Soda - Keeping Curious

In the digital world there seems to be a continuous battle between the old way of doing business and the new. Quite often deals are brokered to ease these transitions, but occasionally, people like to take advantage of negotiation preceding and try to get much more than their fair share. You may or may not be aware of an ongoing battle running alongside the usual lawsuit press surrounding the music industry. Internet radio is becoming a large market, it is offering many different specialised stations catering for every different persons tastes and preferences. So much so is this diversity, that in America alone 7 million people listen to online radio every day. All that is set to change by a very real threat.

I’ve been involved with Internet Radio for many years now, ever since some friends of mine created SHOUTcast some ten years ago. Back then I had the advantage of being sat on very fast Internet access in my dorm at university, at a time when the original Napster didn’t really exist and there wasn’t the saturation of networks that there is today with the likes of YouTube and Bittorrent.

Streaming my music back then was a luxury I didn’t have to pay for. But it did require fast internet access, and that did cost someone money. Today, many hobbyists are doing the same, but not many have the luxury of subsidised bandwidth. You wouldn’t know it, but the big guys such as AOL do offer lots of bandwidth for free to many stations to aid the growth of this industry, purely because the networking costs are just far too high for popular stations otherwise. Simply put, the majority of Internet stations out there run AT A LOSS. That isn’t to say that the record companies do not make money from them.

Currently, Internet radio stations pay more expensive fees than terrestrial or satellite radio. It is these fees that, under examination, are going to see a hike. Already lumbered with the overhead of running at an acceptable loss to fund their hobby, many station owners will see their losses increase substantially. To further drive the stake, these charges are going to be backdated, effectively fining Internet Radio as a whole.

Today marks yet another date on the calendar for people to try and get heard about this issue prior to the new rates and backdated payments coming into effect. To do that, the big players and small alike are turning their normal programming off for the day, either going offline or broadcasting an informational message about the issue, urging Americans to call on their congressional representative to force a change.

You can read more about the ongoing issues at SaveNetRadio.org. An old acquaintance of mine who rightfully has made his way up the ranks to be recently appointed General Manager of Yahoo’s Music division has posted a much better explanation of the issue on the Yahoo! Music Blog. You should read it, he’s in the unique position of having worked both sides of the fence.

Two weeks ago today the agency released its latest and greatest online creation. I present to you the new Alton Towers website.

Exercising our knowledge of Alton Towers brand to create an online explosion displaying all aspects of the Alton Towers resort; the site offers the consumers a media rich preview of many of the features that make Alton Towers one of the top attractions in the UK.

But that’s not all. Coming soon is the Alton Towers Day Designer. Allowing families and individuals alike to plan out and print their day. Watch this space.

We’ve been keeping tabs on consumer commentary, so I’ll address some of the questions raised briefly:

1) More videos. We hope to add more content in the coming months, but right now our focus is on getting things complete and running as smoothly as possible.

2) Phase 2 and 3. I’m not sure where these concepts came from. We’ve been working alongside Alton Towers for a long time producing print media. We have bigger revisions to come, the day designer being one example of content that was not completed for a release alongside the main site. There’s more on top of that I’ll post about at a later date.

3) Sound Effects. All but two sound bites were taken directly from recordings made on park, Sorry. One of the two sound bites sourced externally is the steel drum used on the Water Park video. I think the reason people are confusing the sounds with RCT is because we dropped the quality as a file size trade off. That or RCT sampled rides at AT?

With regards to the sound on the site, we developed what I believe to be a world first (I’ve certainly seen no other site ever use something similar). The Alton Towers site has one volume button that controls volume across the entire site. My colleagues will assume I’m talking up my own work (which I am), but I only mention it since I plan to post instructions and code samples here at a later date. Flash people rejoice!

What’s wrong with you… scared of fast rides?

It would probably be appropriate to begin this update with an apology. I see that the previous post already contained one of those, so I’ll skip right ahead.

Not one to let Becky get the better of me, I’m here to announce (belatedly I admit), the launch of the new Playtex website.

I’m not the best person to explain the virtues of good site design, but I really like it. I hope you do too. You should check it out.

Also launched alongside the site was the Moonwalk microsite. Following the same theme of the Playtex site, but contrasting it, the microsite aims to offer tips for people taking part in a very worthy cause.

Two of our own agency members will be taking part in the walk later this year. Hopefully we’ll get an update out of them afterwards.

I’ve been meaning to post a fair few articles for ages now on a few subjects, but the studio has been very busy and I just haven’t had time. I thought I would author them outside of the office and post them when I got in, but you all know how that story goes.

Anyway, apologies aside, I just read a rather brief article posted by the BBC that sums up all of my concerns in one shot.

Tech rant: Technical ignorance

I suggest everyone reads it and takes away the notion that while people may disagree about the civil liberties issues, you cannot escape the fact that the government clearly gets the technical facts incorrect (or explained to them by the marketing drones at the company trying to sell the technology).

There is lots of room for expansion on the subject which I may do here when I get the time.

In my previous update I made reference to Technorati failing to visit us for a stint.

It seems that this was recognised as a bug eventually and fixed.

Reading peoples comments it seems that most peoples problems centered around Technorati’s lackluster efforts to respond to people, something I too have made mention of before. I know it’s a free service, I know it probably gets many mails to sift through, but a little bit of a concerted effort to reply once in a while would be advantageous.

Far too busy to write anything more than a quick update to wish everyone a happy new year.

Here at the agency we’ve ushered in 2007 with a fair few project wins which we hope will set the year in motion and allow us to develop lasting relationships with new faces, and some old.

We realise that this blog has taken somewhat of a back step with regards to the frequency of updates, so to pass away the time until we update again I’ll offer you this belated Christmas gift. If you were on our contact list earlier last month the following probably isn’t new to you.

Answers may come as an excuse for a later update.

With Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 finally being officially released, I have just made some minor alterations to our RSS feed. The changes are to work around some implementation inconsistencies in those browsers with regards to their automatic feed styling. Firefox, IE and Safari decide that web authors should be overruled when displaying a feed, all of which offering their own advice and in some cases, many or few alternative sign-up methods.

To that end, I’ve now set up our feed to circumvent that detection where possible (sadly, Safari still wants to do its own thing) and offer you the original styled version I set up a while ago that should let you sign up with many more services than each browser offers independently.

Don’t worry though, I’ve changed our stylised feed to offer you the ability to switch to your browsers interpretation automatically should you want to. It only works in IE and Firefox because Opera works correctly already, and as I stated above, Safari disregards the author anyway.

If you see any problems feel free to comment below.

In other news, for the last week we’d not had any visits from the Technorati bot meaning our Technorati profile was looking quite stale. With no apparent cause, I took a little bit of flak from my colleagues since Technorati’s last update was my article ranting about them.

I’m sorry Technorati, I didn’t mean to offend you, thank you for coming back to visit. I won’t be as mean next time!

Ciao

With more and more attention falling on Digital Rights Management in the news with the upcoming next-gen DVD players, and the iTunes music store’s increasing market share I found this story particular interesting. As a side note, if you are unaware of what DRM is, I suggest you do a little research to protect your consumer rights.

A group of Anti-DRM activists known as Defective By Design have been utilising Amazon.com’s customer “tagging” system to mark all products that utilise DRM with “defectivebydesign” as a means of notifying people up front as to the potential for restrictions that may be in place with their purchase.

I think this is a fantastic idea. Far too often people are unaware that their purchases may not allow them to exercise their fair-use rights. Not that purchasing something without restrictions won’t mean that the rug can’t be pulled out beneath you later.

As they’ve always said, buyer beware.

Something has been bugging me since the creation of this blog that I still, to this day, have not been able to correct. Since this is a blog, and blogs are notorious for being a place to rant, I’d like to step up and offer mine alongside the rest of them.

As Becky already mentioned, we’re being tracked by Technorati. It’s an impressive service, offering the ability to scope out the voice of the world for anything and everything that is currently being hotly discussed. But as you can see by the picture to the right, all is not well.

I thought I could correct this by adding rel=”nofollow” to our bookmark links, how little I knew.

That leads to a whole other issue, what about if comments included spam links that were not really acceptable content for our readers. Would Technorati publish that we were linking to discount meds, mortgage lenders or “adult content”?

So I sent off an email to Technorati in early September and to date have had no response. In the meantime I’ve tried various methods (short of dynamically adding the bookmark links via JavaScript) to get a more appropriate list in Technorati without result.

Anyone out there know of the magic switch to apply that stops Technorati’s blanket assumptions? I’m guessing there isn’t one. And if that is the case Technorati need to get their act together.

When viewing a post on our blog you’ll now be presented with a list of related posts. Powered by supreme artificial intelligence, the list is generated automagically and hopefully should become more accurate over time.

I’ve written this as an aid to those visitors who wind up here via search engines. Quite often they resort to browsing by tag to find related content, so hopefully this will be a great aid.

Enjoy!