Pay for Content? Ha, Say Users. Online publishers who think subscriptions are the key to their success are wrong, wrong, wrong, according to a panel at the Jupiter Media Forum. Noah Shachtman reports from New York. [Wired News]
"Playboy.com has 114,000 people paying a monthly fee of anywhere from $10 to $69, according to Randy Nicolau, an executive there. That's to be expected from one of the top adult media brands, because a large part of what little money is being spent on paid Internet content is blown on porn -- $273 million in a total market of $1.4 billion, according to Jupiter."
That's a lot of porn! And I reckon it's much higher than that.

Irish Fitted for Broadband Rings. In a government-funded gambit to jump on the broadband bandwagon, Ireland will encircle 123 towns and cities with high-speed, fiber-optic access rings. Karlin Lillington reports from Dublin. [Wired News]
"A second phase will bring 48 more towns and 1 million residents online, with the final 56 towns connected by 2005"
It's going to be a long time, but it's much more promising than anything that's happening in the UK. Do you know Glamorgan is a desert for broadband? One of the lowest GDPs, isolated, and in need of regeneration. I'm angry.

Microcontent News: "covers what we call the "microcontent" sector: weblogs, Webzines, email digests, and the entire personal publishing sector."
I think I'll be reading this a fair bit. But truth be told, I'm already converted, if only some people who I talk to would read this.

Foreigners must pay for Times online. Brits get it for free [The Register]
"So what will happen when the charges are introduced: first the reader numbers will drop, and then the advertising revenues will follow. Overseas readers will tip up at for their UK fix at The BBC and the Guardian Online..."
Yup, blogs will fill in too. I don't go to many news paper sites any more. Only the Guardian, I think, by choice or bookmark anyway. I get my news off the TV, and analysis from, yep blogs. Metafilter has better analysis than any newspaper.

My favourite boss [Cliterati.co.uk]
We like Cliterarti, and this is a nice story... Well, I liked it anyway, and that's what counts.

Sexblogs are open for new "Radio" business. It's going to be a new way of forming relationships -- meeting people.

 

 

They'd only just come back from Nannie's. And Amanda thought they'd need feeding, and she needed some piece and quiet. So off I went. Bradley's thick lips look gigantic when he's puckering them for a kiss, as he was doing for me again and again. I tend to ignore everybody else when I'm out with the kids, and so do they. We're in our own little world.

Post Modern Sleaze (Reprazent Mix)

Currently listening to Post Modern Sleaze (Reprazent Mix). Drum and bass to you!

15580 » March 17 6:34 AM. Farewell Arthur Andersen - I guess having one corporate basket case is a misfortune but two starts to look like carelessness. With tens of thousands of employees and pensions holders across the world, it's a disaster, for staff, pension holders and clients. Is this tough treatment "a gross abuse of government power" or a fitting reward for crooked practice? [MetaFilter]
"The firm allegedly spent a month shredding documents. Andersenâs auditing clients are heading for the door, the firm's reputation is in tatters, and even a takeover now looks unlikely"
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Wicked people, need locking up. This white collar crime should be punished ruthlessly. IMO

'Dot.Con': One Is Born Every Minute. John Cassidy, a financial writer for The New Yorker, looks at the Internet stock craze and the fortunes it made and lost. [New York Times: Technology]

Useit.Com: Protecting the User's Mailbox. Email is a powerful way to reach customers, but overdoing it is risky. Let users know up front that you'll respect their mailboxes. Otherwise, they won't give their email addresses, and you'll lose a unique channel for marketing and customer service. [Tomalak's Realm] Stating the bleedin obvious isn't it?

All good clean fun. I just thought I'd show the types of envelopes I'm sending out... Like to add some more templates to this feature. It looks good printed, believe me, it's just the cheap jpeging I've used...

Inside the Ring -- The Washington Times: "•FCABig BLU, we are told, will be six times bigger than the F-15E-carried thermobaric bomb and will be packed with some 30,000 pounds of high explosive. It will be guided to targets by satellite and will sport a cobalt-alloy penetrating warhead that allows the bomb to dive up to 100 feet below the surface before detonating."

The Sun : Trapped by goat hairs in his underpantsThe court heard HIVpositive Hall lassoed the goat with his belt before dropping his boxer shorts.
But as he had sex with the animal, a packed Hull to Bridlington train stopped at signals nearby.
Prosecutor Rebecca Thornton said: ãThe defendant tried to conceal himself behind some tin sheeting but didnât stop what he was doing.
ãHe emerged with his trousers around his ankles. It was all too clear to the witnesses what was happening.
ãThe defendant was in a crouched and concealed position clearly having penetrative intercourse.
ãIt seems he was engaged with sexual activity for some ten minutes.ä

theswedishchef: See YA Later!: "Thanks for the blogs Steve, A world changing invention, for me.... " True, once you've blogged, you're lost for all time.
Dont get the tip though. Does he mean the old way? http://astonVilla.blogFootball.com/theswedishchef/admin/flipHomePage

CNET: Gateway shifts retail strategy: Gateway said last month that it was testing stocking three of its most popular desktop models at about 40 percent of its stores.
They're getting desperate, well, creative anyway? Could these guys be ready to give blogs away with 'puters. Quick edit this page demo on their machine in the store... Or tell them the address on the phone or send them to their new site, once they've bought on line.
Their site contains all the details about their new machine, ads for new bits see below.
Like fellow PC manufacturer Dell Computer, Gateway more typically sells computers directly to customers, either online or over the telephone. But now the company plans to carry computers in the stores on a permanent basis
Joe Punter, the ordinary man in the street, just like Villa bloggers.
The move is a risky one, warn analysts, who caution Gateway could increase its cost structure by selling PCs through the retail outlets. Offering select models in stores, where salespeople have more incentive to move stock on hand, could sap other systems. The PC manufacturer also must absorb the cost of moving and maintaining stock and the financial risks of carrying inventory.
Risky? Would giving blogs to store sales people also be risky? Staff could be bloggers of blogs, knitting the community together. The subgroups could be about machines, geographic areas, applications. Of course, people (staff/customers) would be blogging about personal stuff too
Drawing store traffic and with it sales, is something Gateway dperately needs right now. The company has been in turnaround mode since CEO Ted Waitt returned in January 2001 to run the company he founded. Waitt's return sent seven of 14 top executives packing and set off a series of strategic initiatives that have yet to right a company listing from stormy PC sales and a pounding by Dell.
Strategic initiatives? A cluetrainy blogging colony where Gateway become context providers, would certainly be strategic -- fuck me! They could dominate the whole 'puter gig.
Turner also sees another opportunity to further sell services, software and other extras along with PCs bought and carried out the same day.
Their blog could remind them of the bits they didn't buy. People go to their own site, they don't go back to Gateways's.
"They're also going to be focusing more on peripheral products," Duboise said. "We're talking digital cameras, camcorders, games and all of that."
All of those high-margin add-ons could benefit Gateway's gross margins and eventually operation margins.
Perfect!

This is fun! The rest are over at sexblogs. A client sent these to me by email, me thinks, he'll be proud to got onto sexblogs ";->"

Now if I could only wrestle this css stuff to the ground!

This is nice. Using clipToGif it automatically resizes an uploaded graphic and opens a browser window with the HTML ready for text. I just drop a screen shot into a folder, bingo.

A little test of the new adjustments to uploading pictures. This should link to a pop up window of the actual item. Probably need to de bug the html, let's see if it works first time?

Advert results: "Total click throughs = 15
Total views = 8672 "
A new macro, anybody can add it to their site, so long as it's a blog football site. {suites.bannerAds.adResults ()} I'm hoping to try and sell some advertising on blogfootball, and this macro is an early beta of the results a customer could expect.
{suites.bannerAds.adResults ()}

theswedishchef: WELL NOW THEY ARE ALL "LISTENING!": "Frankly, I wondered where they all were, this is such a great idea why wasn't there a site for the low-life * supporters of other sides."
My thoughts exactly. Allowing anybody to have their own site, where they can do what the hell they like in (so long as it's on topic, or a paid for site) makes real sense. You do realize that you can download your site and move it somewhere else, like another service provider (not many that are service providers, but they're out there).

claretpimpernel : And on the second day, God made Blogfootball: "Not sure about the oar puller tip though Steve! Out of all the articles here, you chose the only one that dwelt on tactics."
I wasn't going to wade through loads of villa sites just to get a suitable site with a suitable quote... I was at yours and... Didn't mean to cause offence, just illustrate.

A Good Riddle: "Sr. managers determine a strategic objective for the company. A physically distributed management team develops a tactical plan/chronologic to do task list in the form of an OPML outline. Each task is an outline head which can be subscribed to with a desktop aggregator (Radio) by the people who need to know. The task owner/doer updates their progress under the OPML task outline head and publishes it to a cloud. The aggregators subscribed notice the change and push the new information to the subscriber weblog and/or optionally notifies the subscriber by IM or email. Authorized people (other than the task owner/doer) may write comments etc. under the task outline head which are also published by the task owner/doer.
This creates a communication system that doesn't rely on email and is self organizing. Very handy on multiple levels and the rewards are immediately apparent."
This needs some careful reading. But I don't see why Manila private sites and open sites joined discussion groups and so on cannot do this right now. I know that Userland have been using Radio and RCS internally, but many Sr. managers right now don't/aren't techie and this solution just smells of tech. Though, I'm sure it can look neat and tidy once installed and set up, but the IT geezer won't want to be involved in all the nonsense that maintaining the CEO's machine entails.

This stuff is coming, and it will eventually be piss easy, but it isn't right now, while Manila is, and a joy to use. If we could get some companies to adopt a blogging colony with Manila now, later they could grow into more powerful features... Inch by inch.

rss.xml file in every blogFootball site!

Click for bigger view of how I blog from the villa blogs these days, well as of in a minute. Now, I can keep up with the people who use the servers. They spot errors PDQ ";->"

PalmInfocenter: Sony Introduces Two Models with Keyboards, MP3 Players

Sony Japan has just introduced two new cutting-edge handhelds. The PEG-NR70 and PEG-NR70V both have built-in keyboards and 320 by 480 color screens. They also have built-in MP3 and ATRAC3 audio players. In addition, the PEG-NR70V has a built-in camera.

Palm OS 4.1, 16mb RAM has a 10Mb ROM, April 13 release for the top of the range $456 only in Japan... Why aren't laptops moving closer to this space? I need a phone inside my PowerBook, and a camera. I know I can get a phone card, I already use the infra red port and a Nokia 6210 at 9k, and a kritter. But it isn't something I take to the park with the kids, my Nokia is small enough but the damn key pad and predictive text, no copy/paste...

More to the point, imagine mobile blogging and surfing on the commute home, or intranet knowledge blogging, listening to the hum of the organisation as you're whizzed down the M6 in your chauffeur driven Merc. Maybe 5 years off in technical terms, but, many, many years before it's common place.

Test this

Testing the new title link thing. Will it auto google?

Of Weblogs, Websites and RCS

"(And no, Mom isn't stupid).
If I say to her, "just go write in the browser and here is a way of seeing the places where it has gone after you posted it" and "here is the place in the same browser where you go to assist the people who are coming to you" - RCS on her desktop-and-in-the-browser for the flower club work - she is quite likely to go, "ah, that makes sense."
Interesting article. I like it when people (techies) get down to this bottom level (mummies). This is the problem I have with "Radio" right now. There's too much interest in the high flying new and wonderful coding and development. Nothing about my Mum. And nothing, repeat nothing in the K-logging space is going to happen till developers come out of their own arses. (Me included.)
It mustn't matter where news items get posted, what's public, what's private. Until there are users, not coders, nor early adopters, there is no community.
I've a load of football meatheads currently forming communities of interest based around Manila. None of them care it's Manila. All they're interested in is the content, and a little of how it looks. I don't think many of them use the search facilities to look back into the archives, it's more a what's happening now type of gossip, who's updated their blog, who's getting most hits. There is little research, just commentary. I hate it, I've no, read none, zip, zilch interest in looking at fucking football drivel -- though I have to sometimes.
They are in fact mostly oar pullers rather than sail inventors . There are sail inventors there. Though of all their comments and suggestions re: the team, all get ignored, by the club, but not by their blogging peers.
Sail inventor EllisOut: Ambition For Villa - Manifesto: "I am standing for Parliament because I passionately believe urgent action is needed to make sport - not only football but other sports as well - more responsive to the needs and views of the supporters and spectators who are its lifeblood."
Oar Puller claretpimpernel : Round Holes, Square One: "Which brings us on to the midfield. Working from left to right, Barry had a sublime 5 minutes where his natural quality shined through."
Manila has my vote at the moment, it's mature and brings web writing to the bottom users -- football meat heads -- gawd bless 'em.

Netimperative.com looks for buyer. Receivers called in.
Last year netimperative asked its readers to pledge money for subscriptions in a bid to generate revenue. Most of the news there is deeply IPO type material, and mostly PR releases, usually without comment. I'm not surprised they're facing the wall.

The Register: "Mac performance: up to snuff or up the duff?"
Some replies to yesterday's suggestion via the eg, that Apple was slow and PC's were fast.
You have just been deleted. Any website that would post such crap is crap.
Seems like some people just don't believe it.

blogML

Acts of Volition: The Weblog Markup Language: "1:37 PM - Joe makes a post on his blog about his golf vacation on Prince Edward Island

3:24 PM - Joe makes a post on his blog about hang gliding in Newfoundland

Two weeks pass.

Sam searches Google for hang gliding in Prince Edward Island. Joe's blog is the first result.

The trouble with this picture is that Joe never wrote anything about hang gliding on Prince Edward Island. The thought never even crossed his mind. "
This is certainly a good idea for later, when there are so many blogs as to drown relevant searches.

Some new adverts, about time I did some advertising.

Welcome to Weston Park: "Welcome to weston-park.com. You will require the Flash 5 plug-in to view this site. "
Oh nice one! I thought I was up to date with flash... Never mind. When you're more welcoming I'll maybe come back... Not. Dickheads.
I wanted more info on the Festival of Transport: "Great family day out with over 1,500 vintage & classic cars, bikes, trucks, buses and tractors on display, alongside arena entertainment." On the 31st of March.

Virtual Shropshire. A short history of Dawley: "The parish of Dawley lay within the forest of Mount Gilbert, now known as the Wrekin, until 1301 when it was disaforrested. "
Not that I'm from Dawley, but still interesting. Though, the photo seems a little flattering.

Shropshire news

BBC - Shropshire: "Police are questioning a man as part of a murder inquiry in Ironbridge. Darren Corrigan, aged 24, from Majestic Way in Aqueduct (pretty close to me, a mile or so) was found seriously injured in the car park of the Crown Inn at Hodgebower on Saturday evening."
Some local news... I only live 4 miles from Ironbridge, and this is the first I heard of it... Power of the internet eh?
More here: Shropshirestar: "The injured man was bleeding from his mouth and his eye."