Richard Giles

My mate Jon, who seems to be able to launch a new social site in minutes, has just announced News 2.0.

I love the way Jon works. He takes a concept, cuts it down to the bare bones (37 Signals would be jealous), and launches on a dime.

News 2.0 generates the latest news around the Australian Blogosphere every 30 minutes. It does this by monitoring weblog posts submitted to AustralianBlogs. It’s that simple.

In a conversation with Jon, it looks like a few more features are due. So it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

Ben Barron, my 2web compatriot points out that Australia’s ninemsn is beginning to offer downloads of some of its television shows, such as McLeod’s Daughters.

It uses MPS Broadband and Space Coin, at least that’s what is in the terms and conditions. Having said that, it says everything is covered under UK law and charged in UK pounds. So I’m guessing they haven’t changed the terms and conditions yet. A bit sloppy.

I’d love to have a go of the service, but I tried it with Firefox on OS X, which wouldn’t even launch the Flash application, Safari, which couldn’t play any of the videos (including the 30 second preview), and IE on Windows, which played the preview but I couldn’t download the episode. Perhaps it’s a Windows Media issue, but without errors, it doesn’t make it intuitive.

So if anyone can get it working, I’d like to know how, and next week the cost.

I’d love to say it’s a step forward for Aussie television, but given it doesn’t work, I can’t say it is.

I chatted with Auren Hoffman with Cameron on G’Day World the other day. He’s the CEO of Rapleaf, a new reputation system that we liked to compare to whuffie: the concept Cory Doctorow introduce in his novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

I convinced myself today I should “advertise” my Rapleaf profile when I noticed Clay mention it in his blog.

We’ll see how it goes. I tend to find these services take a good few months to show value.

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