Tim Worstall

A national jazz radio station has attracted record audiences after the owners announced its closure and replaced the DJs with a musical loop.

OK, great, so what listeners want is jazz, not DJs. An interesting finding and one that many other radio stations might do well to copy.

However, the station’s closure prompted a backlash from music […]

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A Conservative MP claimed yesterday that thousands of under-age children, including his own daughter, were giving false information in order to sign up to social networking sites.

Shocker, isn’t it? Next they’ll be telling us that kids try to buy tabs and booze.
One possible response to the claim is, so, Mr. Whittingdale, why did you teach […]

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Oh dear, someone really should have a little chat with the Guardian Leader writers.

The proposed merger has been about how other players could combat Google’s increasing arm lock on search and the El Dorado of advertising that goes with it.

Google does indeed have the lion’s share of search activity on the web. It also has […]

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You know, this sounds very much like a bunch of producers insisting that someone else should pay for their business to succeed.

The internet could grind to a halt within two years under the pressure of booming demand for online video, experts have warned.
Soaring visitor numbers to video websites such as YouTube and the BBC’s iPlayer […]

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The home secretary will today outline plans to increase protection for children surfing the web, including new jail terms for convicted paedophiles who use social networking websites.
The measures, which mirror systems operating in the US, include a requirement for convicted sex offenders to give their email address to the police. If they use that address […]

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I find out that I am in fact an iWonk.
As to the software required, aren’t there Facebook and LinkedIn clones floating around?

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I’d not heard of this.
Rickrolling.
Here’s the full description in the New York Times.
But the thing is, it’s pretty much an American phenomenon….and Rick himself lives in the UK.
So no one knows quite what he thinks about it himself.
So, to go further, does the Great Man himself read any of the UK blogs (so please do […]

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A powerful coalition of children’s charities is urging ministers to make it illegal for companies to trawl Facebook and other social networking websites for information on prospective recruits.

How?

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Highly amusing:

The Miss Bimbo game has seen girls aged as young as nine given an online alter ego, which they look after.
They compete against other players in beauty contests to earn money so they can dress their characters in lingerie and take them to nightclubs.
The aim of the game is to become "the coolest, richest […]

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This was always going to happen, wasn’t it?

Hackers have managed to circumvent the BBC’s anti-piracy systems to gain unrestricted access to the programmes on the corporation’s iPlayer internet TV service……..
However, the backdoor in the iPlayer allows users to completely bypass those protections and download unprotected versions of any show on the website.
One of the hackers […]

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The co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has been accused of offering to edit an entry on the online encyclopaedia site in return for a donation.

Of course, it’s denied, point blank.
But I really wouldn’t be surprised if such things went on (whether by Wales or others). A Wikipedia entry can be worth good money, affect a […]

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It seems almost certain that, as predicted last year, Google therefore overtook ITV1 in 2007 revenues.

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Could one ofour resident tecchies comment upon this?

All those who are suspected of wrongly downloading pirated material will receive a warning email for the first offence, a temporary suspension from going online for the second and if they commit a third crime they will find their web contract will be terminated, under the new proposals.
Every […]

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Yes, this sounds very good indeed….unless someone is already doing it.
//For anybody out there looking for a business idea how about a software filter which uses information provided by other internet users to create its block list. i.e. like social bookmarking. Other parents/users who stumbled across a site could rate it or block it and […]

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I had an interesting little email yesterday from someone I haven’t seen or heard of since I was 10, he’d stumbled across the blog.. How’s that for technology beating the anomie of modern life, the way in which we no longer commune?
71-73 we lived just north of Naples (father, RN, was posted to the AFSouth […]

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Then you need this.

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Yes, all in favour of this one.

"The video-sharing Web site YouTube has suspended the account of a prominent Egyptian anti-torture activist who posted videos of what he said was brutal behaviour by some Egyptian policemen, the activist said."
A YouTube competitor should post these videos and then run advertisements saying that unlike YouTube it is not […]

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So, 5,000 Amazon reviews and counting.

Mr Harris, whose hobbies include train spotting,

Sort of a codeword there, don’t you think, a phrase to alert us to something?

"I suppose people might see me as a geek," he said.

No, no, not at all!

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