Geoff Jones

The blogosphere today (maybe)

Posted on April 10, 2006January 14, 2015

Two takes on the role of the blogosphere.

First post by Morgan McLintic reflects on Dale Wolf’s post based on people who are subscribed to rss feeds on Bloglines where apparently there are “only” 36,000 feeds with more than 29 subscribers. Personally I think this is a gross under estimate. As off the people I know who read blogs etc only one (apart from me) use RSS aggregators. Also I suspect Bloglines is very USAcentric whereas blogging isn’t.

Second post is on The maturing of the blogosphere by Mary Hodder which uses link counting as an indication of popularity particularly on the relationship between inbound and outbound links. with 4 blogs having more than 10,000 links.

Interesting how both exhibit similar long tail effects so vividly. With millions of people having just a few links or a few readers. But the fact is people are gradually turning away from big media and spending more time on their own media.
/>Which to me as a true anarchist is excellent.

My Van survey results are in…

Posted on April 10, 2006May 23, 2014

Many thanks to the 41 folks who completed my survey. A synopsis of the results can be found at http://geoffjones.net/2006/04/10/the-vanspot-survey-results/

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.