I, with many others, have recently been converted from an evil, “grubby little man” to a life of wondrous joy where downloading anything is a sin, thanks to the highly successful “Knock-Off Nigel” campaign.

Oh yes. I realize that to an American reader, or in fact anyone from somewhere other than the UK, will not have a clue what the hell is going on in this ad. We here almost didn’t know until they rudely interrupted poor old Nigel’s life and ruined his reputation by singing a jolly old song. This IS the UK’s best attempt at combating piracy. Some bloke who looks like he recently came of the cast of “Life On Mars” or “Ashes to Ashes” strolls up and starts singing in some daft way as the whole office join in behind him.

Every time this advert makes it’s way on to my TV, I fail to see how it has stopped anyone from continuing to download or “knock-off” illegally. At all. It is just so badly done. Nothing like, “STOP - Piracy is a crime” or “Would you steal a car? Would you steal a movie?”. Just a message that has been poorly conceived by some idiots on some ad agency somewhere.

What’s worse is that this was probably funded by the UK Government, which means our money has been spent on producing this tripe. Still, I suppose on the bright side, you can get a quick kick out of just how devastatingly bad they really are.

And if you want to know more (I hope to God you don’t), check out Nigel’s very own site.

Despite its supposed pronunciation, the one thing Cuil definitely isn’t, is cool. After the tremendous splash the newly released search engine made on Monday following spectacular media coverage its rating in the online community has dropped to absolute rock bottom. It was heralded as a true ‘Google killer’ and indeed is run by several former Google employees, however, there can be no doubt that Sergey and Larry can sleep soundly in their multi-coloured ball covered beds for quite a while longer.

Billing itself as “the world’s biggest search engine”, Cuil promised to bring a viable alternative to Google, both in terms of how it presented and indexed results and how it protected your privacy. While we cannot yet dispute its claims about privacy, there is no doubt that it has failed to present any kind of alternative to the more conventional, as it would call them, search engines already in place.

One way of looking at it is to say that Cuil’s Monday launch and their subsequent ‘whale tail’ scenario started off rather well for them. We all know how media outlets love to push news of any challenge to Google’s dominance, and also that we as consumers lap them up- this was exactly what happened for Cuil. Scores of users were driven to the search engine resulting in a similar message across the board: “Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.”- a tantalizing message, serving only to drive even more visitors. Unfortunately for Cuil, they added that ‘more capacity’ in just a few hours and the general public got their chance to size up the search engine. This led to the now universal consensus that, while Cuil may look slightly nicer than some of its competitors, its results are in many cases utterly irrelevant and completely jumbled in its ‘magazine style’ results window.

For example, a search on Cuil for ‘Cuil’ itself yielded results for French breads and Irish cottages- not a whiff of the search engine or, incidentally, any of the bad press it’s been getting. Furthermore, not only does Cuil bestow the reader with irrelevant results, it accompanies these with equally irrelevant images from completely different web pages, take a search for ‘MobileMe’ for instance. The first result actually linking to a page from Apple was alongside this bizarre image of some kind of archaic filing system, sat on what looks to be blue, crushed velvet.

For now, and for the foreseeable future, Cuil will remain a ridiculed and outcast search engine, bettered on almost every front by either Google or other, new and emerging search engines, such as SearchMe. It can be assumed that Cuil will at some point try to branch out into other areas, perhaps attempting to rival Google’s dominance of online mapping, however, it seems some internet users are already predicting dire results for such a venture.

New statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) say that there are now 253 million people connected in China, compared to 223 million in the USA, making them the biggest net nation in the world. This figure is up an amazing 56% from the same time last year.

This is particularly interesting as the US has held the record for the most number of people connected to the internet since records began. This also gives us an indication of how fast China is growing as more and more Chinese can afford technologies that up until now were not commonplace in the country.

Broadband is apparently the most used in China, with 95% of those connecting up via high-speed connections. Despite this huge increase, the BBC report that the China’s net economy is still behind other countries.

Despite having a greater number of people online, China’s net economy still has a long way to go to match or exceed that of the US or even that of South Korea.

Figures from Analysys International said China’s net firms reported total revenues of $5.9bn (£2.96bn) in 2007. By contrast net advertising revenue alone for US firms in 2007 stood at $21.2bn (£10.6bn).

It is expected by 2012 that there will be 490 million connected users in China alone.

Credit to http://resnet.ucsc.edu/besmart/filesharing/

As has been rumoured for a number of weeks in online and print media a group of the biggest Internet service providers (ISPs) in the UK have signed up to a ’Memorandum of Understanding’ drawn up by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR). This treaty of sorts between ISPs, the Government and the British Phonographic Industry (which acts to serve the interests of the ‘big 4′ music labels in Britain) comes after Virgin Media admitted that it had sent several hundred ‘warning letters’ to customers whom, it had been deemed, had obtained songs illegally on their internet connection.

Unsurprisingly many customers who had received these letters from Virgin, such as this man, began claiming that they hadn’t illegally downloaded the songs Virgin Media said they had and furthermore that they were extremely taken aback by being accused of such an infringement of copyright.

This first attempt at a ‘warning letter’ scheme clearly shows the faults the system would have on a wide scale. Sending a letter of this nature to customers will obviously cause them considerable discontent with the ISP, whether they did perpetrate the crime and are annoyed that their ISP has effectively been ’snooping’ upon their internet usage or whether they didn’t download the songs in the first place, ultimately this looks set to contribute to the ISP losing subscribers (this being the main reason most ISPs have been reluctant to join such a scheme). Another incredibly obvious yet key problem is that in the age of WiFi networks and Foneros it is always a possibility that someone is piggybacking on an unwitting customers network and maintaining illegal activities without their knowledge.

This week, despite numerous causes for concern from all sides, the ‘understanding’ which certifies that ISPs will not only commit to a “significant reduction” in music file-sharing in the UK but also help develop legal music services was signed by BT, TalkTalk, BSkyB, Orange, Tiscali and Virgin Media.It has also been announced that regulation and future amendments to the ‘memorandum’ will be overseen by Ofcom.

To me, the idea of British internet providers attempting their own content delivery services on a large scale when giants like Universal have failed to make a significant mark upon iTunes gargantuan market share seems preposterous, it also veers on being monopolistic. However, there are intriguing whispers of a different method of collecting royalties from users who download music illegally. The Times reports that Ofcom may introduce an annual download tax, similar to TV licensing. This move however would beg the questions: ‘what do those of us who buy content perfectly legally online do?’ and ‘how would this system be policed?’.

Thankfully, there is one glimmer of hope coming from this ongoing crusade against internet users. Several ISPs have made it clear that there was “absolutely no possibility” of them disconnecting alleged pirates from the Internet.

You may ask why I think this a good thing and from it you may assume that I ‘obtain’ my music, but as something of a very small-time artist myself I appreciate the value of music and do pay for all I download. Having said this I wouldn’t be too surprised if I ended up getting my very own warning letter from my ISP, despite zealous protection of my network, and I, like everyone else, wouldn’t want to be disconnected and blacklisted for something I simply didn’t do (or indeed because the ISP or the BPI made a mistake).

We have created a poll on the right in the sidebar too see how many people fileshare and how many steer clear. Take your vote now or leave a comment.

MobileMe is a service from Apple which many of you will no doubt have heard of before; the service replaced .Mac and in doing so brought more emphasis to having your data ‘in the cloud’ and it being ‘pushed’ (or at least nearly pushed) to all your devices. I myself have been a .Mac subscriber for just under a year so was salivating when i heard the new of the update, however, the transition to MobileMe was anything but smooth and has left many, many subscribers with “rocky” service (to quote Apple themselves).

At first the ‘groundbreaking’ web applications promised for your email, contacts and calendars simply failed to load for almost every MobileMe member. Apple now claims that this was due to “a lot more traffic to our servers than” they anticipated. They now assure us that they’ve “since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better”. So, this would seem all well and good, however, there is one more major issue. For the last week or so many MobileMe users have been shouting from the hilltops, saying that their MobileMe email either on the desktop or on iPhone is simply not working. After a few days Apple did acknowledge this problem, but went on to say it was only affecting 1% of MobileMe users.

Yesterday, Apple had this to say about the issue:

“Last Friday a serious problem with one of our mail servers blocked those members’ access to their MobileMe mail accounts. As of today a team was able to restore limited web access to those accounts so the affected members can use their browsers to read mail that has arrived since last Friday (though not before) as well as send and receive new mail.”

Apple’s MobileMe support staff also say they expect all email accounts to be functioning fully by the end of next week. What’s more Apple is now saying that at least 10% of email messages sent to this “1%” of subscribers between the 16th and 18th of July have been lost.

With the advent of the MobileMe service many people, such as myself, have left their previous email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail…) and have attempted a complete switch over to MobileMe. This extended and hellish debacle will no doubt have made many switchers question their actions and perhaps already turn back to their old email service. None of this can be construed as anything but awful news for Apple.

One interesting development came yesterday on the MobileMe support pages however. As a gesture to show understanding and sympathy this page now tells us that Steve Jobs has personally requested a member of his team to “write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe”. The anonymous poster says they are working alongside the MobileMe engineers so will have up to date information at every moment.

Despite all of this hideous trouble, MobileMe is shaping up to be a good, useful service. There is certainly a lot more work to be done in the way of stability, scaling and new features, but if Apple can eradicate these problems and listen to their users’ requests MobileMe could be in for a long and fruitful life to come.

Right now I am posting from the awesome Wordpress app for the iPhone.

You can even take photos and put ones from your library into the post very easily. This will be very very handy when I am out and about and I need to get around and blog. As you use the iPhone typing gets much easier so it doesn’t worry me so much.