Puffbox

I mentioned last week that my broadband had suddenly halved its connection speed for no apparent reason. And after further discussion with the Tiscali support desk, it appears I’m some kind of idiot.

I got a call from their second-line guy midway through yesterday’s Arsenal game (thanks). He was very nice about it all, and pointed me to a website called samknows, which tells you stuff about your local telephone exchange. Very good site to have to hand, actually. And according to Sam, I ‘cannot receive 2Mbps ADSL’ – and I ‘may be able to receive 1Mbps ADSL’. Unfortunately, he couldn’t explain – and didn’t really seem to believe – that I had been getting 2Mbps quite successfully until a fortnight ago. Perhaps I was hallucinating.

So here we are: connecting at 1.1Mbps or thereabouts. It’s actually fast enough for almost everything I do… and if anything, it seems to be a bit more reliable. I’ve had occasional issues getting online at peak times, which this seems to have cured.

But take my advice, people. Get a screengrab from samknows.com’s availability checker while you can… and have it ready in case things grind to a halt for you, too.

I’ll be honest… I didn’t think it would or could work. But I’ve just sat for I’m-not-sure-how-long watching Current TV, and it’s remarkably compelling. Famously backed by Al Gore, it bills itself as ‘the first TV channel created and controlled by the people who watch it; featuring the latest trends, subcultures and stories affecting twenty-somethings in the UK and Ireland.‘ And this twenty-fourteen-year-old is quite gripped.

Basically, it’s a steady supply of five-minute-ish documentaries – some, but not all, made by amateurs. There’s no ‘schedule‘ in the conventional sense… certainly not on the Sky TV programme guide anyway. So you flick it on, and you don’t know what’s coming next. If you aren’t the slightest bit interested, who cares – something else will be on in a minute.

But perhaps even more interesting is the website. Not only do the viewers produce the material, they edit it too. Registered site users can ‘greenlight’ or ‘redlight’ a video that’s been submitted, affecting its overall rating. Positively-rated stuff makes it to broadcast, negatively-rated stuff doesn’t. And yes, money changes hands.

It isn’t the manic free-for-all it might have been. I feared it would be like the front page of YouTube… or a 24-hour edition of Jackass. It isn’t. It’s intelligent, it’s amusing, it’s surprisingly good. The revolution can be viewed on Sky channel 229, or Virgin channel 155.

I’ve been aware of cashback website Quidco for a while, but only just bothered to sign up to it – because some of the deals on offer are eye-popping. For example… I’m about to reach the end of my current mobile phone contract. And being the online type that I am, I’ve been keeping an eye on 3’s X-Series with unlimited internet access.

The X-Series deals just got a little bit better: for an equivalent of £32.22 per month (over 18 months) you get a free Nokia N73 smartphone, plus web, email, instant messaging and Skype. If you want the newer E65 phone, which really does look lovely, that’ll cost you £50 up front, plus £40 per month. Included in the tariffs are 750 x-net minutes and 150 texts, or 300 mins and 1000 texts. Characteristically generous from 3. But – if you go through Quidco, 3 will give you £100 cash back. Not a typo, folks – that’s a full one hundred.

I’m currently playing my existing network off against the 3 deal, but so far, they can’t even come close. And that’s before I mention the £100 cashback deal. Looks like I’m switching in a few weeks.

I’ve just started work with a local community group keen to build a civic website. I’m looking at open source CMS solutions like Drupal as the base system… but I must admit, I’m wondering if the best idea isn’t simply to aggregate stuff from elsewhere. Apparently that’s the direction the BBC is heading, according to this report of a chat between some of their leading lights, and their opposite numbers at the Telegraph.

But for me, it’s not so much the need to transfer (or shall we say abdicate?) responsibility for moderation. Instead, it’s a recognition that these specialised third-party sites are inevitably going to be better at what they do, than anything you or anyone else could cobble together.

Take the example of photo sharing… you won’t find a better website than Flickr. So why not just create a group, and let the members feed into it. Let Flickr take all the pain of hosting, user access rights, etc etc – not to mention the expense. That’s why they’re there. Meanwhile, you just consume the various RSS feeds (or whatever) back at base.

I’d almost describe it as the next step in ‘social networking’. Do what you do, in the best place (for you) to do it, and as long as RSS feeds are available, we can aggregate it. If anyone sees a catch, let me know. Preferably sooner rather than later. 🙂

I’m much more a ‘cat person’ – but there’s a lot to like about the new Doggysnaps website, launched by UK canine charity Dogs Trust. They’ve used the irPublish platform to build a remarkably good Flickr-like photo community,  with comments and the added ability to give ‘treats’ (and hence bribe your way to a huge social network). They reckon they’ve had a commendable 13,600 dogs sign up since a soft launch last September.

Why is a charity doing this? ‘As a thank you to all you dog lovers out there,’ they say. There are ‘donate’ buttons on most pages, but it doesn’t get too intrusive. Visitor numbers keep ticking upwards, Dogs Trust boosts its standing in the pets world, and I’m sure a good few people click to donate or buy merchandise from the online shop. This is Marketing 2.0 at its finest.

Oh… and while we’re on the subject of dogs… they’re being trained to use cash machines these days.

Mildly interesting to note that Georgina Henry, editor of the Guardian’s Comment Is Free website has been ‘promoted’ to ‘executive comment editor’, with responsibility for the printed comment pages. Or to view it another way, the print version has now been consumed by the online version. Rusbridger’s web-first policy in action. (Details in Media Guardian.) Happy birthday to CIF, incidentally – one year old today.

Remarkably, someone at the BBC has deemed this blog worthy of front-page exposure on the BBC TWO website. Very kind of you, guys. Any chance of spelling my name right next time?

More interesting to most people, I suspect, is the link directly beneath my promo… inviting you to ‘Share your stuff with BBC Two’. If you’re hoping for a better definition of what constitutes ‘stuff’, the best you’ll get is ‘something cool that you think we’d like’. A rather vague step into user-generated content.

I’ve just had the extraordinary experience of having my broadband forcibly downgraded. Until the end of last week, I was happily receiving 2.3Mbps through my generally trusty ISP. Suddenly, it dropped to a snail’s pace – I’m talking slower than dialup. I stuck it out as best I could, until this morning, when I reached for the national-rate helpline number. After a couple of calls, I’ve managed to get 1.1Mbps connectivity restored… but the guy on the helpline tells me that’s the maximum I can get. He didn’t seem convinced when I told him I’d had double that until last week. I’m promised a response within 96 hours. It had better be a restoration of what I had. In the meantime, beggars can’t be choosers. 1.1 meg it is. Zzz.