Daily updates on the Internet and its social and public policy implications, useful websites, political/cultural musings and more from a UK-based academic (PhD researcher at Media@LSE), Internet consultant and journalist

Archive forJanuary, 2008 | back to home

18 January, 2008

After 12 years, Yahoo’s “picks” feature has packed up. I have been following it off and on since its inception and especially in the early years when there wasn’t so much going on on the web it was for me an invaluable information source. I suppose Yahoo’s owners believe that there’s no point in hand-picking when the wisdom of crowds finds the ‘cool’ automatically. I’ll miss it, if only because of nostalgia…

9 January, 2008

Since it is tax time again I find myself looking up my online bills. Only to find that they are only saved for a year or less, when I really need to see them back to April 2006 (beginning of the tax year 06/07). Would it really cost these companies too much to make available a couple more months’ of statements online? Or even make the records available indefinitely? Otherwise I will end up having to print out some of my statements before I lose them, this missing the whole point of going paperless in the first place!

7 January, 2008

I recently got five free tracks from iTunes (Londoners with Oystercards see here) and thought I would buy Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Unfortunately, on some CDs it is divided into lots of tracks < 1 minute long, each costing £.79, while on other discs it is on a single track… but because of its length you can only download it if you buy the whole album (£7.99). Bah!