Just got chance to look at a link I was sent a week or so ago … Microsoft UK commissioned Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant of “The Office” to do a spoof training video. The film is viewable on the page via Google Videos … very funny!! Hopefully the link sticks around for a long while!

SpiralFrog, a free music download service, is due to be launched this December. The interesting part is that they believe they can support their venture by advertising alone, and by the fact that they have signed up with Universal Music Group, must mean that the numbers sound good!

The deal is that music and video downloads are free to use for 6 months from the download. The catch is that before the download starts, the user has to watch 90 seconds of advertising.

90 seconds is a long time to be forced to wait for a download to start for each song/video … how many people will just set it going and walk away? Mind you, it’s a novel concept that I’m pretty sure will see them become a popular site … everyone loves “free”!

The answer is that in ASP.NET, static variables should be used instead of the Application object. It's something that I had never considered in terms of best practice, until I was asked this week. After a little digging on MSDN I came across the guidelines which state:

• Use static properties instead of the Application object to store application state.
• Use application state to share static, read-only data.
• Do not store STA COM objects in application state.

It comes down to the fact that the Application object is included for compatibility with classic ASP which had no application runtime like .NET.

You learn something new every day! More info can be found in the Knowledge Base article 312607.

I came across a great web site today, www.mapmyrun.com. Using Google Maps, you can plot your run on the map and then get distance and speed calculations based on the route. The geocoding support from Google isn’t there for NZ, so you can’t search by address, but there is nothing stopping you from searching for the city and moving around manually. The bit I love best, is that you can view by satellite and also via Google Earth …

If you want to see the runs that I do most often, go here

Ever wanted to know the different revenue structures used on the web? Brian Oberkirch has a great post entitled "Beyond AdSense: A Business Model Checklist". From the different options listed, it seems "Freemium" (love that term!) combined with Subscriptions is the overall favourite.