At home, I’ve three computers that I use regularly: my Asus Eee PC, a really rather heavy HP laptop, and an even heavier and larger (and much more ancient) Sony Vaio. All run Ubuntu, though the HP has Windows XP on it for the times when I have to boot up in that flavour.

But, if the hard-drive broke on any of these machines, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

All my photos, and increasingly videos, are held at Flickr (I buy a DVD once a year of all the photos I have there, just for safety’s sake). All my documents are with the increasingly-good Google Docs. My code is held on my website, though backed-up daily. All my email, back to 2004, is held on my Google Apps for Your Domain. My list of passwords? I don’t have one, using my own password generator.

Of course, I do have some files held locally. The other machine in my house is a fairly old Mac Mini, which sits under the telly. I use it to play DVDs and sync my iPhone, but it also contains my music collection. Indeed, after an Amazon.co.uk “sell your stuff” spree, I have about five CDs left in the house. But, once more, if the hard-drive broke on this machine, I’d lose absolutely nothing.

I back up the 30G of data I hold within iTunes automatically every night, thanks to a piece of software called JungleDisk. This simply watches for changes within my iTunes folder, and uploads those changes to Amazon’s servers somewhere. I pay £1.89 a month for the storage (and like JungleDisk so much, I also spent a one-off £10.10 for the software). So, while undoubtedly it would be a hassle and a lengthy download if this disk broke, I’d again not lose anything; and JungleDisk also ensures that my music collection is available to me wherever I am in the world.

With the advent of services like Amazon S3, Flickr, Gmail and Google Docs, it strikes me that we don’t really need computers to have great big hard drives any more - certainly not on a laptop. Asus appear to be the first computer manufacturer to really understand this.

By leaving all my data on the cloud, am I ahead of the curve, I wonder? Or simply too trusting of Google/Flickr et al?

So, I run Media UK, the UK’s online media directory. Media UK’s an interesting project for me: it allows me to test things on a large site, and bring those learnings to those that pay my salary.

Only 11% of Media UK’s traffic is “direct” - that is to say, only 11% of people who visit Media UK do it by typing “www.mediauk.com” into their browsers. A whopping 77% of Media UK’s traffic comes from search engines - predominantly, like most websites, from Google, which is responsible for 79% of all the search engine traffic.

Among the plethora of Google Analytics reports, you can view ‘top landing pages’: those pages people first saw when coming to the Media UK. Given that most traffic comes from search engines, this roughly equates to the websites where Media UK outperforms a media owner’s own website - by coming high, if not #1, for the media owner’s keywords on Google. This, therefore, provides a list of the not altogether fairly titled “worst UK media sites for Search Engine Optimisation” - where people have visited Media UK instead of the website they were looking for.

The full list is below, but let’s examine a few.

Tiny Pop is the top of the list. Tiny Pop is a TV channel on Sky, if you’ve not heard of it. Media UK is currently #1 in a search for Tiny Pop. Indeed, that Google search doesn’t actually bring back the ‘real’ Tiny Pop site at all. It does bring back a few directory pages like mine, as well, amusingly, a link to a Yahoo question where someone is wondering how to find the Tiny Pop website. When you do find it (clue) the website is a fully-featured Flash site. The makers have produced alternative text links to help Google spider the site, but they’ve also carefully made them display:none on the front page. As a result, Google have banned them entirely, and tinypop.com appears nowhere on Google. (The bizarre thing is that the links also appear within the Flash movie, so if it’s an aesthetic reason why they’ve hidden the HTML links, why replicate them within the Flash?)

The list is also full of media names which haven’t been carried over to their online presence. As an example, the Reading Evening Post has a website which they’ve branded ‘getreading’. Nowhere on the page does it appear to mention ‘Reading Evening Post’, and while the page description does on Google (and getreading.co.uk appears higher than Media UK’s page), it’s not altogether obvious that if you wanted the Reading Evening Post’s site, you’d click the link.

London Lite appears to manage both of the above crimes - a different brand and making life hard for search engines. Brilliantly, their website has in the title bar “L o n d o n L i t e”, thus making it virtually invisible for search engines (albeit it still appears at #3). The main website for London Lite is actually branded thisislondon.co.uk (just like sister publication the Evening Standard). Once more, even though Media UK’s result is #4 in Google, it still gets a good amount of visits.

And some media brands in this list suffer from their very name. How do you spell “2ten” anyway? Is “Mercia” really the name of a radio station? A search for mercia fm radio station gets Media UK at #1. Mercia’s website (split between merciafm.co.uk and mercia.co.uk, bad GCap) contains the markup <title>Mercia</title><meta name="description" content="Mercia" /> which doesn’t help too much in a quest for excellent Google optimisation. (I have no doubt Robin’s team will fix this pretty fast, incidentally - they’re quite good).

Finally, talkSPORT is in this list, and I didn’t understand why. You can use Google Analytics to drill down to “what people searched for to find this particular page” level; and it would appear that a search for talk sport uk brings Media UK quite high in the list. talkSPORT would do well to add “UK” in their title/description somewhere.

This has been an interesting exercise; and I’m gratified that none of the websites I have some responsibility for (either now or in the past) appear on the list. If you’re a media company website owner reading this page, please don’t change your websites; I like the traffic.

The worst UK media sites for SEO - from mediauk.com
1. Tiny Pop
2. The Scottish Sun
3. Century Radio 105.4
4. Reading Evening Post
5. Blackmore Vale Magazine
6. South Wales Echo
7. London Lite
8. Official UK Playstation Magazine
9. talkSPORT
10. Sunday Express
11. Derby Evening Telegraph
12. Kiss 100
13. 2ten FM
14. Classic FM
15. Mercia

Photo: Jan Krömer. Used under licence. My full disclosure details my relationship with Google and Media UK.

I’ve run a mailserver for quite some time, which comes with its good points (nice customised error messages, additional spamassassin, address rewriting) and with its bad points (it falls over occasionally). It also handles a seemingly huge amount of mail - all the mail for @cridland.net (which has around 20 people on it) and all the mail for @mediauk.com. Because I’m fairly free with my address, and because Media UK started life as a domain over ten years ago, I get two or three emails a second, every minute of the day - virtually all of them spam, and virtually all of them dictionary attacks.

Even before leaving CIX, I had started using the bullet-proof email from spamcop.net: coming complete with a (rather hacked) version of Horde webmail and a decent IMAP account. It was quite a passable webmail system, but I found myself oscillating between webmail and mail on something like Outlook Express for some time. I think I finally stopped using Outlook when the first Outlook worms came out.

On 14 June 2004, I joined Gmail; and very quickly realised that this was better than the email software I was using. (I know this because Gmail’s still kept that first message). Fairly quickly, I pointed my @cridland.net email address, and Media UK’s, to Gmail instead - particularly when they allowed you to “send as” a different email address.

Earlier this year, I left Gmail; and moved over to Google Apps for My Domain. After a lot of looking and prodding, I’ve managed to configure it so that my own @cridland email comes to Google, while everything else passes through quite comfortably to my own mailserver. It also migrated all my old mail over from the old gmail.com to my new @cridland.net address, so searches still find my old emails. It’s all working splendidly. It’s the premium product, so I’m paying £25 a year for this privilege; and it’s all working pretty well so far, bar a few initial hitches.

Anyway, the point of this message was just to point out that, just like Gmail, you can change the “http” at the front of the address to “https”, and it makes everything nice and secure for you. “https” encrypts your web traffic so that even your IT people can’t snoop into your own email.

Life is slightly different in GAFYD. Yes, you get a secure interface in exactly the same way, but Google also gives you a user-configurable domain like http://webmail.cridland.net/ which you can’t simply change to start “https” instead. After a few days’ scratching heads, I’ve discovered a simple and magic solution: host “webmail.cridland.net” myself and, through one line of PHP, point my browser to the https:// version. Excellent, that works nicely.

PS: An unintended but quite useful benefit of Google Apps is that I can now use my real email address on Google Talk. So, for those of you with my @gmail address in Google Talk or Jabber, feel free to delete it and put instead my proper email address, which is my first name @cridland.net.

Photo: kk+ from Vancouver fashion and portrait photography. Used under licence.

A view of a power plant in Houston, taken on February 20th. Photo: Louis Vest. Used under licence.

Google Calendar on your website using PHP and stuff
If you use my code for this, you might like to note that there are quite a few contributed bugfixes, which fix, er, some bugs.

Has digital radio had its day?
I'm quoted in this piece. Executive summary: "no".

The BBC iPlayer and buzz monitoring in action
Nixon McInnes decides that I might know what I'm doing, and that "the BBC still kick ass", which is very nice of him. Must get back to the kicking.

Is Radio Suffering From Too Little Research?
Self-serving post from Edison Media Research. Yes, research is good - but as Henry Ford said, "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse".

Adrian Fitch's spring training
The Fitchster uses one of my photographs, and concerningly writes about 'going hard', but it turns out it's about cycling.

Another of my photos
… a rather old manual montage, originally shot on film would you believe, used in this blog posting

Intempo Rebel Kills Radio DJs (Gizmodo UK)
"A music sampling system that, once tuned into an FM station, records the 40 most played tracks and then edits out the DJ chatter and the ads." Nurse? The copyright!

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from February 15th to February 23rd. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

Photo taken this week by mike138. Used under licence. Photos for my Delicious postings like this will be taken from Flickr’s ‘interesting feed’ for the day concerned. Seemed like a good idea.

Postalicious
One of the reasons I stopped posting my Del.icio.us links to this blog was the unpleasant way that it rendered, and the lack of any control I had with regard to timing. This hopefully fixes this.

Meet Mr. TechCrunch UK - ScobleShow
In the latest of my “let’s mention Robert Scoble because he normally adds your mention to his linkblog”, a serious one - Robert interviews the excellent Mike Butcher, who’s looking very well in this video. I last saw Mike a good eight months ago.

Ubuntu
Recently added it to my normal workhorse laptop (an HP Compaq tc4200). I wouldn’t say it worked totally instantly out of the box, but after a little tinkering, it’s doing everything I want except print, which is a good start, and I’ve still Windows on the machine if I need it.

The UCC Journalism Society Conference 2008 (my speaking events)
Delighted to be speaking on “the place of traditional media in the Web 2.0 world” at this conference for University College Cork: under the auspices of my Media UK work.

An ego blog-search
I wanted to see who was blogging about me, but I had problems with Google Blog Search returning my own blog entries. I’ve worked out how to stop that with -blogurl, like so: “James Cridland” -blogurl:james.cridland.net -blogurl:www.flickr.com

v-moda “Vibe Duo” headphones for the iPhone
My Christmas present to myself was an iPhone: and these are just excellent headphones - way better sound than the original crappy ones, and with a headset mike, so I can still use it as a phone. Mind, damn expensive.

ShinyRed - 10 blogs to read in 2008
Nine blogs you might actually want to read; and one ridiculous suggestion. But it’s very nice of them, so thank you, ShinyRed.

So, Robert Scoble hassles Google about the amount of duplicates in the new shared-items-from-friends feature…

…and look! Both Matt and Robert have shared one item that I’m reading, and it’s not duplicated it. Neat. Has Scoble got his wish, I wonder?

Prompted by Martin Belam’s list, and to avoid the utter boredom of reinstalling OSX now that my Mac Mini’s internal hard drive has given up the ghost a day before Christmas, here’s my top ten blog posts of 2007, thanks to Google Analytics.

I don’t get nearly the number of readers that Martin gets, and interestingly my recent appearances on the BBC Internet Blog (and links from it) haven’t altered my blog traffic significantly. In fact, most of the traffic to james.cridland.net has been related to a BBC Backstage gadget I’ve written, bringing feeds of BBC Weather to iGoogle. But, here’s the most-read blogs.

1. Fantastists and lazy journalists
Back in March, I looked at a story that the press failed to adequately check before printing, while I checked on it by, um, typing things into Google. I don’t comment on this story any more, and almost feel wrong even linking to it, but it’s clear that others still find it interesting. I wish Ryan and his family all the best.

2. When a perfectly valid credit card won’t work
Highly confusing, this one. This is just a rant, in January, against a credit card (one I don’t have any more, I think), but has clearly caught some search-engine love.

3. iPlayer on GNU/Linux
Welcome news about the BBC iPlayer, with a screenshot from the Ubuntu box in the kitchen. Oly posted in 12 December, but the third most popular posting of the entire year.

4. Review of the O2 XDA Mini S
A review of one of the most hateful phones I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to own. Curiously, my idea (held within this post) of how wifi should work on mobile phones is entirely how the Apple iPhone works. Interesting, too, how much of what I say is fixed with the iPhone.

5. I move to the BBC
My announcement from May, which many linked to. This posting has the record for the amount of comments on this little blog - 37 comments to one post. I ended up leaving Virgin at the end of June, and starting at the BBC on 9 July.

6. DAB+ in the UK
From March, a posting which appears quite high in a search for “DAB Plus” apparently; berating WorldDMB’s Quentin Howard for saying DAB+ would “never come to the UK”. He was wrong then, and while there are still no plans for any DAB+ broadcasting in the UK, he’s still wrong now.

7. How to auto-fill your iPod and train it for better music
From January. I mean to write a follow-up; but sadly have lost my iTunes library thanks to a failed hard-drive today, including all my information about the songs I like. Sigh. Will have to listen to lots more music, then.

8. Channel 4 and DAB Digital Radio
From March: an enthusiastic post about the (winning) Channel 4 bid for the second DAB multiplex. I wonder how many of the promised services will actually make it on-air? Virgin Radio Viva’s certainly not there… and it had a nice logo, too…

9. The Apple TV versus the Sony PSP
A long blog entry from March, essentially saying that if you allow people to hack your products, they’ll sell more. The Apple TV has, of course, sunk without trace; while the Sony PSP has lived to see another day.

10. iGoogle BBC Weather gadget
The source of most traffic to james.cridland.net these days. Bizarrely, Hereford appears to be the most popular place that people want their weather for.

11. Pandora - available to the US only? Or not
A rant about Pandora (who don’t pay PRS/MCPS and PPL licences) still being available in the UK.

12. talkSPORT nicks my little UK flag
…and I’m happy. This blog posting made me add the flag to all my sites again. Ah.

13. DAB audio quality from Ofcom
94% of people say that DAB audio quality is just as good if not better than FM. Worth a blog post.

14. Sky Anytime
I discover this catchup service on my Sky box. Seems to me that we’ll be much better services by proper IP-delivered catchup services. BBC iPlayer seems to fit the bill rather better these days.

15. The story of last.fm
To coincide with their sale to CBS, I witter on about how they don’t pay any licences to the music collection agencies, and just went ahead and made a business (while PPL, MCPS/PRS just stood around and did nothing). Nothing has changed.

16. DAB Slideshow
A photograph of the UK’s first DAB Slideshow services. The BBC has since added some slideshow services, but I don’t own a radio capable of decoding them.

17. Facebook - goodness, it’s good
I discover Facebook. In May of this year. And it’s quite good.

18. Getting rid of out-of-office replies in Gmail
Quite a few rules to rid yourself, mainly, of out-of-office replies. This post needs updating.

19. Logitech Harmony review
A long-term review of a remote control. No, seriously, it’s in the top 20.

20. Google Charts with PHP
Only posted in December, this is announcing a free mostly-port of some Google JavaScript code (which does the same job in PHP). The power of open-source strikes again.

Might I wish you a happy and safe Christmas.

Photo: Stuart Meldrum. Used under licence.