Old news is like yesterday’s papers. No-one is interested. The chart of failed spammers is as good indicator of traffic to your blog as any. Old gems may totally get ignored depending on timing. I might have one avid reader. Lots of people are looking for information about ‘Dixons Tax Free Shopping’, ‘SonicStage 3.3’ (are you listening, Sony ?) and, oddly enough, ‘Paul Scholes + family’. Google is a popular but sub-optimal search engine for blogs as monthly archives may contain a wide variety of unrelated content (Roy Keane, Antibes, Blog, Chameleons, DAB) which will ultimately confuse people and waste time. ...

Days Inn Hotel. No restaurant service ‘because it is Christmas’. No cooked breakfast ‘because it is Christmas’. No Sky Sports which is normally available but has been withdrawn ‘because it is Christmas’. Boddingtons is available despite the proximity of ‘Christmas’ at a very reasonable 2.95 GBP for a pint. The Marksman hostelry, a mere half a mile away, but a little more earthy, has Sky Sports at every booth and on big screens and sells Stella Artois for 2.20 GBP per pint. ...

The news is out. Yahoo! will be offering WordPress hosted blogs for small businesses and charging a monthly fee for the service. I think this is good news for all WordPress users (.com and .org) as it provides a revenue stream for future development.

Some professional (but impecunious) bloggers feel it is very important that there should be a regular, repeating cycle to the frequency of your blog articles to capture the hearts and minds of your tens of readers. Thankfully, I am a mere amateur so I will post when I feel like it and have prolonged periods of radio silence when I feel like it.

Bob Geldof wanted The Killers to appear at Live 8 at Hyde Park in London. The Killers themselves desperately wanted to take part. Harvey Goldsmith couldn’t find room to accommodate The Killers in the running order because of problems about the closing time and the provision of police/ambulance/London transport cover for a late ending at Hyde Park. Eventually, The Killers played one song on another band’s kit at Live 8 in sharp suits to save time on the changeover. ...

The Akismet spam filter included with WordPress.com means I am not troubled by comment spam on my blog at all, ever. However, I recently reviewed the spam sitting there all alone in quarantine. Most was inviting me to sample all sorts of delights describing all manner of different and very imaginative ways that a man and (wo)man can be joined together. One spam comment stood out head and shoulders above all others though with a blissfully simple but effective, marketing message. ...

So Typepad had plans to implement resilient disk storage but had an outage before the work was complete, which meant that users lost access to their treasured blogs as a consequence. Elsewhere del.ico.us celebrated the Yahoo! takeover by having an outage that also meant that users lost access to their bookmarks. I also noticed that the transaction log on the database used by Newsgator filled up over the weekend and the forums were also unavailable this morning. ...

I wanted to export my Newsgator feeds into OPML and experiment with SearchFox, who kindly gave me an account, to take part in the beta program. Only one slight problem, Newsgator doesn’t support OPML export. Strange but true.

I am fortunate that my job takes me to lots of exotic locations (Prague, Bergen, Amsterdam, Munich, Oslo, Nice, Paris) and now, err, West Bromwich. The last time I was here was in October 1981 when I attended a game at The Hawthorns between West Bromwich Albion and Manchester United. The game got underway and the United fans started a chant: Oh I do like to be beside the seaside Oh I do like to be beside the sea ...

I just downloaded an interesting, wide ranging interview (sorry podcast) by Tom Raftery with Matt Mullenweg and Donncha O’Caoimh, the two leading developers behind WordPress. Matt and Donncha talk about their backgrounds, hosted WordPress.com, features in 2.0, blogging, spam, plugins and future WordPress developments. Tom also happened to ask a specific question about my concerns for the WordPress business model and Matt provided some reassurance that there is a revenue stream through partnerships (hosting companies) so both guys do have enough money to eat, drink Murphys and wear clothes. ...