Itisi

You have read my complaints about sploggers who scrape blog posts to fill their nasty little blogs, but there is another menace to bloggers: people who take your work, remove your byline and post it in forums or even on their own site. I have just discovered that someone has done this with an article of mine. What’s even worse, somehow they had even managed to mangle the formatting so it looked like crap. GRRRRR!

It really bloody annoys me when people seem to think that something you have worked long and hard on can be stolen from you simply be ‘it’s neat’ or ‘kinda cool’. Or mainly because they are too damn lazy to write their own content. Writers work for a living just the same as plumbers or teachers! Just because it may seem easy and even fun (yeah right) does not mean someone can steal from us.

Oh, and if you happen to be the sort of person who goes in for such bone idle copy and paste jobs ask yourself how you would feel if your boss decided not to pay you at the end of the month? Would you take it on the chin or be extremely pissed off?

OK rant over, sorry about that. I really needed to vent.

Currently listening to: My teeth grinding

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Captchas are those little images on blog comment pages which exist to prevent automated bots posting spammy comments. If you click on the comment links on this blog you will see one – and I wish you luck trying to decipher it first time because Blogger captchas are notoriously difficult to read. However, while it may take a couple of attempts to get a Blogger captcha right, they are actually the good guys of the captcha world because they include an audio version for anyone with visual impairment who is using a ‘speaking’ browser. To give you an idea of the kind of experience the same person would have while trying to sign up with Facebook or MySpace watch this video.

I don’t know about you, but watching that made me feel quite sad. It is extremely unfair that someone should be denied the opportunity to use highly popular sites simply because of unnecessary technology, and these captchas are unnecessary. I used to use them on my other blogs until I realised they made little difference – spambots are detected by other software I have in place and anyone manually posting the stuff can read the captcha. Meanwhile, a genuine visitor, who just happens not to be able to see, is denied the opportunity to interact. That is awful and very unfair!

So, I say, send image only captchas to Room 101, the internet should be available to everyone!

To take part in Room 101 and consign life’s little irritations to oblivion go here.

Currently listening to: Diego, who is ready for his second breakfast

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Over at The Quacks of Life, Pete has written a piece about the news of cutbacks at the BBC in which he echoes my own thoughts about the matter. There was a time when the BBC could be relied upon to provide programming that was entertaining, but high quality. Sadly, in the last few years all that has changed. Yes, there are still some gems, but they produce far too much inane, formulaic dross.

I realise that in order to remain competitive they have to compete with dozens of other channels. I realise that due the licence fee they have to try to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. But, I feel that in their attempts to do this, they have actually become a pale, insipid clone of certain, more commercial channels.

At this point you may be thinking something along the lines of ‘but all that dross is hugely popular’. But is it? Or is it really popular only with a small number of viewers, while the vast majority watch it because it all that is available? Wouldn’t people really prefer comedies of the calibre of Blackadder or Porridge? Or David Attenborough style wildlife programmes? Or more dramas and book adaptations? Those genres were the ones the BBC were most successful in, and the programmes they made are still being repeated because people want to see them. The fact that so many viewers tune in to the nostalgia channels to watch repeats of BBC series, often for the umpteenth time, rather than watch something new on BBC1 says quite a lot!

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