Blogging would not have taken off the way it has if it wasn’t for broadband. Very broadband will boost new trends - such as podcasts and video blogs.

But a word of caution. Since writing about my 24 meg internet connection, I’m beginning to understand why 24 x the speed does not necessarily mean 24 x the experience. I’ve been exchanging emails with a couple of bloggers about how fast it really “feels”.

It seems that even if you do have a very fast internet connection, other factors can come into play. Adrian Pegg has sorted out the copper wires in his home, and his connection has jumped from 7 megs to 20. He explains more about it on his blog.

I’m getting 21 megs out of my connection. The BBC site and Google are pretty much instant. My Yahoo email and secure services such as eBay are much improved. Other pages, notably ft.com still take time to load up. As Adrian explained to me, the speed you get can only be as fast as the weakest link in the chain. The website you are looking at may be on a slow or overloaded server. At your end, a fast web browser like Opera makes a noticable difference. Steaming Video seems to take less time and you can potentially get better quality. If you have several people sharing one connection, it’s well worth having the extra bandwidth.

I’m not really the person to ask about the details of this technical stuff (as my slight confusion on my previous post shows) but I see a trend here. The “people” are getting more and more internet power, and therefore more and more opportunities to “do media” themselves. The extra internet power means that the difference between storing something on your hardrive or on the web is becoming more marginal. More and more stuff that previously stayed on your personal computer is being shared online - bookmarks, photographs, audio, documents, and increasingly video. The internet is making us all much more sociable and inclined to share knowledge. The old gate-keepers of knowledge, including the broadcasters and publishers, are having to compete with the likes of you and me. There’s never been such a good time to be indie.

Steven Rubel isn’t sold on Flock yet.  In case you haven’t heard, it’s a new internet browser. Why would we want one of those? I hear you say.  Well, if you are a blogger, you might well want it.  For instance, you can write posts directly from a nice little window in your Flock browser and send them directly to your blog.  I’m doing that right now.  You can drag links from the browser into the window where you are writing. You can display your pics in Flickr along the top of the browser, and any time you fancy it, just drag across and post them to your blog

All your internet favourites on the Flock browser are integrated with Del.ic.io.us (a place on the web to keep your favourite links).  The RSS feeds are there too, so you open up favourites, click on a + sign, and there’s RSS without going to the webpage.

It’s in beta which means it’s full of bugs and scary warnings.  I haven’t come across any yet, but no doubt I will.  At least Flock really understands all the things bloggers like. It’s made with us in mind. There are a lot of us bloggers in the world, and I think many of us will be using Flock one day soon.

Companies may be suspicious of blogs, but Cable & Wireless broadband unit Bulldog has shown it is not scared of anything - maybe that why they named if after a particularly fearsome dog. Bulldog has some interesting products - I’ve been tempted by the leaflets through the door myself - but notoriously poor service. It makes NTL look good, by all accounts. Its flaws were lovingly detailed at www.my-bulldog-hell.co.uk. But now, it what must be something of a first, Bulldog has teamed up with its critics. The site has started discussions with Bulldog, bringing problems to their attention as they crop up on its forums.

“As you can see it looks like Bulldog are keeping to their word and are keen to sort the issues we bring to their attention. If you have an ongoing issue that you’d like sorting then please feel free to start a thread in our forum so we can help, ” announces the site. “We also now have Bulldog staff registered on the site who can help with technical support issues - we hope that over time more Bulldog staff will feel able to register and lend a hand - If you do join our forum please refrain from abusing these members, they are only here to try and help. The team here at my-bulldog-hell feel that Bulldog are sincere in their commitment to work with this site and improve the relationship they have with their customers. ”

And why not? In reality, companies don’t have anything to fear from customer blogs. Nobody went broke by listening to the customers. Nor by improving their service. In the past, anyone going to bulld0g-hell would run straight off to Wanadoo, or BT. Now, they might just sign up.

It has already been reported that the BBC’s experiment of allowing visitors to download Beethoven’s symphonies free of charge attracted around 600,000 users. Norman Lebrecht has some interesting figures in the Guardian suggesting actual hits may well have been past one million, about a quarter of which came from Britain, another quarter from the US, and the remainder from the rest of the world. In other words, it was a tremendous success. I think there are two lessons to be learned from this for people interested in podcasting. One is, fairly obviously, that there is a tremendous audience out there for downloads. The other is that it is a pretty upmarket audience. The BBC’s other big hit has been Melvyn Bragg. I think the point is that there is lots of mindless trash out there - you don’t need a podcast to listen to jabbering DJ’s and Girls Aloud, since you can just switch on the radio. The people intersted in podcasts are searching things out, and making an effort, and by definition they are likely to have more sophisticated tastes.

There’s a lot of talk about the definition Web.2.0., the favourite buzz word of Venture Capitalists at the moment.

Here’s one angle. If Web 1.0 was led and epitomised by Yahoo! then Web 2.0 is led by Google.

As a quick reminder, Yahoo! burst onto the stockmarket in 1996 with an immediate valuation of $1 billion. Its sales back then were a mere $1.4 million in ten months and it was still making a loss. It followed an equally spectacular stockmarket debut by Netscape (who they?) the previous year.

Google floated in August last year when it already had revenues of $1.35 billion a year. The float valued the company at $23 billion (Economist article). According to yesterday’s results, it’s now earning $1.57 billion a quarter.

Even the CEO, Eric Schmidt, seems to be surprised by the numbers. He told the New York Times the secret: “It is really about getting the right ad to the right person at the right time and having them click on it.”

The blog (excuse my language) “fucked Google” - strapline, “praying for Google to Crash” - may have to wait a while to see the fullfilment of the its prayer. In fact, as of now, it seems that the blog itself has vanished. Perhaps it just decided to give up in disgust. Or have lawyers got involved?

Web. 1.0 was the dream. Web 2.0 is the reality.

Google will be forced to change the name of its Gmail service in the UK, following litigation by a little known company, Independent International Investment Research, which claimed it had the right to the name in 80 countries (reports the FT).

The internet is so international, it’s hard to see how the brand won’t have to change in the USA too.

The top brass at Microsoft and Yahoo! are smiling today.

One of the reasons why blogs have grown in importance so quickly, at least for companies, is that internet sales are exploding. Take a look at the latest ACNielsen survey that polled 21,000 consumers in 38 markets worldwide. It found that more than 325 million people have bought something on the Internet in the last month, while more than 627 million have done so at least once. In total, 97 percent of Germans have bought products online, followed by 96 percent of Austrians and 95 percent of the British. In other words, just about everyone. I’m just guessing, but most people sitting in front of a computer buying something also do a search to collect information about what they are getting - whether it is a CD or a gadget or whatever. Increasingly that search is going to turn up blog opionion - since what we most want to know is what other people think of something. The blogs are, in a sense, the atmosphere, in which you shop online. They are as important to companies as the look and feel of a shop or showroom in the old-economy. Which is why they are becoming crucial to determining sales. Companies used to spend a lot of time getting their showrooms or shops right. Now they should be spending a lot of time getting their blogs right - and making sure they know what other bloggers are saying about them.

Like all blogs, we get a lot of spam. We’ve just received a single comment that contains 150 links to porn sites. Is this some kind of record? I’m glad to say that Dr. Dave’s Spam Karma 2 for Wordpress didn’t have any trouble spotting that one. It gave it a bad karma rating of -6088 which means that it’s very obvious spam indeed. I don’t seem able to get through Dr. Dave’s site right now, but I see he has lots of other fans.

PS I still can’t get through to the the Blog Herald. though I do see some posts on RSS. Is it just me? Or is the Blog Herald really still down?

I must be among the first people in the UK to have a 24 Meg broadband internet connection (sorry about my confusion, see below). It’s 24 times faster than my previous internet connection, and at £20 a month, it’s costing me £5 less.

I must admit, it feels faster, but not 24 times faster, at least when I am using Internet Explorer or Firefox. To get the the full benefit, I have to use the Opera Web Browser, and that really does let rip. Even the cumbersome FT.com loads up in under an hour using this system. It’s good for downloading podcasts and videos. I think it’s helpful for Skype too.

I think that Be (who sponsored the recent Podcastcon conference) are the only people offering this kind of speed in the UK at the moment. They sent me a free modem/router, which includes a wireless connection to use the laptop around the house. All you have to do is plug it in and go. They aren’t very good at telling you how to put wireless security on your system. That information is buried somewhere on a disk. But I called their helpline in India, got through quickly, (in the morning, there was a long wait in the evening and I gave up) and they told me what to do.

Another good thing is that the connection is really quiet, so it doesn’t interfere with the phone line adding lots of crackle and hiss to conversations.

If this sounds a bit like a sale’s spiel, well it to tell you the truth, I have an ulterior motive in passing on this bit of useful info. If I refer you to Be, I get a month’s free access. If I refer 24 people, I get a lifetime’s free access. But the good part is, you get a month free too. And then you have get the same deal, refering your contacts. It’s a good old pyramid scheme.

So if you live in the UK and have a BT phoneline, and want to change your internet service provider (ISP), drop me a line at hugh@blog-relations.com and I’ll refer you to Be.

(Update: I got a good earlybird deal. It’s £24 a month now).
(Second update Stupid me! 24 Gig, not meg. Had to change the title of this post too!)
(Right the fist time, thanks David. 24 Meg. I’m embarrassed by my confusion. Don’t know what got into my mind)

Latest update. A reader got in touch to say that he’s only getting 7.5 meg out of Be, even though he’s only 600 meters from the exchange. I checked and see that I’m getting over 21 meg. I suppose it partly depends on your copper wires.
He also pointed out that Parental Control doesn’t seem to work on the Be Box. I tried to block FT.com and redirect it to Blog Relations. I couldn’t get it to work either.

A measure of how worried the old media is getting about the new came with the lecture by Les Hinton, the chairman of News International in the UK, to the Society of Newspaper Editors. He complained about the ‘freeloading generation’ who have become too used to getting their news for free. He moaned about bloggers spreading inaccurate information about the Hurricance that struck New Orleans. “In New Orleans a lot of bad information came from bloggers and amateur witnesses, all newly empowered with instant communication,” he said. “We must be experts at getting it right and being reliable.” Well, fair enough….although some people might be tempted to wonder whether the publisher of The Sun and the News of the World is really the right man to be lecturing the world on journalistic integrity. Indeed, one reason why blogging has grown so quickly might be because people aren’t getting the kind of news they need from the newspapers.

The interesting point is that figures such as Hinton can see power, and more importantly money, bleeding away onto the web, and can’t quite think what to do about it. The figures from the newspaper industry continue to be very disappointed, both in circulation and advertising. One thing is certain. Just whinging won’t fix the problem.

One of the interesting things about blogs is how quickly they are absorbing themselves into mainstream, traditional media. Newpapers are launching blogs as part of the editorial line-up, and TV shows now come with a blog attached. The latest example is ‘Blooks’, that is books based upon blogs. The American website Lulu has just launched The Blooker Prize to recognise the sub-genre of books based on blogs. Whether it takes off remains to be seen. The point is that publishers are going to be increasingly looking at blogs for new ideas: and published authors are going to be creating blogs as part of a process of building an audience. The way blogs are emerging is not as a separate stand-alone medium, but as an adjunct to something that already exists.