Category Archives: The Internet

New March of Dimes website

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In all the kerfuffle of the last week (birthdays, gigs, life altering announcements etc)  I forgot to mention that I’ve recently launched a new website for my band, March of Dimes.

You can see it at http://www.marchofdimesmusic.com

It’s got videos, gig listings, and our album and EP in full to listen to (and buy, if you haven’t already!)

If you like it, it would be great if you could pass on the address to your chums. Just a wee facebook post, or tweet, or anything to share what we do.

Also, if you know of any promoters or bands that might want to work with us, put them in touch with me :)

For those who are wondering, I built it in WordPress (my favourite CMS!) with a metric boatload of plugins. Every single part of the site – from the base system, to the music store, to the email system) is free to set up. In fact, apart from a bit of commission we pay to Bandcamp for the sales, it’s free to run as well! Brilliant! Gotta love ya some open source. If anyone wants to know what plugins I used for any part of it, just ask and I’ll let you know.

So… go forth and share… please! :)

I need your votes for Yorkshire telly!

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Hello,

Those lovely people at Yorkshire Telly are holding a vote for the favourite videos on the site right now… They’ve got so much on the go, but it would be splendid if you could pop a vote our way, for this video we did in Ripon:

You can vote for whichever you want using the #favouriteyorkshiretelly hashtag on twitter, or posting to Yorkshire Telly’s facebook wall.

If you’re on Twitter and want to vote for us, just click here! And please tell your chums!

Choose your own adventure? No thanks!

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It’s been reported today that the always comical statistic of 69% of people want live voting to alter storylines in shows.

That awful BT Couple

That awful BT Couple

Now, a cynic might point out that Diffusion PR, the people that commissioned this study, have BT on their roster. The same BT who recently ran a choose-your-ending ad campaign. But far be it from me to cast such nasturtiums.

There’s no more sure fire way to bland-up your show than by giving the public a choice in the matter. Not only will you end up with lowest common denominator outcomes (I present to you Joe McElderry, Rachel Rice, that one that won that thing.. you know, whassisface, yeah, with the total lack of distinguishing features… yeah?) but to say that we, a bunch of drooling telly watching eedjits, know better than the writers is just arrogant.

Last year, during the quite brilliant, Torchwood: Children of Earth, lots of writers (some that weren’t even involved with the show) came under a huge amount of flack for killing off one of the main characters. I loved the character, a lot of people did, and killing him off was brutal, but worked brilliantly as a plot development.

If you think you can write the stories better than Steven Moffat , Graham Linehan, James Moran et al, then for goodness sake send it in to the BBC and don’t hope over 50% of viewers agree with you so it’ll turn out ok in a vote.

And if you’re writing to please more than 50% of your viewers – give up, you’re doing it wrong.

Welcome, Yorkshire Telly!

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There’s been a bit of a buzz around the Leeds cultural scene over the past few months, and a lot of it has been down to one page on a website.

“Yorkshire telly is coming soon”

After keeping us waiting and building up quite the interest, Yorkshire Telly has finally launched, and has already uploaded four great videos – a taste of things to come from this pioneering internet broadcast team.

Watching these videos made me think the following:

1) I want a double bass
2) How lovely is Yorkshire in the summertime?
3) I really want a double bass
4) There’s so much talent in Yorkshire, it’s fantastic to have a place to show it all off.

It’s worth mentioning the video technology too – loaded really quickly at a very high quality for me… I hope we can get a mobile version sometime, I’d love to see these videos on the go!

So pop on over to Yorkshire Telly and see what they’re up to. For a taster, here’s one of the first videos they’ve uploaded, I’ll let Albert Ross introduce it…

Say hello… Wave Goodbye…

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Google WaveSo, Google are effectively closing down the Wave programme.

Odd, for a creation that picked up so much hype, to end up being so underused – it’s difficult to know quite what went wrong.

Officially, the uptake wasn’t as high as they wanted – and I can see why. Pitched as the great new social collaborative working tool, it was originally offered out as an Alpha release (and then Beta) to a select group of people. It integrated seamlessly with their address books, so they’d be able to connect with anyone else on the trail.

Here’s where the logic machine breaks – if you’re creating a collaboration tool, but none of your friends have the invites yet, you’re not going to be able to do much on there.

But the good thing here is that gave it a try. Google can’t be blamed for the hype that whipped up, and their commitment to innovation should be praised. That said, they could have handled what happened next better. By integrating it more closely with gmail, or mobile software, they could have held people’s interest that bit longer, and got the engagement they hoped for.

Perhaps this just wasn’t meant to be – innovation can be great, but all great innovators miss the mark sometime!