Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Twitters

Commentors and fair use

Thanks to Jyoti one of my blog commentors I found myself listening to this video on The Tube. Lawrence Lessig is one of my heroes especially in the way he is fighting for sense in the copyright debates at the moment.

The video seeks to explain why the Publishers Guild v Google fight to stop Google digitising the worlds books is such a bad thing . The Publisher Guild are trying to emulate the BeamIt example where the music industry forced it to close down and paying $110m damages. Lessig sees hope in the Kelly v Arriba case which allowed linking by way of thumbnail images as an example of fair use.

To me its seems crazy that anyone should prevent the digitisation of out of print books. Where there is no way of contacting the author or original publisher, which represent over 50% of the books Google were going to do. These associations (and don’t get me started on the RIAA) are really modern day Luddites, except governments seem to pander their whims, even when it is clearly to the detriment of the electors.

An excellent video if you have 30mins to spare and a really smart way of giving a lecture allowing you to hear the speaker and see their slides.

Podcasting and The BBC

This is to me is pretty amazing. the BBC has released some figures on his podcasting trials. these have revealed that in Feb 2006 there were 329,888 downloads of the Radio4 programme “Today’s 8.10 interview”. Note that the Radio4 reach is 10million per week (and I would guess a middle aged audience profile) so the podcasts represent quite a significant fraction of total listeners especially given how new podcasting is and what is involved in doing it.
The most downloaded podcast at the BBC was “Best Of Moyles” on Radio1 with 364,265 downloads. The show has a weekly reach of 6.66million listeners.

Thanks to memeorandum and EuroTelCoblog for alerting me.

One day in the life of my blog.


Yesterday I inserted the code that Statcounter gave me so that I can track site visitors. Tons of interesting information and graphs.
This pie chart shows the percentage of visitors who stayed for varying lengths of time.


Visit Length
drill down 25 Less than 5 secs
drill down 2 From 5 secs to 30 secs
drill down 4 From 30 secs to 5 mins
drill down 3 From 5 mins to 20 mins
drill down 1 From 20 mins to an hour
drill down 2 Longer than an hour

Other information was that I had 67 visitors yesterday and the most visited page was my write up of the technology2.0 event with 25 visits. The most used search expression was pees on earth. With 9 out of 13 using google for search. 69% of visitors were from the UK and 31% from the USA. 33% used Firefox and 55% using IE
However, the free version only tracks 100 visits, should I upgrade!