My main areas of photographic interest are around nature, landscape, urban and cityscape, human interest, texture and abstract.

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The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence suggests that heavily taxing alcohol will help to reduce the British culture of over-drinking, but I’m far from convinced.

What will happen is that those who want to drink large amounts of alcohol will simply spend more — just as those who are determined to smoke cigarettes do — while those who drink moderately will suffer by paying higher prices in pubs, supermarkets and other establishments selling alcohol.

It’s the same stupidity that suggests to confectionery and snack manufacturers that they reduce the size of their products in a bid to cut obesity.

It doesn’t work!

Now, I am against the deliberate selling of alcohol as loss-leaders, or prolonged happy hours, because they set the cost of alcohol artificially low. However, adding vast amounts of tax to each equivalent unit of alcohol hurts everyone.

Tackling our destructive alcohol culture will take so much more than price changes. It requires education from an early age in how to consume alcohol sensibly, plus sensible management by all those involved in selling alcohol.

I am now officially the Technology Channel editor, which means I get to write about tech, gadgets, gizmos, web sites and other geeky things, as well as boss a few select writers around a bit from time to time.

It helps that I absolutely love the sites.

If you’ve even slightly been missing my ramblings about high definition TV, the iPhone and general consumer tech, you’ll find a similar blend of regular writings over at ForeverGeek, Gadzooki and GeeksBlog. I’ll also be popping up from time to time on Have Laptop Will Travel, My Asus Eee and IT Security Blog.

More into blogging and new media? You’ll find my news and feature articles at Blog Herald, 901am and Performancing.

All of our blogs and writers are stars. Some have a larger following than others but we’re a friendly crowd (usually — the odd bit of ‘snark’ pops up from time to time) and we’re definitely worth a visit.

Add the whole channel to your RSS feed reader (go on) or visit each site to grab the individual feed.

Despite reports to the contrary — and not trying to sound pompous — it was me that broke the story to the Internet, based on the closest thing to an official statement as I could get (my editor at Tech Digest Skyped me after having just found out himself).

This was later backed up by tweets from co-founder Katie Lee and, finally, by email message from Chris Price.

You can read how the Internet has covered the story (Guardian, Inquisitr, Real Business, Digital Journal, New Media Age, Paid Content UK) so I won’t rehash it all here.

This is a summary of my feelings on the matter, for those who are interested or care, or simply want to add it to the increasing pile of commentary on the matter.

1. I’m a freelancer who has lost little

Compared to some with a greater stake (financial and emotional) in Shiny Media, who in fact have generally handled things extremely gracefully (online and in public at least) I know where I fit in the pecking order.

I always knew that the freelancers’ life was a somewhat risky path to tread, and in fact I’ve been very fortunate to have worked pretty much full-time with Shiny Media over the past three years.

I’ll probably end up out of pocket and I’m a little frustrated that the last month’s worth of work (when I could have been investing time in other projects) is unlikely to be remunerated, but that’s life.

2. I saw it coming (or at least, I wasn’t surprised)

Yes, it’s easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight, but unfortunately I can’t say I’m surprised at all this.

In fact, I thought it might happen sooner (maybe six months to one year ago).

I realise that I don’t have insider knowledge, and I can only speak based on seeing things from the outside, but Shiny Media always felt like it had problems. I believe this ultimately led to its downfall.

Firstly we have…

3. Communication (or lack thereof)

Communication, certainly between management and freelancers at least — I don’t know exactly what it was like for permanent staff — was patchy, and sometimes non-existent.

In the early days of Shiny Media we had a lot of resources, guidelines, an internal staff forum, and more to help us to deliver what the company expected from us.

Now, editor-to-writer relationships have, as far as I’ve seen, been very good. This is testament to the overall high quality of staff at Shiny Media. On personal and individual site levels, it all worked quite well, but the overall vision seemed disjointed.

Again, as a freelancer, I don’t expect to be kept ‘in the loop’ about everything. Even after signing a NDA I realise there are some things I can’t know about. Having said that, more regular filtering down of important information — things that have an impact on how writers write — would really have helped.

I effectively edited two Shiny blogs, also as the sole writer, with no managerial input, for at least six months. That can’t be right.

We move on to…

4. Choice of partners

I have been called out before for publicly slating the company Shiny Media chose to use for its web hosting and “consultancy” services.

While I won’t go into great detail about it now, I still stand by my belief that Shiny Media could have got a much better deal, and indeed service, by working with a dedicated web hosting company. Unfortunately, the financial debts had already set in far enough to make switching very difficult.

5. Staff Support

Let me make it very clear that I think all the staff (and certainly the ones I met) past and present, in various departments, were excellent, quality people.

The trouble it seems — and it’s probably linked with my earlier point about communication — is that they weren’t given the resources required to excel at their tasks, be that technical, ad sales, or whatever else.

Again, let me say that the staff were excellent, but the systems probably weren’t.

6. My defence of Shiny Media may have to cease

I have been a strong defender of Shiny Media — odd, you might think, given that I have no vested interest in the company except that it paid me to write.

When the TechCrunch furore broke out, I strongly defended Shiny Media.

I’ve pushed through, trying to deliver much even when the company couldn’t afford to pay its freelancers an amount closer to what they were worth.

I’d even be happy (in a strange kind of way) to shake the hand of the dying company — metaphorically speaking — and let everything rest.

What irks me, though (and this is as much a fault of UK business law, which I don’t profess to understand) is that another company, owned by Chris Price — possibly even with input from the original venture capital company — is able to buy the derelict Shiny Media, wipe the debts (which includes a lot of unpaid wages and fees) and start again.

Start again?

Of course I don’t mind start-ups restarting, but if I discover in a couple of months time that it’s “business as usual” for Shiny Media, or Shiny Digital, or whatever it’ll now be called, I’m going to be just a little peeved.

Then again, I’ve got other opportunities bubbling, so I’m not going to get bitter about it.

Finally…

7. Would you want to work with someone who uses underhand tactics because they don’t agree with a business decision?

I don’t know the identity of the “minority shareholder” who (allegedly) cut off/hacked the email and mobile phone of Chris Price, but given that it potentially made it extremely difficult for him to communicate with staff and freelancers, I ask whether anyone would really trust said person working for their business, lest something goes wrong and the same dirty tactics are used again?

Yes, I’m posting a fairly personal piece here, and yes I’ve tweeted some annoyed tweets in the past, but deliberately breaking systems because your minority stake is under threat? I don’t think so.

Conclusion

Anyway, there’s not much more to say on the Shiny Media situation. We’ll see what pans out. In the meantime, there are a few more journos and bloggers on the look out for new opportunities.

Be nice to them

Last week I received a press release from UK-based discount electronics retailer Buy It Direct.

It heralded a massive free giveaway of stock from their Huddersfield warehouse, in order to make way for new stock. That’s the story, anyway:

Buyitdirect.co.uk are holding The Great Giveaway, for one day only starting 1am Monday 4th May 2009. Thousands of high value products will be exclusively available online for FREE on a strictly first come first serve basis.

So what’s the catch? There isn’t one – buyitdirect.co.uk are expanding and need the space in the warehouse to make room for some new products. Rather than disposing of the products or sending them back to the manufacturers they decided to give Credit Crunch Consumers the chance to get their hands on some amazing products for FREE. Smeg fridges, Sony LCD TV’s, Laptops and Miele washing machines are just some of the branded products included in the promotion. The only cost the customer pays is the shipping charge of £4.95.

Staying up until 1am on a bank holiday Monday seemed a small price to pay for the possibility of bagging a bargain…

A few things didn’t sit right, though:

• At first viewing, there were only around 220 products listed, many with only one unit left in stock.
• Despite the premise that this is supposed to be a give away of old stock, an article at This Is Money suggests that the company has “also added more products to the offer to give everyone a chance of getting something.” How is that possible if this is strictly clearance?
• It felt like a hyped-up promotion simply to get attention and inbound links from major online news outlets (which they got)

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that this wasn’t primarily a marketing stunt, and in fact I don’t have a problem with that.

It’s the execution that totally sucks.

Those who registered and didn’t receive promotional codes are, ironically, the lucky ones.

• The rest of us (possibly millions?) tried desperately to access the web site with no luck. From 11pm on Sunday 3rd May (probably earlier) the web site was unreachable.
• At around 12.55am on Monday morning a “this site is experiencing heavy load, please try again in a few minutes” message appeared.
• Those who reported being able to access the site at 1am (I wasn’t one of them) said that the “good stuff” (laptops, TVs, etc) had gone within minutes.
• The company may have paid for additional bandwidth, but either this still wasn’t enough or (more likely) there was a huge bottleneck in trying to serve up pages. (Note that the site is running Windows Server 2003 and is hosted in the US)
• The FAQs said that the offer was open to anyone, not just those in the UK. That not only seems unfair but also means many more people probably tried to access the site.

When will web companies learn that they need to have infrastructure in place before trying to run these types of promotions?

“Buy It Direct” must be hoping that its reputation improves, but from what I’ve read on Twitter so far, I’m not convinced.

It’s pointless trying to appease millions of people hitting a web site and trying to purchase a couple of hundred products. Pointless.

What would have worked far better:

• Set up a simple “lucky dip” system. Given that it felt like a lottery even trying to access the site, a purely random draw would have worked better, and those who didn’t “win” anything would probably not feel so bad.
• Users would still have to visit the site to register (hence virtual footfall / linking to the site) to pick up a code and to leave their email address (marketing, see?), mailing address and credit card details (not initially charged).
• After the entry closing time, a random (automated?) draw could take place, matching each available product to a unique registration number.
• Each person is then emailed and their credit card is charged for delivery (though I’d waive that charge altogether for this kind of promotion). It’s a stipulation of entry that if you’re successful, you get what’s drawn for you and you pay. If the card is declined, another registration number is drawn instead.

Why would this work?

In a perfect, unconstrained world, the existing method chosen might seem better because you have more people browsing the site.

However, In this imperfect world (with bandwidth and server capacity constraints) very few people get a reliable, pleasing experience, which tarnishes the company’s reputation and leads to a bad taste all round. The company has to pay for tons of bandwidth, but even those who manage to view the site aren’t guaranteed to get anything. The company might get a few days worth of interest on all those £4.95 delivery charges, but that’s about the only minor monetary benefit, and even that feels rather underhanded.

Staying local

Additionally, if you are a British company, it would be much better if the promotion was only available to UK residents. I don’t have a problem with the company selling overseas, but this was a one-off promotion and it would have been better to limit the geographical scope.

Finally, on the infrastructure front, you must ensure that your server is of a decent specification and, ideally, your web hosting is based in the same country that the majority of your visitors come from. Hosting a UK-targeted site with a US ISP may make little different during normal business operations, but those extra transatlantic milliseconds all add up when the server is under strain.

Conclusions

I shudder to think how many people have been charged for delivery multiple times because they managed to get through to the order page but then the web site fell over. It doesn’t appear as if the company has a separate, robust server for handling credit card orders. Yes, they’ll get a refund (hopefully) but it’s been handled very badly indeed.

This sort of thing has happened far too many times. Companies need to assess the physical limits of their infrastructure and business before running promotions like this. Running something simpler and less server intensive would have worked far better.

Good luck to those who did manage to get the decent equipment at 1am last night. For the rest of you, I hope you didn’t spend too much of your holiday time trying to bag a bargain. Your time is more important.

Update: Just received an email from Buy It Direct:

Hi,

We’d like to say a HUGE thank you to everyone who took part in our Great Giveaway Promotion yesterday.

The response was so overwhelming that our servers struggled to keep up with demand even after some early morning tweaks from our IT guys! As a result, despite the best efforts of our support team, we know quite a few visitors experienced difficulties browsing the site and completing their orders.

Thousands of customers managed to grab a freebie and we’re now in the process of going through all the orders and allocating the stock.

Once again a huge thank you to everyone who took part. Don’t worry if you didn’t manage to managed to grab a giveaway item, there will be more special offers coming over the next few months!

Anna James
BuyitDirect

Hands up who is going to be signing up for future promotions/deals? Anyone?

Every podcast needs intros and outros, right?

It’s my composition that’s sitting there. Well, I say composition, but that’s probably a little generous. More like “stringing together some GarageBand sound effects and ‘stringy’ chords”.

Anyway, it’s there. Hopefully it adds something to Dan and Duncan’s tech talk. Give it a listen.

While there’s a decent spike in followers at this point, Michael Arrington concludes:

We love these new users, but they aren’t nearly as valuable to us as the ones that we fought for in the early days of Twitter.

OK, you love them but they’re not as valuable. Quite what this definition of valuable is, I’m not clear. In any case, I can’t remember when I joined @TechCrunch but I’ve since stopped following.

For the record, anyone wanting to follow me on Twitter will be most welcome indeed, no matter how valuable you think you are. No strings or variable value assessments attached. Oh, no spammers, though.

A technology lawyer believes the BBC broke the law even thought the Corporation (which we law-abiding Brits fund to the tune of £140 each per year and rising) didn’t do it with any malicious intent.

Straun Robertson claims, “It does not matter that the emails were sent to the BBC’s own accounts and criminal intent is not necessary to establish an offence of unauthorised access to a computer,” he adds.

“The Act requires that a computer has been made to perform a function with intent to secure access to any program or data on the computer.

“Using the botnet to send an email is likely to satisfy that requirement. It also requires that the access is unauthorised – which the BBC appears to acknowledge.”

It’s interesting that security firm PrevX gave their blessing to the experiments, even though (reportedly) most security software companies won’t mess around with computers even if they are infected.

I doubt anything will happen, but remember if you live in Britain you’ve helped to fund this little experiment.

Lynx is a text-only web browser that can be easily run from a command line. There’s a version installed on a web hosting account I used so I tried it out and… disaster.

Admittedly, there’s something a little odd going on with my version of Lynx, but even so, I couldn’t log in and the actual display was hard to use. You’d think that a text-based browser for a primarily text-based service would be great, but I didn’t think so.

I tried to access the mobile version of Twitter, too, but that just tried to get me to download something, which was most odd.

No, it’s desktop clients, iPhone clients or the plain old web site in Firefox or Safari for me.