Objectively, you could look at this a different way. If the BBC stops publishing re-engineered press releases and left that to the newspapers and focused solely on making sure that they produced insightful, detailed analysis pieces then this will bring them nothing but benefit. They will be providing the service that we (in the UK) pay for, instead of providing free advertising to a company that wants to tell the world that they've released a new product. Plus the repackaged press releases and Associated News/Reuters content tends to not get many people looking at it after day 2. Big spike in people looking at it when it is new, little long tail. The detailed analysis pieces will be worthwhile for a long time yet.

Plus this still has to be approved by the BBC Trust. They can reject it if they don't see it as a useful way of spending the tax payers money. It's the equivalent of me putting a business plan into my boss on how to make better use of my time.

The large Government UK website that I work on still has 12%+ on IE6 (plus another 24% on IE7), so it is impossible to say that we're not going to support IE6 any more. However being business facing, we are probably seeing a slightly larger percentage of those. Interestingly IE8 has about 35% share - so users are moving over to the new browsers, albeit slowly.

The bigger issue might be caused by corporations holding on to IE6 (as someone above has mentioned). In house we still have IE6 as the standard because our CMS/finance systems won't work in IE7 or IE8 and the cost of upgrading it to work in those browsers is larger than the negative impact of forcing everyone to use IE6 in the company. The downside is that we have lots of other systems that are faltering because they don't work in IE6 and I have to go against company policy of telling everyone to use Firefox or Chrome. Then again, the wider company policy is not to use IE6, so they're already breaking their own rules.

Just out of interest the company's 2% rule (although I reckon it should be a 1% rule, but that's an argument for another time) says that we have to support these browsers: IE 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0; Firefox 3.0, 3.5 and 3.6; Chrome 3.0 and 4.0; Safari 4.

I know you jest slightly, but I'm presuming the music company take an artist/band they think will make money and attempt to make them even more money whilst making themselves a bit on top. If you could do it all independentally then the bands would. Think of the equivalent of you filling in your tax return/paying an acccountant to do it for you.

However it has never been easier for musicians to go independent. It's cheaper than ever to get good recording technology. It's easier to distribute to masses through the internet. You can get your song on itunes. You can promote yourself in pubs/clubs. There have got to be far more people doing it now than there ever were, thus eroding some of what record label do.

However if you do go for the record label route, where you take half the hard work that you have to put in out of it (making the videos, setting up the recording studios, promoting the songs, albums, videos, tours, etc) then you can't complain when the record label tell you what they are going to do with them and tells you that you aren't going to make as much money as you would have before.

Plus you could probably replace the words 'musician' and 'record label' with the word 'journalist' and 'newspaper' in the paragraphs above then it wouldn't be any less true.

It sounds to me a bit like the music video was always meant to be a product that Musicians could use as a method of promoting themselves so they could make money on the things that actually made money.

This used to be selling CDs. Seeing as nobody buys CDs any more, this should be music downloads or live tours/merchandise. (I'm sure someone with a bit more time on their hands can dig out a link to that graph showing which people are making money out of music now).

If your record label is spending a fortune on making your video and then not allowing certain countries to see it, then you're not going to be making money from those countries (or not as much as you could). It's not like there is an incremental cost involved in allowing it to go on other blogs/other country's youtube. It's just that the record label is being greedy because they think they can get some money out of them, at the cost of the band's image.

I'm going to go with you on the unintentional options here. But it probably means that someone at Target hasn't really worked out what is going on yet. I mean - there are some quite sophisticated tracking technologies going on there, someone should know that there are people arriving at these random searching pages from Google and then working out if they actually sell anything from it. If people then click through to the actual exercise bike pages and buy stuff, then it will probably look like it is profitable and will discourage them from removing it. Whilst you may think getting them pointed at the 'correct' landing page might lead to higher conversions, it may possibly be that by sending them to the search pages even for things they don't sell, they make more money, because they get visits for things they wouldn't do normally.

Although it would make more sense if they noidnexed those search results pages, to be fair.

The whole standfast up there is misleading. From the BBC article:

Currently some websites allow you to see articles that should be hidden behind a paywall barrier for free if you appear to come from Google. It allows them to get their pages indexed in Google and get those users to those pages even though they are hidden to everyone else. They can then try and persuade the users to sign up based on the fact that they can only see 5 pages. It works for the organisations because they have get another marketing source and it works for Google because they get to add more into their index and give their users what they want.

So overall nothing will be changing. Previously if you'd visited five pages on the site and found a sixth through Google news, then you'd be thrown a page asking you to subscribe. Now you get told on the Google News page that you are going to. I, for one, am not that impressed because I don't go to those sites anyway.

Unless Murdoch comes up with an ingenious way of reducing funding for the BBC. Say for example, striking a deal with the opposition politcal party to cover them in a complementary way in their press, in exchange for reduced funding of the BBC when they get into power.

Maybe we should ask Andy Coulson about that one (ex editor of News Of the World - a Murdoch title - and current 'Strategist' for the Conservatives). If he can buy out the UK's free source, he can buy out any other 'not for profit' options.

This is a great comment. However, in theory this has already been done through the Data Protection Act

Unfortunately companies don't appear to get prosecuted for not complying at the moment and the rule isn't particularly enforcable. Not least because this is a UK law (although it might also fall into EU law) and the majority of sites you browse aren't UK based.

I should have stated it in the submission: Cookies can't collect personal data. If you enter personal data into a website and allow them to market to you because of it, then it is your own fault if they then market to you because of it. Another site can't collect that personal data without the site you entered it into giving them permission. If they do it illegally they should be punished, but this is nothing to do with the cookie. This should be what the EU focus on creating new laws. The cookies thing won't stop it.

I apologise most humbly for my inability to read the date. Although it's better than last time when I had glaring typos in a submission. One day I'll get the hang of this :/

Quite right too. However most of them have tick boxes at a point that allow you to opt in and opt out. As someone whose seen the results of the tick boxes, I know far too many people are stupid and don't opt out. I always do.

*uses (damn beer at lunch time)

What you are suggesting is enormously complicated. You're suggesting that every single time a user clicks a link they have a Get/Post. You're also suggesting that the user has no control over their browser in terms of back/forwrad buttons.

Your also missing a large point. Most of the web doesn't sit in a secure environment where you need to post the page with details in it to get the next page. Most of it sits in a free for all content situation. The best that your servers (and hence your logs) know about it is that a user has requested a page (by clicking on a link).

If you are going to use javascript to track your users then you lose them inbetween pages because a new page will load with new javascript. To join those different javascript functions together you need to assign them a unique id. That unique ID sits on a cookie. Javascript itself can't track anything other than whatever is on the page at the time.

And before you ask. I do this on a website where we don't make any money. Our sole job is to give you advice. But if I can't tell if people stay on the site, use our tools, consume lots of our content - how can I ever persuade anyone to give me more money to build more of it? And if I can pesuade them, how do I know where to spend it?

Google Analytics users a first party cookie.

Thanks for the personal attack. Really appreciated it.

You do not make websites better by guessing what the user wants. Your own slashdot website probably has someone who looks at what people do, looks at how many people comment and generally advises on which are the most popular links. This helps them work out which stories are interesting to you and not a load of garbage. It also helps them work out what tags submissions should be grouped together based on the likelihood of users to read certain types of submissions.

Using cookise for advertising is completely different. You're using your cookies to make sure that either the money you spend gives you the biggest return (ROI). You're thinking about this the wrong way around though. You're thinking from your perspective as an advertiser (or someone who works for one). I, as a user, want to be able to click on ads of things I want to buy. Your job, as an advertiser of things I want to buy is to give me those ads at the right time and in the right place. You can't make someone buy something they don't want to. You can make it a lot easier for them so they don't get psised off and go to your competitor.

Not that this is the purpose of cookies - but how do you differentiate between real people and robots/spiders?

More importantly how do you tell, from your server logs, how many of your users who arrived from a certain referring source stayed on the site? Do you know what they did afterwards? Do you know if they then went and performed the function your site is aimed at? Do you know if they came back at a future date to do it? Can you do any of these things without cookies?

And no, you can't do any of these things with IP address+Useragent lookup - it's far too inaccurate.

Knowing where a user came from and what they searched for is a bad way of trying to optimise your site. I can name hundreds of situations where someone was proud that they'd generated a huge volume of visits (or page views if you weren't using cookies) of users that then left straight away because it wasn't what they were looking for.

Usability testing is very useful. Not using to usability testing to try and increase revenue is the death of any business.