Charlotte Gore explains the banking sector problem with characteristic brilliance:

The lesson is this: Don’t Nationalise The Banks. It will not help. We’ve already got partial nationalisation, which is in itself part of the problem – the banks are having to pay back the bailout money quickly, and the cost of borrowing from the emergency fund is more than they can sell it on for. The banks are having to recapitalise and pay back the Taxpayer and are supposed to be able to increasing lending, too – all while having suffered the end of the wholesale credit markets. It’s a complete farce and an impossible situation.

As I have said before: debt is always an expense, it is never an income.

Ironically, the original blog monetization strategy of choice — advertisements — is the one that continues to be the most frustrating for most bloggers. I’m more convinced than ever that the traditional approach to web advertising is a bad deal for sponsors, and a terrible deal for publishers.

…

Whether you want to call it a blog or not, social media content production results in an influence platform, not a passive advertising doormat. I’m not saying you can’t make money from sticking 125×125 ads in your sidebar, I’m just saying you’re walking away from the lion’s share of revenue and ignoring the bigger picture.

He goes on to list four better ways to make money through your blog – direct sales, affiliate marketing, integrated sponsorships and ‘network marketing’ (the last I find a little suspect). All extremely good ideas, and in line with my thinking. Of course, I am not intending to make any money through my blog (at least not right now), so all I can do is shout from the sidelines.

The problem with advertising is that it distracts readers from what you are writing. When people come to my blog, I want them to read what I write here. I want them to follow the links I’ve put up. I want to interest, amuse, entertain and provide value. If I put adverts next to my writing – particularly the attention-grabbing video and audio ads which are becoming ever more common – I’ve just distracted your from my writing and lessened the impact of my site. If I put up plain and non-intrusive adverts, nobody will click on them and I won’t make any money. It’s largely a lose-lose situation.

On the other hand, affiliation is something I have a lot of support for. That’s where, for instance, I could tell you that the WALL•E 2-Disc DVD is well worth buying and includes a fascinating documentary called ‘The PIXAR Story’, and if you click the link and buy the DVD, I’ll get a little bit of money for it. That way we’re all happy – you’ve found out about a great product, Amazon has made a sale, I’ve got a little bit of money and the pride of having helped you. We’ve also built our relationship and you’ve become more likely to listen to my recommendations in the future. That’s a win-win.

There are even better ways to make money, too. Iain Dale may not directly make very much from advertising, but he uses his blog as a platform for increasing his media profile and bringing more value to his paid speaking engagements and journalistic work. Jessica Hagy doesn’t have any direct advertising at all on Indexed, but she’s published a book of her marvellous Venn diagrams, and sells tee shirts with them on to make money. John Gruber makes thousands of dollars a month by having his RSS feed sponsored – and the companies and products which sponsor him see big jumps in their sales thanks to it.

Bottom line is this: there’s plenty of better ways to use your blog to make money than simply slapping an advert or two on the front page. All it takes, in the words of Peter Pan, is faith and trust – and a little bit of pixie dust.

Totally makes up for there being no Stevenote™.

Rather excellent analogy from Devil’s Kitchen:

Your humble Devil was in conversation with an American lass of his acquaintance today, and she was explaining why she felt unable to vote for either of the two idiots contending for the US Presidency.

“I think it’s because I’ve seen The Princess Bride,” she explained. “I felt like I was in that battle of wits between The Man In Black and Vizzini. I clearly couldn’t choose the wine in front of them (Obama) and I clearly couldn’t choose the wine in front of me (McCain).”

I happen to like Obama (still!) but for the uninitiated, here’s the scene in question:

I think I need to start trimming blogs from my daily reading. Anyway, it’s full of cobwebs back here. I’m sure I’ll be back properly within a few days.

Welcome to 2009 – I hope yours is happy and prosperous!

Radio 2 had a rundown of the top 30 best-selling Motown tracks in the UK to celebrate 50 years of Motown. Awesome stuff. It’s on iPlayer until January 8th, don’t miss it.

In the same series they’ve also had Michael Jackson and Prince, which are also well worth it – particularly the clip of Vincent Price recording his section from Thriller…

I adore Christmas day, but equally I understand why many people who haven’t spent every Christmas day of their lives around small children don’t appreciate it so much. When my sister was born I was 9 years old, and it didn’t take long to realise that the magic of Christmas is the effect it has on children between 2 and 10. Now, my own daughter will turn 3 next week, so I get to do it all over again. I just can’t imagine what Christmas would be without small people to share it with.

At the same time, however, I am declaring ‘feed bankruptcy’ in light of the fact that I currently do, indeed, have better things to do than read everything that’s been written over the past week. I’m sure a lot of it is very good, there’s just no hope of finding the time. The count, as of lunchtime on Christmas Eve, has reached 200 unread blog posts, and there’s only one direction that number I going. I expect normal service to resume early in the new year, but I doubt I shall read any of the backlog, unless there’s some really catchy headlines in there!

So, to anybody who reads this, anyone who reads this blog regularly, anyone that I’ve linked to over the past few months, anyone who has linked to me, and everyone else as well, a very merry Christmas, and a very happy Hogmanay.

Stu.

As Obama has moved with unprecedented speed to build an Administration that would bolster the confidence of a shaken world, his flash and dazzle have faded into the background. In the waning days of his extraordinary year and on the cusp of his presidency, what now seems most salient about Obama is the opposite of flashy, the antithesis of rhetoric: he gets things done. He is a man about his business — a Mr. Fix It going to Washington. That’s why he’s here and why he doesn’t care about the furniture. We’ve heard fine speechmakers before and read compelling personal narratives. We’ve observed candidates who somehow latch on to just the right issue at just the right moment. Obama was all these when he started his campaign: a talented speaker who had opposed the Iraq war and lived a biography that was all things to all people. But while events undermined those pillars of his candidacy, making Iraq seem less urgent and biography less relevant, Obama has kept on rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the imperatives and possibilities of each new moment and organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity.

Mike Smithson at Political Betting suggests Cameron’s trying to do too much for too long as opposition leader – and that he’ll go the same way as Neil Kinnock. Money quote:

Maybe the best strategy for Cameron is to do what he’s always seemed capable of doing – going quiet for longish periods and only appearing when he has something interesting and dramatic to say.

Spot on. In fact, it reminds me of… me. Take note A Tory!

Tim Montgomery picks out a few lessons for the Conservative Party in the wake of a drop in polls following the Damien Green Affair™:

There are lessons in the weeks and months ahead for the Conservative Party.’ The Party has too many messages at the moment.’ It needs to have the discipline to pick a few key themes and focus upon them relentlessly.‘ My shadow cabinet source said those three messages should be:

1. The scale of public debt – personalised for every person in Britain;
2. The scale of Labour incompetence – these people can’t run anything;
3. The scale of Labour deceit – big tax rises are coming;

I have one lesson to add: forget about the bloody polls.

See, the way I see it is that if you can pursuade people to vote for which ‘version’ of the Liberal Democrat party they would like in an open primary then they would almost certainly be more inclined to feel invested in the party should their side ‘win’ – and might vote for us again in a General Election. Who knows? No-one’s ever done anything like this.

Done right it could feel that our party was one that the public themselves had played a part in creating. You’d still have to be a member to vote on specific policies at conference but the direction of our policies would be mandated by the public, whether or not we’re in Government.

I’d go one step further (as I may have mentioned before) and turn the whole party into a ‘Wiki’ party – where normal people, whether party members or not, could write, research and debate policies – which then go to a central party authority for final approval. Where people who work on the front lines and people who hold a deep understanding of the issues involved are able to make positive contributions towards the policies which affect them.

The internet has become an incredible resource, with extremely knowledgeable people who are willing to share their knowledge for free. It’s become, in fact, the world’s first distributed think tank. The first party to take advantage of that, while keeping the system protected from special interest groups and single issue campaigns, will have great things coming to them. This ought to be the natural progression of the Conservative Party, since they were the first – with Webcameron – to invite the public to debate the issues with the party and with David Cameron on an ongoing basis. After creating the site, allowing it to grow, ironing out a large amount of the problems and creating something really new and interesting, they unceremoniously killed it and have never looked back.

In fact, if the Liberal Democrats did do something like this, the Conservative Party might see themselves lose a vote from me¹. I’ve been moaning about the Conservative Party’s woeful internet strategy for a lot longer than I’ve been blogging. I’d definitely show support for people who are innovative with the use of technology in decision making.

1. Of course, since I live in Margaret Beckett’s constituency in one of the safest Labour seats in the country, I’m not sure it’ll make much difference whether I vote for Lib Dems or Conservatives. But still. The principle is the important thing.

Blue Eyes bemoans the inconsistent approach that the government is taking with the motor industry: considering bailing out foreign-owned car manufacturers whose sales are dropping thanks to the government taxing and criminalising car-owners.

Noses, knives, spite and faces all jump, unbidden, to my mind.

John Gruber:

Repetition blinds us to just how odd certain rituals of tradition are. Like how it seems perfectly normal that every December we chop down millions of small trees, decorate them with electric lights and glass balls, and display them prominently in our homes.

Gruber is actually talking about Steve Jobs and Macworld here, but I think the point is universal enough.

In the 300 B.C., years before the birth of black Jesus, Aristole postulated that all good things were made of ‘win.’ That was a pretty good guess, but he was drunk and probably also having an orgy. Modern day awesominers know there are actually 118 fundamental ‘awesoments’ that compose all good things. The Periodic table of Awesoments can be a very useful tool. It’s designed to show the relationships between awesoments, and often one can even predict how awesoments interact simply by their positions on the table.

For some reason, the table doesn’t include itself. It should.

Via Jason Kottke

Angels in Marble would prefer a general election to an enquiry into the Iraq war.

There is no need for an enquiry. What has happened is widely documented. And any enquiry conducted by a New Labour regime will be yet another narrative of lies. What is needed is a general election, so that the people can pass judgment on New Labour’s foreign policy just as much as on on its financial achievements.

I do agree that we need an election, but a General Election has already happened since the war in Iraq began, and the Labour Party were returned to government to continue with their foreign policy. That was the will of the British people and we should respect that. The people have already passed judgement on New Labour’s Iraq policy. New Labour have a democratic mandate to continue with the war until they feel it is done or they are voted out of power.

We need an election to find out if the unmandated economic policies of our unelected Prime Minister are the will of the people. If they are, we should similarly accept that and move on. It’s the job of the Conservative Party to illustrate to them why the government’s plan is wrong and that there are better alternatives out there.

Right or wrong, that’s the nature of democracy.

My curiosity was aroused however, when I noticed that someone recently arrived on this site by searching on Yahoo! for ‘top hat & tails quarantine kennel & cattery’.

I verified this quite easily: it still happens now¹ – the fourth result on Yahoo! search for that term is a page on this site with the title ‘The Worst Scam on Earth‘. It’s not hard to imaging that this could have genuine business consequences for the company – okay, even a cursory read of the post in question would allay any fears that the kennel in question has been involved in any form of confidence trick, but associations form quickly and irrationally, and that slight black mark against a company’s name could theoretically lose them business. The power of search engines is widely recognised in this regard, and the practice of increasing your own site’s ‘page ranking’ – or where it appears on search engines for specific phrases – has developed into a booming industry in its own right.

The reason for the search result turned out to be a list of kennels left in the comments. Now, just quickly I’d like to make sure it’s clear that there’s nothing wrong with writing whatever you like in the comments on this blog – I’m grateful for every comment and I’m delighted that anyone has the inclination to read my ramblings, let alone comment on them. What’s more, I don’t expect anyone to watch what they say for fear of how it looks externally – it’s my responsibility, as the blogger and administrator, to look after the content of this site. Indeed that is exactly what I have done, the list of businesses has been removed and I’ve left a note of explanation in its place. What I’m getting at is how random and unpredictable these connections and associations can be. How impossible it is to recognise in advance how information will be digested, distributed and interpreted by the internet at large.

And here we find our philosophical truth: that an innocuous comment with benign intentions can have completely unintended consequences further down the line. That the internet exists in a state of true chaos.

Near enough every page on the internet is indexed by search engines and often retained in a searchable cache. Even websites which have disappeared from the internet can live on with technologies like the Internet Archive’s ‘Way-Back Machine‘. As Maximus Decimus Meridius once said, what we do in life echoes in eternity.

For those of us who run websites, I have discovered that it is our responsibility to make sure that the trail we leave behind doesn’t inadvertently harm other people’s lives or businesses.

And that I find humbling.

1. at time of writing, of course. If you are reading this after the date on which it was published, results may, quite literally, vary.

John Ward on Lib Dem Voice draws an interesting – and certainly unflattering – comparison between Brown and Nixon. After examining the parallels between ‘Greengate’ (awful term) and the Watergate scandal, he makes this point:

Last Friday, a small piece on page two of the Financial Times pointed up the increasing Conservative frustration with Gordon Brown’s persistent deferral of a promise to brief the Opposition prior to any election. The pledge (allegedly made nine months ago) said that the process in relation to some of the key fiscal and economic factors would begin on January 4th 2009. There is no sign at all of this happening, and this in turn suggests two obvious hypotheses: one, there is yet more smelly stuff the Government doesn’t want the Opposition to know; and two, Gordon plans a snap election during which most of the damning facts are unavailable to both electorate and Opposition.

If he’s right, the awfully scary prospect is Labour winning a fourth term and any ‘smelly stuff’ remaining under wraps for the next five years.

You see I have no particular need for one. My current deal doesn’t expire yet, my current phone sends messages and makes phone calls. I have email at home and work. I have a little iPod already. I am not important enough to need email on the move. I don’t need web access in the street. I don’t need to be able to put my phone up against a speaker to find out the name of the song which is playing. I don’t need to be able to blog on my way into work. I already have an A-Z and reasonable map-reading skills.

Maybe it’s because we’re both INTJ’s, but I read this with a pang of recognition: this is almost exactly the same as my own internal debate on the merits of getting an iPhone in August – in fact, I already had an iPod Touch (which is an iPhone minus the phone) and therefore had even less reason to plump for one. Plump for one I did, though¹, and I can’t be effusive enough in my praise for the thing. And Mrs Sharpe very much likes her new iPod Touch, even if it has got ‘Stuart Sharpe’ engraved on the back (at least she’ll always remember who she’s married to…)

The benefits of this little device, in fact, are not obvious from any of the features listed above. You can’t even see them by playing with one in a shop or using a friend’s for ten minutes. There is no ‘killer feature’ of the iPhone, no specific thing that it does which can’t be achieved with other phones or with a computer. In fact, it’s not even particularly good at making phone calls.

Put all of its features together, though – the web browser, the fantastic iPod built into it, the on-the-go maps, the excellent contacts and calendars management, the incredible variety of available applications, games and other assorted distractions, the (life-saving) alarm clocks(!) – and you end up with a device which changes the way you live your life in a way that no other electronic device has ever done in the past. It’s the PDA of PDAs, the internet device of internet devices, your plastic pal who’s fun to be with. And I say that with absolute seriousness and no hyperbole. There is nothing else, certainly no other smartphone, which compares. The iPhone is our first glimpse of the future of communication, and there simply isn’t any other phone.

If you still don’t think there’s enough justification there to run to the shops and buy one immediately, think about it this way: People who buy iPhones have been statistically proven to be better looking, more intelligent, trendier and far more likely to attract lovers than their iPhoneless peers. What’s more, iPhone usage has been linked to climate stability, the reduction of third world debt, widespread disarmament and the growth in populations of the lesser-spotted newt. By buying an iPhone you also greatly increase the chances of Earth being contacted by benevolent alien life-forms, as they notice how awesome Earth must be to have produced a piece of technology so inherently marvellous. On top of all that, they are extremely cool.

As you can see, there’s really no rational argument against it. Besides, in the words of my boss, there is never a need to justify a gadget purchase.

1. In my defence, my parents were kind enough to offer a contribution towards it thanks to my having just graduated with a 2:1, no less..

It seems he just can’t get enough of the Conservative Party and is rather desperate to switch sides, unfortunately external pressure means he is stuck for the moment.

Don’t worry, Mr Harris, there’s a warm home for you on the right any time you need it.

Life models in Paris have taken to the streets to protest poor wages… In their ‘uniforms’.

In front of the tastefully decorated Christmas trees outside Paris city hall’s culture department, the naked and goose-pimpled models demanded a pay increase, proper contracts and, most of all, respect for their craft as they held trade union banners in the pose of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

[…]

They also wanted to quash the misconception that life-modelling was merely something students and retired people did for pocket money. Sean Connery may have posed naked in Edinburgh to make ends meet when he was a struggling actor and Quentin Crisp may have spent the war years posing naked at Derby School of Art, but in France life-modelling is widely seen as a serious career choice.

[Insert your tastless joke about artists/nudity/the French here]

Devil’s Kitchen explains why my Incoming Links box has been near enough useless for the majority of the time I’ve been writing this blog – Google’s ‘Blogsearch’ tool is broken and sends alerts to all sites linked from the entire page of a blog post, rather than only from the main content of the post itself. Hence I get alerted of an incoming link every time certain bloggers put up a new post, because Sharpe’s Opinion is in their blogroll. Admittedly, this isn’t such an issue for me because few people actually link here, but I can see how it would drastically affect some of the more widely read blogs out there. Not because of ego, but because the blogosphere is one large conversation, and it helps to know when someone is responding to or following on from one of your posts.

What’s more, since quite a large portion of the value I try to bring to this blog is derived from linking to other sites, it’s reasonably important to me that other sites know that I’ve linked to them. On the other hand, I don’t have a static blogroll any more, so at least I’m not spamming anyone with incoming links…

Well, so accepted wisdom will tell you. Lesson 1: Never trust accepted wisdom.

In the real world, at least in the music business, piracy can do exactly the opposite. Piracy can help artists get paid. Internet file-sharing, or at least something like it, can bring more money to artists than any development since the birth of entertainment industry. The evidence of this sea change in the way that the entertainment industry is organised is becoming more evident over time – and the easiest way to explain it is with real-world examples of musicians who have succeeded by either embracing ‘illegal’ file sharing as part of their business model, or by moving away from releasing albums of recorded music as their main revenue stream.

• The Arctic Monkeys. The Sheffield-based band had their big break not through shrewd marketing, but because they wanted their fans to know the lyrics to their songs so they could sing along at gigs. The band produced a couple of EPs on the cheap, as many fledgling bands do, but rather than sell them at gigs they simply gave them away – and encouraged their fans to share the music with each other and others on the internet. Through word-of-mouth and the fact that fans could easily get hold of their music, their following sky-rocketed and the rest is history. Without ‘piracy’, the Arctic Monkeys might still be an undiscovered gem, as many other bands are.

• Radiohead/Nine Inch Nails. Radiohead famously allowed customers to decide how much they wanted to pay for In Rainbows, their most recent album. They also sold a limited edition boxed version with an array of supplementary content for £100 a pop. Sound expensive? Doesn’t matter – die hard fans want it and will pay for it. Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails took this further and gave away his most recent album away as a free download (admittedly, it was rubbish) and then sold supplementary tracks and bonus material to fans who wanted to buy it. He’s also recently got together with Tapulous to make a special edition of the iPhone game ‘Tap Tap Revenge’ which features Nine Inch Nails music. A number of independent artists are similarly finding that deals with computer games companies for the new games such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band increase exposure to their music while still being quite lucrative.

• Jonathan Coulton. Jonathan Coulton is a singer/songwriter in America who started out with a podcast called ‘thing a week’. Each week he’d write a new song and let anybody download it for free. Then he put all the music on his website and started selling unprotected unrestricted MP3 files for 99¢ each (while allowing donations from people who’ve ‘already stolen’ it). Never heard of him? Doesn’t matter. He has a relatively small but very devoted fan base and is able to make his living from his music – which is all that the vast majority of artists are striving to achieve. He’s also excellent – check him out (I recommend Ton Cruise Crazy and Code Monkey).

• OK Go. After their excellent self-titled debut album, OK Go decided to go DIY and made a music video for their song A Million Ways by putting a camcorder in the back garden and doing a dance choreographed by a band member’s sister. The video ‘went viral’ on YouTube and its succes encouraged them to make a second video – this time on treadmills. They received the kind of audience that A&R guys dribble about in their sleep. Again, it was only by allowing fans the freedom to share their content without restriction that they achieved such high figures.

• Madonna. While Madonna seems to be the perfect example of orthodox thinking, if you thought that, you’d be wrong. Madonna no longer has a contract with a record company. She signed a deal, instead, with Live Nation – a live events organiser. Madonna knows which way the wind is blowing and knows that there’s no value in records any more. Fans will pay a lot of money to go and see an artist performing live (the latest Oasis tour is £45 a ticket, and I’m still genuinely considering it) – and the experience is far more memorable and entertaining for them than buying an album. The old recording business model has a band touring to promote an album released in the shops. What we will probably see more of in the future is records being released at rock bottom prices – or even free – to encourage people to go to live shows, where the real money is.

There are, as you can see, a multitude of ways artists can continue to make money from music, not by fighting piracy but by embracing the latest technology and using it to build fan bases and carve their niche. The On-Demand world is desperate for talented and innovative artists to entertain them, and the spoils will go to those who can adapt to the new rules and recognise where they can offer fans bonus material that is worth paying for.

The only losers from