Symphonious

Rich Bowen has been posting podcasts of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Simply brilliant! Sadly it doesn't look like we'll get to the final stave by Australian Christmas so I'll most likely have to wait until I get back in the new year to hear the end. All the same, it is a very entertaining reading of one of the classic stories and I can't recommend you listen to it enough.

Thanks so much for sharing your love of this story Rich.

Scoble:

I would love it if my blog tool could tell me more about the things I link to. For instance, how much traffic did it send to that person? How many people linked to it after my link (that would tell me the viralness of an idea)? How many times have I linked to Graham? How does that compare to the number of times I’ve linked to Dori Smith or Dave Winer? What’s the reciprocity of a link? (Did Graham link back and continue the conversation?)

 Most website tracking software will tell you how many people followed a link from your site. How many other people link to it is moving into Technorati/PubSub/etc's realm, as is the reciprocity count for links. How many times you've linked to various sites isn't a stat I've seen before but could be added either directly to your blogging software or to your blog tracking software.

BlogBeat gives a very easy to use view of these kinds of statistics and Google Analytics provides a more in-depth but harder to understand view of them. It would be worth trying a few of these types of services out and seeing which you prefer. The main question though is why do you want to know these things? What do you plan to do with the information? If it's just for interests sake the simple interface is probably the best, if you want to use that information to post more about what interests your readers, perhaps you need more in-depth stats and should also consider looking at what people read vs what they skip over or just skim.

Queensland Transport provide an online form to allow you to change your address details:    +5 brownie points

The form pops up in a new window:    -2 brownie points

The new window expands to be full screen:    -4 brownie points

The new window hides the location bar and all other window decorations:    -10 brownie points

The SSL certificate is self signed:    Do not pass GO, do not collect brownie points. Go straight home and tell your mother what you did.

Sigh, this is Queensland's idea of how to be the smart state…

I've caught up on the backlog of stuff to write about from the past couple of weeks where I've been preoccupied with moving house, mostly by dropping it off the list because it's just too old to be worth commenting on now. So now I'm off to the Gold Coast for christmas holidays with my darling fiance and her family. It's a tough life sometimes. Anyway, that means I won't be posting much here for a while again, possibly until the new year. So merry christmas all!

The Boston Globe:

AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers' own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.

Why does that not surprise me? In the end though this is very bad for consumers who are paying for internet access and deserve to get the best speeds possible for the best price possible for whatever services they want to use it for.