French President Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed new taxes on internet access and mobile phone use.

The new taxes would help fund France’s two public television channels, which would be free of advertising.

They may call it an internet tax, but isn’t it just a good old-fashioned TV licence of the sort we’ve had here for decades?

via BBC Online

What? You thought it already was?

Copying music from a CD to a home computer could be made legal under new proposals from the UK government.

Millions of people already “rip” discs to their computers and move the files to MP3 players, although the process is technically against copyright law.

Intellectual property minister Lord Triesman said the law should be changed so it “keeps up with the times”.

Music industry bodies gave a cautious welcome to the proposals, which are up for public consultation until 8 April.

via BBC online

There are a number of sites offering web-based documents using online word processors, spreadsheets and presentation tools and I’m a big fan and regular user, mostly of the superb Google Docs. Others of note are Ajax13, Zoho, and Thinkfree

But there’s one offering something different from all the others. Editgrid allows the creation of public spreadsheets that are editable by anonymous users. A bit like a wiki spreadsheet I guess, but very easy to use, and no login required.

Try editing this public document to see how it works …

Oh horror!

It appears that some people have discovered that Jool’s Holland’s Hootenanny new year’s eve show was … and I hesitate to reveal this … PRE-RECORDED! Who would have thought it? (After all, surely it would have been so easy to get that many celebs and artists to give up their new year’s eve to spend the night in Wood Lane).

The BBC had already made a rather feeble attempt to cover this fact up (presumably rather than cancel the show altogether) by having Jools climbing into the Tardis and ‘time travelling’ to top and tail show. Pathetic.

I hate all this. Really I do. I mean what harm does it do?

The BBC has received complaints from viewers who feel misled after discovering that Jools Holland’s Annual Hootenanny was pre-recorded.

The New Year countdown show, which featured performances from Kylie Minogue and Sir Paul McCartney, had been recorded eleven days before December 31.

… more on Digital Spy

I have tried very hard to like podcast.com, especially since they started e-mailing me regularly with hints and tips for using it, but something is stopping me.

Firstly I resent being described as ‘international’. ‘International’ is a relative term, and what is international to an American audience is NOT what is international to me! To find content from my own country I have to look under ‘International’, and that makes no sense at all and quickly re-enforces the feeling that the site is not aimed at me.

The site is web 2.0 through and through, but like a kid in a sweetshop it seems to want to try everything at once. Virtually the entire site takes place in one space, with menus opening all over the place, and buttons loading new content on other parts of the page. And then there are icons for everything, and of course every icon needs explaining. Even opening things from left to right would start to rationalise the use of the space, but here you click on something on the right to open something on its left, or click on a link on the far left to open something two columns to the right. It’s certainly very clever, but it just comes across as a bit shambolic and, I’m sorry to say, pretty impenetrable as a user interface. In some ways it reminds me of the early days of the web, where the objective was simply to get as much information on a page as possible.

There is still something to be said for KISS.

Keep It Simple, Stupid…

Microsoft has entered the online space dominated by Google Docs, with their product ‘Office Live‘ allowing subscribers to store and share documents online.

See the video

The BBC has made a good job of its homepage re-launch

Take a look

According to Digital Spy, BBC Worldwide has produced its own gameshow and sold it directly to the US, cutting out the BBC altogether.

So what does this mean? BBC Worldwide was created to exploit programmes produced by the BBC (at licence payers expense) in order to produce a return back into the corporation and subsidise future productions. BBCW has previously experimented with publishing non-BBC brands in the area of print, ‘eve’ magazine for example, but it has never before competed directly with the corporation in radio or TV.

BBCW operates at arms length from the BBC and takes no funding from the licence fee, but since it derives its profit from selling BBC product, using that profit to produce its own programmes for direct sale internationally (there is no indication that this was a fully funded commission) surely means that it is taking money away from the BBC and competing with the BBC as a producer, as well as with all other independent producers who are under far more pressure to acquire funding.

And what happens if the gameshow is a huge success in the US and the BBC wants to acquire it for UK. The licence fee will be spent on the acquisition of something that was produced using profits derived from licence fee funding.

How can this be right?