The vision thing

Well, Monday is the moment of truth for BT's long-awaited entry into TV, and I guess there must be more than a few sets of white knuckles at BT Centre. The launch comes at a time when TV viewing in the UK is seeing some interesting shifts - around 40% of respondents to a BBC survey say that internet video is displacing TV viewing to some extent, 20% say it is significant, and it also looks like the HD bug is catching. I'm curious to see what BT delivers, and I wish the company well, but there are still some pretty difficult fundamental questions as to what the medium even is anymore (ignore the long downloads and initial annoying advertisement - these are worth waiting for), which I doubt will be answered on Monday.

Whose tube?

The downside of user-generated content, from South Korea, as some shibpallom gets literal.

Things are in the saddle, and ride man

It's 2015 in London, and you're still trying to recover from the fantastically successful Olympics. Your home has a 100Mbps symmetrical broadband connection which satisfies most, if not all, of your media and information needs. Your legacy PSTN connection is a distant memory, and in idle moments you reminisce about those bad old days when a movie used to take a few hours to download. Most of the applications you run are web-based, and a lot of your media is stored somewhere other than on a device in your home. Well, if this LogicaCMG survey is right, you'd better have your own generator, or a house covered in solar panels, if you want "five nines" access. I wonder how much of an issue the telecom industry sees in securing/guaranteeing a reliable energy supply for customers? Any comments, as usual, are most welcome.

Abandoned blogs

I thought this would be an appropriate topic with which to start the revival of Chaotica. Recent work commitments have made it impossible to maintain momentum here, but I will now return to regular posting as things have finally calmed down a bit.

The hard-working people over at japan.internet.com have updated their regular series of surveys into blogging, focusing this time on reasons why people give it up. Interestingly of the 1,041 people interviewed, 42% claim to have published their own blog, but of this number 31% claim to have abandoned it. Of those who abandon their blogs, 67% say it is because "maintaining it is a hassle," 22% say they "got tired of it," and 17% say that the relevance of the topic their were posting on had diminished. Most interesting to me is that another 17% of respondents say that their attention has moved to community sites such as Mixi.