Microsoft’s shares have tumbled after it failed to convince investors that its investment in new products will pay-off. I’m not surprised.

The former near-monopoly of the software world faces a number of problems, not least that its current release of Windows, XP, is pretty good. In the past it made enemies and money in equal bucket-loads by being crap. Remember Windows 95? It was so frustrating, and crashed every other minute. When a new release of Windows came along, you would rush out a buy a new computer in the hope that it would give you better service.

There’s not much to complain about XP, so there’s no great rush to upgrade. Even if Windows Vista turns out to be pretty good, I’ll probably just wait until my faithful IBM Thinkpad T23 finally kicks the bucket before I’m into a new Windows product.

Microsoft’s next problem is that applications are moving onto the Web. Sure, Microsoft Word, Excel, etc will run off a web server soon, but Google’s Writely costs nothing and is pretty good. One day it will be even more powerful. So why fork-out for Microsoft office?

The “free” web will do for Microsoft in the long run. Armies of motivated geeks can can produce better products than big bucks. One day Microsoft will be a bit like a utility, boring but necessary, cranking out its Windows operating system for the benefit of the world, but struggling to succeed in other fields against its nimbler rivals.

The BBC reports that companies should beware of iPods and Digital Cameras. You can easily transfer not just pictures and MP3s, but loads of digital information onto them, as well as USB memory sticks. This makes them a security risk, and few check to see what employees are transferring from the PC to their camera. Even the military is vulnerable. Recently it was found that USB memory sticks full of American military secrets were being sold on market stalls in Afghanistan.

I’m not so bothered about secrets myself. I keep anything confidential in the safe, and try not to write it on my computer. But on the positive side, moving data about is so convenient these days. From time to time I write about the virtues of the Sony minidisc, which in my view was one of the big missed business opportunities of all time, when it lost out to the iPod. I’d just like to point out that one Sony Hi MD carries 1 Gig of data and costs £5. There’s a lot more you can keep on minidisc than music - and no, I’m not on commission from Sony.

Neville Hobson writes that yesterday’s announcement from the BBC represents a “seismic shift” in the way the Corporation sees its role. The World’s largest broadcaster is “re-inventing” itself for the age of participatory media.

I would not go quite so far. It seems to me that the BBC has reached a first stage - outlined by its head of interactive radio, Simon Nelson, in an interview he gave me a couple of months ago - of accepting that “on demand” is a big part of the future. In other words, the BBC will be as much an online-archive of media as a live broadcaster. People will view and listen to content in a variety of ways at a time of their choosing. There will be a massive educational resource on the BBC’s servers, and a historical, social, and above all cultural wealth that can be accessed at any time.

As Simon Nelson said, the realisation that media is for the future as well as the here and now, will effect the way the BBC makes programmes. It makes you focus on the “classic value” of what you are doing. You are not just chasing today’s ratings, but trying to create something that will be appreciated and downloaded in years to come. This is the quality that was so lacking from the BBC in the “multi-digital” era of the remote channel hopper and ten second attention span. I know that Greg Dyke was a hero at the BBC, but when he was in charge, you really did hear people question the reason for its existence all the time. You don’t hear so much of that now. It’s largely because the BBC is thinking about quality again, as well as ratings.

The second thing that is happening - but I think to a much less great extent - is a shift in the meaning of “public service” broadcasting. In the past this has always meant a service for the public. Now it is starting to include a service by the public. We’ve seen it with pictures an videos sent in by the citizen journalists. Now in some slightly unspecified way we are going to see more of it in the BBC’s online services. Next week the BBC is co-sponsoring the “Our Media” conference about participatory media. I think we are going to be hearing a lot more about “Our BBC”. But there is still a lot of figuring out of what that means. It’s something all big media organisations are going through - but it’s fair to say that the BBC is more open-minded and creative about participatory media than most,not least because it doesn’t have to work out how to make it pay.

Perhaps it’s a co-incidence, but every time the BBC’s licence fee is up for renewal, it re-invents itself for the age. When I was there, it was re-inventing itself for the multi-channel digital TV age. This sounds cynical, but perhaps it’s not a bad thing. Imagine that the NHS faced a possible cut in or total annihilation of its budget every ten years. I think it would focus its mind on value for money, and giving the public, not its employees, what they want. They might start to inform and involve the public more in decisions about their own health. If you needed to see a cancer specialist pronto, the “particpatory” NHS would make sure that you did, by hook or by crook. You would hear a lot fewer lectures about “policy”. Your GP would take care to park his brand new BMW with personalised number plates round the back of the surgery where you can’t see it. He might be willing to drive round to see you out of surgery hours, like his forebearers did 30 years ago. He wouldn’t claim to be running a “complex business” just because he employs an accountant.

Sometimes the BBC’s licence fee model backed up by a Public Service remit and a statutory Charter seems out of date, but it provides much needed discipline that is so lacking from the bottomless-pit model of publicly funded services.

Now that those wealthy would-be lords are calling in their million pound loans to the Labour Party, Tony, Gordon and co really are hard up. They’ve just sent me an email begging for 10 quid.

My name is Sandra Graham, and I am standing as a Labour candidate in Whitley Bay at the local elections on 4 May. I’m asking you to donate £10 to help me, and people like me, fight for cleaner, safer, more vibrant communities all over the country.

It’s interesting to see how the political parties in this country are experimenting electronic campaigning. The Conservatives now podcast speeches and sycophantic interviews with their leader. Labour has set up a site to spoof David “chameleon” Cameron. In the US, at the last elections, vast amounts of money were raised for both parties via blogging and emailing, especially at local level. Whitley Bay is rather a long way from Paddington where I live… Actually, I don’t even know where it is, but presumably it’s by the sea somewhere.

I note that Sarah wants me to give her a tenner. Now if she asked me to lend it, she might have better luck.

Bluehost continues to baffle me. A month ago, I offered to pay, as per their website, for more bandwidth as our Storynory podcast now exceeds the monthly 250 gig allowance of transfer. They wrote back saying that I couldn’t buy bandwidth, as they made a loss on selling it. They explained that our website would go down before the end of the month and wished me to “have a good day.” I spent a weekend transferring all our audio to the internet archive, and recently have put the latest episodes on Libsyn. Now Bluehost writes to me and customers saying:

Dear Bluehost Customer!

We are writing you today to tell about some good news regarding your
Bluehost account. Starting May 1st Bluehost will be offering 15 Gigs
of disk space, and 400 Gigs of data transfer. As always when these
upgrades occur you aren’t charged a thing.

Well this is a generous offer, but I still can’t quite understand how they can’t afford to sell us more bandwidth but they can afford to give us more. The speed of downloads from Bluehost is certainly better than the alternatives we’ve been using. The internet is a strange and wonderful place. I don’t want to be ungrateful, so thank you Bluehost.

Meanwhile Libsyn -who provide unlimited transfer - have announced that 45 million people listen to podcasts hosted on their services:

We think it’s safe to say more then 45 million people listened to and watched podcasts off the Libsyn network in the first quarter of 2006. That is approximately a 200% increase from Q4 2005 (about 25 million).

That’s a Hell of a lot of low-cost bandwidth.

It was also good to meet Glyn Wintle of the Open Rights Group on Sunday’s Podcast-Adam-Curry meet up. The ORG campaigns in the UK against over-burdensom attempts over-protect digital rights.

A good example is the the Hazel Blears amendment to the Police and Criminal Justice Bill that will make it illegal for anyone to own equipment that could be used by hackers. Of course that could cover almost anything, including perhaps a webrowser. It certainly includes security equipment that can be used to test web defenses. Glyn said it’s like banning sledge hammers because they can be used in break-ins, without realising that they have legitimate uses.

In the old days, when the common law ruled supreme in this country, judges and juries were able to cope with the concept of “intent”. It’s not owning a knife, but your intent on how to use it that counts. Now we are moving towards a Napoleonic Legal system, where anything and everything has to be codified, and of course no code can possibly hope to deal with the every eventuality. It’s like Soviet Style Central

The result is that law-abiding people are held up from doing their legitimate business, while criminals just carry on as before.

Just back from the meet-Adam Curry get-together organised by Britcaster at the Bricklayer’s Arms in London.

I met Adam Curry and his crew from Podshow at the entrance to the pub. I was expecting the 1980s MTV presenter to be more of a wrinkly rocker, but he was quite baby-faced, as well as being very lanky. I didn’t chat very much with the “Podfather”. He seemed to be out of circulation for most of the time.

Of course Curry is promoting Podshow,which aims to promote podcasts and win sponsors. I was more intrigued by his rival, Kosso, chief geek for Podcast.com, which will soon launch as yet another podcast directory.

Until recently, Kosso - aka Jon Kossmann - worked for the BBC in the technology department. He was headhunted by Podcast.com whose owners paid a rumoured quarter of a million dollars for the domain name. Kosso was explaining to me how Podcast.com will use OPLM OPML technology. I’m afraid it was a little above my head, but as I understand it, you the user will be able to create your own directory of your favourite podcasts, and you will be able to do it jolly easily. You will even be able to put it on your own blog.

There are so many podcast directories out there, but there isn’t one really good one. As Kosso said, iTunes is great if you use it with an iPod. It just automatically transfers your subscriptions to your portable player. Apart from that, it’s cumbersome and a nuisance. Other directories rank podcasts according to users’ votes - and that’s wide open to abuse. It isn’t easy to find what you are looking for, or to manage your subscriptions. In other words, there is still room for the Google of podcasts to come along. And yes, Podcast.com will be getting into the sponsorship business.

At the moment, Podshow is the biggest outfit in town when it comes to roping in sponsors. But its ritzy Madison Avenue glamour rubs many podcasters up the wrong way. I really do believe it’s going to have tough competition from the likes of Feedburner and Podcast.com.

Interesting to see how the Telegraph is getting the hang of blogging. It started off thinking along newspaper lines - with lots of blogs arranged as correspondents’ columns. It took quite a few clicks to move from one to the other. Now it’s seen the light and has developed tagging to arrange its blog posts. It’s also giving readers tips on RSS feeds, telling them that they are not as scary as they seem. What’s more, the blog has its own clean design and feel, distinct from from the very 1990s Web feel of the Telegraph site.

Well done Telegraph. There is hope yet for the old media.

There are a lot of grumbles that there is no “AdSense” for podcasts - a cheap and simple way for advertisers to reach a portfolio of podcasts. But I notice that on the “Monatize” tab of Feedburner, there is a message promising help for podcasters soon.

Feedburner holds out the best hope yet for podcasters who want to make some money this way. By providing an excellent, and largely free, service, it controls the distribution of over 47,000 podcasts through iTunes, Yahoo, and other podcatchers. You can see how Feedburner could tag a sponsorship message onto the beginning and end of a download. A sponsor could buy 100,000 downloads across four programmes of their choice, just for example. Feedburner could do the reckoning up.

Watch this space. I think it’s going to be an interesting development.

The Labour Party has put up a “Dave the Chameleon” site lampooning the Conservative Leader, David Cameron. Naturally, it includes a spoof blog of sorts.

It seems a little ungrateful, given that Cameron is conspiring with Tony Blair to bring in state funding for political parties, but I like the cute blue chameleon.

One person has died in the Indian city of Bangalore after police opened fire on a violent mob mourning the death of actor Rajkumar. Many fans wept and beat their chests shouting “Long live Rajkumar”. Other elements in the crowd damaged over 50 buses, torched two police vans and 10 private vehicles following the news of the actor’s death, police said.

And the result for IT users around the world? This email from “Be There” Broadband internet hit my in-box this morning:

Dear Be-ing,

Proof that we live in a globalised economy.