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.

There’s a well-worn cycle with tech toys.

- You think they’re bloody great for the first few days.
- You convince yourself that despite the drawbacks you’ve found with the product, it’s still a jolly good buy.
- A few weeks later, you discover the full potential of the device with some odd workarounds that take quite some time to do, but make your product do some really cool things.
- A week later, you work out how to automate most of the workaround, which makes you feel even cleverer.
- A few weeks later, you stop doing the ridiculous workarounds because they take far too long to wait for the automation to work.
- A month later, you consign the product to a drawer.
- Six months later, you discover the product again and get all excited.
- Six months and one day later, you realise exactly how much of a crock of shit it is, and throw it back in the drawer.
- A year later, you sell it on eBay for a fraction of the cost you initially spent.

This is generally my cycle.

I’ve spent probably many hundreds of pounds on tech toys that I thought would be great but the dim reality dawns once I play with them. Nevertheless, half the fun is hacking these tech toys to do what you want.

An Intel MP3 player, that required an arcane piece of software to be run every time I wanted to put some music on it, and for me to sit and wait as it slowly transferred over USB1. No podcasts at the time, but plenty of free content broadcast over the air on DAB Digital Radio, for which I had a computer-based tuner which allowed me to take the bitstream, then manually re-encode it into MP3 (since MP2 wasn’t supported), and then allowed me to manually copy it over.

A Compaq iPAQ, USB TV tuner, Sky+ and Windows Media Encoder combo that would, once I’d programmed it carefully using a DOS batch file and co-ordinated hitting buttons on the laptop and the Sky remote, record those programmes I’d flagged in Sky+, encode them into Windows Media format and copy them onto the SD card which I could then the next morning take and place into my iPAQ which would then allow me to watch the programme I’d recorded on the tube.

Similarly, a USB-based DAB tuner which I managed to get networked on a Bluetooth connection to my iPAQ, allowing me to listen to (and control) DAB Digital Radio in any room in the house. Before I realised that it was infinitely easier to get a DAB Digital Radio.

Anyway, this is an awfully long preamble to saying, quite simply, I’m only on the first point with my iPod Touch. I still think it’s bloody great.

Now, true - I’ve “jailbroken” it, so now I have a ton more applications on it. VNC allows me to control the machine over there that’s playing music. I also have the Mobile Mail application (and the maps application) which should be on the iPhone; and it works perfectly when it sees a wifi connection - checking and uploading my email automatically. The ‘terminal’ application, which allows a full Unix session, is pretty cool to show off with (though moderately useless otherwise).

But I’m using it as I did my iPod Nano - automatically filling it and training it to play me great music, as well as getting some great video podcasts, like the aforementioned Mahalo Daily (if I mention it again, maybe Jason Calcanis will pop back and make another nice comment), the slightly surreal Tiki Bar TV, and the always excellent Onion News Network, a delicious pastiche of network news.

It is also, as mentioned earlier, an excellent web tablet - not least because websites have done such a good job of reformatting their content to work with the device. From Facebook, to BBC News (they’ve done some nice tweaks recently, I note), to Google Reader - content owners are taking notice of this little device. (Visit this website on your iPod Touch or your iPhone and you’ll notice that I could hardly resist myself.)

If you’re looking for a good Christmas present - perhaps even for yourself - you can’t go far wrong.

Photo: my colleague Dan Taylor. Used under licence.

The first post on our Radio Labs blog is a blinder - a very neat version of the BBC’s podcast directory for use on an iPod Touch and an iPhone.

Simon does a great job of explaining what we’re all about. Neat.

In other news, I’m off to SBES tomorrow. Hope to see you there if you’re going. I drink beer, by the way.

Deep in O2’s terms and conditions for the iPhone…

Unlimited Data / WiFi Fair Use Policy:
Your O2 tariff for iPhone allows you unlimited use of O2 UK’s Edge / GPRS networks and The Cloud’s UK Wireless LAN network, for personal internet use, email and Visual Voicemail (VVM) on your iPhone only. All usage must be for your private, personal and non-commercial purposes.
You may not use your SIM Card in any other device, or use your SIM Card or iPhone to allow the continuous streaming of any audio / video content, enable P2P or file sharing or use them in such a way that adversely impacts the service to other O2 customers. If O2 reasonably suspect you are not acting in accordance with this policy O2 reserves the right to impose further charges or disconnect your tariff at any time, having attempted to contact you first.

So. I’m forbidden from using an iPhone, since I would be using it for commercial purposes (ie fielding the odd email about Media UK, the website I run).

And if you’re planning on running iRadio, a neat little app which copes with streaming MPEG streams for your iPhone, then - don’t. Not on O2’s tarrif, anyway.

(I’ve not got one. My iPod Touch is beautiful, particularly now it’s jailbroken and contains loads of apps; my Nokia N70 is acceptable, if not great.)

Photo: Otu Ekanem. Used under licence

I mentioned, over on Facebook, that I was getting most excited about the iPod Touch, and that I wanted to buy one. And I got two almost instant replies on my “wall”.

Andy, a man who’s unable to drink more than a pint of cider without running away, said: “I’d certainly appreciate a high quality Cridland review if you get the chance, very close to purchasing one myself.” And then, Trevor, a man who’s unable to write or talk without using language requiring strategically-positioned asterisks, added “What a sh*tting surprise.. James buying a gadget… HOLY T*TS! But I’m with Andy.. if it’s any good will you tell us.”

Well. I’ll give you a high-quality Cridland review in a bit. But here’s my ‘first impressions’ review. It’s very, very fine indeed. It’s thin - incredibly so - and a highly beautiful-looking device. And give that my phone, while O2, is under the cold grey hand of beaurocratic dullness, a new phone isn’t an option. So what was I waiting for?

The music player works well, and, to my cloth ears, sounds better than my previous Nano, though that might just be the embarrassment of spending so much money on a replacement for something which hadn’t broken yet. “Shuffle”, the way I always use my iPod, is quite easy to use, and the graphics are beautiful.

One of the downsides of the touchscreen is that it’s impossible to change the volume level without getting it out of your pocket, hitting the home button twice, and then fiddling with the screen. At least with my old trust Nano, I can feel for the volume control. If you’re wondering whether to get an iPhone or an iPod Touch, note that the volume control on the iPhone are buttons on the side.

But the touchscreen, and the user-interface that comes from it, is beautifully done. The “flick” works excellently; it’s quick and easy to find anything as a result. The whole UI is animated in such a way to make using it a joy. The ‘cover-flow’ is also a really usable way of exploring your music.

But naturally, you wouldn’t be interested if the only thing it did was play songs. Because that’s the least of this thing’s capabilities. It does video, too - things like CNET Live are crisp and clear on the screen (only playing in landscape format, incidentally). A double-tap smoothly switches between “fill the screen” and “see the whole picture”.

But if your own downloads aren’t quite enough, the YouTube application is astounding. Using the built-in wifi in the device, the video quality, to me, is impressively better than the same YouTube on the PC - probably because it uses H264 which’ll be supported in the next version of Flash.

The wifi is also used for the in-built Safari. The test of any browser, for me, is whether it’ll cope with the complication of loading, say, Gmail. The good news is that it does. You can even read your email in the fully zoomed-out view. Most users, though, will find the special PDA version of Gmail rather more usable; you can get to it via http://www.google.com/ig/mobile, a useful page to know about, since it also gets you to the mobile version of Google Reader. But, it coped happily with anything I threw at it - the BBC News website works just fine, for example (as long as you don’t want to watch any of the video content).

The device is surprisingly high-powered, too. I loaded a complicated website, www.nyt.com, on both my copy of Firefox on the PC, and Safari on the iPhone; having ensured the cache was clear on both occasions. My “battery lasts half an hour” PC loaded the page in 12 seconds; the iPhone iPod took a respectable 16 seconds. It should be noted that the page was visible and readable on both devices before it had fully loaded, so the wait-time was even lower.

This is a viable “take it into the garden and read the e-paper” device. The fact it’s an iPod is almost irrelevant.

The ‘contacts’ application, which syncs both ways (so you can add contacts on your device), is a good system - particularly when combined with Plaxo on my Mac, which means the changes I made on a boring tube journey are now part of my proper contacts book across the many devices I use.

Sadly, the ‘calendar’ application is less useful. Through no apparent reason other than a wish to cripple the device, Apple removed a chance of editing your calendar directly from the iPod; so it’s read-only. You -could-, I suppose, use Google Calendar through the wifi, and get iCal to sync that, but it’s a shame that this has been crippled in this way.

Connecting to wifi is quick, and the device is quite sensitive; it finds an amazing amount of wireless networks in central London, and connects almost instantly to my (hidden) WPA connection at home.

In conclusion, then, this is three devices in one. A surprisingly-usable web tablet. A splendidly capable contacts book. And it plays music (and video) too.

Add a phone in there and, well, you’ve really got something.

.

Looking for some tips and tricks?
- Make sure you use a powered USB hub, or plug it directly into your computer. Mine irritatingly made the “syncing” noise, but did nothing more, until I fiddled around. Just because your previous iPods charged happily on an unpowered hub doesn’t mean this new beauty will.
- Want a sensible case for it? An Apple iPod sock is just the ticket; it fits almost too perfectly.
- Developing for it? The user-agent contains “iPod” and not “iPhone”.

(Update 15 Oct: thank you John Naughton for noticing I’d turned my iPod into an iPhone in one paragraph. Now fixed.)

Photo: Daniel Morris. Used under licence.

I’ve been working this weekend on a presentation I’m giving in a few weeks’ time. (My speaking calendar is on my website).

I’ve stumbled into an interesting statistic.

DAB Digital Radio really launched for Christmas, 2002, when the Pure Evoke, the first really consumer product, went on sale.

The Apple iPod was launched in April 2001, with a Mac-only product. The Windows-compatible iPod was launched in July 2002.

So it’s interesting that 4 million iPods had been sold in the UK by mid-2006. Which makes the iPod - iconic and tremendously popular device as it is - about as popular as DAB Digital Radio.

So it’s interesting that only 2 million iPods had been sold in the UK by mid-2006. Which makes the iPod - iconic and tremendously popular device as it is - less popular than DAB Digital Radio.

Or, to put it another way…

DAB Digital Radio. As More popular as the iPod.

Crikey.

(Updated with a rather more useful link to the Mirror’s site).

While I was there, I visited the electronics market in Singapore, and a few other electronic stores. Notable was a total absence of DAB Digital Radio sets, despite DAB launching many years ago in Singapore (and despite the fact that it’s the only country with 100% coverage). That’s a concern.

I did buy something, though - something I discover is known as a “ChiPod”: a chinese imitation iPod Nano. This unbranded machine - above - looks a quite passable imitation, and it cost just £27. Inside, it has three games; a video player (playing the mysterious MTV ‘format’); an audio player that plays MP3s and even displays lyrics; an eBook reader (of which there is no documentation at all); a photo viewer; a voice recorder; and last, but not least, an FM radio.

The FM radio is there, of course, because there’s an FM radio on the chip that’s inside the device, and support for it is written into the software. It was, arguably, more work to disable it.

But it does pose the question: Why, in a £149 device like the iPod Nano, is there no FM radio - when this ChiPod managed to include one, and a mains charger too incidentally, for £27?