Daily Record - New internet radio station plays tracks in your head  

Scotsman - Radio silence, but you ‘hear’ catchy tunes

As you know anything quirky or odd is always likely to pique my interest so when I saw a tweet from Stef Lewandowski (@stef) announcing the launch of his new ’silent radio station’ that was me sold.

Twadio is a twitter based radio station which plays popular hits … but not in a way anyone can listen to. ‘Listeners’ are sent messages in their twitter stream letting them know what song is playing but that is it, there is no way to listen along.

They claim that because many songs are so recognizable simply seeing the name of a track and the artist causes you to remember the music, and that is as good as hearing it.

‘Oh @$%&’, I thought. Over the past year or so I have encouraged a number of clients to go with Brightcove video on their sites. I braced myself for a few angry phone calls.’

“Regretfully, we’ve decided to discontinue the Brightcove Network (the free version of our service). The discontinuation of the free Brightcove Network accounts will not affect Brightcove platform accounts that customers have paid to use.

Please see the FAQ for complete details about this transition.”

On December 17, 2008, we will be shutting down Brightcove Network accounts that have not been upgraded to paid Brightcove platform accounts. At the same time, we will be shutting down the Brightcove.TV website 

The Brightcove Network had since 2006 allowed smaller sites the same feature-set as the big-boy publishers such as the Telegraph and the New York Times, but without the option to monetize.

Publishers could create custom players, playlists and embed-able videos.

I had often wondered how they were able to offer the same service they charge big publishers thousands for, now it appeared they were asking themselves the same question. 

As on 17 December all Brightcove Network accounts will be turned off, that means all the videos you embedded in articles will disappear unless you upgrade to their new “low cost” service.

However they do not tell you the price of this “low cost” service, nor is the information available anywhere on their site. I have heard from other users it is around $6,000 per year, but am waiting for a reply to my emails.

While this is no doubt a fraction of the price they charge big publishers it is still waaaay too much for the people I had introduced to Brighcove. Some of them have hundreds of videos embedded in articles which will be turned off in little over a month.

If they were offing a $50 per month deal I would be telling people to go with it, Brighcove has great encoding, backend and players. As it is I will suggest they make sure have the original files, an enough time to re embed them into articles on another service.

My new business cards have arrived in a variety of brightly coloured flavours and at first glance it appears I even managed to spell my name correctly, which is good news.

I the box from Moo.com there was also a fun little game which I am going to give a go. Buzzword Challenge, where you try to use buzzwords including ‘Social faceworking’ ’socialocomotion’ and ‘blogospherical’ in meeting and see how many of them you can get through before someone asks you what they mean.

On closer inspection I found everyone was going manga crazy and at least 25% of the people I follow were now represented by a manga version of themselves.

As someone who had tried FaceYourManga a day earlier – but quit after not being able to find a suitable jawline –  I recognized the distinctive images and wondered if this would carry across social networks.

Oddly it hasn’t (yet) very few of my friends on Facebook or the multitude of other social sites appear to have gone manga, so what is it about twitter users?

Above you can see my attempt at a manga me … and why I didn’t use it.