Something that never fails to get up my nostrils is websites that use Macromedia Flash. Used when appropriate Flash can create nifty looking and often informative websites - I'll concede that - but such niftiness comes invariably with a pretty hefty downside for both user, and for the website.

In a nutshell Flash based sites break all sorts of well established best practices for user navigation in addition to making the website, for all intent and purpose, 'invisible' to search engines (i.e. invisible to one of most important WWW 'launching pads' for surfers around the world). A few years ago on the CLUAS Discussion board I let rip about such sites, pointing out the numerous shortcomings of this technology before...

In the last few years it has been as clear as crystal to me that there were - and continue to be - so many things that CLUAS needed to do better (or, for that matter, just simply start doing). Finding time to do them for me has always been a problem.

Thankfully 2007 saw some essential building blocks finally get put in place - the launch of the CLUAS blogs, rolling out the ability for writers to directly publish reviews to the site themselves and optimisation of the site for search engines (one result of which is that Google now features new CLUAS articles usually within - literally - minutes of them being published). The last 12 months also saw CLUAS secure thousands of valuable new links to the site (of which several hundred links were from authoritative...

Journalist and blogger Adam Maguire has kicked off a campaign to get Tom Waits classic "Christmas card from a hooker in Minneapolis" to the top of the Irish charts this Christmas. Quite right too.

For a purchase of the song to count for the chart you need to buy it by this coming Thursday (Dec 20) from any of the outlets listed below (all of which are used by IRMA when they compile the charts each week). I've culled these links from the Official Blog Adam has set up for this initiative, I've just split out which services work with what type of platform.

Indulge me a moment as I have a moan. It pains me greatly to see there are no DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) downloads that are recognised by IRMA when they compile their weekly charts. But that I am sure is a temporary state of affairs. By next Christmas I suspect things will have changed on that front as the music industry progresses, as it has begun to do, towards the realisation that using DRM to restrict what music consumers can do with a purchased download is a mug's game.

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Back in 2003 I stumbled across an internet-based radio station called Accuradio. As can often be the case with internet radio 'stations', to call it radio was a bit of a stretch - there were no DJs and with a click of your mouse you could move onto the next track they had lined up. Anyways, back then over a period of about a week I tuned in regularly to their American indie channel and discovered a whole bunch of acts that up to then I had been oblivious too such as The Shins, Modest Mouse, Blonde Redhead, Death Cab for Cutie, Built to Spill and Daniel Johnston. One other act that caught my ear that...

Not happy with pegging concert ticket prices at ever increasing prices, some of the biggest names in the music industry now want to now get a slice of profits made on tickets resold on the web. They are proposing that a 'Resale Rights Society' (RRS) is established that will slap a levy on the sale price of every ticket resold on sites like eBay. Apparently Radiohead, Robbie Williams and Arctic Monkeys are among the 400 artists who think this is a good idea. With a straight face the chairman-elect...

Last night the voting booths for the 2007 CLUAS end of year readers' poll were opened. Keeping things simple we are this year only having one category: best album of the year.

Unlike previous years readers will not be able to vote for absolutely anything they want, instead there is a shortlist of 40 of the best albums released in 2007 from which readers can pick their favourites of the year. The shortlist of 40 was picked by the CLUAS writers (or to be more precise, 38 were chosen by the writers, and 2 slots were decided on by members of the CLUAS discussion board were, more info below). We're doing it this way as, quite simply, in previous years the counting of votes took an absolute eternity. Streamlining it with a fixed shortlist will make it a relative breeze.

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It would come as a surprise to regular visitors but CLUAS is - for the moment - Ireland's no. 1 website for Jazz music. Official.

Well, official at least in the eyes of Yahoo, or Microsoft's 'Live' search engine because, at the time of writing, those two search engines are ranking CLUAS as the number one result for searches for 'Irish Jazz Music' (see Yahoo's results here, Live.com's here). What's more Google was also ranking CLUAS as the number one result up until last week when they (getting a dose of common sense or something) decided to rank another website for these vital key words (Update: After dropping CLUAS from the...

Anybody who tried to access the CLUAS home page, blogs or discussion board this morning (from about 6am GMT to 1pm GMT) would have seen a big fat 'sorry you can't access this website, mate' error.

These sort of errors happen once in a while around these part so it's - normally - no big deal, just a bit of an inconvenience. However this time around it was the first time that the ability to access parts of the site was deliberately blocked by our hosting company because there was too much traffic to the site (to be perfectly precise, access was not blocked to CLUAS but our website was disconnected from the database that contains the content of our blogs and discussion board; the other parts of the site not depending on the database were still accessible).

Being blocked for attracting too much traffic is good news (hey, hey we're attracting more users!) and bad news ("damn, we're going to have to toughen up the hosting infrastructure to deal with the increased levels of traffic").

While sorting...

Bob Dylan has (cue mass rumbling of moral indignation) gone and done an ad for Cadillac to help them sell one of their top-of-the-range SUVs.



It's easy to get outraged by this sort of carry on, especially when you consider the anti-establishment line that defined his first decade as a performer. But, it's really no big deal. Dylan nailed his colours to the corporate mast many a year ago (hell, there's probably some pompous heads out there who would try and tell you he did so back in 1961 when he signed to Columbia Records). There's been plenty of huffing and puffing at the various points when Dylan made it clear that cutting deals with various corporations was fine for him. There was that corporate gig Dylan did for Applied Materials employees back in 2002. Then in 2005 he got into bed with Starbucks for an exclusive deal to distribute 'Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962'. And then last year he lent his hand (and silhouette) to Apple's iTunes division for some exclusive terms with the release of his last album 'Modern Times' (that included a pre-sale ticket tie-in with the devil incarnate TicketMaster). ...

Suffering from how-Radiohead-have-utterly-changed-the-music-industry fatigue yet? Yeah, me too. Despite this I have one final blog entry relating to the release of 'In Rainbows'. It'll be the last one from me, I swear. I wrapped up my 'Radiohead in smooth download shocker' blog entry last week hoping that techie details of how Radiohead delivered the album would be released so that other acts in a similar position could at least go about a similar venture in an informed way. The details I was hoping for? They are at last out. This weekend some fascinating (well, fascinating to a saddo wanna-be geek like me) information emerged about the infrastructure used to deliver 'In Rainbows'...

Looks like Radiohead's back room tshirt sales team geek team got their proverbial finger out. Despite their server crash last week and my fears for a meltdown today, I managed to download a copy of 'In Rainbows' from their (t-shirt shop hosted) web server this a.m without any problems. And it was downloaded in a matter of seconds.

I would not have been surprised if - after their website problems last week - Radiohead had used a specialist third party service to host their digital music files, but they appear to have kept it all in-house. The link they sent out for the download pointed to a new domain name the band has not previously used or announced (inrainbows.co.uk is where the MP3 files are hosted, before now...

Trent Reznor is stirring up a good bit of commentary today having just announced (via his website) that is finally free of the contractual shackles of his label (Interscope) and looks forward to having what he calls a "direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate". There are many comparing it to Radiohead's announcement last week (releasing their next album via their own website and inviting fans to pay what they...

In April 2006 I saw Jane Siberry do a gig in Brussels. I won't labour you with the details but suffice to say she was – at least that night – away with the fairies. It was a terrible, toe-curling fest of an evening, certainly the worst gig of 2006 that I'd seen. But one thing about the night was very memorable. About half way into her set Jane (who was then, and still is, without a record contract) announced she'd be selling copies of her albums after the gig but – and this is where it got memorable - she had no pricelist as she was leaving it to us to decide what we wanted to pay for each CD. Now that was something I'd never heard of before, or since.

Until this week that is.

This...

September 29th marked the six month anniversary of the launch of the Irish Times blog section. The first of their blogs to go live was Jim Carroll's On The Record (the first entry of which was posted on March 29th). The Present Tense, Pricewatch and Correspondant blogs soon followed, although the latter of these was only active until shortly after the General Election. Thankfully, from the off, the decision was taken to not lock the blogs up behind...

Amazon's MP3 store went live yesterday (well, it opened its doors as a public beta) on the US Amazon site. At a quick glance it is an impressive offering for a Beta:

All MP3s they sell are without any form of copy-protection. About 2 million songs are available for purchase which, for a freshly launched public beta service, compares favourably to eMusic and Apple (who claim 2.7 million and three million tracks respectively). Half of the songs are priced at US $0.89, the rest at US $0.99. This is cheaper than iTunes DRM-free MP3s ($1.29 each), but eMusic still offers a better deal to US downloaders Prices for complete album downloads are in the US $6-$10 range. Unlike many other online music stores you don't need iTunes or Windows Media player to download, play or manage the tracks, even so…...