Many Flickr members are planning a mass account delete, 24hrs before Flickr requires Y! IDs. This will probably be next year.

Over 1000 members are in a Flickr group which opposes this move, and as said some are going to delete their accounts. I’m a member (#1001) but I’m not deleting my account. This group is called Flick Off .

I don’t like the idea of Yahoo! IDs being incorporated, as whenever Yahoo! get their hands on something it becomes bad, look at BT Openworld (now BT Yahoo!) for example. My Y! is my BT Openworld email, which I don’t use. I don’t want to have more than one Y! ID, as it’s awkward, but nor do I want to let people see by BT email address.

I would like to be able to opt-out. I will protest a move, though if needed I’ll create a new Y! ID or switch to Buzznet (though probably not). Hopefully, Google will enter the market by then.

Many major sites have commented on this new movement, such as Wired, The Guardian Newsblog and Cnet. It’s interesting how a user group can create such a media following. It is always nice to think someone making a point can get so much publicity, in such a short time. Perhaps one day I could rise to the top. It rises my spirits, that I might not always be at the bottom of the pile.

Tags: flickr, photo, yahoo!, yahoo, blog, google, photoblogs, protest, BT, BT Openworld, BT Yahoo

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After the media hysteria surrounding the super simple, nothing new, Google Talk release I made this little cartoon.

It was done using PSP9, Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition (C#), a camera (my scanner broke) and some paper and a pencil.

My sketches are a little rubbish so the person on the left is Larry Page, and the man on the right is Sergey Brin.

Anyway, that’s about it (sorry for not posting yesterday BTW).

Tags: google, google talk, google im, brin, page, larry page, sergey brin, cartoon, humour, humor, joke, fun, funny, internet, software

Ugh, I downloaded a copy of Theme Hospital (I have a copy, but couldn’t find it, so I wasn’t breaking the law, US law anyway… oh wait I was British law though…).

Anyway it didn’t look good on 16bit colours, it kept going pink… and Windows XP cannot support 256 colours only, so I had to run compatibility wizard. This was sort of annoying, if it can handle 256 colours why not just build it in?

I’ll guide you through the progress of getting Theme Hospital working. There’s no need to bother changing OS as it runs fine as an XP application. We just need to change the colours settings

Get to a screen like this:

Your menu may not look like this, but you want to open the Bullfrog folder in the menu and put your mouse over Theme Hospital.

Right click it and press Properties then Compatibility until you reach this screen

Then check ‘Run in 256 colors’ and then Apply and then OK. Now launch Theme Hospital, it will work! You may have to use this procedure for other old programs which doesn’t display the correct colours.

These instruction seem obvious to a tech literate person like you or me, but I’m hoping they may help someone else.

Tags: compatibility, colours, colors, 256, 256 colors, 256 colours, windows, windows xp, bullfrog, theme, theme hospital, wizard, compatibility wizard

I know this site isn’t new, but I didn’t find anything else to write on, so I’ll just write about this site.

You may have been a member of Audioscrobbler, but now instead of just being partners with last.fm they’ve merged sites.

Now, I personally liked Audioscrobbler more as it was light compared to the the more packed last.fm. Last.fm does let you listen to a radio station based on the music people with similar taste to you like, so you can discover new bands and tracks.

last.fm is also sort of a blog provider, it allows you to keep a journal (about music I guess). last.fm also utilizes what Silicon Valley calls The Web 2, social networking and tagging (and users groups of course).

Tags allow tag radio which allows you to listen to music under a certain tag (which is probably or genre).

The social networking is very clever, it matches people who listen to similar music, and gives them a match value (out of ten I guess). From this is can recommend music to you, and provides you with better profile radio.

You can pay £1.50 or $3 a month to upgrade your account and get personal radio, which is radio only using the song you listen to. Just to clarify the service is free, this is just for extra features.

It is quite jumpy, because of the high demand on ad-free legal radio stations. It doesn’t run on the HTTP protocol, but on it’s own protocol (lastfm://) which requires it’s own software.

You need a plug-in to use last.fm, however Audioscrobbler plug-ins will do the job. You can get them for most media players including Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, XMMS, Foobar and Xbox Media Center (built-in).

Another good thing is that the RIAA or BPI can’t sue you using last.fm’s stats, as it doesn’t distinguish if you’re listening to it from a CD, a legal radio station or a MP3/OGG/WMA (or if it has DRM).

It’s quite nifty, so you might as well try it.

Oh, BTW Feedburner is down as it appears everyone has no readers .

Tags: last.fm, music, mp3, cd, wma, ogg, web 2, the web 2, tagging, social, social network, audio, scrobbler, audioscrobbler

Okay, the BBC is saying the Maturing net growing more slowly. They are wrong, in my view.

By using statistics from Linx, the London Internet Exhange, which is the busiest in the world it is saying the web is only growing this year at 49%, compared to 104% last year.

These are calculated using the Gbps going flowing through Linx. In a little a year Linx has gone up by 37Gbps, to 67Gbps (BTW, Gbps means gigabits per second, one gigabit is an eighth of a gigabyte/GB). Back in Y2K the rate was only 5 gbps (the Beeb says it’s about 1 DVD per second, but that’s wrong, a DVD is 4.7GB not 4.7Gb!).

Growth rates still stayed high in Asia and Latin America though, 76% and 70% respectively.

Perhaps the growth since 2003 was due to the growth of file-sharing. It says not many more people are going online as so many are right now, and they are using it as much as they a likely too.

However I have another theory, perhaps the amount of data being transferred doesn’t matter – people may be browsing over downloading. Blogs are generally small, not gigabytes big for example, so this wouldn’t account for much. Also, better compression and more understanding of better codecs might also be a reason.

There is no good way of tracking web usage without a massive breach of privacy – actually tracking the amount of pages accessed (and ultimately what they are).

Perhaps we shouldn’t jump to conclusions like this, we have no solid evidence.

Tags: traffic, internet, data, file sharing, web, exchange

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