g7uk » pop

Streetview sightseeing: do the Safety Dance

GS — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 09:25:51 +0000

If you really want to do the Safety Dance properly you should visit the village of West Kington, which is near Bath.
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Conditional server side includes and cookies

GS — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:24:36 +0000

I can’t write PHP or Javascript. I could learn, but I don’t have much interest. Most of my websites are good old-fashioned static HTML and I use server-side-includes a lot.

I thought I would write, in simple terms, about some of ways I’ve used them.
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Classic Colgate toothpaste ad

GS — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 19:10:59 +0000

A marvellous Colgate toothpaste ad from the early 1980′s based on ‘Baggy Trousers’ by Madness.

And here’s a version for the US market with some of the same kids. But with every trace of Britishness and most of the Madness imagery removed it doesn’t quite ‘get it’ and ends up looking like a dog’s dinner.

Reports problems to your local council with Neighbourhood Fix It

GS — Sat, 19 May 2007 14:21:19 +0000

The Neighbourhood Fix It website is an effective way to highlight and report problems in your local neighbourhood.

Check out the Basement Cafe and Social Centre in Manchester city centre

GS — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 01:43:08 +0000

It comes as a breath of fresh air to realise that there are still good people around in Manchester who are not focused on relieving you of as much cash as possible.

Smashing Time, baby

GS — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 01:39:38 +0000

A sequence from the rarely-seen 1960′s British comedy Smashing Time, starring Lynn Redgrave and Rita Tushingham.

Manchester and slavery

GS — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:35:26 +0000

Manchester’s wealth was founded on the cotton industry and dependent on slave-grown cotton. But the city was also at the centre of the anti-slavery movement.

Carnival Queen is a boy

GS — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 12:06:27 +0000

The Daily Mirror reports that thousands of local people lined the streets of Axbridge, Somerset (population 2,025), to cheer their new village carnival queen – 15-year-old David Bridge.

‘Schoolboy David beat three girls to the title. He wore a tiara and flowing dress as he took pride of place in the parade. David proudly waved to 2,000 wellwishers who turned out to see him.’

Photos here.

I love funny old Britain sometimes :-)

Free Download Manager

GS — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:35:57 +0000

I’m using Free Download Manager with RSS Bandit.

Life is good. It’s the most painless method I’ve found for grabbing file enclosures from my favourite vlogs… RSS Bandit presents the enclosure link nice and clearly. Just right-click > copy link location (shortcut), Free Download Manager pops up, hit OK and the file is saved in my downloads folder.

Windows always seems to offer the wrong file location when I save a file the usual way. The worst is when you are opening from one location and saving to another.

However, for years I’ve been using a little utility called File-Ex, which enhances the file dialog with lists of favourite and recently-used files and folders. A big timesaver.

Rocketbust: the question the articles never asked about Rocketboom

GS — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:17:30 +0000

Andrew Baron, the creator and producer of the videoblog show Rocketboom, and Amanda Congdon its star, have parted company according to reports.

In all the hype that surrounded Rocketboom in its first year online, there was one question that always went unanswered.

Print articles and TV reports were in awe of the show. Breathlessly, they told us how it was produced in an ordinary living room, had a quarter of a million viewers each day and yet cost just $20-$50 to make. Some even suggested that the main expense was photographic light-bulbs.

Andrew, the creator and producer of Rocketboom, was quoted as saying he spent some 8-14 hours making each five-minute episode. Which will be no surprise to anyone who has been involved in the time-consuming business of making television programmes or video.

But, as they predicted a rash of ‘user-generated’ Rocketboom-style programmes coming to a website near you, what none of these ‘anyone can do it’ reports ever asked, was how did the people behind Rocketboom pay the rent and buy food?

It was clear that making Rocketboom was a full-time job. After a year, I began to wonder. Did Rocketboom have a financial backer who had given them start-up cash? Was Andrew a rich-kid who didn’t have to worry about earning a living? Were they all on welfare?

Of course money isn’t everything, but eventually it became clear they did want to earn an income from the show.

As a video blog, Rocketboom has been a spectacular success. A phenomenon and I wholeheartedly congratulate Andrew and Amanda on what they did. But, as a business, it represents a missed opportunity of quite staggering proportions. I read they made about $80,000 from the one ad they had so far.

To be running for eighteen months, with 300,000 viewers per day, five days per week, and make only that, is just mind-boggling. With Google ads you can make $500 a year from a website that only gets 50 visitors a day…

History is littered with the tales of people who had great ideas or creativity, but failed to do what was necessary to turn those into an income. Rocketboom gave away its product under a creative commons licence. Its website and show usually carried no ads. It seems to me that the only valuable asset is the ‘brand’ and Amanda Congdon is a huge part of that.

Now the bubble has burst. Occasionally Rocketboom was brilliant (Amanda dancing in Russia), but often it was a bit too off-the-wall and left us scratching our heads in bemusement. Andrew was an expert on the RSS distribution side of things, with the result that Rocketboom was the first to make it big. It was a novelty and highly popular for that reason. That iconic combination of Amanda and the map… They captured a moment in time and I fear that moment is now over.

If I was Amanda, I would start making a new online show right now while she is so much in the public eye. If I was Andrew, I would sell the Rocketboom show, archives (which don’t have a lot of value because they are so topical) and domain name and split the money with Amanda, while they still have the chance to make some money from this. Otherwise Rocketboom is going to begin a slow fade into history without making either of them rich.

The worst thing would be to get tied up in a legal case for several years, by which time there will be nothing left to carve up. Time is of the essence for both of them…