I’m glad to say that Storynory finally broke through 4000 daily subscribers for its feed.  The website is currently doing about 1,100 uniques a day.   It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that iTunes etc is about 4 X as important as the traditional website for this type of audio podcast.

Downloads are at around 140,000 a month.  This is of course the key metric, as sponsorship is generally sold per thousand downloads.  I’m told that finding a serious sponsor will be much easier when we get into the 400,000 to 600,000 range.   Storynory has a big advantage over topical podcasts, because people come back and download several stories from the archives, especially when they are about to go on holiday, where I think a more newsy podcast probably has to rely mostly on downloads of the latest show.

Then I think we can expect $25 -$30 per thousand downloads if we split the revenue with a media broker.  Or perhaps more if we find the sponsor ourselves.

We have always received approaches from potential partners on a regular basis, but recently the quality has been noticeibly higher and some interesting  discussions go on.    There are some people who have imaginative ideas about making money out of podcasts in various ways, but I’ve sworn to keep them under wraps.

On thing I can say which is no secret is that Wizzard Media, which is part of the same group that owns podcast hosts Libsyn and Switchpod,  is actively raising advertising deals for podcasts that can be neatly inserted before and after the show by the webhost.   As they host most of the major podcasts,  Wizzard look set to become the market leader in this field.  Of course when Google /  Feedburner get going that will be pretty serious too, as they are in an ideal position to auction podcasts ads via AdSense and to insert them onto the feeds.

What this all ads up to is that podcasting is starting to shape itself into a business.

Right now our strategy is to concentrate really hard on the content and find partners to do the business side.  In the end, you have to concentrate on what you are best at.

I’ve spent a good deal of time recently trying to rescue my wife’s  PC which has crashed fairly decisively.

I tried various methods found on the net including tapping strings of commands into the recovery console such as these ones.  These got the b***er to boot up, and I thought all was saved, but when the desktop appeared it just hung with an hourglass pouring sand out for all eternity, and nothing could be  done.

I was pretty certain that running a Windows XP upgrade disk would repair everything (rather than a clean re-install which wipes data).  But half-way through the re-installation it just stuck.  I repeated numerous times and the same thing happened.

It was in the early hours of the morning that I found the solution.  Forget Windows, use Linux.   There is a version that boots from a CD and lets you see and copy all your Windows Data.    I plugged in my USB external hard drive and just dragged all the data onto it.  Well alright, it’s going to take all day to transfer, but at least I’m staring at a screen that’s making progress, while typing away on my Mac.  It’s so much less frustrating than yesterday’s road to nowhere.

So if ever you reach this dire straight and all else has failed, what you need is Knoppix.   Be sure to download the English version (unless you are German of course !).  It’s the one that ends in EN.  I chose the smaller version for a CD rather than a DVD.  I burned the disk image (iso) on the Mac using the disk utility, and then slotted it into the PC.   Hey presto, it booted up a desktop Linux, which isn’t half as baffling as it sounds.  It looks more or less like any desktop.

There are two icons on the desktop, one for the files on the PC’s internal hard drive, and another for my USB hard drive.   One tip,  I had to make the USB drive writable before I could transfer the files onto it.  For this it’s important to close all windows that have the drive open in it.  Then right-click, and tick the permissions boxes to all you to write data to it.   The rest is just drag and drop.

Documents and settings aren’t hard to find, but Outlook’s emails and contacts are more buried.  You need to find location the .pst file which should be under the following path:

\documents and settings\username\local settings\application
data\microsoft\outlook\.

You might have to click ‘view hidden files’ under the view tab in the browser.

Once the data is all backed up, I’ll do a clean reinstall of windows, and then reload all my wife’s documents, pictures and goodness knows what from the back up drive.  I’ll also have to reinstall her version of Microsoft Office and I’m not sure where the product key is…..  I don’t see her using Open Office somehow.

Well that’s it. Hope this is useful to somebody, or at least to myself as a reminder if I ever have to go through this PC hell again.  Moreover, I hope to win some brownie points on the domestic front, which always come in handy.

I was asked by an overseas film company to look into the cost of filming some tourist vids in London. Here’s some costs for permissions from the authorities.

If you don’t have permission, the minute you set down a tripod a van-load of Bobbies will descend on you, and cart you off the the Gulag.  This goes even for open spaces.

The Royal Palaces charge £350 + VAT (17.5%) per hour for filming. They also say that normally we would film before or after opening hours. The Royal Palaces include:

Tower of London
Hampton Court
Kensington Palace
Banqueting House
Kew Palace

Royal Parks Charge Between £750 and £1000 + VAT for up to 4 hours. They include:
Greenwich Park
St. James’s Park
Hyde Park
Kensington Gardens

Trafalgar Square run by the Red Mayer of London is the biggest rip-off of all. It costs £500 + Vat per hour. They said that it can take 4 weeks or more to turn around a permission.

I’m yet to get a reply out of Westminster Council as regards spaces such as Covent Garden and Piccadilly Circus.

These costs might within the budget of a Hollywood Major company, and they might even be within the budget of our potential client - though I await their reply with interest - this is the YouTube age. “We” are the media now, and that means that a video made by one camera operator and a dog can get half a million or more downloads. But whose YouTube can afford these prices?

Come on London. Film-makers want to encourage visitors. Don’t let rip-off Britain scare them away.