I could discuss film & music piracy, the coming death of the traditional music, film & TV industries, newspaper paywalls, the lack of residual value with digital products etc. etc. etc.

I’m going to try and avoid that.

Suffice to say, people are used to getting things for free on the internet.

We are spoilt for choice these days.  Even having to register (for free) to use something is enough to put us off.  Being asked to cough up money for something is just unthinkable.  We’ll just look elsewhere.

Does this mean we are all cheapskates or pirates?  Does it mean we don’t believe people should be rewarded for their efforts, even if they benefit us personally??

I don’t believe so.

Anyway, back to the point…

I believe there is a need for a simple method of rewarding people for their efforts financially, and I believe a new “social micropayments” service called “flattr” could well be it.

The idea is simple.

If you provide a service or some content on the internet (I’ll henceforth refer to “content providers”) and want to allow people to reward you if they find it useful – you sign up with flattr.com and add a button to your website.

If you want to “donate” or “pay” (whatever you want to call it) money to a content provider you pay a flat fee (of your choosing) to flattr.com and, as you surf the web and find useful content you click on their flattr buttons.  flattr keeps track of whose buttons you have pressed over the course of a month and at the end of the month it divides up your account balance equally and gives it to the content providers you have rewarded.

ie. If you “load” £10 and click 10 buttons over the month, each content provider will receive £1.

This is the best method I have yet encountered that allows people to reward content providers financially and allows content providers to be rewarded.

I should mention, in order for a content provider to be able to receive money, they must also load money into their account and “flattr” other content providers themselves (this is the “social” part of the service).  Sounds fair enough I think.

Now, I don’t believe for a second this will stop skint teenagers from illegally downloading music, films & TV shows – they simply don’t have the money to spend anyway.

However, I do believe it provides a convenient method for people who have money and who *want* to reward content provider for providing them with something useful.

It’s a fantastic way of bridging the gap between charitable donations and traditional purchasing.

I could see myself using this to pay for user-supported internet radio, open source software, digital artwork, eBooks etc. etc.

flattr.com – watch this space.

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can”.
- Arthur Ashe

“Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness – the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected”.
- G. Macdonald

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”.
- G. K. Chesterton

“Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened”.
- Gerald W. Johnston

“Hope doesn’t come from calculating whether the good news is winning out over the bad. It’s simply a choice to take action”.
- Anna Lappe

“Management is nothing more than motivating other people”.
- Lee Iacocca

“God gave us memories that we might have roses in December”.
- J. M. Barry

“He is able who thinks he is able”.
- Buddha

“Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia”.
- Charles M. Schluz

“One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things”.
- Henry Miller

“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them”.
- Edward R. Murrow

“Do what you can with what you have where you are”.
- Theodore Roosevelt

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit”.
- Aristotle

“Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
- John Wooden

“Sometimes it is not enough to do our best. We must do what is required!”
- Winston Churchill

“No day is so bad it can’t be fixed with a nap”.
- Carrie Snow

“People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one”.
- Leo J. Burke

“Dawn: When men of reason go to bed”.
- Ambrose Bierce

“Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it’s time to get up”.
- Author Unknown

“Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus you may feel your pulse”.
- Henry David Thoreau

http://www.weebls-stuff.com/onthemoon/

The Fab Faux – Abbey Road Side 2 (mostly) from The Fab Faux on Vimeo.

I spent many weeks in 2004 archiving my CD’s onto an external hard drive in the lossless audio format FLAC. I did this because I wanted to have a perfect copy of my music which I could subsequently convert into various lossy formats such as Ogg Vorbis, MP3, AAC etc. Ripping CD’s is a laborious process and I only wanted to do it once!

For every day use I have converted my music collection into Ogg Vorbis format (using quality setting 4 in case you’re interested).

I am thrilled to bits with how it’s worked out. FLAC does a great job of saving me disk space and quite how Ogg Vorbis can sound SO good yet take up such little space is nothing short of miraculous!

Having said that, from time-to-time it is useful for me to be able to convert my music into MP3 format. I use the free MP3 encoder “LAME”. Yet another open source miracle.

This article explains how I perform the conversion from FLAC to MP3 using a great piece of free software I (eventually) found on the web.

The best program I have found for converting FLAC audio files to MP3 using LAME is “Frontah”.

It is basically a nice frontend for various audio codecs. It will convert between the formats we are interested in ie. FLAC and MP3 but can also handle others such as Ogg Vorbis, Monkey’s Audio, Musepak, AAC etc.

It makes the whole process very easy, transfers all the file tag information (track title, artist, album etc.) and allows you to pass additional command line parameters to the codec so you can customise the encoding process.

You can download “Frontah” for free from:

http://home.vxu.se/mdati00/frontah/

When you have downloaded “Frontah” there is no need to install it – it just runs when you double-click the “frontah.exe” file.

Before you start encoding make sure you have downloaded the LAME MP3 codec, unzipped the files and copied them to the same directory as Frontah. Do the same with your FLAC codec files.

For more information on using Frontah visit the website:

http://home.vxu.se/mdati00/frontah/

Who needs a dodgy digital radio with its limited stations, poor sound quality and lousy battery life?  Not me, my PC is my radio.

Here are links to a bunch of my favourite internet radio stations.