thoughts on digital radio
Two things that are not immediately obvious about digital radio.
1. Not all DAB stations are national. You may be able to listen to Capital Radio in Brisbane over the Internet but you can't listen to Capital Radio on a? digital radio? in Inverness. This is because 'local' radio stations are still subject to UK broadcasting regulations which means they must remain local, even with DAB. Consequently, the range of radio stations? available on? DAB? isn't (quite) as wide ranging as you might expect.
2. The sound quality of FM radio is better than DAB. Tune the same radio station in on FM and DAB, turn up the volume and toggle between the two. The difference is quite marked. I used to think my ears? wouldn't be able to distinguish between an expensive Bang & Oulfsen system costing 2,000 GBP and an Alba record player. I was wrong.
probably the best phish in the world
A few months ago, I was shocked and amazed to receive an email from Friends Reunited entitled 'Janet Oldsgate has sent you a private message'. God, I was so excited, I could hardly contain myself. The adrenalin started flowing, I broke out in a hot sweat and clicked through like I had never clicked through before. Oh no. What is my darned password for Friends Reunited ? I looked it up on the Palm - nothing. I looked in Thunderbird under 'Infrequently used Web sites' - nothing. I tried a couple of the usual suspects but no joy. Then I remembered the password was in fact, 'JOldsgate73!'. This password was a deliberate and incredibly secure choice to prevent a repeat of the unfortunate incident when my wife hacked my Friends Reunited account and modified my 'Profile' in an oh so amusing and hilarious fashion. My, how we laughed. Now I was logged in and the sense of anticipation grew. I summoned up the courage and clicked on the inviting 'Your Messages' icon. Nothing. Shurely shome mishtake. Refresh. Nothing. I frantically read the online help and used 'Advanced Search' to locate all private messages from 'Janet Oldsgate' sent directly to me, ever. Absolutely nothing. Then it slowly dawned on me. There was no private, personal message from my long lost and first love, Janet Oldsgate. I shouldn't have got my hopes up. I should have known better. I was gullible. I was foolish. The clues were there all along. Firstly, I went to an all boys grammar school. Secondly, I do not and have never known anyone called Janet Oldsgate. This email was merely an elaborate, cruel hoax (known as phishing) that ruins peoples' lives, causing untold distress and angst to its innocent victims and breaking up happy marriages. And all of this purely in the name of a CRM marketing campaign to drive more traffic to the Friends Reunited web site. And now on the back of the increased traffic, advertising revenue and click through rates generated by this slightly questionable and underhand campaign, the founders of Friends Reunited have sold up to ITV for a cool 120 million GBP.WordPress.com business model
I am worried about those developers at WordPress. They have to eat food, drink coffee and wear clothes but how are they ever going to make any money ? There isn't even a 'Donate' button anywhere on the site.
WordPress.com provide me with a hosted blogging platform which I think it is very good; better than Blogger, better than Bloglines, better than Yahoo 360', better than most of the competition.
The service provided by WordPress costs me absolutely nothing so represents excellent value for money and I would recommend the service to any of my blogging friends (if I had any).
WordPress have to provide servers, manage those machines, implement resilience, scalability and high availability, develop code, do boring things like backups, testing, fix bugs, worry about the business plan, buy laptops, S & M (sales & marketing, not the other one) and what do I give them in return ? A load of feedback (mainly negative) about minor, trivial things that don't work and waste their time whenever I have made an idiotic mistake (quite frequently).
Now, WordPress are planning to add extra features and functionality (customised CSS and templates, more themes and plug-ins, hosting on your server, statistics) which will cost money but they have also pledged that the current functionality will remain free. The sad fact is I am very unlikely to pay them anything for additional add-on features, ever.
This main reason is because I am quite happy with the existing product. Secondly, any additional contribution would have to be minimal as I could pay my ISP an extra 4 GBP per month to add PHP and then would be able to run WordPress.org with total control over everything. This would be more work for me but would probably be fun and an interesting experiment anyway.
Maybe I am not typical, maybe there are hundreds of frustrated WordPress bloggers out there with cheque books poised waiting for the two tier service to be announced. For the sake of the freeloaders like me, let's jolly well hope so.