stuart test blog

Sad news today… The Ricky Gervais Show just released the last episode in the first series. This extremely popular podcast had been at the number 1 spot on the Apple Podcast directory for the last couple of months boasting over 2 million downloads per month.

What’s even more sad is that they are now pulling the free podcast and replacing it with a paid version that needs to be downloaded through the Audible website. This really annoys me – a typical example of greed taking over. I’m sure that many people will pay money to download it but nowhere near 2 million per month – I’ll be surprised if they get a 10th of that.

Let’s look at some of the reasons why it was so popular:

• It’s funny. Yes, no doubting the comical genius here. Adward-winning Ricky and Stephen compliment each other well while Karl provides the dim-witted humour which has now made him into a cult on the net.
• It’s easy to download. Apple’s iTunes software makes subscribing and downloading to the podcast incredibly easy. The show was listed as the no. 1 podcast in the directory and a single click later and it’s on your iPod. Not everyone would have used iTunes to download it but I’m betting it would have been more than 95%.
• It’s free. Need we say more? Just like public television, or radio, or any other podcast, it didn’t cost a cent to download. In the last couple of episodes the adverts were becoming slightly more prominent, but they were funny themselves and didn’t ruin the show.

Now about to head into the second season of the show, two out of the three reasons for downloading it are gone. You now have to register with the Audible site, hand over credit card details and pay money to download the half hour episodes. Also, you’ll need to install seperate software from the Audible site to be able to download the episodes and synchronise them with the iPod.

It was looking like The Ricky Gervais Show was heading towards becoming a cult classic, like The Office, but now it may end up being remembered as the show that shot itself in the foot by letting greed take over. I hope this commercial ‘experiment’ fails.

I’ve been playing around with a lot of beta software recently – this also includes beta services that are popping up all the time from the new “Web 2.0” companies. I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen so much beta stuff around at once.

The word beta used to be reserved for pre-release software that had limited distribution to a select group of qualified testers. Today, it’s cool to release beta software and make it available for wide spread use. Google probably started the trend with their various offerings and now everyone has jumped on the band-wagon too.

I guess the appeal to end-users is that they are getting their hands on ‘state of the art’ software, so new it’s not even fully released yet. I’m one of these users too – I love playing around with new software. For the developers of the software, there’s many benefits to releasing beta software – you can test it, break it, spread the word, and take it away again and if anyone complains, just point them back at the Beta disclaimer and say “I told you so.”

Some of the best beta software that I’m using at the moment are all web-based applications. News Alloy is my choice of online RSS/Feed reader at the moment. Flickr is another service that I couldn’t live without – this is also a classic case of an application which really shouldn’t be labelled as Beta.

There’s also a whole heap of other beta stuff that I’m using currently that I’ve yet to make up mind about. I’m testing a bunch of the Windows Live services – Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Windows One Care Live.

I’m thinking about starting up a new blog dedicated to the beta software around at the moment. If I get time over the next couple of weeks, I’ll put one together – stay tuned…

Major server crash – two weeks of email/web/etc lost…

More details later.

The next version of IE has a feature that displays all of your open tabs as thumbnails in a seperate tab. Not to be outdone, a plugin has released which does the same thing for Firefox. It’s really cool – you can add the button to any toolbar or click on the icon in the status bar, and a new tab is opened that contains thumbnails of all the open tabs. You can switch to a tab by clicking on the thumbnail or close a tab by clicking on the close icon in the corner of each thumbnail.

Link here: AJAX Yahoo! Mail/foXpose/Tabnail – Viamatic Softwares

Update: New post on spam I get for the HearTheMusicPlay Scam

Performancing for Firefox has just been upgraded to version 1.1 – you can read more here: http://performancing.com/node/945

I’ve been testing out a few desktop publishing tools for blogs recently and haven’t really found one that I like. I’ll give this one another go and see if I suits my needs or not.

My brother just started up his own blog recently hosted on blogger: maxxhouse.blogspot.com.

He’s just published a cool post about vinyl and how some under-18’s have never even seen a record before. He’s a DJ over in Amsterdam so he uses vinyal all the time and he’s just bought himself a pair of excellent Technics SL-1200 MKII’s.

Read his post here: http://maxxhouse.blogspot.com/2006/01/long-live-vinyl.html

Update: backlinks should now be working on Andy’s site…

I’ve also reinstalled my WordPress installation – it was a bit messy after testing out a whole heap of plugins and wordpress nightlies.

I’ll be working on the theme over the next week or so to come up with something I like.

Head on over to our Deb and Stu site as it has just been updated with a new theme and a new photo album!

Link here: http://www.debandstu.co.nz/2006/01/21/website-updated/

I created a del.icio.us link to this a while back but wanted to create a new post to highlight this event in Wellington, NZ. Blog Hui 2006 is the first blog conference here and should be exciting to see how blogging is taking off in NZ.

Here are the details copied from the website – http://bloghui.org

New Zealand’s first international blog conference
March 17-18, 2006
Wellington, New Zealand

Theme: Activate!

I’ve just set up a new blog where I’ll post all my Active Directory related stuff.

Here’s the link: activedir.blogtown.co.nz