Slightly more on-topic, but still McCann related (for whom my sympathy grows ever day), I do wish that when newspapers and news agencies like the Guardian refer to a blog - in this case Gerry McCann’s - they could give us the link.

Does James Bond accurately reflect the British mood?  I’m switching off my brain and watching “The World Is Not Enough” on TV.  It’s from 1999 and stars the slick Pierce Brosnan.   Nowadays, 007 is played by more rugged Daniel Craig.  Does this mirror the Blair to Brown transition?  Does it reflect the current public taste, and does it suggest the best strategy to convince the public in today’s world?  A smooth act isn’t quite so trusted.   A few rough edges are considered more ‘real”.

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.

Oh the irony !   Helen Bowden,  the BBC manager who decided not to cover the July 7 bombs two years ago, but to keep reporting the official  London Transport’s “delays on the line” message, while Sky was telling the world all about the biggest terrorist attack on London, has redeemed herself somewhat.  She’s on the scene at Glasgow airport where a burning car has just rammed the entrance.

Even so Sky News is still beating the BBC on this breaking news story, with dramatic pictures from phones while the BBC shows library pictures of  the airport on a boring day.

BBC managers are in love with 24 hour news, but I’m still not quite sure that they ‘get it’ - or anything that can’t be planned ahead in a meeting.

If I was a PR man, which thankfully I’m not, Tony Blair would be my Way, my Untruth and my Light. He would be my Great Lord and my Inspiration.

His genius, I believe, was to invent political humility. Alright, it was probably fake humility, but it convinced more often than not. The quality was evident in his self-authored epitaph which he declared yesterday: “I did what I thought was right.”

There is something winning about a leader who admits he is an ordinary, fallible, mortal, who is simply doing his best. I noticed it years ago, when I saw Blair, the young opposition leader, walking around the BBC’s Broadcasting House. He was talking to a producer and a presenter, sprinkling his star dust on them, but really talking to them. Other politicians who came round were more other worldly. They weren’t rude, but they were somehow like other beings. They sort of swept in and out of the BBC. There was something regal perhaps even super-natural in their bearing.

I can tell you something about Gordon Brown. He is never going to say that he thought he was right. When Gordon is forced out to face the public, which not that often, he bangs on about how everything does IS right. He just goes on and on about his record which is not just right, but is THE BEST.

But the conversational tone, which is exemplified by blogs, is now the modern way of communicating. You can spin or not spin, but you have to talk across to people, not down to them. This is why Gordon Brown cannot win a General Election.

The owner of the world’s most self-regarding newspaper has been musing that his NY Times might no longer be in print in five years’ time,

Here’s what Arthur Sulzberger has to say;

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either… The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”

The Times’s online readership stands at 1.5 million a day besides its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.

But Sulzberger seems to think that people will pay to read his news online…. I doubt that somehow. News is a commodity now, and the NY Times doesn’t do it that much better than anyone else.

The BBC Trust - which nowadays is the governing body of the state-sponsored broadcaster - has given the go-ahead for the BBC to offer more TV and radio programmes as downloads.

It’s not great news for those of us independents struggling to get established in the download business. However, I am glad that they are showing some restraint as regards audio books, as there might be unfair, state-sponsored competition with an established commercial market - not that that usually stops the Beeb doing what it wants. Overall I don’t think this is positive for audio or video podcasts. We might be faced with a deluge of lavishly funded, heavily marketed material pushing us out.

The danger for the BBC, though, is that when a show gets downloaded it is disassociated from the network, and the audience starts to get loyal to the show and its stars, without holding any affection for the broadcaster. This is a continuation of what’s been happening since the ‘golden age of telly’ back in the ’70s, when people still called the BBC ‘aunty’. In these multi-station days of the zapper, few of us know or care what channel we are watching.

Time Magazine has named its person of the year as “You” - by which it means “us”, dear readers, or everyone involved in Web 2.0. So congratulations to us - and to Time. It’s a brave move for a magazine that is definately “them’.

P.S.

I think some of the big bloggers are being a bit churlish about Time. If it’s a wheeze to get lots of traffic off bloggers, then they are only doing what most of us do, but don’t like to admit (they are succeeding too, so good for them). More likley it was less calculated, and a generous gesture to a rival form of media. Time’s “Person of the year” is not meant to be news, it’s meant to be a retrospective recognition, and a sign of the times that will be recognised in years to come. Perhaps bloggers don’t always have to be negative….

Google has announced that it’s experimenting with audio ads through its Adsense service. Initially it’s helping advertisers buy space on radio stations, but why not podcasts next? There may also be an opportunity for podcasters to produce audio ads for those advertisers who don’t yet have their audio plug ready. I would have thought selling simple endorsements / sponsorship would be the audio equivalent of a classic Google text ad. All in all, a significant development for the commercial future of audio.

The Press Gazette is to close after 41 years reporting on journalism, mostly in the UK. No reasons were given. In a way, its surprising it’s lasted so long. Classified Ads for British journalism jobs go straight to Monday’s Media Guardian. I suppose there are so many media pundits blogging away for free these days, that the competition was almost limitless. Still, I think if you wanted to really know what was going on behind the scenes in British journalism, you had to read the Gazette. It will be missed.

Interesting to see that Podshow’s slick new site is putting a big emphasis on video, and is calling itself a “media network”. Deeper in, you’ll find that a lot of the content comes from “across the net” i.e. from YouTube. In the UK Podshow has teamed up with BT and is looking for video-on-demand talent.

We still believe that there’s a lot of demand for audio - it’s a very special medium - but there just isn’t enough top-quality speech talent in podcating.

At the minute video is hot even when it’s crap, but soon quality will rise to the top. It’s the same with audio. People will try out cheap and easy podcasts and then stop subscribing. You have to aim to be up with the best of them - and that means the BBC and NPR. It means a lot of time, thought, and effort and little up-front reward. This is essentially the story of why the indies are losing out in the podcasting wars and moaning about it over on Britcaster.