To add or not to add ….

What do you do with that former bully’s friend request?

Facebook friends aren’t always friends, are they?

So what do you do with a would-be one who most definitely wasn’t a friend at all?  A person who used to bully you between the ages of 6 and 16 – not physical bullying, more just being a real sod – has sent you a friend request on Facebook. Do you ignore them? Explain why you’re not accepting their request? Or accept them, and let bygones be bygones?

Could this be the chance to actually let them see all the great things that came to you – Spy on all the on goings in their life!

Its a tricky one but im sure we’ve all been in the situation where you just leave it hanging – weeks or months … Accept or ignore ?

Oh the dramas of the social media!

Spotify is going offline …. but in a good way

Spotify is going offline. Not in a bad way, but in a potentially profitable way.

From today, “premium” subscribers to the music streaming service will be able to select their playlists and set them to be ‘Available offline’. According to Spotify, “Those playlists will then be synced to the computer so you can listen to your favorite tunes even if your internet connection goes down or if you’re at summer house with no connection at all.”

The interesting question that we haven’t been able to determine but which will doubtless be investigated in great detail by Spotify premium-owning geeks around Europe is: do the songs have any digital rights management (DRM) attached?

Spotify streams in the patent-free Ogg Vorbis format, but it actually caches what you’ve listened to (on a Mac, for example, you’ll find the songs you’ve listened to or might be about to listened to in an strange format in your home folder at /Library/Caches/com.spotify.client/Storage/.

As much as anything, it’s a neat way to avoid having to pay streaming bills (though not of course music publishing charges) if you keep listening to the same songs.

Unclear – but it’s not clear if those files actually have DRM too. Clearly, the app does something else to the files so that it can read them but others can’t. In that sense, the obfuscation amounts to a sort of rights management: Spotify can read them, but others can’t. But it’s not the way you usually think of them.

The question now is whether this will mean more people will sign up for Premium ??

The last time there was a public declaration it was that something like 2% of users have gone for it – though the introduction more recently of the iPhone version may mean that’s moved up. But – Spotify on your desktop machine? What’s the point? Don’t you always have your songs with you if you want them, on a digital music player? It seems like an oddly retrograde step, to encourage people to use computers to store songs again.

Nevertheless, if it grabs you, you can also now pay for your premium subscription.

Spotify has specified that you can store up to 3,333 songs on up to three devices including your phone. You have to have the latest version of Spotify, and may need to log out and in again to see it. Premium only, of course.

So – will that make you more likely to pay for the privilege ?

information overload or addiction ?

Paul Hemp has written an essay outlining his concern over the unsettling side effects of our 24-hour, 21st century lives, and specifically the amount of information, emails and facts we are bombarded with.

He writes:

“The flood of information that swamps me daily seems to produce more pain than gain. And it’s not just the incoming tidal wave of email messages and RSS feeds that causes me grief.

It’s also the vast ocean of information I feel compelled to go out and explore in order to keep up in my job.”

In case you got sidetracked and didn’t get a chance to read the rest either so here are the cold, hard facts:

• A study found that once workers were interrupted by an email it took on average 24 minutes to return to the suspended task.

• 2,300 employees judged nearly one third of the emails they receive to be unnecessary, but spend two hours a day processing them.

• Research reported that the IQ scores of people distracted by email and phone calls fell from their normal level by an average of 10 points – twice the decline recorded for those smoking marijuana.

How we get anything done is a miracle.

Before your attention wanders elsewhere, please confess the tendencies you have noticed in yourself that may be symptoms of this very modern malady. Can you remember the last time you finished reading a novel ???

Hemp recommends limiting emails to five sentences, or setting virtual break times to force yourself to step away from the desk, as possible remedies.

But how do you stop yourself from completely drowning now the information floodgates are well and truly open?

Paul Hemp has written an essay outlining his concern over the unsettling side effects of our 24-hour, 21st century lives, and specifically the amount of information, emails and facts we are bombarded with.

He writes:

“The flood of information that swamps me daily seems to produce more pain than gain. And it’s not just the incoming tidal wave of email messages and RSS feeds that causes me grief.

It’s also the vast ocean of information I feel compelled to go out and explore in order to keep up in my job.”

In case you got sidetracked and didn’t get a chance to read the rest either so here are the cold, hard facts:

• A study found that once workers were interrupted by an email it took on average 24 minutes to return to the suspended task.

• 2,300 employees judged nearly one third of the emails they receive to be unnecessary, but spend two hours a day processing them.

• Research reported that the IQ scores of people distracted by email and phone calls fell from their normal level by an average of 10 points – twice the decline recorded for those smoking marijuana.

How we get anything done is a miracle.

Before your attention wanders elsewhere, please confess the tendencies you have noticed in yourself that may be symptoms of this very modern malady. Can you remember the last time you finished reading a novel ???

Hemp recommends limiting emails to five sentences, or setting virtual break times to force yourself to step away from the desk, as possible remedies.

But how do you stop yourself from completely drowning now the information floodgates are well and truly open?

Google to digitise millions of books … and take slice of the proceeds

The judge overseeing Google’s controversial agreement with American publishers to digitise millions of books has delayed a hearing into the $125m deal – effectively shutting down the settlement and sending it back to the drawing board.

Instead of proceeding with the internet giant’s plans to make millions of in-copyright books available online and take a slice of the proceeds – a deal first announced last year – the groups will now go back and renegotiate the settlement in way that satisfies critics including the US Department of Justice.

A hearing into the existing deal had originally been scheduled for early October, as the court prepared to rule on whether the settlement was fair or not. However, following objections posed by Washington, the groups involved in the deal had said they needed more time to re-work the agreement.

New York district judge Denny Chin, who is overseeing the case, said on Thursday that the parties would be granted their request to return to the negotiating table to work out more details.

“The current settlement agreement raises significant issues, as demonstrated not only by the number of objections, but also by the fact that the objectors include countries, states, non-profit organisations and prominent authors and law professors. Clearly fair concerns have been raised,” he wrote in a two-page order.

He added, however, that there was substantial public benefit to be gained from the deal and that future tweaks would be dealt with as quickly as possible.

“The proposed settlement would offer many benefits to society, as recognised by supporters of the settlement as well as the Department of Justice. It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit.”

The case had proved one of the most controversial in recent memory, creating a tidal wave of criticism from a wide variety of groups, including authors, publishers, advocacy groups and Amazon and Microsoft opposing the deal as “susceptible to abuse”.

In Europe, concerns were raised since the deal could have significant global implications, despite only theoretically applying to the US.

Google had tried to head off those criticisms by assembling its own alliance of supporters, including Japanese electronics giant Sony and a number of groups who backed the wider availability of information promised by the book scanning project.

The Californian internet company said that it intended to continue pursuing a deal, while the Authors Guild – which was one of the groups that agreed to the settlement – said the details would eventually be thrashed out.

“We’ll continue to work on amending the settlement to address the Justice Department’s concerns,” it said in a statement on its website.

Money that can only be spent in Brixton

A Brixton Pound note, featuring an image of the political activist Olive Morris

How exciting to have ‘One Brixton Pound’, as the new denomination is called, is worth exactly one pound sterling – and can be used to pay for goods and services at a range of local shops and businesses.

The are saying that the aim of the scheme, the first in an urban area, is to keep more of residents’ money in locals’ pockets.

People will be able to exchange their sterling for Brixton Pounds at designated points and ask for the special notes in their change from participating businesses.

Lets see if we can get our hands on a few …