts. One commenter said that we're not fully making use of the medium, and too many podcasts sound like traditional radio programmes. That may be so, but it's because having a structure to what I listen to is no bad thing. There truly is nothing to stop someone with a laptop and a microphone making a podcast, but like television and film, there is a certain language or grammar (in television they'd include cutaways, close-ups, reaction shots, establishing shots) that guide us into the story. If I'm listening to music, it's really useful if someone can somehow tell me what I've been hearing. And at the start of a spoken word podcast, some idea of what they've got coming up is useful.

What I'd like to have heard more about is the inclusion of music in podcasts. Deals have been struck to allow thirty second clips of music into podcasts produced by either the BBC or commercial radio. But these deals are temporary, and only account for rebroadcasts of previously produced radio material. What about original shows? There are plenty of podcasts that use music of course, but the reality is that either they're not paying rights for those tracks, or they're using unsigned bands or having to deals with the composers/performers themselves. I don't see anything happening in a rush - particularly given the recent experiences of Pandora.

And how long should a podcast be? Many of the panel spoke about the freedom they had, not needing to fit into a 30 minute slot. It's certainly true that there's nothing more annoying than listening to an interviewee on the Today Programme only for them to get cut-off just as they're getting interesting due to time constraints. But editorial controls still need to be applied - I don't necessarily want to hear an hour and half of meandering. I find podcasts of over an hour "intimidating" when I see them in iTunes, while others at just three or four minutes could be longer.

Video is interesting. Yes, you can watch videos on your iPod or in iTunes. But there are different standards for different devices, and while I can listen to mp3s in my mobile phone, enhanced podcasts won't work. Video podcasts probably aren't "radio" because you have to watch as well as listen (obviously!). But then we're living in a world where there isn't any longer a clean delineation between different media types. The same device that lets me listen to TWIT lets me watch Mahalo Daily, so are they the same or is one radio and one TV? Yesterday Apple relaunched Apple TV - a device that does let me watch video podcasts on my TV. So maybe it is TV after all?

Still, all said and done, more has to be done to make podcasting mainstream. It's still too complicated. Lots of people don't understand what the word means, or how they do it. I spoke to a colleague yesterday who'd never downloaded a podcast for his iPod due to it being Mac formated, yet he now has a PC and didn't want to lose the music he has on it. That's more a shortcoming of iPods - why does an iPod have to be formated differently depending on what you plug it into? As Apple sells more Macs, users going the other way face the same issue, even though it can be overcome. Nonetheless, even with iTunes, it can still be made simpler.

2008 may become the year of DRM-free music, as people want to start loading their music onto their mobiles; their PSPs; their Xboxes; their sat navs. But downloading needs to be made simpler still. And we need more opportunities to do different things. Matt Wells spoke about dynamically inserting ads into Guardian Unlimited's podcasts. So when I download Football Weekly might determine what ad I hear. This goes someway towards what should be achievable, but let's go a step further. If we know your sex and age, delivering relevant advertising would be great. UK listeners might get different advertising to American listeners and so on. At the moment, we have one feed serves all, and short of making people register and subscribe to different streams according to their profiles, this isn't really possible. Yet...

Accountability and accurate targeting are ever important in the advertising world, so these are others areas that podcasting should perhaps address.

Sometimes I wonder about the sanity of the film industry.

The torrent sites currently have for download a high quality copy of a "DVD Screener" of the big new Will Smith film, I Am Legend. The film has only just opened in the UK, and has only been out about three weeks in the US where it's been doing fantastic business.

What's happened is that someone has got hold of a DVD version of the film and ripped it. But what I want to know is this: why are film companies even making DVD screeners of their big films? These discs very existance increases the likelihood of high quality pirate goods getting out.

In actual fact, the only real reasons for doing it are either to pass to critics who are too lazy to go to the cinema to watch the films, or to hand to members of the various groups like the Academy and BAFTA, who give films awards. You see these people, despite having cards that get them free into cinemas, and having special screenings laid on all the time, still can't be bothered to get off their fat backsides and go out to see films the way they were made to be seen. So film companies send them DVD copies to watch at home, in the hope that they might vote for Will Smith as Best Actor or whatever (this is the same industry that openly campaigns for votes with those For Your Consideration ads in the trade press - again a waste of money benefiting only the companies who publish those trade publications).

What the companies are saying is this: it's more important that they win an Oscar than it is that they might suffer significant financial setback if a high quality DVD gets out.

Before Christmas, the film companies were heavily promoting a campaign to persuade us not to be "Knock-off Nigels" and buy pirate DVDs. Yet at the same time, they actively produce DVD versions of films. So while there's little to stop dreadful camcorder versions of films, they're basically giving "Knock-off Nigel" a leg-up by making them.

The whole industry needs a massive kicking to get into the 21st century. They need to stop spending millions on advertising and DVD production for a handful of crusty old fuddy-duddies who can't be bothered to go to the cinema a bit more. And they're fighting a losing battle with internet piracy and dodgy DVD sales.

Personally, I believe that they should be selling DVDs to cinema goers on the way out of the theatre - can you imagine how many parents would have picked up copies of Enchanted on the way out? And the whole awards industry needs a ground up reworking. If members can't be bothered to see films, then they shouldn't be able to vote. And they should be seeing those films in cinemas. Shortlists of films can be put together by committee, and then voted on by the mass electorate once we know for certain that they've seen all the nominated titles.

Another website "optimises" itself for the iPhone. I do hope that every other gadget on the market gets a version of Picasa Webpages that makes best use of its own unique attributes.

As I said previously, I'm getting really fed up of everybody rushing to write iPhone specific versions of their sites. I've no problem with generic mobile versions, or "lite" versions of sites. But it's really dangerous having to write new versions for every device.

I know that some sites that use lots of AJAX actually have browser dependent versions which differ depending on how Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer or Safari handle different elements, but there are a relatively limited number of browsers.

I've just been looking at this website's "activity log" and was amazed to see how often comment spam comes in. Thank goodness that I've got some basic filtering in place. Yesterday there were 170 attempts to comment here (with one genuine comment), all of which failed because they didn't pass my cunning challenge response box.

Interestingly, I've had one piece of spam come through and reach publishing which did pass the challenge response. I guess that was entered "by hand" which seems a very dull thing to be doing.

In other news, there are some very odd findings coming out of Technorati searches. It seems that people cut and paste things from this blog into other blogs (and link back) purely to include spam links on those blogs. I'm sure that there's a word for this, but I don't know what it is.

Finally, here are some entertaining search terms that resulted in people finding their way onto this site recently:

derek acorah imhotep
tessa dunlop
imhotep derek acorah
sally morgan star psychic
allo, allo british film vicki michelle photos
jeremy kyle merchandise
playback the return of allo allo
sally morgan psychic
"allô, allô" rené download clip
"martina cole" culture show clip
"robert kilroy silk" "new zealand"
"sally morgan" psychic contact details
"star psychic" production company

OK - that's not all of them, and some of the search terms at the bottom are the result of only one search. But what's clear is that the stuff I like least and tend to moan about is what people actually end up here looking at.

I'm guessing that Derek Acorah and Sally Morgan fans are going to be truly disappointed that I think they're frauds who play on the insecurities of the gullible and the emotionally vulnerable (and with any luck, they'll be visiting even more so as a result of this entry!).

I'm also impressed by the number of Allo Allo fans out there, including those who include the correct accents.

The Robert Kilroy Silk search is especially concerning...

There's an interesting piece about Apple's pricing for video in Variety at the moment. It seems that Apple would quite like to drop prices from $1.99 to 99c an episode, and not all the studios are happy. ABC/Disney might bite the bullet, but as an unnamed commenter for the piece says 'it doesn't make sense to charge the same amount for an episode of "The Brady Bunch" as for "Lost."'

Will Apple be able to get away with it? Or will other studios fight back like NBC?

Well, I've bitten the bullet and upgraded to MT 4, and so far everything seems OK. I got it working pretty much straight out of the box, and I took Sixapart's advice and did it as side by side install to allow me to only move across folders that I actually needed. That said, once I'd run the upgrade, MT 3.3x didn't see any blogs, so it's 4 all the way now.

There are a couple of things that I need to fix. I believe I should be able to use CAPTCHA to allow comment approval going forward. But the current system works well, so I'll leave that for another day.

More pressing is MTAmazon which just showed a neat little icon of the current book or DVD that I'm watching. For reasons beyond me, that stopped working a couple of weeks ago. But now with MT 4, I don't yet have a complete solution.

In fact, the whole site needs a visual overhaul - it's something that I've been meaning to do for ages. Back in June this blog celebrated its fifth birthday (yes it passed me by too). I check today, and I've published over a half a million words. Anyway, watch this space as I get around to giving the place a good spring autumn clean.

NBC Universal has fallen out with Apple over the pricing of their products on iTunes with the result that Apple will not be offering any new material for sale from the company via its store. That means no new seasons of Heroes, Battlestar Galactica or The Office - three series that have sold very well on iTunes in the past.

For the most part, people are looking at NBC and thinking that they must be mad. Why would they make it harder to legitimately get hold of downloaded versions of programming when users can just download a torrent of the same programme without any payment.

But I've got to say that actually I think that NBC should be able to price their programming as they see fit. Some reports suggest that under NBC's proposed pricing structure and suggest that costs might rise from the current $1.99 an episode to as much as $4 or even $5 an episode. Well, that's really for them to determine. If they charge too much, then they won't sell any programmes, and that's the nature of a free market.

Apple's insistence in controlling pricing doesn't allow for product differentiation. Heroes is a premium NBC product just now and perhaps can command a premium, whereas an old episode of some eighties detective show might only be 50c. Yet on iTunes it's $1.99 and there's no flexibility. Why shouldn't some of the forthcoming new series be sold at greatly reduced prices to garner interest?

If I walk into my local HMV, or scour the virtual shelves of Amazon, DVD box sets are sold at vastly different price points. I mentioned in my piece a couple of days ago about the launch of the television section on the UK iTunes store that season tickets for series are sometimes more or less expensive than their physical DVD equivalents.

There are many reasons for differentiating prices - sales, old programming or stock, promotions. It's for the retailer and distributor to determine what a series can be sold for.

Similarly, music should have differential pricing too. We're all used to picking up classic albums relatively cheaply. Yet compare a few classic albums on Amazon and iTunes and there can be a vast differential:

Highway 69 Revisted - £9.99 on iTunes, £4.97 on Amazon
Bridge Over Troubled Water - £7.99 on iTunes, £4.97 on Amazon
Parallel Lines - £7.99 on iTunes, £2.97 on Amazon

Yes - Blondie is exceptionally cheap! But old songs and albums really shouldn't be that expensive. And iTunes needs to be able adapt to variable pricing.

Of course, iTunes single price means that Brits pay 79p a track compared with 99c in the US. At the current exchange rate that should be more like 50p. Similarly TV programmes are all £1.89 a show (irrespective of whether they're a 22 minute South Park episode made for peanuts, or 42 minute episode of Grey's Anatomy made for millions of dollars an episode), compared with $1.99 a show in the US.

A lot has been made of Hulu, the new Fox/NBC destination to watch streaming programming. It's basically an attempt to break YouTube's stranglehold. But it's going to stream shows, not let you download them to your iPod or PSP. I wouldn't be surprised if within days of it launching somebody hasn't built a tool to snatch a file version of the stream as you can with YouTube.

In other news, it was interesting to note in HMV today that you'll be able to buy the pilot episode of Heroes for £2.95 on Monday. I can't see them releasing the whole series this way, which makes it an odd experiment. Why not either give it away, or make it a covermount on something like SFX magazine if it's just to drive DVD sales?

A couple of great posts about internet radio revenues in the UK, from James (late of these parts) and Kevin Coy.

While I might rail on incessently about record companies desperately trying to extend copyright periods for no good reason, I passionately believe that performers and artists deserve a fair remuneration for the broadcast of their work in whatever capacity.

Companies like Last.fm seem to just avoid paying fair dues while others stump up.

Have I told you about my great new business idea? It's called Last.movies. Here's how it works. You tell me which movies you like, and you can stream them direct to your PC. My clever algorithm finds other movies you might like based on people with similar movie tastes, and the service will stream those movies to you too. It's great! All you do is log on and watch the movies you love, and movies you don't know but will love. Now I haven't done any deals with any Hollywood outfits, but I'm going to stream the movies anyway, and with luck my website will be so big that all the companies will keel over and do business with me at a fair rate determined by me.

What could possibly be the problem with that?

Just because my great idea is to stream movies you might like based on ones you tell me you like, it doesn't mean that I don't have to licence those movies

We all know that Flickr is really cool don't we? I mean, I've certainly always thought so. Until now.

That's why I was appalled to read this post from Rebekka who's easily one of the more famous Flickr photographers.

She put up a composite of several photos she'd taken of her home country Iceland and explained that they'd all been illegally downloaded and sold by a UK based company for money. Going through sales on eBay, she calculated that they'd benefited to the tune of several thousand pounds. She'd talked to a lawyer in Iceland, but being relatively poor and in another country, he'd been unable to help.

There were hundreds of comments below, not all of which I read, but which were very supportive of her plight.

And now Flickr has removed the whole thing.

Thomas Hawk (another great internet photographer) has more.

Not cool.

[Update] Flickr has apologised.

[Update 2] And fronted it all up in their blog.

I'm looking forward to reading this.

My laptop has had a hidden "service" partition on it since I've had it, so in a fit of tidying up files, instead of handing the space over to Windows, I decided to chuck Ubuntu on it. It's been ages since I had a play around with Linux, so I thought it was worth a punt.

First things first - the installation took no more than twenty minutes from start to finish (once I'd worked out the finer points of the number of partitions it wanted).

I got onto my wifi network in no time at all - and unlike a Windows installation, the computer now had a decent variety of Office-type applications as well as graphics amps like the GIMP.

All very good. One of the annoying things with a new Windows computer is that it immediately sets about downloading loads of updates which tends to annoy you on a new computer. Well to be honest, it's not much different here. 164 downloaded and installed files later, and a single reboot, and I finally was up and running.

I did have install Flash (although I did that before my auto-update), but otherwise most things were working well.

But I did have trouble with the BBC's site. RealPlayer wasn't installed, and installing the open Helix did not seem to help with listening to streaming radio. After a certain amount of fiddling around I was finally able to install RealPlayer, after first uninstalling Helix. It occurs to me that the last time I was typing UNIX command file expressions was 1990 when I was doing things like downloading the complete IMDB from newsgroups and "installing" it locally on my £10k Sun workstation (Incidentally, you can still download IMDB files and install them locally on a machine). I think it's fair to say that to this date, I've not used a more expensive machine - certainly none that just sat on my desktop for my sole use.

Anyway, I digress. I had a bit more of a play around but ended up giving up playing back any audio. Needless to say Virgin Radio worked fine - with the Flash version of the player being automatically chosen. This version of the Virgin Radio player also happily works in the Wii and PS3 (BTW - I note that the PS3 is already being "discounted" to £399 which, while only being a £26 reduction, is practically unheard of with a new launch machine, and just shows quite how much Sony has misjudged the machine's pricing. Will we get any accurate sales information? I certainly won't be buying the stories about how Sony has flooded the market with enough stock to ensure that purchasers are left short. They wanted a complete sellout - make no mistake. Stores should not have to be discounting within days of any product's launch).

So there we go. A dual-boot XP/Ubunutu Linux machine in no time at all. I don't know how useful the alternative operating system will really be, but I must admit that if someone just wanted a cheap laptop for surfing the net, doing their email and writing the odd letter, then it'd be perfect without the need for all the wastefulness of Windows (always assuming your inkjet printer of choice has drivers that will work). It's interesting that Dell's now offering Linux flavoured laptops, although I must admit that I couldn't find them for sale anyway on the UK website.

There's plenty of coverage elsewhere about the whys and wherefores of EMI going DRM-free, with Apple iTunes the first partner. But I will make a couple of comments.

It is brave of EMI, but necessary. By holding out longer, you're just going to piss your customers off, and when you're having as turbulent a time as EMI has been recently, that's simply something you can't afford to do.

I know that all of a sudden, I'm much likelier to buy downloads. I still love CDs and any artist or album I truly want, I'll buy the CD version, but knowing that I "own" it and don't just licence it is very important to me.

Some people have commented on the limited range of hardware outside of the iPod range capable of playing even unencrypted AAC encoded music. Well there are couple of things to point out here. First, iTunes is simply the first vendor to open up the EMI range fully - others will be along very shortly, and for the first time, they're going to be able to properly supply music to iPod owners - by far the largest hardware market share. While I don't suppose we'll exactly see a price-war, the playing field will certainly be flattened. I'd also hope that some of the major record labels will start talking to vendors like eMusic about being included on their services. Secondly, who doesn't think that every major hardware manufacturer is going to be racing to ensure that their mp3 player or mobile phone is capable of playing AAC encoded tracks? There'll be firmware updates for legacy kit, and since the lifecycle of mobile phones is somewhere around 12 months before consumers seek a replacement, we'll see widespread compatability within a very short time-frame.

Apple really don't have much to worry about - as long as they keep producing the smartest and coolest devices, then they're going to be making their money from hardware rather than software.

The Independent's piece today is headlined "EMI concedes defeat in war on internet pirates" and I've just got to say that this is wholly and totally missing the point. The piece itself is quite level-headed, but removing DRM is not giving in to piracy - it's taking on piracy. Previously, if I'd bought an album on iTunes and then bought a non-Apple replacement mp3 player, or perhaps installed an mp3CD-capable car radio, I'd have been forced to either go through the ridiculous process of burning and then re-ripping the audio, or just head into the nether-regions of the internet and download a version someone else has made. Now I don't have to go through that ridiculous process - well not once the hardware out there all supports AAC, but as I've already mentioned, that won't be very long.

Isn't it nice to actually write something nice about the music industry for a change?

The news that YouTube is being sued by Viacom for $1bn is not really that surprising.

I've been frankly amazed at how YouTube has managed to operate when so much of its content is clearly copyright. I know that people like Jeff Jarvis will think that Viacom is shooting itself in the foot by bringing this action but if you're a copyright owner, you can't sit idly by while someone else profits from your art. ([UPDATE] He does indeed think that it's a "boneheaded" move.)

I love YouTube, I really do. It's great that if someone says "Did you see Joss Stone make a fool of herself at the Brits" you can go to YouTube and find it. Of course, it'd be smart if ITV posted those clips on its own site and driving traffic there - perhaps allowing you to post it on your own website and creating the social network that YouTube has built. But if ITV or whoever the copyright owner is doesn't want to do that, that's their right.

Until now, media owners were effectively being held hostage by YouTube. Why should they have to put manpower and resources on a daily basis into removing videos that have been uploaded to the site with no concern to copyright?

If I replicated YouTube and let people upload mp3s irrespective of who created it (of course I'd ask them to make sure that it wasn't copyright), then I'd expect to be sued to within an inch of my life by the record companies. That's what happened to Napster, and Audiogalaxy. Video or audio, it makes no difference.

Now, I doubt that YouTube, or rather Google, is actually earning any cash out of the business at the moment since they have to be careful about placing ads near these videos, and streaming costs are likely to be extortionate. But that's not to say that this isn't costing Viacom money. I know that if I want to watch a clip from last night's Daily Show, I can get it simply and easily on YouTube (at least I could until a few weeks ago). I could also have gone to Comedy Central where Viacom earns revenue from those clips. And loss of traffic equals loss of revenue.

Google/YouTube has effectively been a bully, with attempts at revenue sharing and a dominant market position so that "if you're not on YouTube you're nowhere." Well that's got to be the copyright owner's choice. The BBC might agree to make clips available on YouTube, but it can also ensure that the clips are ones it has chosen, and that their full programmes aren't available. That's their choice.

Anyway, I've no doubt that this case will take months if not years to sort out, and Google will eventually lose. Mark Cuban's blog is going to be worth reading too.

I've got to say that I'm somewhat disappointed by the current state of play of some of the BBC's websites. In particular, their main BBC1 and BBC2 homepages, and the BBC Radio homepage.

Let's start with a specific example.

BBC2 has a new series called Are We There Yet presented by ex-Panorama reporter John Ware. It started last week, and seems to be an effort to salve the BBC's conscience for also carrying Top Gear. Of course, Top Gear goes out on Sunday nights, while Are We There Yet is in the "dead" slot opposite Eastenders.

I wanted to go and visit the website. But I didn't know the URL. Naturally I alight at www.bbc.co.uk. I invariably click the TV icon at the top to take me to www.bbc.co.uk/tv.

There I have lots of funky overlays that change the secondary content of the page - the main content is fixed (today, it's Life on Mars). Selecting BBC2 presents me with three programmes - none of which is Are We There Yet - and a "What's On BBC2" option which simply takes me to a listings page. That's no use to me, so I click on the BBC2 logo and thankfully, if less than intuitively, end up at the BBC2 homepage.

The look of the page is very "clean." By that I mean that there's hardly any content on the page. There's a big display at the top promoting one particular thing - yesterday it was a competition to make your own BBC2 ident which while I personally might be interested in it, is not the best thing to lead on. Most people just want to know about the programmes!

Today it's clips of various programmes playing and strong links to Dragons' Den and The Graham Norton Show. The right hand column has "Stuff From You" which seems to be snippets of nice things people have said about BBC2 shows on other websites. I wonder if this blog entry will be featured?

Then down the left we have three big options:

Home - that's where I am already
Everything - ??????????
TV Listings - what it says on the tin

There are also some generic links.

So where do I go to find out about Are We There Yet? I click Everything. There are some links to some comedy pages for relevant programmes, links to the new BBC2 idents (not really the most important aspect of the channel even if everyone concerned is very chuffed with them). Then there are some links to other shows, including the aforementioned Top Gear even though it's no longer on air. No sign of Are We There Yet. Then some links to YouTube highlighting clips available there. Quite why the BBC can't host them isn't entirely clear to me, but there you go. Finally "More Speed" which seems to simply be links to Top Gear clips.

I next try TV Listings. The show's on tonight, and I see a neatly presented list of BBC2's schedule today. There at 7.30pm is the programme. I click the link and get taken to a version of the same page with a short summary of what the programme's about, followed by the listings again. All nicely done, but no link to the programme's website.

Maybe it simply doesn't have a website. It's possible. Not every programme gets the resource for something like that.

I click the A-Z Index that appears at the top of every page on the BBC site, and choose A:

Are You Being Served?
Are You Younger than You Think?

No sign of Are We There Yet.

So finally I try the search box - and it works! The first link, described as the Best Link, takes me to the page for the programme.

It's good to know that a site exists, and you can get to it. But it really shouldn't be that hard. You should be able to find information by simply clicking through.

In actual fact, I missed the first programme in the series and I didn't know exactly what it was called. How would I then search for it? I should be able to get to it via a logical process. There's simply no excuse for not having links from the TV listings.

The BBC2 site looks "clean" but for clean read "has minimal links and information". I realise that people don't necessarily want to see gargantuan lists of programmes, but there are smart design ways of presenting lots of information in easy to consumer manners. Many newspaper sites are very good at it. Indeed the BBC's own News site is also pretty good.

Incidentally, the Are We There Yet site actually falls within the News section of bbc.co.uk. There's not a lack of joined up thinking because BBC Two is a different department to BBC News is there? There's no direct link to Newsnight from the "Everything" page of BBC2 either.

While I'm on a rant, here's another example. The Trap, the new Adam Curtis series, started on Sunday night on BBC2. The impact The Power of Nightmares (not a "real" site) and previous Curtis documentaries had means that there's a lot of interest in this programme. Hurrah - there is a direct link from the "Everything" page. But the page is terrible. It plays a short extract of the series and here is the entire rest of the content from this "microsite":

This series of three films, Bafta-winning producer Adam Curtis (Power of Nightmares) examines the notion of freedom. He demonstrates how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures has led to today's idea of freedom. Examining the government, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and terrorist attacks in Britain, Curtis shows how we're in a trap of our own making. A trap that controls us and causes chaos abroad.

That's it. Nothing else. Nada.

Hang on. There's a link that says "More information about The Trap."

I click on it and I'm taken.... to the BBC Press Information site! Now this is a useful site, but should the average viewer have to be negotiating around a site designed for journalists and filled with press releases and press packs? You have to scroll down past pieces on Castaway and Comic Relief before you get to The Trap. And the piece we get is only moderately longer than the piece quoted above.

What's the point? Other links from The Trap's "main" page include one to Curtis' entry on Wikipedia. Wouldn't a transcript be useful? A Q&A with Adam Curtis? Even the same content that's over on the press office site just presented a little more fully with pictures on the consumer site?

Rubbish.

Finally a brief bit about the new BBC Radio homepage. Again, it's the new clean look that they've gone for with rollovers for each station. But the layout means you do need to be a dab hand with your mouse, and it's a shame that only one station's programmes can be displayed at a time. Are we all so insular and stuck in our ways that we might only listen to one service? Where's the opportunity for a Radio 4 listener who might make a beeline for that button to be "upsold" a Radio 3 play? Or a Radio 2 comedy?

The icons at the bottom explaining ways to listen are very good, but given that displays are getting every larger, it seems strange that the radio site should use so little screen "real estate".

I really hope that the Beeb doesn't follow through in too similar a style with the stations' individual sites. Currently a design expert might call the Radio 4 website messy. There is a lot of text on it, but I want to see a full range of programmes. I don't want style over substance.

We all know that MySpace is rubbish, but I hadn't realised, until I went to play with it, just quite how rubbish it is. Considering its popularity, you might think that they'd make the damned thing a teeny bit user friendly.

You're stuck with default sections and to do anything neat at all, you have to hack around in CSS in a horrible manner.

Anyway, much buggering around with my site has resulted in this. I'm not proud, but it's better than 99.999% of MySpace pages in that it doesn't look garish and doesn't assault your good taste too much.

Next up is a bit of playing with Yahoo Pipes. But that may be a while yet.

A bit more on DRM. Sorry.

It's interesting that at about the same time as Steve Jobs becomes a sudden convert to going DRM-free, the BBC Trust reports back its conclusions to the BBC's on-demand proposals and in particular the iPlayer.

One of the key things they want the BBC to ensure is that DRMd material is platform agnostic:

As proposed, the TV catch-up service on the internet relies on Microsoft technology for the digital rights management (DRM) framework. The Trust will require the BBC Executive to adopt a platform-agnostic approach within a reasonable timeframe. This requires the BBC to develop an alternative DRM framework to enable users of other technology, for example, Apple and Linux, to access the on-demand services.

Around the 'net there's a lot of harrumphing at this with plenty of people moaning that the BBC shouldn't be sticking DRM on their material at all. We [British licence payers, that is] have paid for it so we should get it. Well things aren't as simple as that are they? The BBC licence but don't own a lot, if not most, of its broadcast material. And even programming they do own, they sell on DVD - Bleak House for example. Do we want to kill this income stream and force the BBC to raise the licence fee more than it is being raised?

The other problem is that the BBC wouldn't be allowed to stick its content out un-DRMd even if it wanted to. That's what this whole Trust thing has been about. As Ofcom's Market Impact Assessment highlighted, the BBC entering this market affects other TV channels' business models regarding selling downloads, as well as third party companies such as iTunes. Indeed they were terribly worried that content that the BBC might easily be able to give away free such as book readings, plays or classical music (out of copyright, performed by in-house orchestras) might affect, say, Audible, much of whos British content is actually BBC stuff "re-purposed" to use a horrible Americanism.

But on the other side of the argument, there's also a technical one, with lots of discussion running on the BBC Backstage email list. Indeed, they've just released a podcast featuring an esteemed colleague of mine. Is it possible to come up with a DRM system for Linux - an operating system that by its very nature is open source? As it stands, the DRM being proposed and likely used in the launch phase of the Iplayer, is Windows.

There just isn't an easy solution to this. If the BBC released material free-to-air, the BBC Trust and Ofcom would stop on the basis that it's anti-competitive and distorting the market. But if the BBC does release DRMd material, it'll either not work on everyone's computers (read Macs and Linux in the short-term), or will be in some bizarre "Open Source" format which will immediately be hacked.

The thing is that if material does appear in a DRM format, the same material will be released to world in a non-DRM format too, because some people will want that. I want to catch-up with last night's Eastenders. Great - the BBC Iplayer lets me do that. But hang on... I want to watch it on my PSP on the train. Ah. The DRM wrapper on it won't let me do that. I'll find a torrent instead and drop that through PSP Video 9. Voila! I can now watch it on my PSP because that's what I want to do. It's a technically fiddly process, and not as neat as just downloading in PSP format direct from a website, but depending on the value of the content to me, I might well go through that process. It's unlikely that the BBC will be releasing "Complete Season" box-sets of Eastenders (although scarily, they are doing this with Casualty), although UKTV Gold does show episodes. And there's a value to them in some overseas territories.

We live in an age where you can do a lot more with content than you were once able to. We're just going to have to accept that people will try to do more, and change our perceptions of what you should and shouldn't be able to do with something.

Right - I'm off to fill out the BBC Trust's On-Demand consultation questionnaire.

Well? The answer according to the new-look mirror.co.uk is three! One on the left, one on the right, and a big one in the middle!

A word of advice - don't try playing them all at once. The planets get into alignment or something and bad things happen...

Roy Greenslade at Mediaguardian shares his thoughts on the new multimedia aspects of the site. He's not a happy man.

[UPDATE] As a commenter on Mediaguardian notes, if you open the site in Firefox, it tries autoplaying both the side videos together leading to a complete mess as both videos play in the same screen on top of one another.

YouTube, it's reported, is working on an advertising revenue sharing mechanism that rewards creativity and generates cold hard cash for people who include advertising in their videos.

The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website.

Right. But surely they're not suggesting that people upload material for which they don't own the full copyright currently do they?

Here's a hypothetical based on a discussion at work today.

A media owner puts up a video of a popular band. Someone steals that video and posts it to YouTube.

In my hypothetical case, the copyright owner doesn't spot that the video's on YouTube - they don't have the manpower to be constantly searching YouTube for new infringements. The person who stole the video, by the way, lives in the Cayman Islands or Cuba or Liechtenstein or somewhere else well beyond US jurisdication just for good measure.

The uploaded video is by a well known band and contains a popular new single. Something that many people are searching for.

The person who uploaded it starts earning $xx,000. We don't know how much, but there are lots of views of it. Lots and lots of views.

The cash gets paid out in whatever mechanism.

Then a year down the line, the media owner spots the video and gets YouTube to take it down.

Who's entitled to that cash? Can YouTube get the money back from our tax-exiled uploader. Sure, the account can be suspended, but it's not really that hard to open another, and get a new bank account for cashing future cheques.

The media owner not only wants that advertising revenue, but the share that YouTube earned and compensation since the video was never licenced for taking advertising, and if it did, it would want way more than that!

In this instance Google/YouTube probably pay the media owner off. But how many times can this happen?

Maybe someone at YouTube has to watch each video that's included in the ad revenue scheme to determine whether it belongs to someone other than the uploader. But how do they know? It's a new band the YouTube video watcher has never heard of. As the uploader I might be a bandmember wanting to promote my new single and well within my rights, in which case it's fine. Or I might be a keen fan who's broken the band's copyright even though he's just trying to promote it.

As far as I know the DCMA only stays in force while someone isn't monitoring everything that goes up. When they do start looking, doesn't that protection fall away?

As this week's BBC >Click show gets excited by the growth of TV torrenting, legal alternatives are finally presenting themselves.

The BBC is all ready to roll (I was a beta-tester back in 2005, although somehow failed to blog about it), but is having to go through a public value test. Ofcom last week published its Market Impact Assessment into the proposal.

As someone who works for a commercial operator, I completely understand some of the issues that Ofcom has, but I absolutely disagree with some of their headline findings/issues.

1/2. The concern that "series stacking" could lead to drop-offs in DVD sales. They're worried about people saving up whole series and watching them back in one go. I suspect that this'll drop from the 13 weeks to something like 4 weeks' availability. You have to allow more than two weeks to make the service useful for people on holiday. DVRs/PVRs with greater capacity are going to make this a non-issue in the longterm anyway.

Removing "series stacking" altogether, as Ofcom suggests, would be fundamentally against the public interest. The example of the 15 part Bleak House is given. This was a BBC made-programme with BBC Worldwide/2Entertain releasing the DVD box set. I suggest that it's unlikely that the full series would be released on a "to keep" basis, but the Ofcom report suggests that this shouldn't be allowable one way or another. Frankly, I'm perfectly capable (and often do) of recording an entire series and then consuming it in large chunks over the weekend or whenever. I'd like increased flexibility to let me do this.

3. Ofcom's worried about the audio book market and classical music market in regards to the BBC's non-DRM'd audio proposal. It's obvious in the BBC's proposals that what they're really talking about is continued availability of the kinds of programmes that are currently podcast.

The irony here is that the audio book market is burgeoning, yet somehow needs protecting. Much of the content they're using is already BBC-based, with BBC Audio now one of the biggest players in the field. As things stand, once an afternoon play has been broadcast on Radio 4, unless it gets a repeat or very occassionally, a commercial release, that's the last it'll ever be heard of. If the writer's famous enough, it might eventually show up on BBC 7, but that's for famous actors and writers only. If the BBC can get the rights, then what's the problem with making this programming available? Frankly, I'd actually pay for some of this unattainable material, but at the moment, there is simply no outlet. Even the likes of Audible are only really interested in high profile comedy and drama releases by big names - usually

And the classical music scaremongering is record company driven. I don't believe that the BBC was proposing this anyway, but Ofcom is trying to put a clause in to prevent it one way or the other.

As a correspondent aks in this morning's Guardian, "Is it Ofcom's job to stifle public service innovation?"

In the meantime, Channel 4's "4OD" has launched, and I've also tried out Sky's Anytime service. I haven't so far bothered with Five's service since there's no free programming on it from what I can tell.

The big problem with these services is that they each require a separate application to be installed - even when there significantly shared elements within the services, in particular the peer to peer technology from Kontiki.

4OD is largely paid-for rental of programmes, with the odd freebie given away. Since I'm not really predisposed to pay £1.99 for an episode of Deal or No Deal, I've only watched very little on it. Actually, just an episode of Trigger Happy TV that was free.

Meanwhile over on Sky Anytime, you get different freebies depending on subscription, as well as various pay per view opportunities.

Neither service is too clear about the fact that it is peer to peer technology, and like others, I found it really difficult to kill the sharing once I'd closed the applications. You really shouldn't have to be manually killing individual processes. Downloading movies can really ruin your general internet experience. I couldn't find any kind of throttling option with either piece of software.

Finally there's the fancy new cool kid on the block - Joost (née The Venice Project), from the people who brought you Skype. It's only in beta at the moment, but first impressions are pretty good with a user interface that doesn't take too long to get to grips with. You can also close the program properly when you're done (I'm always suspicious that I'm eating bandwidth when I've not shut the programme down fully). Joost is very different in that it streams almost immediately at a pretty good bit-rate. But there is a relatively minimal programme offering just now with behind the scenes of music videos and episodes of The Album Chart Show predominating. Worth watching!

One thing that is going to affect the UK market is the current prevalance of capped downloads.

In summary, the question is whether or not I'm willing to pay for a programme that went out free to air on television? The answer in most instances, even for a keen viewer like myself, is not. If I miss something, I tend to think of it as my own fault for not setting the video/PVR or being able to see it online. The US market is the one to look at, where viewers can indeed catch up with Lost or Heroes online with limited commercial interruption. And the same programmes are also available ad-free on iTunes for a fee. Which model is going to work?

The other big question is how to get that content from our PCs to our TVs in an easy manner. Yes plenty of half-decent video cards have video outs, but that's a solution involving wires, and we're living in wifi homes these days. Apple TV is a start, but there's plenty of room yet to improve things. That's not much use if I want to catch up with TV on the BBC's smallish player.

It's not that there aren't some fine sites that utilise some of the following; but the words and phrases themselves are so over-used that tedium sets in when I read them. To put this in context I read a trade story about the Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread Book Awards). It explained that as well as including excerpts of the shortlisted titles themselves, there'd be "user generated content" with people writing about the books. So, effectively, that's like Amazon right? They just want people to write books? Fine. Just say that. Don't couch it in today's hot new buzzwords.

Without further ado, here's my list to date. Expect it to grow...

User generated content
Content
Launching a viral
Web 2.0
360 Degree Commissioning
IPTV
Multi Platform Projects
Blogosphere
Meme
anything to do with Second Life

I thought I'd write a brief review of the recently released Bush Wi-Fi radio. With the growing number of home networks being set up, this has to be a growth area for radio, and I've only really been waiting for prices to fall far enough to buy one.

This particular model can be purchased at Argos for £119.99 currently, although I also hear that it's available for £80 + VAT at Makro if you've got one of their trade cards.

Anyway, back to the product in hand. Setting it up was really very simple with a quick scan for local networks and then a prompt to enter any appropriate passwords. There's also a process for networks with hidden SSIDs so everyone should be catered for.

A couple of quick station listing updates (via Reciva), and I was away.

The three main options at the start are Stations, Media Player and Configure. I jumped to Stations, then selecting first Location, then Europe and then the UK which has 484 stations listed. First up had to be Virgin Radio. The sounds was good with nice bass considering that there's only a single speaker on the unit.

The buffering was very quick, and under the station name, a second line told me that it's Real Enabled. But another piece of text told me that it was actually using the 128k MP3 stream that Virgin offers. That made it sound awfully good. Plugging headphones in, just showed the quality of the audio - it was much better than our usual DAB signal, but I'll leave that argument to others.

128k MP3 streams were also used for Virgin Radio Xtreme, Virgin Radio Classic Rock and Virgin Radio Groove, or "Virgin Radio G" as it comes up on the somewhat limited display.

Flicking over to Talksport, a station I'd never ordinarily listen to, revealed what happens when you use too little bandwidth for streaming. Their 20k WMA stream was worse than a decent AM signal. I found it pretty unlistenable. The buffering took longer as well.

Over on Capital Radio, the 32k WMA was only marginally better, but disappointing for a music station. The buffering wasn't as bad as it was for Talksport, but really this isn't up to DAB or FM in quality.

Similarly, Classic FM was also only on a 32k WMA stream, but the piece of music I listened to wasn't as bad sounding as Shakira had been on Capital.

Moving over to the BBC, I tuned to BBC Radio 3. Choosing a BBC station gives you a choice of Live or On Demand. I chose live, and after a pre-roll informing me that I was listening to the streaming version of the station, it was onto the service which was encoded in a 44k Real format. I suspect that Real is the default option when there are choices, but that tends to be the BBC default anyway since it's available on more platforms. Listening via headphones, the unit had good sound to the live concert that was being broadcast when I was testing it. You could hear a little "noise" in some quieter moments though. Reasonably acceptable, although not as good as a strong FM or DAB signal.

What's really powerful about the BBC's offering, is of course, the On Demand listening. Choosing On Demand from Radio 4, I was presented with an up to date list of current programmes. If there are multiple editions, then I get a day by day breakdown to choose the one I want to hear.

Some stations, like Virgin Radio, have a variety of streams available to listen, and the radio doesn't really give you the option to choose. That's down to Reciva picking the appropriate one.

It's worth noting that I didn't do anything too bandwidth heavy whilst listening. So no torrents or anything, but I did download a couple of sizeable files whilst listening to Virgin and BBC stations, without any interruptions or buffering.

Listening to the odd on demand programmes, I did notice the occasional break-up, and the BBC has that slightly annoying habit of changing bit-rates mid-stream. But it's all very good.

There's one more part of this radio that really needs addressing. As I've mentioned, Reciva are responsible for the station list. They supply the list to pretty much all the available wi-fi radios currently on the market. If you go to the Reciva website you can register your set online which creates a "My Stuff" section which lets you add your own streams and station favourites. So, although there are ten presets built in for favourites, you can have more by going to the My Stuff menu option.

Adding streams is especially useful if you want to use a higher quality version of a stream than the one offered by default. Unfortunately, none of the three I've tried so far has worked. I listen to Paul Harris on KMOX a bit, and CBS has an annoying new system of making you register before you get a player launched. Discovering the exact stream took a bit of detective work. But although it works in Windows Media Player, the radio fails to play the stream.

What's really curious is that there is precisely no mention of Reciva or its website and the functionality it offers, anywhere in the Bush manual. You just have to "know" to get there.

I do think that some radio stations need to ask some serious questions about the quality that they're currently using to encode their streams. As more people start to get these radios (and I've heard that one manufacturer is planning on building wi-fi into most of their digital radios in the future), sub-standard streaming is going to become as issue. And only offering streams locked into players is not going to be enormously helpful, unless the stations at least let Reciva know what the real addresses of their streams are.

The only two things I can say at this early stage that could do with improving are the size of the display, which is a little small, and the shame that there's no way of getting some of the scrolling text that various players can offer. Obviously with no single standard for players, this latter is going to be a problem.

Still, all said and done, the ease with which you can just listen on demand to programming when you feel like it without booting up a computer, makes this a killer device. Roll on the advent of listening on demand in commercial radio in the UK.

By the way, it's probably a bit misleading of Argos to print details on DAB Digital Radio in their catalogue in the entry for this unit. There's no DAB or AM/FM on this product. They even print the DAB logo. Mind you, the photo shows the radio as having an antenna when it doesn't.

Five's TV download service has been working for a few weeks now, offering downloads of the various CSI flavours. For some reason the service is being heavily advertised in the marketing trade press. Indeed, I thought that maybe they'd put a free episode up for trial such is their current press spend.

But no, it's £1.49 for old episodes and &2.49 for the next episode in advance. That's "next" if you didn't already see it after downloading it in around March or April this year when it aired on US TV.

Obviously charging for episodes is fair enough although you should note that this is a rental fee with episodes only viewable for 14 days. Not for me then.

But my biggest question is about the "sponsored by Yell.com" logo that appears in both the trade ads and on the site. I can't really see what the sponsorship is doing for me the consumer.

I've always argued that sponsorship should be seen to be giving me something that I otherwise wouldn't have had. Of course I'm not naiive enough to think that Coronation Street wouldn't be made were it not for Cadbury, but if the Evening Standard gives away copies free for an hour as they did a couple of weeks ago, I understand that it's a commercial agreement that in this instance was made with Nokia. Nokia get something out of it, and I get something out of it.

Yell's sponsorship doesn't really tick those boxes. For all I know, there'll be a Yell.com ad on the front of the download.

Incidentally, wouldn't have been better for Five to launch this service with something like Prison Break - a series where you feel that you need to see every episode so as not to miss anything. Sales of episodes will surely be much better. CSI is eminently "missable" with few, if any, ongoing storylines, and is all over television anyway with additional showings on the new Five US.

Fascinating insight into the recent Google/YouTube machinations from an anonymous insider posted at Mark Cuban's blog (via Waxy).

Following on from the FA the other day, Media Guardian today reports that a rights protection company called NetResult has got YouTube to remove over 1,000 clips for copyright violation. The article goes onto report that NetResult believes that there are "as many as 10,000 more illegal clips on the website."

Right. I think they'll find that there are many more than that. And there are lot of rights agencies that Google/YouTube will have to deals with beyond four major record giants to clear themselves. Indeed, given that if I video the Hollywood sign or the Eiffel Tower at night I'm infringing copyright if I don't pay, the infringements are likely to be endless.

The latest company looking at copyright violations on YouTube seems to be the FA. Unsurprisingly, along with any music video of any note, most of the key goals from around the world and other football incidents (Defoe's arm chewing for example), quickly find their way onto YouTube.

All this is copyright of course, with Sky and the BBC paying lots of money for the rights in the UK. But a 1 minute goals roundup of a match is perfectly suited to the internet, and those videos are going to end up somewhere.

What's strange about the story is that the FA is going after a blog rather than YouTube for hosting the goals.

Anyway, it's really working, because the site links to many of the goals of significance from this weekend including Arsenal's demolition of Reading, and Real Madrid's defeat of Barcelona. None of the Saturday games are up, and no doubt by the time you read this, the Premier League goals with have been taken down.

So what happens next? Does the FA sue YouTube? Or do they strike some deal with Google to allow goals to be played and get a stake in Google as a consequence like the record companies? I suspect that neither will be the case.

Of course, if they were really smart, they'd look at the example of Major League Baseball. The World Series is underway at the moment, and they let you watch a "fastcast" which is a short, neatly produced free video package. The highlights of last night's game - in which the Detroit Tigers tied the series up at 1-1 against the St Louis Cardinals - are already online. But if you want, there's a competitively priced package of full game streams available to buy. Sadly, while there is video on thefa.com, there's no Premier League action, relatively little England footage, and even the U21 stuff is out of date (no Germany v England from the other week - just the first leg).

Surely the best way of combatting pirates and video sites is to make something even more compelling available for consumers? That's certainly what happened with music and the like of the iTunes music store.

Just testing the embedding of Google gadgets into webpages.

There's been a bit of media coverage of a deal that The Times has done with its sister company Sky News, leading to Sky's news being available on "Times Online TV" a streaming video service available on The Times' website.

Aside from the fact that this is surely not really news - two sister companies working together - I was more surprised when I had a bit of a look at the Times Online TV service to see what else it had. A lot of the video is supplied by Reuters, and perfectly good it is too. But aside from a Sky News tab, there's also a Fox News tab. Surely that really doesn't help The Times does it? Rabidly right wing, with it's famous "fair and balanced" nonsense strapline. Just about the first story on the site in the US News section gives a fair indication. It's a follow-up piece from a few days ago following an interview on Fox News with Bill Clinton, in which Clinton vehemently defended himself against accusations that his administration hadn't done enough to look for Osama Bin Ladin. The piece even featured the reported words of Fox News Chief Roger Ailes in a self-reverential manner.

Maybe the service will next start using The Sun for its entertainment service?

Mark Cuban's completely correct in his analysis of YouTube, and why things can't go on. I know that there's this DCMS takedown setup, but how can a system that's chock full of copyright material, and reliant on it for page impressions, not be responsible for itself? It's really not the same as providing webspace.

I've argued this before and I'll argue it again. Oh, and Google's pretty much in the same boat.

[UPDATE] Is this story, at the moment with Warners, the way out for YouTube? Somehow, YouTube is going to identify if the music included in your video is copyright using some software they're working on, and then it's going to somehow share revenues with Warners. Is this ad revenue? We're talking about?

Quite how this works with remixes, mashes, visually copyright material and much more, I don't know. But it could YouTube's way out of a sticky situation.

Amazon has a feature whereby it examines your previous buying record and recommends new products of a similar nature. I'm sure it's similar to "Customers who viewed this item also viewed" really.

Except that today I got the opportunity to buy the new Le Carré novel, The Mission Song for the bargain price of £30! Except that it would have been better if it had pointed to this version of The Mission Song at the rather more attractive price of £8.99 and which is currently sitting at no. 12 in the sales rank.

No doubt the pricier volume is either some kind of special edition or a foreign copy. It's not clear on Amazon.

And it's quite amusing that I got this warning from Amazon at all following my previous complaint that they don't have an automated system to let me know about new books by selected favourite authors.

When did Google News start analysing my recent Google searches and recommending appropriate news content? Very clever, although this might highlight certain privacy issues. Yes I know that with myself logged into Google it's tracking my search history, but do I want that in my news?

I was on the tube this morning, and after avoiding a man who threw up in the middle of the carriage, I ended up standing near a guy who was refining a paper copy of his Powerpoint presentation. Closer examination, as I pretended to read my book, revealed that he was giving an i-Level presentation - i-Level is a digital media agency.

Most amusingly, his final slide (as far as I could tell) was all about User Generated Advertising!

Do we really have to do everything ourselves online now? It's all far too much like hard work.

Unless I'm missing something, there's a feature that I'd love Amazon to add to its service. I'd like them to let me know when one of my favourite authors has a new book upcoming.

For example, I like John Le Carré's novels, but if it wasn't for the fact that I otherwise knew to look (I read about it in a newspaper), it'd have taken me by surprise that he has a new novel coming out in a few weeks' time. (Incidentally, BBC Four has a programme on Le Carré later this week)

Why can't I register Le Carré as favourite author, and Amazon just email when he has a new book out? I realise that sometimes these books are likely to be just older titles republished, but that's better than not knowing about a new title surely? The same could be done for musicians too.

Maybe this is some hidden (or not so hidden) feature of Amazon I've just missed up until now, and if so, someone please do tell me.

The new geotagging feature in Flickr is very nice, but it does show up the shortcomings of Yahoo Maps in the UK. The maps really are poor compared with Google Maps. In particular, the whereabouts of railway lines is really off-kilter.

Writely Post

This is a bit of test to copy to check that I can send this from Writely.

Minutes later...

Well that seems to work OK. Lots of ways of getting stuff onto this site now.

Another quick entry to test my so-called tag cloud...

Well after a couple of false starts I think I've now got Movable Type version 3.3 (3.32 indeed) working. I had some false starts earlier which gave a "PreSave failed" error. Googling it really didn't help, and I was flumoxed. But I think that I failed to update a folder since a second reinstall seems to have done the trick.

It's too early to say yet how good the new version of MT is, but I'll be having a closer look over the coming days.

This week's New Media Age makes quite interesting reading for various reasons - some of which I'll go through separately, not least the interview with David Elstein.

But there's an interesting piece by Guy Phillipson of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), an organisation who's role is to "work with our members to ensure marketers can easily identify the best role for online and help them engage their customers and build their brands, through a combination of resources and events."

The piece talks about the upsurge in IPTV, and goes on to say that it has published a comprehensive report on the emerging IPTV market in the UK. A note at the end of the piece says that the report "IPTV: The Emerging UK Market" is available from iabuk.net.

Well that sounds worth reading, so off I trot to their website. The report is clearly highlighted on their front page, and I go off to read more. At the foot of the page is a link to a Word document which is an IPTV FAQ. But just above that is a link that says: "IAB members can download the full ipTV: The Emerging Market report from our knowledge bank on our website."

I follow the link but am confronted with a login page. Oh well, the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) also makes you register. I fundamentally disagree with this policy since the organisation's raison d'etre to encourage marketeers and advertisers to use radio as a medium, and anything that makes it even trivially hard to get the information about advertising that they need means that it's harder to get that all important advertising. But registration's free and once in, there is a wealth of information freely available to advertisers, marketeers or simply the curious (if you can find your way around the appalling layed-out site).

So I try to register with the IAB.

Nope. I'm from an "Unapproved Member Domain". You see, I'm not actually from a member organisation. Of course I could be a company looking for information about how I can make IPTV work for me. But the IAB's not going to help me out.

Rubbish.

Interestingly, the four page Word document I can download says this in answer to "What is IPTV?"

...Is it the delivery of programming over a closed network to a TV set-top box, or is it the viewing of video content via the open network of the world wide web on a PC monitor?

Whilst these two different models are often interchangeably labelled ipTV, it is the former that lays stronger claim to the term. ipTV is a closed, proprietary TV system such as those present today on cable or satellite services but instead delivered through IP technology over a secure network...

So the IAB is very much trying to say is that it's content delivered to your TV set rather than your PC. Yet few of us actually watch streamed content via IP on their TV sets (unless we've got Homechoice Tiscali or Telewest Teleport or something).

I find that a rather limiting definition. Technically it may be correct, but if I'm watching the BBC's Player or streaming Channel 4, is that not also IPTV?

Incidentally, why indeed is IPTV all falling under the IAB's auspices anyway? If I were Thinkbox, television's marketing body, I'd be getting into IPTV big-time. One for TV buyers and New Media buyers to fight over I guess.

Oh, and I note that Thinkbox's website is completely registration and membership free. It seems that "New" media has something to learn from "old" media after all!

It's difficult to explain just how satisfying it is to get 2,800 emails in my inbox down to a slightly more manageable 35.

I noted the other day that the BBC had launched "vodcasts" of some of its news programming including a weekly Newsnight summary. I also mentioned that it was disappointing that the BBC hadn't made the format available as anything other than an iPod friendly mp4.

Well of course mp4 files play on plenty of hardware. But trying to play it on my PSP was a struggle.

However, Sony has now released another update to its software - version 2.80 - which gets around this problem. You can now drop mp4 files into a VIDEO folder in the root of your Memory Stick Duo, and they'll play. You don't even have to rename them something strange, or drop them into some bizarrely named folder depending on the encoder used as you used to.

It's worth noting that you do need to use the root of your PSP, not a PSP/VIDEO folder as I first thought. But the Newsnight video works and plenty of other videos formatted for iPod should too - as long as they're not encoded as .mov files I believe.

Today's Media Guardian reports how Alexa is now showing YouTube as having overtaken MySpace (note to self: when you create your Web 2.0, or even 3.0, company, ensure that it's two words with no space and two capitals - it's the law).

I'm sure it's fantastic news for YouTube, a bit like the way that Murdoch's doing well out of MySpace. But both sites, in my view, have some serious questions that need answering in the world of copyright before they can be fully monetised.

I've been through the arguments about YouTube before, and a Napster-style takedown has got to happen at some point, sadly. MySpace is a little more confusing, but it too is full of copyright music. A lot of it is new music that bands and artists have put up there themselves, and that's great. But what about all the copyright material that anyone can put up themselves? Even if I can only stream and not download the track, that still has to be paid for.

For example, I note today that even Media Guardian's "Monkey" has got himself a website there in honour of Murdoch's conference in Pebble Beech, at which Tony Blair felt it was somehow necessary to give a speech. Maybe he can come and give a talk at our company? We're not even that far from Downing Street. We could arrange it in the lunch hour.

But back to the Media Monkey MySpace site. When you go on it, you're regaled with Hey Hey, We're The Monkeys, by the eponymous group. Very funny. And the hideous design is true of many MySpace sites, it's as if nobody's moved on from the early days of GeoCities.

I would like to know where along the way, The Monkees songwriters and performers get their cut?

Questions, questions, questions.

Last week MSN released a report entitled Blogging in Britain (PDF via The Daily Telegraph) which is all very interesting and supplies lots of hard and fast numbers which I'm using for a work project. But whoever worked on the presentation of the stats in the report really needs to go back to school and learn how to accurately reflect charts.

Throughout the document, there are some nice looking 3D pie-charts. Except that pie charts should almost always represent the individual parts of some whole; all the bits added together should represent 100% of the whole with no duplication within segments (e.g. you're only in one age-group). Yet the pie charts throughout this report show entirely different things.

By way of an example, here's the first chart in the report:

At first glance, it looks as though the largest part of the blogging population is under 25s followed by 25-34s. And this is the case, but a close reading of the key shows that there's something wrong with this chart. The percentages add up to 119%. Even allowing for the odd rounding error, you shouldn't manage that with 4 data values. What they actually mean is that 42% of under 25s blog, and 58% don't. You could show that as a pie chart, but this one is very misleading. The data should really be presented a little like this:

(To further see how the pie chart is wrong, consider the case where, say, 95% of the population blog, and it's constant across all age groups. You'd end up with a pie chart divided into four neat equal segments looking for all the world like 25% each, yet each representing, somehow, 95% of their individual population segments).

This may all seem a little pointless, but it's an indication of mathematical illiteracy at large, and a strong mathematical education is vital to strong debate.

And yes, I did spot the typo - "25-43" in the original chart.

One final note, in an interesting analysis piece on the Telegraph's blog, Shane Richmond compares this survey with a seemingly similar one produced by advertising agency Universal McCann back in May. The two surveys have some startling differences that he does well to explain away. But he also mentions in passing that the MSN sample size was 743 internet users. Nowhere on the PDF is this explicitly stated. I assume he either contacted MSN or was working from a slightly more detailed press release. Once again, if MSN are going to put together a glossy PDF of their findings, a little detail about the methodology should really also be included.

A fascinating piece on copyright issues in The Hollywood Reporter (via TV Squad) following on from Newsnight the other day.

There are a couple of questions I've got after reading this piece:

First, YouTube's 10-minute clip limit and tiny video window cater to clip culture, not pirates.

Well yes, but it may be a tiny video window today, because YouTube is already facing massive bandwidth costs, but in a couple of years it could be serving full resolution HDTV for all I know. Yes, if I was a studio, I'd be targeting Bit Torrent and other P2P users rather than YouTube, but the question's still there.

There's also much made of the "Safe Harbor" rule in the US DCMA. Well that's fine as far as it goes, which is to the shores of the US. What are the international implications? I'm reasonably sure that if I host copyright material on this UK hosted website, my hosts stand to be prosecuted as well - at least if they do nothing about it when alerted. I don't know the ins and outs of the legalities, but in practical terms, threatening an ISP can be a guaranteed way to have your site removed irrespective of whether or not there's a legal grounding for the claim.

It's interesting to speculate on the longterm business model of YouTube, but they're going to have to be careful. All those kids miming to their favourite songs are copyright, and it'd be pretty foolish for the record companies to sue their customers for being such big fans that they're lip perfect when they sing along, but when have record companies ever done the smart thing? Look forward to a case soon.

I don't see how there's not a series of big legal cases coming soon for these sites. Even if what they're doing is legal in the US, it may not be elsewhere. Don't forget that for years, AllofMP3's defence has been that they're legal in Russia where they're hosted.

A very interesting comment piece by Daniel Pearl, deputy editor of Newsnight on what I consider to be the fatal flaw with the business model of sites like YouTube.

A picture in today's Times shows a tangle of cables as David Baddiel and Frank Skinner recorded their first World Cup podcast (a separate website incidentally). I wish that amidst all the kit, someone had spent a little time normalising the audio. The level of the first recording is really low. With the volume at the maximum and listening on headphones, it's only just audible.

The first edition very much sounds like it was recorded on a Sunday morning. Very laid back and relaxed.

But I think that The Guardian's one with Football Italia's very own James Richardson has it. It takes a more serious line - not completely serious, just more serious than Baddiel and Skinner.

Office workers of the UK are rejoicing. In a pair of announcments, the BBC has revealed that it'll be simulcasting all its live World Cup games on the internet. To UK viewers only of course. They'll also be providing the full interactive option for Wimbledon too. Fantastic. Nobody will get any work done in the next month.

Of course, you may find that your company's ISP is not peered or listed with the BBC and therefore you won't have access. But you should have found that out already, with the Olympics or Commonwealth Games coverage.

I've played around quite a bit with VOIP but thus far, I've not really embraced it. A while back I mentioned that I'd seen Tesco selling cheapish phones accompanying their own VOIP service. Today I crossed over to the darkside and went into Tesco where I noticed a sign that suggested that the phones had been reduced to £14.97. Never one to turn down a bargain, I popped one in the basket (also managed to get a football shaped mug with some PG Tips and a "limited edition" World Cup Coke glass). But when the total was rung up, I noticed that it was priced up at £19.97. Once I'd paid, I had a close look at the receipt; Tesco, like other retailers has this annoying habit of announcing, with a fanfare, all the savings you've made at the end of your transaction, rather than as the items are scanned. So it was possible that the fiver would be at the bottom in terms of a "saving".

It wasn't, so I did that terribly un-British thing, and questioned it. Assistants went to check, since the display was in line of sight of the till. It seemed that the offer should have expired on May 14, but someone had neglected to remove the sticker. Fine, I'll get my fiver back.

Off to customer service, where the problem was explained. But instead of just crediting me with the fiver, they gave me all my cash back. Cool. Free VOIP phone then.

Of course, even with a fiver's worth of credit, I really wanted the phone for either Skype or GoogleTalk. James was able to point me in the direction of the drivers, and all seems to work fine. And I can feel somewhat better, safe in the knowledge that I've cost Tesco a few quid today instead of vice-versa.

Now I just need to try GTalk2VoIP.

Just like playground crazes of yesterday and favourite toys that nobody can get hold of at Christmas, we are now forever likely to be stuck with knowing about the latest flavour-of-the-month social website.

The latest of these is Bebo.com, which The Guardian reported the other day, as muscling in on MySpace.

No, I hadn't heard of it either. But then it's, you know, for kids.

Without going to the bother of signing up, I had a bit of a look around. What immediately strikes you is the sheer inappropriateness of many of the ads:

Free Texas Hold'em, Poker Room Rakeback, Debt Consolidation, Hepatitis C, Massage Training, Montreal Bachelor Party, Live Phone Psychics.

These ads seem to be served by such companies as Overture and Google, and maybe they're using some cookies that are already sitting on my machine. But then again, a child may be logging onto the site in the home. Do these ad companies not have rules about serving appropriate copy? I wasn't in the cottages part of the site. I was strictly within the schools part.

I don't want to sit here contributing to scare stories about kids using the internet, but I do think that sites that are aimed at children should take some responsibility to accurately target their advertising and reject inappropriate content.

Here's an interesting post (via Waxy) about YouTube from someone who's fed up of having his videos deleted because they're copyright.

To be honest, I'm not surprised, and the author probably has no real grounds to complain. These video services are treading a very fine line, and frankly are lawsuits waiting to happen if they're not very very careful. I'm not surprised, and don't have an awful lot of sympathy with the writer. I'd love to upload all my videos, but they tend to be full of copyrighted music. I'd prefer not to have record companies come after me.

The other day I mentioned that if I'd made a TV ad that I thought was very funny, I should immediately upload it to YouTube (see, for example, the Carlbserg Pub Team ad). But one of the problems I overlooked was that performers and music rights have to be paid for each time the ad's played. Suddenly this cost becomes an unknown. That Carlsberg ad has not been placed by their agency, but by a viewer of Soccer AM on Sky where the ad was captured from. That's not to say that rights issues can't be sorted out - film companies seem to manage with their trailers. But it's yet another rights nightmare.

Well I had a very scary experience over the last 24 hours. No, not going through the pain that is watching Arsenal scrape through a very tricky tie to go through to the Champions' League Final in Paris on May 17 (any offers of tickets most welcome).

I went through an upgrade process to get MT, the platform that this site is hosted on, up to the latest version.

The notes on Sixapart's website seemed very straightforward. I went through the process, skipping only one thing that I really really really should have done. That was, backing up my entire website. I backed up the SQL table that the data sits on, but not the full MT installation as it stood.

Anyway, all proceded fine, and there were no problems until I came to run the program. Instead of being faced with a login prompt, I got a Save or Open dialogue box. What?

Opening the text that was being returned I got things like:

Got an error: Unsupported driver MT::ObjectDriver::DBI::mysql: Bareword

Help!

Frantic Googling then followed, and I quickly found out that that the error was down to my host's version of the Perl DBI module was too low for MT. Running mt-check.cgi verified this.

As a few other people have mentioned in their blogs and on various message boards, Sixapart really should have informed upgraders that this needed to be checked before they completed. Since my blog is served from a MySQL database, I really needed this module.

I now had a big problem. If I dropped back to a Berkley DB (as this blog once was), then I'd lose all my entries. At one stage in the process this looked like it was the case as I needed to log in with the installation defaults. Otherwise I could either drop back to a previous version of MT - not something I could do since I didn't have the files, and on the MT website, earlier versions simply aren't available to download (not to me anyway - I could get version 2.66 for some reason but that's it).

My only hope was getting my hosting company to upgrade the module. I emailed them in hope more than anything, but just a few hours later I was told that I'd been moved to a more up to date server, and everything was now fine.

So can I just say thanks to Virtualnames who I must say are a very affordable and reliable hosting solution. The few problems I've ever had have been solved quickly and efficiently.

I had been contemplating a very painful long Bank Holiday Weekend rebuilding this site in something like Wordpress. I didn't really want to do this, although having helped a friend install it, I know that Wordpress is set up with considerable ease.

At some point soon, I will update the look and feel of this site, and maybe I do need to switch away from MT. That'd be quite painful, particularly as it could mean breaking every Googled link to my pages unless I do something a bit clever. But all that's for another day.

In the meantime, Arsenal's in the European Cup Final!

What is it about some companies that means that even the smallest new product launch or enhancement generates widespread coverage in the media?

This week is an excellent case in point. Apple have announced some price cuts for their iPod Shuffles and the introduction of a 1GB iPod Nano. Lovely.

Meanwhile Google's upgraded their Google Talk application and embedded a Chat facility within Gmail (or Google Mail to us UK citizens).

Elsewhere, I suspect that some other consumer goods manufacturers have announced new products and other software companies have enhanced some of their offerings. But they didn't get the technology lead as Google did, or third story on Mediaguardian like Apple did. I realise that both these sites see lots of changes hour by hour, but the fact is that for some reason, these companies only have to sneeze and everyone sits up and notices it.

(As an aside, for some reason, I'm not getting the Google Chat facility in Firefox at the moment. I wonder if it's one of my extensions. I'll have to experiment. [UPDATE] It works in Firefox on all my computers aside from one. I wonder why?)

I'm sure that all that needs to be said has already been said about Google's decision to censor their own offering.

I suppose I find it sad that even one of the biggest companies on the planet with unparralleled power in the supply of information, still feels that it needs to bend over and do the Chinese government's bidding

It does scare me that there's this filtering going on, and as was raised in the Newsnight report tonight, will the Chinese people really thank those companies that have gotten into bed with the dictatorship in place today? Will it actually be a backwards step in the long term?

I'm sure that there are those in China who recall that Rupert Murdoch threw the BBC off his satellite system to make it acceptable to the Chinese government and get a foothold in one of the fastest growing markets on the planet. He refused to publish Chris Patton's memoirs along the way.

According to a report from Continental Research, as published in Campaign magazine, one in ten adults watches television on the internet.

Really? Already? Maybe "has watched", but "watches" implies they do it regularly. Unless you want to catch up on last night's Newsnight, or are engaged in downloading via bittorrent (both reasonably marginal activities still), then there's not a great deal of content out there apart from promos for upcoming programmes, and, until last night, The Thick Of It.

But that's not the least likely fact in the story. According to the same survey, 4% have viewed TV on their mobile.

I'm sorry, but do 4% of mobile phones even have the capability to watch TV on them? GPRS isn't exactly ready for streaming, so we're talking about 3G phones. I'm guessing that 3.99999% of that figure must be watching goals. Does that even count as TV?

The BBC's iMP trial has allowed me to downlaod various programmes onto my Windows mobile phone, but that's something that I've only been able to do in the last week or so (a fuller review of iMP to follow). Otherwise there's the BT Livetime trial which uses "spare" DAB bandwidth on the Digital One national digital radio multiplex to broadcast Sky News, Sky Sports News and Blaze (a music videos channel). I've seen one of the trial handsets and aside from being rather bulky - supposedly due to the data they're capturing for the trial - they work surprisingly well. I guess if you catch the bus home or something, it's quite nice to catch up on the news, or maybe catch the goals from Sky Sports News at the weekend. Whether it's good use of spectrum is another question. I suspect that they're going to want to charge for the privilege of watching these channels.

But 4% remains to high a figure.

This is great news. I've obviously applied, but we'll have to wait and see.

I seem to be getting a surprising amount of Russian spam in my Gmail account at the moment. And when I say Russian spam, I mean spam that's actually in Cyrillic text. Very strange.

So it seems that the record industry in the UK lost £650m in the last two year due to piracy.

No it didn't.

The "shortfall" identified by TNS would simply not have been spent at all. I don't doubt that the music was downloaded but that's not the same as "losing money". It's money that would never have been spent.

Don't forget, album sales went up in 2004 - up 2.6% from 2003. At the same time, legal downloads are going through the roof (and are now included in the main UK chart), and DVD music (and film) sales are soaring.

So how does that square with all these millions of pounds that have been lost? According to the TNS report £376m was lost last year. Obviously a chunk of that was single sales. But if we convert it into album sales at around £14 each, that's an additional 27m albums. This would have meant a 19.4% increase in album sales rather than 2.6%.

OK, I've played a bit fast and loose with numbers there, attributing all that lost cash to album sales. But the same story applies. It's the same fallacy you get in the software industry about lost sales of Photoshop or Microsoft Office. Let's face it, most of the people currently using a piece of software that retails at between £300-500, would not be using it they'd had to pay for it.

So can I make a plea to the media not to blindly repeat trade organisations' press releases and call it news. Particularly when they include phrases like "much of which would have been invested in new British music" when talking about that "lost" cash. Surely they meant to say "much of which would have further lined the pockets of major international artists" since they're the people who're getting downloaded the most.

There's been much discussion in recent days about the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) announcing that more money is being spent on the internet than is on radio.

I must admit to being a little untrusting of this information and I'm not sure that like is being compared with like. And I don't just say that because I work in radio. We also sell internet advertising and have a highly trafficed site. But I'd want to examine those numbers closely.

Anyway, there's a reasonably relevant article in New Media Age highlighting what radio is doing to confront this challenge. In the first place, radio remains the most natural bedfellow of the internet with a "listen while you surf" approach which works. You can consume radio equally as well or even better via the internet than you can using a traditional set. And witness the success of the BBC's radio player; if only all radio stations were able to strike the sort of deal the BBC have done to allow their content to be listen-again-able (it's not technology that holds other stations back - it's lack of the legal right to play the music again).

I do get a bit upset when supposed new developments such as The Bug are hailed because they allow radio to be timeshifted Sky+/Tivo-style.

This isn't new. I'll say again what I've been saying for a while. Ever since Psion launched the Wavefinder, PC owners have been able to do this. It's just a pity that there aren't similar products on the market now. A quick look around reveals only this model from Aria which isn't being shipped at the moment due to XP SP2 driver issues.

Trade magazine Media Week emailed me to complete one of those online surveys, the results of which are obviously going to form the basis of a future article.

At the end of the survey it explained that I'd be entered into a free prize draw to win a holiday which was partly sponsored by Formula Won. Who are they I wondered? So I clicked on their website and discoverd that they're a media recruitment company. On their homepage it says "Click to enter", but when you click it launches into a massive Flash splash pop-up along with music.

Can I humbly suggest to all recruitment companies that they don't use loud music and flash graphics on their websites. Sounds and moving images are not the most subtle of things, and an employee idly surfing in the workplace for a new job probably doesn't want attention drawn to their activity.

So following on from my post about the New Order Bluetooth ad the other day I've been trying to think of other possibilities using Bluetooth technology.

Every year at work we entertain clients at the V Festival. I'd like to be able to use this technology to do something clever for them like this. A bit of Googling reveals that this advertising "installation" works using something called Hypertag technology. Undoubtedly this'll cost a few quid to buy into.

So my question is this: could I replicate this set-up with a PC and a Bluetooth adpator (if we ignore the infra-red option for a second)? Could I not just continually "blast" a Bluetooth signal, constantly looking for devices to latch on to and offer downloads?

If that's the case, then something simple could be set up. Exactly what we'd want to offer clients I don't know, but let's not worry about that now. Maybe MMS imagery of bands that play live there.

A colleague at work did point out that there are some downsides of receiving stuff without asking. Could a future trip through the high street see your phone run out of memory as all and sundry dump stuff onto it? Even though you have to "Accept" the downloads, by the time you're asked, it's already on your phone. And it could get rather irritating if you happen to work somewhere that's doing this constantly.

But I'd love to be able to give this a go. Any suggestions, please use the comments.

I've been playing with satellite photos for the last couple of days. First of all there's the new satellite photos to be found on Google Maps which are lovely IF you happen to live in the US (or at least want to see satellite photos of the US).

But then I found out about NASA's World Wind which is quite simply one of the most brilliant and completely free programs to be found anywhere on the internet. It's a colossal 200MB or so download (bit torrents available) which gives you an application that needs both Direct X and .Net - so Microsoft only. You start with a representation of the globe seen from orbit in space. You can spin it any way you like to find the part of the planet you're interested in. And then you zoom. And zoom. And zoom. On the fly it begins loading in more detailed satellite imagery, where available, and more detailed pictures emerge. You can see mountain ranges and rivers. Then you see cities and then towns. If you choose the US, you can zoom in so far that in major cities you can actually pick out individual cars. It's incredible.

And it's fast, loading up the maps on the fly as you go. So good internet connectivity's required.

And oh, it's 3D.

Go to a mountain range, like the Himalayas, and you can then change your angle of view and the mountains are rendered in 3D before your eyes. You can zoom around and fly about like a deranged flight simulator pilot.

I simply can't think of a better tool for children's geography lessons. But never mind kids - this isn't just for them! You can also pick out recent incidents and appropriate satellite photography's overlaid. You can also compare historic photos to show major fluctuations in parts of the planet - perhaps around a volcano, or icebergs off Antartica.

This is simply phenominal software. A goodish PC with a decent graphics card are desirable, but I managed it with a superfast PC with loads of RAM and a fairly basic graphics card.

I love maps. Really - I do. This is stunning software that I could use for days and days. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Good news - Virgin Radio has started podcasting!

Bad news - we've coined the term "podvertising"...

Over the last couple of weeks, Gmail has changed around how it highlights the invites you have left quite a lot.

Now, all of sudden, instead of having six invites, I have fifty! Are Google entering a new phase of opening up Gmail? This new openness suggests that an invite is no longer a valuable commodity, not that it really has been of late. But Google still isn't opening itself up for new accounts just by logging in. Maybe they never will...

Is Trackback Spam the new Comment Spam?

Worth noting that since I introduced the "you can't comment until you log in" thing with Typekey, I haven't had any Comment Spam at all. Mind you, I've not had many comments either...

A great initiative to stop comment spam has been the introduction of the rel="nofollow" tag that Google has come up with and other major search engines and blogging software vendors are supporting.

The reason for comment spam is to get yourself ranked high on search engines page ranks. But including "nofollow" on the link means that search engines will ignore those URLs. Comment spam is thus redundant... Well aside from anyone foolish enough to click on it anyway.

Well I've tentatively re-enabled commenting on the site. It requires you to have a Typekey username so you'll have to go away and sign up for one if you've got something you want to say to me. And as a result, I will also want a copy of your email address. Be sure that I'll use it for nothing more than replying to you if you want a reply!

I'm hoping that this and a couple of other measures that I've enabled should minimise the ridiculous amounts of comment spam I was getting.

If you want to know what I did, and you have a Movable Type powered website, it's all here.

Wow. This article scares the hell out of me in regard to comment spam that I've been suffering. And it may well be the case that something to do with comment spam was the cause of my massive file issues. Although that may have been a broken RSS link.

In the meantime, I've got to continue without comments at the moment, and will try to get a "contact me" form up and running soon...

Check out this Carl Hiaasen piece from today's Miami Herald. Jon Stewart showed that clip on his show earlier this week, but I think we in the UK have missed it (aren't torrents wonderful?). Rumsfield was so out of his depth in that arena it was a joke - and he appeared with the ridiculous sight of an attack helicopter behind his dais that had obviously been wheeled in for the occassion to make it look good on telly.

I've got some kind of hosting problems at the moment - it seems that this page is being recorded as somewhere in the region of up to 100MB which kinda kills my hosting. I'm looking into the problem ASAP, but in the meantime, please bear with me, and I apologise in advance for any outtages.

As I'm still suffering from comment spam, I'm having to disable comments for the time being. But I'll put some kind of contact box up in its place.

I've been spending waaaay too much time chasing down elusive prizes in the Ebay treasure hunt. Complicated to play, yet strangely compulsive... Been looking in forums and chat rooms.

Someone more cynical than me might think that Apple agreeing to carry the new Band Aid single for its standard 79p price, but donating an additional 70p for each sale they make, is something of a marketing gimmick.

It's worth noting that the official site sells it for £1.99 rather than the £1.49 Band Aid receives from Apple. And I'm sure that some tracks cost more than 79p on iTunes - couldn't be bothered to verify this however.

Thinktank Demos have today published a report detailing how enthusiasts and amateurs are changing the way we do things.

So far I've only had a quick flick through the report, but it's effectively an examination of those people who invest so much time in their hobbies and interests that they're as good as the professionals. Look at what you can do in music or in programming with Open Source programs. Worth a read.

Firefox 1.0 was fully released today, and I've got to say that I'm loving it. Aside from a couple of sites that present me with problems (including the back engine to this very site - buttons in my version of Movabletype are an issue), the negatives are far outweighed by the positives.

There's all those little things that you never knew about like shortcuts to keyword searches. So for example if I want to search for Star Wars at IMDB, I now just type "i star wars" in the address bar. The search box defaults to Google, but you can search any sites, so of course IMDB's there, as well as the BBC News site, and many more.

I'm curious to learn exactly what the deal is that Firefox/Mozilla have got with Google, but there's an interesting homepage that you're sent to from this version onwards.

Anyway, a cool logo, and it's now my home default browser...

Well there's now a rough and ready print version of this page. Should work in any recent browser, and although it's not perfect, it's much better than what you'd have got when you tried to print before. Before I knocked this together, the home page came to 36 pages, mostly in a thin column. Now it's only 8-9 pages long.

Since it's in a print stylesheet, all you have to do is hit print in your browser and you automatically get the print version output.

For reasons unbeknownst to me just now, Firefox and Opera give you much nicer output than IE. All three of these browsers have a gaping hole at the top of the first page, but IE continues this on every page, while the others don't.

And Firefox and Opera include printed versions of the hypertext links so that you can see where I'm linking to. IE doesn't. No idea why.

You may or may not know that Peter Jackson is currently remaking King Kong out in New Zealand, as his follow up to the Lord of the Rings. The people who did the Onering website, are behind KongisKing which features some fantastic video diary updates from Jackson and his cohorts. And unlike those people at the Star Wars website, you don't have to pay to watch it. They make superb watching. Roll on December next year...

So just to make sure that everyone knows that I'm really up with the new technology, I thought that I'd better acknowledge Podcasting. A few weeks back I was bemoaning the fact that it was really hard to find radio in a downloadable rather than streaming format.

Well it's out there and it's called Podcasting. Over the last few weeks I've downloaded a few broadcasts from IT Conversations, including this one which addresses this very phenomena. It's all very interesting, although I think the one issue that hasn't really been properly addressed so far is the lack of server space. A one hour show is going to take twenty something megabytes of space, and that's still quite a lot for most people to deal with. They might be able to get a couple of shows up, but there's also the issue with download limits from your ISP. I guess that P2P is the answer here.

Now all I need to do is find the decent content that is apparently out there... Let me know if you've got any recommendations.

The Times today carries a piece (free at the moment, but likely to become subscription only) describing how the music industry, through its trade bodies, is lobbying Microsoft to include methods to prevent people from copying music in the new version of Windows - codenamed Longhorn.

"One of the possible improvements that has been mooted would involve the computer operating system recognising copy protection rules that have been embedded on a CD, including any limits on how many times a song can be copied and whether it can be uploaded on to the internet."

Well that's going to make the next revision of Windows more attractive to me isn't it? I'm not going to be able to play CDs as easily, and rip them as I want. I'm not quite sure how some of these limitations are going to work, but somehow Linux becomes ever more attractive.

I'm very pleased with myself. I've managed to set up an automatic process to record The World Today from the BBC World Service between 5.30am and 6.00am BST, move the file from one computer to another, convert it from mp2 to mp3, and then dump the said mp3 file onto my Palm, which is also HotSynced around the same time.

So by the time I wake up, I can pick up my PDA, and have all the latest news in both text and audio versions ready to listen to. This is particularly useful when I reach the underground, as I tend to listen to the radio when overground, and then switch.

For those that are interested, the audio is captured with a Wavefinder, using the wonderful Dabbar, and the copying and conversion are done via a batch file and a command line version of the LAME audio converter. I did try to use a program called Pilot Install to copy the file across to my PDA, which allows command line running, but it didn't seem to like to install either mp3s or to copy to the SD card on my PDA. It also had issues with closing down HotSync. A shame because then I'd have been able to use the already running Windows XP Scheduler rather than a third party program. In the end I wrapped the whole thing up with a scheduled macro built in MacroMaker, which allows the capture of keystrokes and mousestrokes so that I can use the Palm Quick Install program to copy the file across. On my Palm, I use a program called Syncer to schedule a HotSync that updates the PDA nice and simply.

Last night there was a music industry debate about PR and the whole music downloading thing. For some reason, I decided to go along (well Virgin has just launched a download chart, cunningly timed to extract maximum PR). It was less about the right or wrongs of downloading, but more about how the music industry should put on a single voice to confront the issue.

I really think that they're still way off the curve. There was a lot of talk about "uploaders" v "downloaders" being different, and the uploaders being the guilty parties. I'm not sure what they mean with that, since most of these things happen at the same time with the likes of Kazaa and eDonkey. If I've got a shared mp3 folder on my computer, I'm equally as likely to put my own ripped tracks in it as stuff that I download via a P2P mechanism.

The guy from the BPI seems hellbent on prosecution. He gave the analogy of the Oxford Street branch of HMV which supposedly has 25 store detectives. Most of those that they capture are kids, and they will prosecute (Whether this is all the time or whether they use discretion and warn some kids I don't know). Figures were quoted showing awareness of the illegality of downloading is increasing. Frankly I'm amazed that many even think it is legal. That doesn't mean you won't do it. It is a seemingly victimless crime, and one that you're not likely to be caught doing. I still think, as The Guardian's Neil Mcintosh said, that the Daily Mail is going to be quite sympathetic towards 12 year old girls who are prosecuted by the big nasty music industry.

There were some well made points about how it's probably not a good idea to either preach down to kids or to use massively rich superstars in a campaign that is attempting to explain that artists are being deprived of royalties (we all know McCartney needs another quid).

But overall, I really think that they don't get it. They should probably fight on quality - you simply don't know what you're going to get when you download from Kazaa. But more than that, they really shouldn't treat their customer as thieves from the outset. That means, get rid of these ridiculous DRM systems that are going to cause pain in the medium to long term (Can't use downloads from MyCokeMusic or Napster on iPods), and the pointless CD ripping prevention techniques that actually stop people like me purchasing the CDs in the first place.

An audience member made a great point last night when he mentioned that it has actually been everyone but the record industry themselves who've made the great strides in download sales in the past 12 month (EDIT: That would have been The Guardian's Bobbie Johnson). The Apple iTunes store is from a hardware supplier; Napster isn't record company backed; Coke bought into a system developed by a company started by Peter Gabriel and not backed by a major label. It wasn't EMI or Sony who did this - although Sony have now started SonyConnect. And then there's still the fact that depsite "1,000,000 songs" being legally available to download, and that being the "equivalent of a megastore" in music, some music is notable by its ommission. Where can I legally download The Beatles? Is the full back catalogue of the Stones available?

As I said, the audience was largely made up of record industry people from a cursory examination of the name tags (although I did also spot NTK's Dave Green having a laugh at some of what was said), and it seems there's some disagreement within the industry about the rights and wrongs of cover mounting free CDs with newspapers and magazines. The mention of that by a member of the audience was the only time the crowd really got animated - which is why I don't think they know what to do as an industry.

And finally, what should they do when Robbie Williams says, yeah, it's OK to download his stuff? I think they want the press to attack him, not his own record label. The better analogy was that downloading tracks is a bit like partking on a yellow line - we know we shouldn't do it, but occassionally we go "what the hell" and do it anyway. Actually speeding's probably an even better analogy, except that with speed cameras we might actually get caught.

And yes the film industry is facing this issue right now - didn't you know that when you bought a dodgy DVD outside the pub from a Chinese bloke who also sells continental fags, you're directly funding Al-Qaeda?

UPDATE: Neil McIntosh has updated his blog with his thoughts of the meeting.

Incidentally, I didn't mention that the meeting took place at The Guardian's Newsroom which is a very useful study and education centre. It's also open to the public. And particularly good at the moment is Apes of Wrath, an exhibition of the cartoons of Steve Bell. If you don't know his work, let's just say that he's not the world's biggest fan of Dubya.

Whilst compiling a reasonably detailed forthcoming entry on international TV audiences I came across this amazing map (PDF) entitled A World Divided by a Common Internet. It shows the haves and have nots of the world - visually demonstrating the "digital divide".

My ISP went down for most of yesterday, and I must admit that it gave me something of a fright. I did consider that maybe all the stuff I've put on this website might have been lost. For all I knew, the company had gone bust or something! Fortunately that's not the case and it was down to a complete loss of their internet circuits. Regular backups from now on I think are the order of the day from now on...

I've just installed MT Blacklist after a number of tedious spam blog entries over the last few weeks culminating in around a dozen entries all made within 24 hours of one another the other day. I know that this is low compared to some people, but it's still a pain.

I'm pleased to say that installation was thoroughly painless and the plugin did the trick admirably!

500 lucky souls at the BBC are getting to trial the BBC's TV equivalent of their radio player according to this report in The Independent (read it quickly since it may go Premium, or go here instead).

I suspect that the service will only be available to those broadband suppliers listed within the BBC's Broadband section. The reason? To limit access to programming to UK viewers only. While the Beeb might not mind me watching last night's Eastenders today, they still sell the show to a few other countries. And keeping the number of people able to access the service limited should also reduce the costs of all that bandwidth.

I'm currently suffering from some kind of spyware/malware that's infecting my Google search results. The top 4 or 5 results are not being served by Google, but being inserted by something called "Hi-results" and pushing the real results further down the list.

The style of Google's returns is retained, even down to a "cached" result which is no such thing. Adaware, Spybot and Spy Sweeper were all no help in removing it. I'm not sure what to do, but am awaiting some responses from a forum post that I've made.

So I borrowed a hard drive from work, resigned to the fact that at least I could crack on with creating a Ghost of a reinstalled XP system last night. I'd already started on the "longer than you realised" list of software I had to reinstall, and drivers that'd need updating.

Plug in the replacement HD and start the XP install, whilst watching Arsenal hold Portsmouth to a draw (only two games to go and we'll be undefeated for the season). But I quickly got into a Catch 22 situation. At a certain point early in the XP install process, the computer needs rebooting, but despite the XP installer seeing the replacement hard drive, the motherboard BIOS was not, and finding only the XP CD, insisted on beginning the process over again!

I gave up, went away and chilled out watching Gordon Ramsay bemoan another chef on Channel 4.

Then I unplugged everything and decided to check the IDE cable. No difference. Then I changed around where my various drives were plugged into the motherboard. This seemed to do the trick. Very quickly I replaced my temporary new hard disk with my old failed one, and it booted. Hoorah! Next step was to grab a pile of CDRs and get backing up furiously. That hard disk still sounds very dodgy to me, so I wasn't going to mess about with it for too long.

So the outcome does seem to be that I have dodgy motherboard again, and I'm left in a quandry. I certainly need to buy a new hard drive, but I guess I should also get a new motherboard. Which will almost certainly mean a new processor (not necessarily a bad thing at all), and therefore DDR RAM to replace my PC133 RAM - and I currently have 768MB RAM. So all in all, that's got to be the thick end of £250 at the very least. On the plus side I get a faster computer.

(Oh and XP has decided that my current computer's configuration is vastly different to the one I had before, and so should be re-activated, which it refuses to do via the internet).

Hmm. One week a viral email appears for the Ford Sportka in which a cat is seemingly beheaded. Bad taste from some European division of Ford. Er, no, because there's a link to this site (doesn't work at time of writing).

Today's Mediaguardian carries this piece (free registration required) in which the Chief Executive of Ogilivy, the creative company, explains that it was all a terrible mistake and not an attempt to spread a campaign via viral email. They're terribly sorry about offending anyone and wouldn't have wanted to, that's why they never ran it.

Slightly disingenuous? They got as far as making the ad. This wasn't a storyboard. A production team filmed the car on location, then a cgi house animated the cat. This all costs real money. Are they really saying that they got as far as making the commercial before realising that it might bring the Ford name into disrepute?

And then today, I get sent a second clip (also here) in which a pigeon suffers a similar car-related fate. So they produced a campaign did they?

Don't kid a kidder. Who did they think that they were fooling with this piece in Mediaguardian?

Oh it's so unfair - some people are so talented.

I followed this link (via Ben Hammersley) to see a personal plea from one Chloé Micout for a job working for Joss Whedon (the man behind Buffy and Angel).

The site is a short personal plea to be given a job as well as several shorts she has made. Two in particular I really liked. Match shows some great techniques and style, that had me enthralled (even if it's all in French, and my comprehension is a little less than perfect). But then I saw À Travers Elle which is something of a showcase, grandstanding several different types of film one after the other. You see a romantic drama, then a Buffy type pastiche complete with demonic makeup, followed by a frightening accurate realisation of a Big Brother reality programme that leads neatly into a news anchor before finally ending on a totally believable pop video.

The website, incidentally, serves the video in either Windows Media or Quicktime, in a variety of bandwidths. There is also a Making Of and even an Out-takes Reel.

Given that the Making Of reveals different DV CAMs, loads of lights and even Steadicam gear, and the news anchor segment was shot in front a professional green screen, I'd suggest she has some very good friends in the industry.

Oh, and Chloé stars in most of the films herself, directs, edits and is even responsible for the special effects. Her CV seems to suggest that she does her own websites, being well versed in everything from Flash to PHP.

I think she must be the perfect woman. Puts my little home videos (which hitherto I'd thought were OK) to shame.

I've just discovered the delights of VNC. Ever since I got broadband at home, I've wanted to fully control my PC from home. I played around with something called RemotelyAnywhere, but the remote control part never really worked well for me.

Well guess what? VNC is free, simple and worked first time, out of the installer so to speak. Within minutes my brother was remote controlling my deskktop. Sadly he runs MAC OS X and it isn't yet available for that. You can even download client packages for mobile phones etc.

Obviously, this just allows me to tinker with my machine all day when I'm at work and should be concentrating on other things, but who cares?

Might double check on security issues though...

This is useful. Hopefully the spelling on my entries will improve, even if what I have to say doesn't.

Much excitement on Sunday, when I finally got my PS2 online. I bought the adaptor... ooh... back in May last year. Registered, and then borrowed a copy of SOCOM to try to get online. Unfortunately, while I was able to register, using my good old crossover network cable, unplugging it from my other PC, seemed to throw a spanner in the works I progressed no further.

Of course I promptly forgot my "handle" and password, and so when I tried again with SOCOM II at the weekend, I was completely in the dark. Sony's nice system for recalling passwords didn't help because I wasn't sure of my username, or indeed, which security question I'd answered. Finally, a couple of calls to their helpline furnished me with everything, and I got it online successfully.

Do I feel a bit on an idiot sitting on the sofa with a headset on? Uh, yes! But it's fun. Of course it'd be even more fun if I had the faintest idea what I should be doing. Just need to put a load of time aside to learn the finer points now, and that way I won't get shot within seconds of starting the game.

Still the headset is USB and seems to be recognised by my PC OK, so if I get my act together with one of these Voice over IP systems, I should be able to have conversations using it via Skype or something.

The promotional cans of Coke advertising their new service have started to appear (in our fridge at work at least), and so I've had a look around their site. Well I say "their site" since I really mean a branded OD2 site, much like the GWR service's site will also be.

I have two problems: it's useless with Macs, and it's a poor site.

I don't even have a Mac, but all those people who bought iPods are going to be left out anyway even if they own PCs since the tracks are all WMAs. But that's nothing compared to the weakness of the site.

A bit like looking up your favourite films in any paper movie guide you ever pick up, I always look up a few favourite artists when I get a new online site to browse.

Browsing by genre brings up 29 categories with the number of tracks available in brackets. I clicked first on Soundtracks (a paltry 2775 tracks) and was taken straight into the "A" section of an A-Z listing of tracks... seemingly sorted by Artist! Brilliant. All I have to do is know the composer for a given film and I might be able to get some of his tracks. Just as well Virgin Megastores and HMV don't sort their soundtrack albums that way. Nothing by the Oscar winning Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore by the way. Oh and maybe it'd have been nice to have a "top sellers"/"new releases" display type thing rather than launching me straight into the As.

So maybe I was unfair. Let's go to Classical instead, with a healthy 21003 tracks. Again the A-Z listing finds me in the As. I skip through to S, in search of something by Sibelius, my favourite classical composer (featured heavily in the Die Hard films incidentally, in case you didn't think you knew any Sibelius). Sadly the Finn has no listing. A bit obscure? Not really. Still let's go for something more mainstream. Mozart. Click on the Ms. There's the great man. Click on his name: "> Here is a list of products matching your search of : Mozart : No Records Found."

Hmm. Not exactly unpopular sort of guy is he. Still, I realise we're talking about a service that caters to the Coke drinking crowd (like me). So we'll try rock and pop shall we.

Pop offers a healthy 66773 tracks, and Rock 54,356. I click on Rock, and this time they have featured artists, a top forty best-sellers selection and so on. This is more like it. At number 8 in their top ten are The White Stripes, and Seven Nation Army. Great track. Let's see if I can buy it (OK - there's no chance of me buying it, but bear with me). I click on the White Stripes link: "> Here is a list of products matching your search of : The White Stripes : No Records Found."

So their 8th biggest rock seller has no tracks available. Maybe Jack White had some kind of falling out with Coca-Cola? I don't know.

There are plenty of other tracks available, but that's not the point. I was just idly surfing along, and found all these short comings. If you're going to have 29 categories then do them properly or not at all. I don't work in retail, but I'm guessing that the average HMV manager knows that having displays of relevant artists in each genre's section probably helps shift product. We don't all come into a store knowing exactly what we want. And in any case, if I happen to know precisely what I want, I'm only moderately likely to find it here.

Amazon is an online store that gets this right. Surely anyone can code up an accurate "best sellers" page for each genre - no human intervention required.

Artists and labels have put different restrictions on what you can do with the tracks on this service, making me even less likely to pay 99p per track.

And one final thing, although you can listen to 30 second samples of most tracks, they stream at a low bit-rate. Mightn't it be a clever idea to stick a handful of free tracks on the site? Up and coming bands or something - no-names even. That way I can fully download a track without making a committment, and check out the download quality. The streaming version is something akin to AM radio (something I'm awfully familiar with).

Mediaguardian has a fascinating look at what the BBC are planning for their digital services. I really hope the BBC get their player up and running before the end of the year, although I'm still slightly concerned that Demon still don't allow access to BBC Broadband (or rather the BBC and Demon haven't met one anothers requirements). Since the BBC is licence fee funded, they don't want anyone apart from UK residents accessing their broadband streams, and as such, there are only certain ISPs with availability.

Demon has not come to an agreement with the BBC for some quite complicated reasons - or so they seem every time I look them up.

It's safe to say that the same will be true with the BBC's player.

Still, compare and contrast with Monday's New Media Diary which was predicting trials slightly earlier than November. The other interesting part of that article was the idea that you'd be limited in the number of plays you could make of a given file. That suggests that rather than streaming the media, they're thinking of downloading it first, and thus making use of peer to peer technology to ease the burden on the Beeb's servers.

Well the results are in:

Last week - 197 pieces of spam over a 24 hour period.

This week - 21 pieces spam over a similar period.

That's quite a significant reduction. And my spam filter is only going to get better and cleaner as a result.

John Naughton wrote a good piece in The Times examining why exactly we're giving Bill Gates an honorary knighthood.

Cheers Nick. The Hysteria Meter can now be relatively easily changed.

Oh, and the Departures box on the left is just using the helpfully rewritten version of the official National Rail Enquiries website to supply me with up to date info on the trains I use. Well it is my website after all.

Hooray! My ISP has started filtering my Spam.

Starting now, I'll see how many pieces of Junk Mail get through, and compare with last week - 1300 Sat to 1300 Sun GMT.

Yeah, right. This is going to happen...

"The vast majority of them, I would say, are not worth the time it took to type them into the keyboard." Val McDermed speaking about weblogs on The Message.

I certainly hope that this writing isn't "sub Bridget Jones" and I can honestly say that despite the fact that I read The Guardian, I don't write this in the desire to make that paper's list of best weblogs.

But the programme did have a decent discussion largely about diaries but also on blogs. I did have a concern that there was unspoken belief that only people with interesting lives deserve to have diaries preserved for future generations. And I'd argue the point that this little site won't exist somewhere in 100 years time. I'd like to think that while some relative of mine will probably have 22nd century DVD with it all on, but even better, someone will have saved this alongside millions more sites in an Archive type project. I'm not going to argue the case that academics will be studying my words ever again, and nobody's going to publish these ramblings in the way that Tony Benn's diaries are published.

Look at Google Groups. Words I've said there in the dim and distant past are now preserved for eternity (or until Google sells the catalogue on).

My weather page is bust because the BBC have changed their format. Some reprogramming's in order...

Lots of spam issues with commenting and send-email stuff so it's all broken right now.

Well having only just properly got my email notifications working for comments (not that there are many), I receive the first couple of Trackback spams. Both target the same site and both reference an article about an anti-war march in Los Angeles.

This could be the start of something horrible.

Well the weather thing is slightly improved today, although it doens't now have the forecast detailed (I'll add it later), and it doesn't work for negative temperatures which is also a problem.

Well I've got to say that I absolutely love the PHP weather thing that I've got running on the index page now. I could maybe tidy up how it appears, and there are all sorts of fancy graphical devices that could be used, but in the short term, this scripting does something I've wanted to do from ages.

Basically I found a script that pulls content from a webpage. I used the simplified text only version of the BBC's weather page for London. The basic script only pulled a section of text based on a start and end search expression, which was a little to simplified for me, but it gave me the intelligence to go further.

I wrote a bit of code to parse the returned data, and then reformat it into a simple table structure. Of course at the moment, it does rebuild every time I refresh the page, but I'm sure that the BBC can cope.

As I say, a collection of graphics corresponding to the words that the BBC use to standardly describe the weather would be next, with the correct graphics appearing correspondingly. I'd also ideally lose the Fahrenheit values and I'm a metric man where temperatures are concerned.

Somehow I never managed to get an off-the-shelf script to do all this for me before, so I'm pleased that I've managed to learn enough about how you use PHP to do what I have. Plenty more to be learnt however!

Just when good old Gerald Kaufman is once again calling for apologies before he wants the dismantling of the BBC, I discover a whole load of really useful resources scattered about.

First off, there are the technical BBC Training resources, with tips on using DV Cameras, and interviewing people, or using MiniDiscs. Excellent stuff.

BBC One launched a series based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales the other night, and they have a writing competition based around the series. I look into that on their website, and discover a whole wealth of other material to help aspiring writers develop what they're doing, as well detailing how to make submissions.

I even downloaded a nice Word template macro that allows easy formatting to the correct specifications for just about any kind of written material.

He was on the Today Programme this morning. The site also links to the audio (at least it's there today). The Guardian has a G2 cover story today as well.

Check out the new RSS Feeds on the right hand side of this blog! I think that they look quite cool, and there's a funky new RSS 2.0 version which should be read quite easily by such programs as FeedDemon (which I'm beginning to learn to get to like). In fact it was only because I realised that my basic RSS 0.91 feed didn't have a published date, that I got into it.

It seems that Google has bowed to pressure to remove listings for sites that distribute Kazaa Lite.

If you search Google for "Kazaa", "Kazaa Lite" and variants thereof, you get a notice:

"In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results"

Of course irony isn't even the word to use about the complainant, Sharman Networks. They produce the full version of Kazaa complete with spyware, popup ads and the like. Kazaa Lite is a hacked version of this software, and they're arguing that their copyright has been infringed. Of course the fact that the entire purpose of Kazaa is to infringe other people's copyright is neither here nor there...

The other irony is that the link Google is putting in to the complaint, lists all the sites that Sharman Networks want banned.

The Sobig virus is really virulent just at the moment. I got *20* emails today with it attached - far more than I've ever had in one day from any other virus.

I'm keeping my antivirus software well up to date just now.

This site's on Google!

Yesterday was London's first Flash Mob. I suspect that this will be a short lived concept. The idea is that you're given some instructions about meeting somewhere around town. At the given venue, you meet a contact who hands you further instructions in the form of a small piece of paper.

With very precise timings, you go somewhere and follow the instructions.

So yesterday everyone was instructed to go to one of three pubs dependent upon their starsign. Then they were to head to a Tottenham Court Road sofa shop and converse with other people both there and on the phone, not using the letter "o". They should leave fairly soon afterwards.

Well I went down and collected my piece of paper, although I failed to order a drink. Round at the sofa shop at 6.30, there were several hundred people all trying to get in, but the shop seemed closed. Eventually it was opened up and everyone went inside. Well quite a lot of people anyway.

I'm sure that London hasn't seen quite as many digital cameras in one place - with no doubt dozens of blogs being updated last night and this morning. I must admit to standing at the back of the crowd and not really joining in properly. This was probably more a consequence of my timidity.

The media was out in force, with obvious press photographers and at least one camera crew.

The whole idea about these things is that they are somewhat communal, and politics isn't part of it.

At the same time as all this, I've started reading Join Me by Danny Wallace which is another community idea. I'll talk more about it when I've finished it (and shh.... I really am also reading The Way We Live Now as it says in the top right hand corner). It's all very "communal".

Yes of course this is a soapbox. This is my personal soapbox. I can write what I want! Does that make it worth reading. Umm... no. Not the fact that I'm writing it, just the fact that I might have something interesting to say.

I can see that Movable Type's not brilliant at special characters without using proper HTML to describe them.

Will bear that in mind.

I've got a basic "Now Playing" section working, but I've kind of given up on the Amazon link, since for whatever reason, Winamp simply won't pass more info than the song title alone, and that's not good enough for Amazon to search.

Must try to get it working properly from work.

Well I now have Winamp talking to my PC courtesy of the very smart Virtual Venus website and the associated plugins and scripting languages that their system uses.

I just need to take it one step further, and that's proving to be quite difficult. Basically I want it to have those very smart pop-up boxes.

Well I got my calendar right, but now I need to get my Now Playing working properly. More complicated than the instructions suggested. I shall persevere over the weekend.

It may be something to do with firewalls here, so I'll have bash at home.

Excellent! The week now starts on a Monday, which anyone in the world apart from the States knows. I used a patch from a kindly soul on the Movable Type support forum.

Well I haven't sorted the calander yet, but I do seem to have managed to retrieve all my missing entries. They really were missing - probably as a result of the corrupt database, but the old HTML tables still existed on my server, so I was able to reconstruct the entries and import them back into the database.

I must admit that it's quite a slow and painful process, and not something I want to repeat. So regular export backups shall now be the order of the day. And that starts as soon as I complete this entry!

The best way of learning something new code-wise is to experiment, and steal other peoples code. So I've been busily borrowing from those fine people at Bluerobot to learn how to do three columns.

There are a couple of things I'm not happy with. There are gaping holes in the top left and right hand quarters. Maybe the graphic needs work as well. If I didn't centre it, I could start it on the right or left, and fade into a standard colour background.

And there's some sort of error that prevents August-November's month pages from being displayed.

And finally, it'd be good to be able to start the calandar on a Monday rather than a Sunday.

I had a very geeky evening on Friday playing SOCOM online with several others from work using borrowed kit.

I must admit that it was all enormous fun.

So much so, that I went out to buy a network adaptor of my own yesterday. Now the thing to say about this is that Sony have decided to limit users to those who have broadband.

Despite some astonishingly unclear instructions with the bundled DVD, I got online relatively easily and registered.

Sadly, I wasn't able to play the game (which I'd borrowed), since it simply wouldn't let me online. I might try again later, but it's somewhat frustrating, particularly as I have to hand back the kit (aside from my adaptor) tomorrow!

When it all goes wrong. Actually I ran out of space on this server, and that had dire consequences for the Berkley DB on which this blog is sat. Even adding extra space was no good.

Fortunately, the shift over to MySQL soon put things back on an even keel, and now I even have MTAmazon working with me properly linking to the local site!

Well I did have a bit of a play around with MTAmazon, trying to replace US links with UK ones, but unsuccessfully.

The whole Plugin is fairly small, and despite the fact that I didn't understand how it was all put together, I did find the references to the XML that Amazon supplies, and the link you should insert for the UK site. Sadly, some simple find/replaces didn't do the trick.

I'll keep my eyes open to see if anyone else manages to overcome this problem. It'll certainly need a new release of MTAmazon.

So I'm late in the day. But I read about Bit Torrents recently, and finally got around to getting them working at home this weekend.

Consequently I'm a couple of episodes ahead of the rest of the country with 24 (well it'll be one episode after tonight's is aired).

Today's actually been very frustrating, with my connectivity disappearing for most of the afternoon.

I suppose the only problem with Bit Torrents is that you're very much at the mercy of everybody else. If I were really dedicated, I'd have caught each of these episodes as they aired rather than waiting towards the end.

I've also been playing around with this site a little, so that you can now see the name of the book I'm reading at the moment, and a nice picture. The problem again is that it links to Amazon.com rather than their British site - something I've yet to overcome.

The Guardian has an interview with Iraqi blogger, Salam Pax.

Day three and I'm up to 99 items!

Today's total after full cleaning - 68.

Can I break 200 by the end of the week?

I'm running a bit of an experiment this week, checking to see how much Spam I get in the course of a week. I'm now using a superb program called POPfile to sort my spam from genuine mail.

The user just has to identify some early mail, differentiating between spam and genuine mail, and it does the job. I'd say that I'm about 90% there at the moment.

Anyhow after Day One I've had 40 pieces of spam. Of course, I haven't recorded the number of genuine emails, which would usefully provide a % rubbish figure.

A bit strong I suppose, but that's how I feel at the moment, lacking internet access. There's some kind of problem at the BT exchanges - well a couple of hundred of them anyway. Demon are ever so coyly not naming names, but it's evidently BT's fault. The fault seems to have been around since mid-afternoon, so I'm unfortunate that at 22.00 it's still the case.

Can't check my email or anything! I suppose if it was really bad I'd chuck my modem card back in PC and connect that way, but I have plenty of videos to watch and books to read. Maybe I should be honing my writing skills some more (that'll make sense in the fullness of time).

A fantastic new website is putting Pepys Diary on the net in the form of a blog, posting it on a day by day basis.

The really clever part of this proposition (which might take ten years to complete at a day by day rate) is that readers can annotate the entries themselves to help others understand what's going on.

I went out and got an el-cheapo Wordsworth Classic copy of his concise diaries yesterday so that I can get properly up to speed. Last night Claire Tomalin's biographpy won the Whitbread Book Award - I must get around to listening to my recording of Radio 4's reading of this book.

Just had the shock of my life. I went to Amazon and because of cookies and what not, it knew who I was. Nothing unusual there. And knowing who I was, it tried to recommend stuff to me. Fine. I have no objection to this. And what was number one? Freddy Got Fingered!!!! Possibly the worst film to be made in the last 10 years. No redeeming features at all. Why?

Actually, Amazon has a button marked "Why" and I clicked this. It seems that I looked up Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, a film which I do want to see, but so far haven't (I didn't either buy it or rate it as Amazon says).

I like to think that there's an ever so subtle difference between Kevin Smith and Tom Green.

This is the thin end of the wedge I must say.

Cyber Terrorism is the new buzzword. It's what we should all be scared of. If even The Observer is publishing scare stories about this new threat to world safety then we know we're in trouble.

Let's get a couple of things straight: hacking into government websites is a bit like letting loose with a spraycan at an HMSO bookshop, and targeting the websites of companies is the same as sending malicious mail. Neither of these things are very nice, but they don't endanger our national security. Defence computers sit separate from the rest of the internet and are not connected. Indeed any company worried about hacking into their system should keep most of the system away from the internet. There are plenty of measures that can be taken. Yes emails can be intercepted, but then emails should always be though of as postcards in security terms. Encryption is cheap and easy. Use it.

The Guardian published an excellent article about this last week.

Yup. Some more site tweaks now sees my last five books and films handily available to read. All thanks to the FilterCategories plugin.

Still haven't got this site's look sorted yet. I printed out all of the Webmonkey tutorial but there's a bit more to it than just knowing how it works. Will persevere.

Some ever so slight changes to the site today, because I'm very proud, that I've finally gotten around to learning a little bit about style sheets. You see, those nice people at Movabletype run the whole system from them, which makes it hard for a complete novice like me to adapt the site to suit my tastes.

Anyway, expect some site enhancements over the coming weeks and months, until I'm happy with it all.

Good piece by John Naughton in this week's Observer about how the break up of Microsoft never happened, and the Department of Justice's wimping out.

Don't you just hate it? I got broadband a couple of months ago or so to iron out these kind of difficulties, but you just know that streaming never works fully.

Case in point. At midnight last night (or early this morning UK time, depending on how you look at it), a good friend of mine got married, in Las Vegas, and the ceremony was streamed. A day before the wedding I can get neither the Real nor Windows Media streams to work. Half an hour before the service - now at home - I get it working. I get two full weddings with no problem before Max's is due to start. Then the problems begin. We get a short way into it, and buffering starts. OK, I'll live with that. Then it gets worse and digs into a loop. I end up having to reboot the computer. Meantime the Real version fails as well. Added to that, I am trying to save the pictures, and when a software solution fails, I settle on pointing a video camera at my monitor. This works to a point - if you're happy with sub-security camera quality. But I've now missed most of the vows, and the ever so tender "Viva Las Vegas" big number at the end with showgirls and everything.

At some point the whole thing will be archived on their website, but even the archived versions stream rather than download (why?), and are rubbish quality.

And the big studios think I'll pay to watch movies over the internet this way???