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I am worried about those developers at WordPress. They have to eat food, drink coffee and wear clothes but how are they ever going to make any money ? There isn't even a Donate button anywhere on the site.

WordPress.com provide me with a hosted blogging platform which I think it is very good; better than Blogger, better than Bloglines, better than Yahoo 360', better than most of the competition.

The service provided by WordPress costs me absolutely nothing so represents excellent value for money and I would recommend the service to any of my blogging friends (if I had any).

WordPress have to provide servers, manage those machines, implement resilience, scalability and high availability, develop code, do boring things like backups, testing, fix bugs, worry about the business plan, buy laptops, S & M (sales & marketing, not the other one) and what do I give them in return ? A load of feedback (mainly negative) about minor, trivial things that don't work and waste their time whenever I have made an idiotic mistake (quite frequently).

Now, WordPress are planning to add extra features and functionality (customised CSS and templates, more themes and plug-ins, hosting on your server, statistics) which will cost money but they have also pledged that the current functionality will remain free. The sad fact is I am very unlikely to pay them anything for additional add-on features, ever.

This main reason is because I am quite happy with the existing product. Secondly, any additional contribution would have to be minimal as I could pay my ISP an extra £4 per month to add PHP and then would be able to run WordPress.org with total control over everything. This would be more work for me but would probably be fun and an interesting experiment anyway.

Maybe I am not typical, maybe there are hundreds of frustrated WordPress bloggers out there with cheque books poised waiting for the two tier service to be announced. For the sake of the freeloaders like me, let's jolly well hope so.

The Glazer takeover was not the end of an era. Manchester United is a PLC not a football club.

The departure of Roy Keane was not the end of an era. Players (even great ones) come and players go.

The death of George Best was not the end of an era. Death and taxes.

However, last night's 2-1 defeat to Benfica in Lisbon just might be.

Ricky Gervais is one of my favourite comedians (The Office, Extras) and has produced the first in a series of podcasts for The Grauniad with Stephen Merchant (co-writer) and Karl Pilkington (who has a hard time).

The podcast is 30 minutes of chat and improvisation but very funny.

Scobleizers trip to the Guinness brewery reminds me of a similar visit I enjoyed many years ago with a few friends.

After enduring the 45 minute tour of the Dublin brewery, we finally settled back to enjoy the free samples which were willingly dispensed in 1/2 pint glasses of sheer perfection.

After a while (seven halves), I sensed the barmaid was about to ask 'Shouldn't you lads be moving on now ?' but one of our party got in first with 'Have you not got any pint glasses back there ?'

Don't know where, don't know when but SonicStage 3.3 is available.

Includes ATRAC Lossless format, ripping WMA CDs, wider range of bitrates for ATRAC3Plus and MP3.

However, SonicStage remains the only software application in the modern world without a 'Check for updates' option.

• The Killers - Smile Like You Mean It
• U2 - City of Blinding Lights

Wonder if Brandon got up and played the piano when U2 recently supported The Killers.

In a previous article, I wanted to add a trackback to properly cite an article on Ben Gillbank's blog about his Regulus theme.

I couldn't find the trackback URL but, as ever, WordPress is doing all the donkey work for me and now I see my posting does indeed appear as a comment in Ben's original article.

No manual intervention, head scratching or wasted time. Exactly as it should be.

I quite enjoy the idea of BlogShares.com which a fantasy stock market for blogs. BlogShares places a notional value on your blog based on the number (and value) of inbound and outbound links. Shares in blogs can then be traded.

BlogShares is also useful for identifying blogs by people with similar interests. For example, most Oracle technically minded people usually link to Tom Kyte's excellent blog and their blogs are also worth reading.

However, I am little perplexed as to why BlogShares thinks I have an outbound link to a Spanish blog I have never heard of, let alone referenced.

I also enjoyed this intriguing disclaimer on BlogShares about the outbound links.

This is a list of all recognised outgoing links from this blog. It may not be accurate or complete.

That's a great basis to make investment decisions albeit fantasy ones.

Those nice people at WordPress have opened up WordPress.com to the masses and added a couple of new themes. I really like the Regulus theme from Ben Gillbanks because it looks clear and uncluttered, the tag line is displayed and the RSS feeds for the blog and comments are obvious.

The only polite suggestions for improvement would be to relocate 'Blog Roll' under the 'Archive' and 'Categories' to let the main body text occupy more of the screen and for 'Message ssage' to be fixed in the 'Comments' section.

Please don't tell me that bulleted lists appear in bold. They are not. Apparently, they are just in a different colour. :-) The author is kindly going to fix this issue in the next release.

So now my blog has a pretty picture of the vast, infinite emptiness of the universe and 'Blog in Isolation' is reinstated. Very apt.

Not a brilliant week if you are a United fan...

A few years ago, I was drinking in the Chelsea Potter on the Kings Road and a mate said 'That's George Best sitting over there'. I replied 'Yeah, right'. I looked across to the bar and saw a plump, bearded figure sitting on a barstool, clad in a hideous blue shell-suit, sipping a Coke. I was stupefied. After a while, he finished his drink and left. I was still gawping at him like a lovestruck teenager and I swore he smiled at me on his way out.

Thanks for all the memories, George. RIP.