Sunday, July 19, 2009

The New Pirate Bay: False Economy?

Physorg: New Pirate Bay to be based on give-and-take models.

I've been reading news that The Pirate Bay is to harness it's technology to pay both content providers and users for their content and upload respectively. It's an interesting concept of legalisation. A site once known for its open taunting of legal threats is to be purchased by Global Gaming Factory X and turned legitimate.

It hardly surprises me the owners (who have been found guilty of Copyright Infringement and fined) have considered selling their site. It makes sense. Sell to someone legitimate in order to pay off the fines. This would suggest any earnings of the venture so far are either tied up somehow or spent. Another alternative is that if the owners were found to have made significant sums from the site that they would be taken to court again by the aggrieved parties to recoup their "losses."

What I fail to see is how soon this legal give-and-take model can be up and running. By the time such technologies are put in place I would imagine that the vast majority of the userbase will have moved on to using different torrent sites or other means of sharing illicit files.

Then comes the question of ISPs. Already some have throttled bittorrent packets across their networks. I think that the minute this service is launched those same ISPs are going to start making noise. Why should users make gains by running data across their networks, they'll say!

The micropayment platform with which to pay users will be equally difficult. Sure, you could link the give-and-take platform into a service such as PayPal, but if I were a company like that I'd want to pay out as little as possible. That means I'd want users to sign up, spend a certain amount and only be able to make a predefined amount of money back (say, the price of a movie download). In essence, what you would really want to do is have a method of "paying" users a balance that they would in turn spend on more downloads. Does the long tail apply here? Would a company trying this sort of venture end up coming up against the law of diminishing returns? What then?

It will be interesting to find out what does happen with this. I'll be keeping watch on how The Pirate Bay fares in future. Somehow I doubt I'll get an account with them but if it's all it's cracked up to be I may end up eating my words. Hmm, food for thought indeed...

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Fitzpatricks Hotels "Joy of Summer" Competition

First off, full disclosure, although I work in the Travel trade I am in no way associated with Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel. To be honest, after seeing their latest marketing ploy make its way to my inbox I wouldn't want to be either.



The above image was attached to the following email:

"Ladies and Gentlemen,

The Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel has great news for you...

To celebrate the launch of its wonderful Summer Break Packages, we would like to treat you to a wonderful weekend of luxury.

You and a friend will enjoy :

- a 2 night stay in a Luxurious Suite

- wine & chocolates on arrival

- a sumptuous dinner in one of Fitzpatricks Award-Winning restaurants

And

- a wonderful relaxtion treatment of choice in our Treatment Rooms

To indulge yourself in this weekend away, all you have to do is:

Simply send this email to 8 friends and cc competition@fitzpatricks.com by Monday, June 15th for your chance to enjoy a relaxing weekend away.

Please see our Summer Break Packagesn Attached to forward to your 8 friends"


Essentially what they've done is ask 1 person to give up 9 email addresses in order to win a competition. So what do they do with the email addresses after that? I can guess, I'm sure you can too.

I suppose this just gives them more publicity though, doesn't it... *sigh*

Friday, May 15, 2009

Sons of Anarchy

I saw the ad for Sons of Anarchy while watching TV there a few weeks ago. Ron Perlman, bikes... it looked good to me. Not in an assless leather chaps sense but in a biker gang sort of way. MCs have always interested me. Usually the only exposure regular people would get to them is seeing them pass on the road or maybe the odd Discovery Channel documentary about them.

From reading a few biker forums I'm a member of I had heard good things. One comment even compared the first season to season's 1 - 4 of Lost. I'm a big Lost fan so I expected good things!

I'll say this... Having watched the pilot I was in no way disappointed! It had it all: Ron Perlman, bikes, guns, gratutious violence, an interesting sub-plot and best/worst of all (I can't decide whether it's a good or bad thing...) unanswered questions to get you to tune in next week.

Definitely looking forward to watching the full season. Hopefully it's not another Prison Break. That show should have ended after the first season.

Saturday, February 07, 2009

How I started listening to Dillenger Escape Plan

I woke up on Saturday morning with Aphex Twin's Come to Daddy going through my head. Sung it in the shower too!

It reminded me of college, some of the people I used to know and ultimately one of them who during a drunken conversation mentioned a cover version of Come to Daddy he had heard by "some metal band".

Through the wonder of Google and YouTube I came upon Dillenger Escape Plan. After listening to their cover a few times (read repeatedly clicking 'Replay' when the tune finished) I started to listen to some of their other stuff. Have to say, I haven't looked back since then. I've got three of their albums, even when they cost 22 euro in the "sales" (how come nothing you ever really *want* is on sale).

The whole concept of mathcore is pretty interesting to me also. A topic for another day perhaps...

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

The Recession Jar

I've been working as a professional for a few years now. I was until mid-way through last year doing a lot of contracting for Architectural firms in Dublin and had been hearing of 'cut-backs', 'economic uncertainty', the 'downturn' and many other phrases like that since January of 2008.

Even in my current workplace you hear those words a lot and you see things like KPIs, Cost Cutting exercises and the rest being used like they were going out of fashion.

So here's my proposal: a swear jar, only the swear words are recession related! 20 cent a 'swear'. The money could be used within the office (or home or wherever) or to make it really hurt could be donated to charity. My guess is if it was the latter the amount of swearing would really decline. People would be much more likely to curb it if they knew they wouldn't be getting something back...

I'm back!

Well, I've a bit more free time at the moment so I can start posting (albeit erratically) to this weblog.

I'm thinking I might post some of my recession beating tips soon. I'm also toying with the idea of publishing my ideas books. Maybe something I've thought over the last few years will spark someones imagination... or maybe they won't. I dunno.
About this Blog
I'm currently playing around with the Layout for my site so if there are any glitches or weird bugs please bear with me. I'm slowly but surely cannibalising someone elses work and making it my own. Going from spiderman to something else altogether hopefully. Any comments please email me: nocent -at- gmail.com
I'm a fightin', f*ckin, pinchin', robbin', stealin', fleecin', eatin', drinkin' man.