I've been a Spotify subscriber for about 9 months now, and I view it as a really exciting and useful way to listen to new music. But some in the music industry view it more darkly - see for example comment articles by David Byrne and Thom Yorke. These two articles provoked a response from Dave Allen, who takes a different view.Personally, I think there's a fundamental problem with the discussion (though I think I tend towards Dave Allen's view): that is that none of these articles really contain hard data on music purchasing within the Spotify subscribers (and indeed comparing those people with non-subscribers).For my part, I'm of an age where my music listening and buying has seen several game changes. My first record was this:[embed size="compact"]https://open.spotify.com/track/2A0VyjrAJQPXVKxRzxEePG[/embed]And my first LP was Dark Side of the Moon:[embed size="compact"]https://open.spotify.com/album/3a0UOgDWw2pTajw85QPMiz[/embed]But in those days, finding and buying music was very different. I spent loads of time browsing through the inky music papers (NME in my case), listening to friends' LPs (and taping them), and above all frequenting dark record shops. Most of those record shops were bizarrely idiosyncratic in their owners' attitudes (see this listing for examples!). My memories of those days are obviously coloured by rose-tinted spectacles, but the sense of community was great, along with pressures of poverty meaning that every music purchase was most definitely considered thoroughly. And not just in terms of the music itself - peer group issues were very definitely an issue! My affection for vinyl remains because my shelf of LPs, perhaps 5 feet of LPs, contains records firmly registered in my memory as markers of my life: I can recall the circumstances in which I bought virtually every one of them. I recently digitised the majority of them, and the process became the most astonishing memory trip. I suppose the affection I have for vinyl is obviously related to the the packaging, almost invariably superior to a CD package, but also relates to the need to look after, cherish, the object.CDs became the medium for music (I ignore the cassette tape). Oh how wonderful it was to not have to worry about scratches, crackles and generally damaged product. But something was lost for me - buying records became a rather humdrum and unexciting business, and as internet ordering became the norm, I found myself less and less likely to actually visit record shops. I live in a town almost bereft of record shops now, and the overall effect was that my interest in, and purchase of, music reached an all time low.A few years ago, a review of a device made by Logitech - the Squeezebox - in a Linux magazine piqued my interest. I've blogged before about this system, sadly discontinued by Logitech, though it lives on beyond the grave (see also other systems such as Sonos). I quickly began ripping my CDs to disk - running a music server on an old Ubuntu linux box, I made the initial false move of ripping to mp3. Recognising my mistake, I re-ripped to flac! Listening to music through my home network really revitalised my interest music. There were so many advantages in accessing albums without ferretting around shelves of CDs, searching for obscure tracks became so much easier and so forth. Over the years, my Squeezebox system grew. Now I operate a Squeezebox Touch, my original Squeezebox 3, two Squeezebox Radios, plus I use a software player on my MacBook Pro, and apps on iPads and Android devices. Along the way, I started using last.fm as a way of interacting with others, and trying to find new music. But still, accessing new music remained an issue, despite buying Mojo (for classic rock music and dead, decrepit and generally missing in action musicians) and The Wire (for my more avant-garde tastes).Enter Spotify. Admittedly, I was a little late to the music streaming party but I've been enthusiastic ever since. I rapidly upgraded from the advert-laden free account to a paid Premium account, largely to enable listening on my iPad. I only interact with one friend on Spotify, but even that is enough to open my eyes to a wide variety of music I wouldn't normally here. I frequently don't like her suggestions, occasionally hate them, but quite frequently really enjoy her playlists. I also widely use Spotify to check out albums I've read reviews of.So, in all this, what effect has Spotify had on my music listening? Well firstly, it's enabled me to listen to music I'd ordinarily never hear. Secondly, it allows me to check stuff out before shelling out for it. I can use Spotify in conjunction with the Squeezebox to generate "Smart Playlists", uncovering some hidden gems.And guess what? I have greatly increased the numbers of albums I buy. This is an impact on the music biz that doesn't seem to be considered in many commentary articles on music streaming services. Maybe I'm an outlier here, but the exposure to music leads to increased purchasing, at least in my case. And I blundered across a review of music listening/purchasing trends among 'young' people (with a foreword by Feargal Sharkey) which as I recall seemed to indicate an unexpected (to me) desire to own the music rather than merely have a download. Another important factor is that the young do have a lower disposable income, and I would expect them to use copying to increase their music collection - much as I and my fellow students did with cassette tapes back in the 1970s. I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that this whole issue of fair remuneration for artists is wholly unresolvable without a robust dataset. And, of course, we can add to the discussion the role of the music companies in all this.

Prompted by an article in The Guardian (Spotify opens up analytics in effort to prove its worth to doubting musicians), I visited a Spotify website which seeks to de-mystify the periodic brouhaha around Spotify's business model and whether or not artists are paid properly for their music which is streamed via Spotify. The article by Spotify is really a series of mini-blog articles on a new site (www.spotifyartists.com).It's an agreeably affable page that makes a series of assertions:

Spotify’s model aims to regenerate this lost value by converting music fans from these poorly monetized formats to our paid streaming format, which produces far more value per listener. The chart below shows the money a Spotify Premium customer spends per year compared to the average spend of a US music consumer who buys music (not including those who spend $0 on music).

There's also the claim that Spotify Premium users in the USA bring in $120 per annum to Spotify, and therefore a proportion of that makes it to the artists. There's an overview of the annual royalty payout in the period 2009-2013 (it looks almost exponential). Taken overall, the average Spotify user apparently coughs up $41 per annum. But presumably this is the trackable income that Spotify makes through direct user subscriptions and advertising (for example $10 per month = $120 per annum - it's a fair bit more pricy in the UK). There's evidence of a solidly growing user base:[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="299"] The growing Spotify user base[/caption]Spotify also outline how their revenue is split - approximately 30% is kept by Spotify, with the rest going to rights-holders. I guess it's up to labels and the like what proportion of that gets back to the artists. But the means by which rights-holders get their slice seems a little complex, and it's not on a per-play basis. Essentially the criteria are as follows:

An artist’s royalty payments depend on the following variables, among others:

I have decided to try a 30 day trial of Spotify premium. This is kind of alien to me, really, as my whole music listening past has been focussed on collecting music - mostly in album form - and the concept of merely accessing music from the web is anathema.I've installed the Mac app, the iPad app and the Logitech Media Server plugin.Actually, though, I can see this being an avenue to listen to music before buying it in a higher resolution format (I usually go for flac). I will give Spotify a month (i.e. the trial), then decide whether I'm really going to be getting £9.99 (per month) of value from it. Even the Premium account delivers pretty lo-res music.

This morning I received a tweet in my twitter stream from some internet Bingo outfit, from an account that I don't follow. It's not unusual to pick up spammers on Twitter, but this one was a bit unusual - it was labelled as a "promoted tweet". I did a spot of Googling to see what this was all about and found this help page. Here I find that...

• Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets purchased by advertisers who want to reach a wider group of users or to spark engagement from their existing followers.
• Promoted Tweets are clearly labeled as Promoted when an advertiser is paying for their placement on Twitter. In every other respect, Promoted Tweets act just like regular Tweets and can be retweeted, replied to, favorited and more.

Ah! It's a spot of revenue generation by Twitter via Twitter-sanctioned spamming of user accounts. Let's read on...How does Twitter determine which Promoted Tweets to display in a user’s timeline?

• A Promoted Tweet will appear in a user’s timeline only if the Tweet is likely to be interesting and relevant to that user.
• Our platform uses a variety of signals to determine which Promoted Tweets are relevant to users, including what a user chooses to follow, how they interact with a Tweet, what they retweet, and more.

Ah, so Twitter have monitored my twitter stream (I'm not actually that prolific a tweeter, and only follow about 150 accounts) about sceptics, science, cycling, politics and the like, and has determined that I am actually interested in online bingo? How does that work? Maybe it's a scam to get money from the online bingo by promising to tweet to soft marks, but randomly targeting accounts...Reading on...Can users dismiss a Promoted Tweet if they see one in their timeline?

• Users who dislike a Promoted Tweet can simply dismiss it from their timeline with a single click, using the “Dismiss” button that appears as part of the Tweet.

And here's the example - note the Dismiss option...Except... there was no Dismiss option on the Twitter-sanctioned spam I received. I reported it as spam and blocked the account (which was @jackpotjoy, by the way). Unfortunately I didn't keep a screenshot. But here's their website, which certainly gives the impression that it's a bog standard online gambling site seeking to relieve the more foolish among us of  money, under the promise that they might win big [I think that's a fair description of any monetary game of chance!].I realise that at some point Twitter will have to appease their investors and earn some dosh, but really, is springing this on people really going to help?Shame on you, Twitter!

Ove the last few years, I've dabbled in Facebook, but frankly never really wanted to share all the trivia of my life with others, and nor did I want to know the trivia of other peoples' lives.  Periodically, Facebook seemed to make changes to the privacy settings of the system, and therefore my account, and I have been getting increasingly annoyed at having to delve into what's frankly quite an arcane settings system to rectify the situation.So after news reports of what seemed to me to be a rather intrusive set of changes to the way Facebook streams trivia and tittle-tattle between users, I decided to suspend my Facebook account.  In part this decision stemmed from the stories about Facebook's cookies tracking users' web activity in a way that was rather difficult to close down.  I chose to suspend rather than delete my account because I thought that perhaps I would want to return to the fold, and read updates on peoples' lives, their travails, and above all their bonkers Facebook games.  Well, perhaps not the latter.It's been over a month now, and I've not missed Facebook at all.  But.  I notice that some web companies such as Spotify now require a Facebook account to register.  This is no big deal to me, my music listening habits aren't really going to benefit from Spotify membership - while I think I've increasingly embraced the digital music era, the way I think of and listen to my music collection is somewhat rooted in a vinyl LP mindset.However, during my daily perambulations round the internet I follow a good many links, many of these to news sites where the comments are often of interest.  In general, I tend not to leave comments of my own (unless it's a subject I'm particularly interested in), but I often like to see what the regular readers of the site have to say.  Some sites I've visited recently have required readers to have a Facebook login - not only to post comments, but in some cases to read comments.This is a little sad, I think.  It's assuming all internet users are going to buy into the loss of privacy that the Facebook mindset leads to.(The links to Facebook on this site currently point to a page saying "This content is currently unavailable" - if and when I finally knock my Facebook account on the head, those links will go).

I picked up a link to a website that claims to test if your website is blocked by the Great Firewall of China.  Interestingly the results are as follows:This website appears to be blocked in Yunnan province - I assume that Wonderful Life is also blocked, but it throws an error.The Team Grumpy site and blog, the North Bucks Road Club site, and the Northwood Wheelers site are all freely accessible in China.  So it's great to know that the population of Yunnan province are free to read all about my cycling activities (except my time trial reports!).This all begs the question as to what activities I have perpetrated on Flies and Bikes have roused the ire of those in charge at Yunnan Province!

There seems to be a growing tendency for software updates to be pushed out to users at a fixed and high frequency. I've kind of got used to this through Ubuntu GNU/Linux releases every 6 months (but there it's generally a large collection of packages, many of which will have had significant updates during the 6 months). Additionally, periodically a release is denoted for Long Term Support.More questionable is the Rapid Release cycle adopted by Mozilla for Firefox. In this release cycle, updates are pushed out four times a year. For most domestic users, this might not be a problem (it's not a major hassle updating a browser), but for the corporate sector, it's a headache for the IT managers (Rapid-release Firefox meets corporate backlash).What then do I make of the upcoming release schedule for the Joomla! CMS which I use for a number of sites? You can see the sort of situation in this infographic:This strategy seems to involve releases of different support durations, which is confusing in itself.  To add further complexity to the upgrade path is that often upgrade requires database changes as well as updating files.  For the 1.6.5 to 1.7.0 migration, the Joomla! devs have kindly supplied a 'one click' upgrade tool accessible from the back end of the site to be migrated.  Unfortunately on the two sites I've tried it on, it doesn't work.  The second method proposed in the documentation, in which a migration package is manually applied through the extension manager, also doesn't work.  Irritatingly (and I presume this is to to with my particular hosting company's setup), there's no feedback to indicate where the problem lies.  At least not that I can find.  And the migration documentation isn't too much help.Yet another level of complexity is presented succinctly in this snippet from the documentation:

Check that all installed extensions are compatible with Joomla 1.7 by checking the JED Listing or developer site.

Very wise advice (and I suspect it could include templates).  I use several extensions on my sites - none very exceptional - and few appear to be compatible with Joomla! 1.7 so far.OK, so I probably can't migrate my sites until the extensions and templates are compatible with 1.7.  Who knows how long that may take?  I have every sympathy with the extension developers, who have presumably found themselves at the mercy of a rapid release schedule!As it is, I'm looking at the manual installation, where I have to copy a whole bunch of files and folders over to the site, delete another bunch of files and folders, conduct a migration of the database using an sql script.  Now, I'm competent to do this, but it seems like quite a hassle, particularly when the version being installed is only going to be supported for 6 months (and half a month has already elapsed!).Looking at the release schedule, it looks very much as though version 1.5 will be supported beyond 1.6, and to the point when the replacement for 1.7 is released.  Perhaps I ought to have hung on to 1.5, missing out releases 1.6 and 1.7?  I see security updates for 1.6 continuing for the moment, but for how much longer?  Maybe migration out of Joomla! is the best course?

The BBC reports that the UK ISP TalkTalk (also known as StalkStalk) is pressing on with its intrusive malware scanning system (Talk Talk to introduce controversial virus alert system).  However a better analysis can be read over at NoDPI (Update: StalkStalk, Time to Switch ISP).Essentially TalkTalk will visit every website visited by every TalkTalk customer, and investigate it for malware.  Essentially this is an exercise in recording customers' web activity, in many cases recording URLs containing personal information.  TalkTalk customers cannot opt-out of the URL stalking.  As NoDPI put it:

Yesterday, TalkTalk announced the forthcoming relaunch of their ‘anti-malware’ service. The same system was covertly tested on TalkTalk subscribers in June/July.[...]Every URL that you visit will be captured, and used to classify the web site that you visit. The technology is supplied by Chinese company Huawei, who are commercial partners with notorious spyware company Phorm, who in turn use technology supplied by malware hackers OCS Lab in Moscow.

TalkTalk customers are advised to read the NoDPI article and judge whether their privacy would be best served by leaving for a new ISP. Personally I left BT over their dalliance with the dreadful Phorm.See also

Related articles

• TalkTalk rapped for trial silence (bbc.co.uk)
• TalkTalk to launch controversial Virus Alerts system (v3.co.uk)
• ISP to test controversial alerts (bbc.co.uk)
• TalkTalk reprimanded over Malware trial (ghacks.net)

2010 seemed to bring with it several directions for my web presence. My main Flies&Bikes website tended towards becoming a vehicle for reporting on my cycle racing, usually amplifying on the reports on club events filed at the North Bucks Road Club web site, but also reflecting on the open events I rode during the year. Interestingly some of these articles actually do seem to be read, with at least one time triallist over at Tempsford making a specific request that I note the weather conditions for a particular event had not been good - and this before I'd even changed after the event, let alone got home to write the report!I've been moving away from posting on politics and higher education at Flies&Bikes, and have moved that activity (which is always a bit sporadic) over to my posterous account.  Similarly, my blogging on internet privacy has dropped in frequency, particularly after my departure from BT in favour of a more enlightened ISP a couple of years or so ago on the back of the Phorm phiasco.  I do still blog about techy things that interest me (see tomorrow's post).Team Grumpy blogged sporadically, with brief flurries of excitement as our main event of the year came along, and more extensively with a report on our first visit to the podium (did anyone mention the Duo Normand?)Over at Wonderful Life, my activity increased with the establishment of the UK's first major foray into the wholly risible rehash of creationism, Intelligent Design, in the form of the Glasgow-based (but funded via Guernsey) Centre for Intelligent Design. This has provided considerable meat for the blog, particularly given that its three guiding lights appear to be deeply evangelical (and largely biblical literalists).  I was invited to join the committee of the British Centre for Science Education (website, forum, blog), an invitation that I accepted and a role that I hope I'll be able to take part in more fully in the future.

The British Centre for Science Education (BCSE) is the leading anti-creationist organisation in Europe. We are a well established professional group dedicated to promoting and defending science education in the UK. The BCSE is run as a cooperative organisation by part-time volunteers with paid membership and a community forum where the general public can debate the key issues involved. It believes in the tools for everyone to think for themselves - Science, Education and Reason - and the outcome – Democracy, Pluralism and Liberty.We have become deeply worried about attacks on science education, particularly from creationists funded from the USA and Australia, and our campaign is dedicated to keeping all forms of creationism including Intelligent Design out of the science classroom in the UK.

My twittering (#grumpybob and #teamgrumpy) has been sporadic, and often seems to fill the role of providing content to my FaceBook account.  Website activity at the Northwood Wheelers and Team Grumpy websites has been minimal.

2010 has seen some shifts in my usage of computer technology.After many months pooh-poohing the iPad (after all, what would I need an unfeasibly large iPod Touch for, anyway?), I had something of a change of heart. This was largely brought about by a trip to the USA for a conference - after a bit of thought, I picked up a 64Gb WiFi iPad, which proved an excellent device to cart about documents, pdfs, books, music and video. I've previously posted an overview of my favourite apps for the iPad, but this list just keeps on growing. Recent additions to the roster include:

• Air Display - this enables the iPad to be used as a second monitor for a Mac or PC, though sadly not Linux. It's pretty cool, but it remains to be seen how useful it is in practice.
• World of Goo - I recently bought the ludicrously popular Angry Birds for the iPad, but in my view, World of Goo (originally available for several platforms including Wii, Windows, OSX and Linux) is possibly the most charming app I've bought, beats Angry Birds hands down, and is a game format which works almost perfectly with the iPad's touch screen display. In my less well-guarded moments, I've been known to comment it is the kind of thing the iPad must have been invented for.
• Flipboard is a neat app which uses a neat and intuitive interface to let you rapidly and easily access news from a variety of sources, including Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, and more beside. This is a useful an imaginative way to get at these feeds. I'd previously used The Feed to monitor Google Reader, but it seems to be rather flaky since the iOS 4.2 update.

In any event, the iPad has become a pretty indispensable tool for me, not only at home where I use it for web browsing, controlling the Squeezebox music system etc, but at work, where it's a star turn for MS Outlook related activities, note taking and holding my collection of pdf documents.Every so often, I come across an iPad app that really changes the way I think of interacting with a computer (even if the iOS family of devices should really be classed as 'appliances', rather than computers).  Even my initial antipathy towards the App Store and it's Jobsian control freakery has lifted somewhat.  I'm very much less enthusiastic about the prospect of the soon to be launched Mac App Store (of which more later).Just as that seemed to be pushing my usage of Linux into the background, I had so much hassle delivering a PowerPoint presentation that included video clips that I decided to plump for a Mac laptop, choosing a 13" MacBook Pro. Since that time, I've spent a fair amount of my computer use with OSX. Interestingly, and this perhaps reflects my own preferences and expertise, I don't find OSX as wonderful an operating system as its often very vocal supporters would have it. While I hugely prefer it to Windows 7 (a aesthetic disaster in my opinion, though it does seem pretty solid and a big improvement over Vista), I don't find the Mac way of doing things superior to the configurability of a decent Linux distribution such as my favourite of the last few years, Ubuntu.  I occasionally toy with the idea of installing Ubuntu on the MacBook...Mostly I dislike OSX's use of an application dependent desktop menu bar (I don't know what it's called in OSX). This seems to fly in the face of reason, and makes it a bit harder for me to know what windows are open. And why can't finder include a toggle to show/hide hidden files? Anyway, using the MacBook pro is generally speaking a delight, not least because of the physical quality of the hardware.As for the App Store for Macs (to be launched early in January, I believe), well, I've been very happy with the Debian derived Ubuntu repositories from where software can be installed pretty much at will.  And as it's all open source, generally at no additional cost.  One of the disturbing things about buying into a closed source OS ecosystem is that a new computer comes with little in the way of serious applications, in contrast to the typical new Linux installation.  It's amusing to see how I've pretty much stocked my new MacBook Pro with a variety of open source software (sometimes not open source but free in the financial sense) that I've used for a long time on my various Linux machines, applications such as GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, GoldenCheetah, Filezilla, Mendeley Desktop - the list goes on.  I even found a file manager (XFolders) which lets me see hidden files!Having said that, I picked up iWorks quite cheaply when I bought the MacBook, mostly for Keynote, but I've found Pages to be rather a nice word processor too.  I have the iPad iWorks apps as well.At work I was supplied with a new desktop PC, and even better I've been allowed to install Linux on it!  Of course, I'm on my own in terms of configuring it...not much Linux support at work unfortunately, outside of a neighbouring Department's Linux cluster.  I've already got it synchronising my documents folder with its counterpart on rather aged (nearly four years old now) Sony Vaio notebook which currently runs Ubuntu 10.10.At home I configured an old desktop PC with Mythbuntu.  This works really very well (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), but the case is so unsightly that I've removed it from the sitting room. I'm now planning to reversion an old laptop as a Mythbuntu front-end for it.  In fact  the Mythbuntu box proved to be very much more reliable than our Humax box (which needs to be reformatted two or three times a year).  I guess I'll work on this over the coming weeks.I've extended the home network to include a Squeezebox Radio, and couple of Squeezeslaves running on the MacBook Pro and on a desktop PC running Ubuntu 10.10.  So I've got music systems all over the house...

Here's a rather good webcomic from the ever-reliable xkcd.com:Actually, it's a very pressing concern - how does one keep track (securely) of the passwords that protect our many accounts round the web?  Not quite so sure about Google, though!

It's been a while since I noted any news about Phorm, the outfit that hawked a system for illicit DPI snooping in internet traffic.  The Register today reports that the EU is to sue the UK over its failure to take action (EU sues UK.gov over Phorm trials).Not before time.

The UK ISP TalkTalk was recently spotted shadowing its customers' tracks around the internet. The excellent NoDPI.org has a comprehensive summary of why this is illegal (TalkTalk becomes StalkStalk).  Interestingly the man in charge, despite claiming to have deleted all emails from one protester has had his legal crew write an apparently evasive letter.As with the BT-Phorm debacle, it's going to be interesting to watch this unfold...buy I can't see the UK regulatory bodies acting with any great rapidity if prior experience is anything to go by,

So there I was, on my own with plans to get out on the bike somewhat thwarted by heavy rain showers, and very much at a loose end.  So I took it upon myself to tidy up this website.I've checked over the menu links, which now all seem to be properly functional.  I deleted some that were merely hangovers from a prior incarnation.  A few new menu items were added.In the Main Menu:

• Recently Played Music - now links to a page with information from my Last.FM page, in turn derived from audioscrobbling from my Squeezebox (so it doesn't include CDs and LPs that I play, not anything I listen to on the iPod
• Books from my Library - links to a widget from LibraryThing that scans through my library 25 books at a time, randomly selected.  This replaces a sidebar module that used to show books currently being read, but which was usually out of date.
• About flies&bikes - explains abit about the websites I maintain.

In the Research menu:

• Recent Publications - properly integrates a feed from an institutional publication repository.
• Why Study fruit flies? - link now works!

In the Cycling Menu:

• Links tidied up to point to a new browser window/tab.
• Added link to the Team Grumpy website.

This may all seem rather insignificant, but it's not only a job that I've been putting off, but some of the pages were quite a fiddle to set up.  In particular embedding the last.fm and LibraryThing widgets required Jumi modules to be embedded in Joomla! articles.

At the beginning of July, Rupert Murdoch's press empire moved to charge for access to The Times and The Sunday Times web sites. Up to now, this has been at a charge of £1 for a day's access, or £2 for a week's access.  Perhaps I'm just a cheapskate, but when I'm referred to these sites I decline to pay to read it, moving on to other sites.  I was interested to see that Media Week has some interesting statistics on the effect of the new paywall strategy (Times loses 1.2 million readers - Media news - Media Week). The numbers are quite startling:

News International launched its separate Thetimes.co.uk and Thesundaytimes.co.uk websites on 25 May. It made registration compulsory and began redirecting users from the old site on 15 June and started charging for access to both sites on 2 July.According to ComScore, the combined number of unique visitors to the two new sites has fallen to 1.61 milion in July, from 2.22 million in June, and 2.79 million in May.The average number of minutes each user spent on the site was 7.6 in May, 5.8 in June and 4 in July.Page views have dropped from 29 million in May to 20 million in June and 9 million in July.

I imagine that this reflects the casual page viewers such as me choosing not to pay to read a page they're not absolutely desperate to view.  On the one hand one could view this as a huge drop in web page visitors, but as Jack of Kent pointed out via Twitter, one could view this as a gain of 1.6 million paying visitors.  I guess it remains to be seen how advertisers react to this, and whether any decline in advertising revenue is more than made up for by the subscription income.It seems that some newspapers are banking on the appearance on internet/media consumption devices such as the iPad, and the soon to be launched competitors running on Linux-related and Windows-related operating systems to reinvigorate the newspaper business.  But it seems to me that the joy of newspaper browsing on the web is that I can collect views from across the political spectrum of newspapers, while only buying into one.  What's interesting is that the readers don't appear to have defected to other newspapers' websites: presumably supporting my supposition that the deflected readers are casual browsers rather than dedicated readers.Personally, I think that it's too early to conclude anything from the data available to date - I expect executives over at News International are poring over the figures in quite some detail.  After all page view numbers aren't the only statistic in town.

I've been trying to overhaul my reprint collection* and bibliography, using the Mendeley Research Networks system.  Access to many journals comes via Elsevier's ScienceDirect, which has been down for most of yesterday "for scheduled maintenance".  At the moment it's throwing a "500 Server error".Anyway, a wee bit of internet searching reveals this is rather more than scheduled maintenance, and rather more of a major systems overhaul:

ScienceDirect, Scopus, Journals Consult and the Admin Tool will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance for approximately 9 hours on Saturday, August 28, from 6:30am to 3:30pm Central Standard Time.  During this time, upgrades will be implemented to these systems as part of the launch of the new SciVerse platform. For more information about SciVerse, please visit www.acceleratescience.com.

I bet the ScienceDirect engineers had their hearts in their mouths at switchover time.  And I bet coffee consumption is hitting rather extreme levels...*Yes, the term "reprint" does reflect my age.  Actually I use pdfs.

The New Humanist blog is one of many web sites reporting on a fracas involving criticism via Twitter of Scientology (Welsh councillor in trouble for calling Scientology "stupid" on Twitter ). The synopsis of this story is that

When Cardiff councillor John Dixon visited London last year to buy a wedding ring for his wife to be, a stroll past the "Dianetics and Life Improvement Centre" on Tottenham Court Road (just round the corner from our office, as it happens) prompted him to make the following quip on Twitter:“I didn’t know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off.”

This has appeared to generate a bit of a problem for poor John Dixon, as the "Church" of Scientology made a complaint to the Welsh public service watchdog.  As a consequence Dixon's facing disciplinary action.Problem is, as someone who's read Russell Miller's biography of Scientology's founder L. Ron Hubbard (the wonderfully titled Bare Face Messiah), I rather inclined to agree with Dixon.  It's also why I place quotation marks around "Church", and why I believe Scientology is complete claptrap and an exercise in generating a huge income.  Herewith my modest contribution to the Streisand Effect.On the other hand (and in a spirit of even-handedness), I suggest the core beliefs of most established religions are equally loopy.

A story that surfaced in TalkTalk forums a while back, and more recently in the Phoenix Broadband Advisory Community and the No DPI forums has now come to the attention of The Register (TalkTalk turns StalkStalk to build malware blocker).  This one's interesting - under the guise of harvesting URLs for future malware protection TalkTalk have been following their clients around the web.  El Reg:

It's less TalkTalk, more StalkStalk: the UK's second largest ISP has quietly begun following its customers around the web and scanning what they look at for a new anti-malware system it is developing.Without telling customers, the firm has switched on the compulsory first part of the system, which is harvesting lists of the URLs every one of them visits. It often then follows them to the sites to scan for threats.[...]The new system is provided by Chinese vendor Huawei, and customers can't opt out of the data collection exercise. As they browse the web, URLs are recorded and checked against a blacklist of sites known to carry malware. They are also compared to a whitelist of sites that have been scanned for threats and approved in the last 24 hours.If a URL appears on neither list, Huawei servers follow the user to the page and scan the code. According to measurements by webmasters, the TalkTalk stalker servers show up between about 30 seconds and two minutes after TalkTalk subscribers.

Isn't this clear copyright violation?  On guy in the PABC forums has requested the TalkTalk cease visiting his sites: they have refused to stop doing this, claiming they "reserve our rights to check your site for the protection of our users".It would seem that the URL harvesting takes quite a bit of information along with it.  TalkTalk claim that their crawler obeys robots.txt instructions, but from the evidence provided in the PBAC forums this isn't actually true.  It would also seem that the process interferes with gamers' online activities and prevents computers from being able to access the iTunes store (see for example this thread).