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christownsend

Listed below are comments made by christownsend between Monday, 29th June 2009 and Wednesday, 11th November 2009.

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Jason and the quest for funding 11:35am on 11 Nov 2009 Loving your clear, informative and interesting posts as always Jonathan. Thank you.
Say hello, Wave... goodbye? 1:07pm on 09 Oct 2009 One of the most entertaining dotlife posts for quite some time. Thank you!
Who wants to live in Vodafone's world? 9:14pm on 24 Sep 2009 My phone can make calls and send texts and that's all. It costs me less than a tenner a month to run on a pay-as-you-go tariff. And I'm very happy about that. Vodafone can go whistle, I have no intentions of letting them, or any other mobile phone company, take any more than is absolutely necessary from my pocket this or any other month.
When panic shapes policy 3:18pm on 11 Sep 2009 Mark, the BBC really needs to stop sidelining the Scottish angle with the throwaway line "a separate but aligned scheme". The Scottish scheme is far, far less draconian, whereas your dismissive treatment of it might lead readers to assume it's basically the same thing.

It really isn't, and in the interest of a fuller debate on the merits or flaws of the English system, the Scottish system deserves a proper airing. How about it?
All eyes on Spotify 2:01pm on 07 Sep 2009 @JonnyJoe (6) ... Personally, I don't think Spotify is over-rated, precisely because I'm *not* a massive consumer of music, whether legally or illegally. Spotify gives me exactly what I need: simply, a radio station I control. No irritating DJ who loves the sound of his own voice more than the music. No tuning in to find it's a sports phone-in, or nothing but 'massive' dance tracks for the next two hours.

Spotify is something I can set running in the background while I'm working at home, doing DIY, whatever. If I'm in a room where I can't hear the computer I set up an FM audio-sender and tune in my radio to the channel. The occasional pop and crackle only adds to the experience!

Not everybody is a rampant downloader and not everybody has, or wants to have, a massive CD collection. Some of us just like to listen to a little good music from time to time, or maybe spend a few idle minutes sampling stuff we've not heard before (I've never heard More Abba Gold before. Can you believe that? But I have it playing right now, thanks Spotify).

The irony is, the way Spotify works - for me, at least - is a major disincentive against me paying them a subscription. I said at the outset I would rather they increase the frequency of adverts than decide to withdraw the free-to-end-user version of the service and I'm glad they seem to have done exactly that over the last month or so.
Has Twitter's popularity peaked? 3:46pm on 17 Aug 2009 Wot, no blog post on today's shock revelation that 40% of what Twitter carries can be classified as '40% pointless babble'?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8204842.stm
Has Twitter's popularity peaked? 10:37am on 12 Aug 2009 Maggie, your opening paragraph has made my day. Thanks for acknowledging you at least heard us, even if you don't necessarily agree. :-)
The day Twitter stopped 6:25pm on 09 Aug 2009 Tengsted (22) wrote:

" @11 Totally agree.

This is for once, a justifiable post on the Twitter outage.

It's just going to be lost amongst all the other pointless Twitter stories in the BBC Blogs in the future though.

As you say, The Boy who cried Wolf is a perfect analogy. "

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The thing is, this isn't even a blog post. It's a news story. Go and read it again ... there's no opinion, no behind-the-scenes chatter, no analysis ... none of the sort of material that you would expect to be here in the BBC Blogs rather than simply posted up with the rest of the news.

It seems to me that the BBC's tech newsdesk people *are* reading our blog comments, but instead of taking them on board they're simply casting about for stuff to justify their ongoing obsession with the passing fad called Twitter.

As for the 'news' that Twitter went down: Did it? When? I spend far more time than is healthy in front of a computer, and I didn't notice. Nor did Mrs T, and she actually has a Twitter account.

Incidentally, re the supposed vast popularity of Twitter: its 45 million users account for less than 3% of all internet users worldwide (approx. 1.6bn). But let's not allow the facts to get in the way of a good story. I mean, a few London media types and Silicon Valley's tech-addicts were deprived of their favourite toy for a few hours, so the whole world must have stopped, eh?
Twitter's front page makeover 5:20pm on 29 Jul 2009 What's Twitter?
Michael Jackson coverage 8:24pm on 29 Jun 2009 @Dotconnect (#2) ... when we were first watching this break on the News channel the missus said to me, "Charlie Brooker's going to have a field day with this!" So thanks for the link - looks like she was right. And Brooker is spot on as usual.

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