plasticbag.org

I wish I could take sole credit for this, but I can’t. As part of my last job at emap – where I was running TCN, I also designed (and co-designed) a couple of sites. The first one, Morning After TV was launched a while back – but now the other one (which I only worked out basic structure, and did the early design treatments for) has now launched at J17.com. That’s right, I’ve been working for Just Seventeen. How cool is that. Major design kudos goes to Denise Wilton, who’s responsible for giving my initial designs a substantial face-lift, and huge tech wiggles go to Cal for building, well, all of it…

I’m a weblogging Dame. Who’d have thought it. In more important news, my source at Time Out has given me seven episodes of the new series of Buffy and Angel, so you must expect slightly sporadic updates for the next five or six hours…

Via Ev (who’s pumping out a resolute ‘no comment’ on the whole Premium Blogger thing) comes this neat and well assembled Flash-based clock. I’m always extremely impressed when people manage to incorporate a non-computery aesthetic into sites – it’s not as easy as it seems.

It’s a shame, but it seems that there will be no Anti-Bloggies this year.

Of course the best thing about working from home is that you don’t have to go outside. And correspondingly the worst thing about it is that most of your stories involve particularly sticky patches on the kitchen floor, the number of cigarettes you’ve smoked in a day and how you’re duvet has got stuck down one end of its cover (even though that doesn’t matter because you move so little and drink so much caffeine that you no longer need to sleep).

Now that someone has actually broken the news on a site (rather than just on a mailing list), I think it’s time I gave my opinion on the proposed “Premium Blogger” that is rumoured to cost $30 a year. Bear in mind that at the time of posting, there has been no word from Pyra on this app. There’s a discussion over at Metafilter, but here’s my take on it as posted to UKBloggers:
“The big question then is going to be do you have any idea about
how this premium stuff is going to work?
I had a long conversation with megnut when she was still with
blogger about what their plans were with Blogger Pro – which
this sounds very much like – and the big issue seemed to be
what you’re getting people to pay for…
For example – are you paying for a premium membership with
as many blogs as you like? In which case how do you stop
people disseminating the log-in details to run a hundred blogs
from the same account? If you ARE running a premium blog – do
other people who are allowed to post on the same blog have to
pay to use it? Is there a difference between a user who runs fifty
blogs each with a thousand posters on each and one who runs
one weblog which he posts to every month. Etc. etc.
“There are many more questions – particularly for people whose
sites consist of several blogs bolted together…
“I’d pay in an instant. Particularly for extra functionality. But I’m
interested in what the service will include. I think there are
various ways they could go… five blogs perhaps with a maximum
of twenty users between them (for example) would be a good
system as far as I was concerned. But there WILL be
consolidation of individuals using them.
“Having said that it’s still better to have three users paying $10
each than three users paying nothing…”

Want to know what was really going on in the Lord of the Rings? Then read the many secret diaries of the various participants…

I’ve suddenly started getting lots of traffic and I don’t quite know why. If you’ve seen plasticbag.org in a magazine or a newspaper or anywhere unusual in an article or something, could you let me know. Thanks.

My flatmate is buying an iBook. Just to tease me, you understand. I went into town with her today to decide what she needs. Sigh.

There’s going to be an announcement tomorrow regarding Blogger. Could it be that we’re finally going to have to pay for the damn thing? Could it be that there’ll be some kind of increased functionality? Could it be that Ev has found a business partner who’s going to splash millions of dollars in his lap to make the service horrifically amazing?