As you will note from the little rubik’s cube-like display of recent pictures at the right I am a long-time and very satisfied Flickr user but there were always three things that put me off.

• If you wanted to share pictures with selected people they had to get a Flickr account as well
• The free account limited you to uploading just 20Mb a month and
• The free account only let you make three “sets” of photos and only displayed the most recent 200 photos.Well in the last few weeks two of those three problems have been fixed. Flickr has instituted a “guest pass” so you can invite people to see your private pictures via a simple email, and more recently they upped the upload limit for free members from 20Mb to 100Mb. If they would just deal with problem 3 there would be no reason not to get a free account. As it is if you have $25 a year to spare Flickr does seem to me to be the best web photo sharing application around.

Long time readers of my weblog will know that I am a huge fan of the radio programme This American Life which puts out weekly programmes that mix documentary, fiction and humour. It used to be that they did streaming audio and for MP3 download you had to pay via Audible but this week they announced they are offering a podcast. Sign up now and have a listen – if you only subscribe to one podcast it should be this one…

London Walks for your MP3 Player is what it says – there 15 areas of central London covered (so far). So much more handy than carrying around a guidebook. For an alternative – a single downloadable package of 15 sites plus a map – see iaudioguide (which covers a number of other European cities as well). I heard about it via a roundup of such guides at Londonist – a (rather patchy) commercial blog about all things London.

I thought I should remind you that I store almost all the new useful web bookmarks I come across using Netvouz which lets me (or you) display and search them several different ways. In my sidebar at the right (further down the page) you will see my five most recently added links but by visiting Netvouz you can see more in date order or grouped by category, complete with descriptions and (often) star ratings. And yes if you are weblog-savvy there is an RSS feed for my whole collection or for any of my tags or categories that interests you – cool web services for example. Quality links, updated every day. Enjoy!

P.S. I do most of my academic weblogging (which is most of my blogging these days) over at the Media@LSE group weblog which I set up.

Wow – at last you can look at the BBC News site statistics in some detail so you can see who reads what (at least for the top ten stories in a given subject or continent – and without exact page views).

Interestingly, the site’s announcement of this feature is in the top 10 even though it doesn’t appear on the front page….

According to a free online valuation by Leapfish (based on word length and other factors) this address, blog.org, is worth $202,000 or more. Offers in that region would receive careful consideration…

I just found a handy page full of information on how to work at a computer without hurting yourself, including diagrams. The same site also offers a guide to setting up a home office which some might find useful.

It’s like some kind of sadistic exercise in massively multivariate calculus. You need to be able to afford it of course (impossible on the face of it), you need to choose a neighborhood (based on schools? transport? social cachet? shopping areas?) but that’s just the beginning. Do you need a house or do you want a flat? In a block or in a converted house or perhaps in a new development? In good condition or needing work? Can you live with a ‘bedroom’ 2 metres wide? Do you need a garden or will a roof terrace or a balcony do? Do you care if it is leasehold (yours for 99 years – or less) or freehold? Do you want to try to increase the amount of space in your place to be by adding a loft conversion? If so what would that cost and would the neighbors let you? (Actually you will never know until you buy…)

The Internet has helped a lot – | can normally find out floor plans and exact property locations online. I can even look up the quality of the local schools and the social class of the neighbors using upmystreet! But I have found in recent flat visits that rooms that are smaller ‘on plan’ look bigger when you see them, so you can only go so far online. Plus helpfully estate agents calculate the overall size of flats differently – some count bathrooms, some don’t for example. And London houses being what they are you often get irregularly-shaped rooms so the dimensions can be deceptive. One unusual place we have looked at has about 40% ‘marginally useful space’ which makes the place feel better (or helps with storage) but which don’t help in terms of places to put beds, chairs etc…

Still, after about two weeks of intensive searching I think we will have found our new nest soon – just about the time when the child we are buying it for makes an appearance!

Update:  We are buying the ‘quirky’ place above and I am warming to it – particularly given the amount of potential it has for improvement. So it is possible to find a flat in London. You just have to be prepared to spend a fortune and two solid weeks nearly full-time running around looking at a series of more or less unsuitable properties.

As for the school situation – our situation is unusual in that we want to bring up our child in a bilingual school environment which may mean private schooling (much though that goes against my principles). So location doesn’t matter so much (though in fact the nearest primary school is in the top 25% of schools nationally according to the league table so we wouldn’t have to move to get a good school anyway.)

Me on Brussels’ main square

Originally uploaded by David and Delphine.

My wife and I returned yesterday from our last short break as a twosome (for visitors who didn’t know, we have a boy due on or after April 22nd). There’s a small photo album here – warning – it may not be safe for the sensitive to view at work as it contains a picture of ‘comedy’ breasts made of chocolate. Gotta love that Belgian sense of humour!

P.S. I have edited my R hand navigation bar (which has, I like to think, something for everyone – do check it out periodically). The latest thing I’ve added is a feature I think is really handy – Send me an Odeo which is just a quick and easy way for you to record and send me a voice message if you have a microphone on your machine – even easier than typing a comment! I think this or something like this is likely to replace many of the normal ‘social’ comments – where friends just want to say “that’s funny” or “congratulations on your upcoming child” but don’t need to send a link or contribute anything lengthy or deep. It’s free to use and to add to your own site (no I have no relationship to the company!).

I have also provided a link to make it easy to bookmark this site using any of the dozens of ‘social bookmarking’ services out there (including del.icio.us and my personal favourite, Netvouz).

One of the New York Times’s most emailed articles is, surprisingly, one about early 20th century music history, and in particular an archive of wax cylinders now available free online so we can all hear the kind of things our grandparents or great grandparents liked to listen to (well not my grandfather – he was strictly a classical music guy!).

While I am on the subject of new links, may I remind you that you can see a categorised selection of my bookmarks here – 529 of them now and the number is growing all the time. To see every weblog post I made tagged with “Useful web resources” click on the link above this text or just click here. My “Broadband content” category includes audio and video-related postings…