Links pages gradually lost their role in website discovery with the creation of directories, such as DMOZ and the original Yahoo, and then the rise in search engines such as AltaVista and Google. For a while in the early 21st century, social media networks such as MySpace, Twitter and the early Facebook were also key sources of website discovery.

It wasn’t long, though, before the social media networks started to make it harder to use them to discover websites. Monetisation means maximising user retention, and every click to an off-network website reduces their opportunity to put more adverts in front of eyeballs. So posts containing links are downgraded by the algorithms, and fewer people see them.

More recently, though, even the search engines have started to turn their backs on website discovery. The AI overviews at the top of most result pages pushes website links down the page and makes it much less likely that people will see them.

This is reducing visits to websites, as even Gooogle’s own AI agrees. In some cases, this may be no great loss. But it is a major blow to sites which rely on advertising to survive. And it also means that even official, authoritative sources of key information (such as the government, or your local council) are being downgraded in favour of unreliable AI summaries. People will accept an AI summary as gospel rather than checking the source, or looking to see what the media have to say.

So, with the loss of discovery traffic from social media, and now the loss of search engine traffic, how will independent websites survive?

A lot of them won’t, of course. But in the long run, I have a feeling we’re going to see the independent web going back to its roots. Websites linking to each other. Maybe even the return of webrings! And possibly the reinvention of web search by new entrants into the market. The web ecosystem and the social media/AI ecosystems will diverge. And maybe, just maybe, in the long run the web will be better for it.

Edit: I’ve put this on the resurrected Friday Fun website. You can find it here:

https://fridayfun.net/playlists

Apparently, the majority of music radio listeners these days prefer stations which focus more on “classic” tracks from the past rather than current chart hits. I have to admit that I fall into that category as well; the majority of my radio listening is to Absolute Radio or Greatest Hits Radio (and occasionally Kiss and Planet Rock) rather than stations playing contemporary hits.

One thing that’s always irritated me slightly, though, about “gold” format radio is that it tends to play tracks out of context. In reality, popular music follows a discernible pattern through the year; there’s a noticable difference between the types of songs that are popular in summer and those that are popular in winter. Not necessarily every song, of course, but enough for it to make a difference. Apart from mid to late December, though, when the “gold” stations go all-out, and often excessively, festive on their playlists, you don’t get a sense of that when listening to them.

So, I thought I’d see if I could come up with something which fills that gap. I’ve created an algorithmically generated Spotify playlist which includes a selection of songs which would have been on contemporary music radio playlists at this time of year.

Basically, how it works is that it looks for songs which were either in the charts or were, at the time, recent new releases on this day in past years – that is, the sort of songs that would have been  on contemporary music playlists at the time. It then assigns each song a weighting based on a number of factors.

For example, songs get uprated for being new releases, new entries, big risers or number ones, and downrated for being fallers or for having lingered a long time in the chart. It also adds a small amount of random jitter so successive days aren’t identical, even though they’ll be based on very similar dates.

It then picks the hundred with the highest daily rating, and updates the playlist accordingly.

A hundred songs is approximately six hours listening, so if you feel like it you can listen to this most of the day and you should only hear each song once.

I’ve called it “Seasons” because the idea is that it will change with the seasons as you listen to it over the course of a year.

This is very experimental, and I’ve love feedback on how well you think this works. One of the obvious downsides is that it does result in a wildly varying mix of genres and eras. You could find yourself going from Metallica to Taylor Swift to Elvis Presley in the space of a few songs.  Plus, of course, at Christmas you will get St Winifred’s School Choir alongside Slade and Joe Dolce alongside Ultravox. And numerous tediously unmemorable X-Factor winners.

But then, that’s a bit like the radio would have been at the time, so there is at least a hint of authenticity there. I am excluding a small number of artists with convictions for certain criminal offences – you can probably guess which ones I mean – but other than that, I’m not applying any editorial control.

Anyway, here’s the playlist as an embed in this page. If you prefer to go directly to it on the Spotify website, or open it in the app, the link is underneath. And please, let me know what you think in the comments.

Direct link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7eeRB8ZvkaLrRdQpFYOS43?si=PpKfu2P6RP2eTnPLl6WWrw

My reasons for this are many and varied. But, basically, I think it’s time to call it a day. It was a fun game for a while. But I get the feeling that some people are taking it a bit too seriously. And, as the saying goes, when the fun stops, stop. If you’re reached the point where being Whamageddoned would cause you actual distress, then get it out of your system now. Pop over to YouTube or Spotify and feast your ears on a classic 1980s Christmas hit and realise that you’re better off hearing it than avoiding it.

And it is, after all a great song. The Wham era of George Michael’s career is often dismissed as a mere stepping stone on the way to his solo work. But, actually, it produced some really catchy pop tunes, and Last Christmas is one of the best. Had it been released in any other year, it would definitely have been the Christmas number one.

The reason it wasn’t the 1984 Christmas number one is, of course, because that year it came up against Band Aid and the charity single which kicked it all off. It did finally reach number one in 2022, but until then it was, without a doubt, one of the greatest songs to have peaked at number two (along with Vienna and Fairytale of New York).

What’s possibly less well known is that, when the Band Aid project was announced, Wham decided that they, too, would donate the royalties from their Christmas single to Ethiopian famine relief. Given that Last Christmas was easily Wham’s best-selling single, that was a significant act of generosity. And, in retrospect, Last Christmas has stood the test of time rather better than Do They Know It’s Christmas.

So, stop trying to avoid it. Listen to the song, enjoy the song and celebrate Christmas via a slice of musical nostalgia without guilt or embarrassment.

Christmas Song Bingo (PDF)

Have you wondered why that is? Are you maybe blaming greedy website operators, just as you check out the latest ad-blocker extension for your browser?

If so, you’re right that the trend is towards more and more adverts. But you’re probably wrong in thinking it’s all about greed on the part of the website publishers.

In reality, this is an unintended consequence of something that is supposed to be a good thing.

Online privacy has become a significant concern. In particular, the ability of advertisers and publishers to track your behaviour across multiple websites is something that many people are uncomfortable with.

Both legislators and browser manufacturers have responded to this. The cookie consent laws requiring you to explicitly consent to marketing cookies, alongside browser enhancements such as “do not track” features and default blocking of third-party cookies, have made it much, much harder for advertisers to track people across multiple websites.

So, this is a good thing, right?

Well, maybe. It does address issues around privacy on the web. But it also changes the online advertising landscape considerably.

There are, essentially, two main ways of paying for online advertising: “pay per click”, where the advertiser only pays if someone actually clicks on an advert and visits their website, and “pay per view”, where the advertiser pays simply to put their advert in front of as many people as possible – the digital equivalent of print, radio or TV advertising. For historic reasons, these methods are known within the industry as CPC (which stands for “cost per click”, as seen from the advertisers perspective) and CPM (which stands for “cost per thousand”, as applied to views – the M stands for “mille”, which is Latin for a thousand).

CPC (pay per click) has, since the early 2000s, been the preferred method of online advertising. It works well for both advertisers and publishers. Advertisers like it because they only pay for adverts which actually work – they pay nothing for adverts that get ignored. Which means that none of their advertising spend is wasted, which in turn makes them willing to spend more on them. And publishers like it, because of the higher prices paid by advertisers. It’s a win-win.

The downside, for consumers, is that CPC relies on tracking. The advertiser has to know which of their adverts has been clicked on, so that they can only pay for that advert shown to that visitor. And that needs tracking cookies.

But tracking cookies are now everybody’s favourite villain, hence their discouragement by both legislation and technology.

A consequence of that is that the main advertising networks, such as Google Adsense, have mostly switched away from CPC and now use primarily CPM (pay per view) adverts. Here’s a graph which illustrates that very well:

That’s a graph of my business’s advertising revenue over the past three years. The blue line is CPC (pay per click) revenue. The red line is CPM (pay per view) revenue.

What you can clearly see is that, earlier this year, revenue flipped almost completely between CPC and CPM. And that’s not just for me, it will have happened to almost all publishers.

For you, the consumer, that may seem a good thing. You’re no longer being tracked all the way around the world by advertisers. You’re just being shown adverts, which you can ignore if you want to, just as you can in a newspaper.

But it’s not particularly good news for publishers. You can see that the red line on the right is mostly lower than the blue line on the left. That means that advertising revenue is down. Again, that’s not just for my business, it’s across the board.

That’s one of the reasons why you’re increasingly being nagged to sign up for a paid-for subscription when you view certain websites. If you visit The Guardian, for example, you’ll be confronted by a massive overlay banner pleading with you to sign up for a monthly payment. Over at The Telegraph, you’ll find that a lot of content is now behind a paywall. And The Times went fully paywalled a few years ago, something which seemed like a dubious move at the time but has now been vindicated.

But there’s another consequence for website visitors, too.

In the days of tracked CPC advertising, having a lot of adverts on a web page wasn’t always helpful. In fact, the opposite was often more true. If you had two potential adverts to show, one of which would pay you, say, 50p for a click and the other only 25p for a click, then it could make sense to  only show the higher priced one. And there was no point at all showing adverts that nobody was ever going to click on. The best solution was almost always a small number of highly-targetted, high-paying adverts.

Without tracking, though, there’s no targetting and no high-paying CPC adverts. And if a publisher is getting, say, a tenth of a penny  for a single CPM advert, then the best way to bump that up is to show half a dozen CPM adverts. Even better, show the adverts that advertisers do pay more for, such as video ads.

So what’s happening is that website visitors are increasingly confronted with websites that are smothered in adverts. Because, often, that’s the only way to maintain revenue at previous levels. And it’s also why many smaller advertising-supported websites, that don’t have the resources to implement a paywall, are in danger of dropping off the web altogether.

I don’t think that’s a good thing. I understand the concerns of privacy activists, but I also think that the response to those concerns has created a situation which, for most people, is worse.

My preferred solution would be to repeal the cookie laws. Get rid of the annoying coookie consent popups. Allow advertisers to go back to tracked and targetted CPC advertising.

Most people would, I think, prefer that to the current situation where their favourite websites are disrupted by intrusive and excessive advertising. And it’s still easy enough to avoid being tracked if you want to. Use an ad-blocker, or your browser’s “incognito” mode. Both of those damage ad revenue to a degree, but not as much as the loss of CPC.

I don’t object to people using an ad-blocker when they visit my websites, if that’s what they want to do. I do object to them not being able to choose to accept targetted advertising because they know that supports the site’s operation.

The cookie legislation was supposed to give consumers more choice. What it’s actually doing is taking choice away, and degrading their web viewing experience as a consequence. And that is most definitely not a good thing.

Photo: Emma Haynes

It all started, of course, a few days earlier, when the Queen was reported to be in bad health and her family were heading to Bamoral to be by her side. Nobody in the media was so crass as to say so, but in the background we already knew it was a case of when, not if. A set of black table clothes, condolence books and official photos had been delivered to the town council office in preparation.

What made it more complicated, from our perspective, was that the town clerk was away on holiday – and on a cruise, so she couldn’t just cancel it and come home! So I had little choice but to take the lead myself in making the necessary arrangements, with the sterling assistance of Julie, our newest member of staff.

When the official announcement actually came I was just about to sit down with the family to eat our usual “Pasta Thursday” evening meal. I grabbed my plate, took it with me into the study where I switched the council website into “Operation Royal Bridge” mode and made a series of announcements on social media, then hot-footed it to the town flagpole to lower the flag to half mast.

The following morning, Julie and I finalised the arrangements for the books of condolence, and then started to plan for the Accession proclamation. We decided we’d make it as formal an occasion as possible, with the councillors in their ceremonial robes and Avonbank brass band to play the national anthem. At the last minute, I decided that we ought to have a microphone and speakers so that if the square was full, those at the back would be able to hear. Fortunately, Nick Kilby was willing and able to step in at very short notice.

When I arrived at the town hall on Sunday afternoon, I was, to be honest, mildly annoyed that everything had already been set up with the dias in front of the scaffolding on Nat West Bank. It didn’t strike me as being the best setting for something so momentous. I’d planned to put the dias under the tree instead. But changing it would have meant changing everything else around, so I decided to go with it. We did take two of the union flags from the town hall (a leftover from the jubilee) and tied them to the scaffolding to try to give it a slightly more formal appearance.

I’d had two documents emailed to me from the office of the High Sheriff of Worcestershire: the proclamation itself and the framework of a brief preamble that merely needed to be localised for Evesham in place of generics. I’d also written a short speech to go after the proclamation.

Earlier that day, I’d watched my colleage Alex Sinton, chairman of Wychavon District Council, struggle a bit with reading the proclamation from an A3 sized scroll, which was difficult to keep open in the right place. Given that I had to print the proclamation myself, I’d decided that I wouldn’t try to make it look like a scroll, I’d just use a sheet of A4 paper. But I wanted to add a bit of theatre to the occasion, and in particular I wanted it to be clear, visually, when I was reading the proclamation and when I was reading my own words. So on the Saturday, I’d popped into The Works and bought a purple ring binder and some loose leaf holders. One holder contained the proclamation, which was clipped into the binder. The other contained the preamble and my speech, back to back, but remained loose.

When I stepped onto the podium, I carried the binder containing the proclamation with the other leaf held against the front. That way, I could read the preamble with the binder closed beneath it, then, in order to read the proclamation I opened the binder. And at the end of the proclamation, I closed the binder and turned over the loose leaf to have my speech uppermost. Normally, I’m quite comfortable winging it when speaking in public, but in this case I rehearsed reading it all through several times at home first. Given the somewhat archaic language of the proclamation, I wanted to be sure I didn’t trip over any of the words.

In retrospect, having the podium in front of the bank was the right choice, despite the scaffolding. The square was absolutely packed by the time we started; if I’d been under the tree then half of the people would have been behind me. It’s not the biggest audience I’ve had for a speech – that would be at the Battle of Evesham Festival – but I’m certain it was the loudest and most sustained round of applause at the end. Not that that was particularly for me. Everyone there was well aware that they, too, were participating in history in the making, and the applause was for the Accession, not the proclaimer.

I hope everyone went away from the square with their own indelible memories of the day. I’m just incredibly proud to have had the immense privilege of playing a key role in it.  And incredibly grateful to everyone involved who worked so hard to pull it all off.

Here are the three documents from that day:

• Introduction
• Accession Proclamation
• Closing Remarks

That’s a big responsibility, and one which I hope my fellow party members will take seriously. In particular, I hope that all of us will remember that we are not just electing a leader of the party, but we are electing a Prime Minister.

That means, first and foremost, that the person we elect has to be someone who is up to the task. They must have demonstrated a high level of competance in their career so far, both political and commercial. They must have a high level of personal integrity. And they must be someone who has the ability to unite the party, and reach out to floating voters.

Both the candidates we are choosing from have their qualities. But I believe that one of them is, very clearly, the better of the two. And that is the person who will get my vote.

That person is Rishi Sunak.

Why?

I believe that Sunak is the better candidate, for a number of reasons. Firstly, he isn’t trying to buy our votes with pork barrel promises of unfunded tax cuts. And this is something that the general public – the voting public – clearly agrees with. In a survey reported in today’s Times, 60% of the public think that reducing inflation is more important than cutting taxes. Only 10% thought the opposite. Sunak is the only candidate who has consistently made tackling inflation his priority. On this, he is on the side of the people.

Opinion polls repeatedly show that, among the electorate at large, Sunak is perceived as the better candidate and the one more likely to persuade them to vote Conservative at the next election. If winning elections matters to us, then those opinions should matter to us, as well.

Secondly, Sunak has demonstrated his ability to think on his feet and respond fast. Thrown in at the deep end as Chancellor when Sajid Javid resigned in early 2020, Sunak was immediately in the forefront of Britain’s response to the Covid pandemic. His furlough scheme – much more innovative and flexible than similar projects elsewhere – helped ensure that financial losses to businesses and their employees were minimised. There’s no doubt that, without it, a very large number of companies would have gone to the wall and their workers would be out of jobs.

Sunak’s personal wealth has come in for some criticism, but the reality is that he’s earned it. Born into a middle class, immigrant family, he worked and studied hard for his deserved success in the financial sector – another reason why I trust him to make the right decisions on taxation. There’s no room for the politics of envy here. And one thing we can be sure of is that if Rishi wants to redecorate 10 Downing Street, he’ll pay for it himself!

Don’t just take my word for it. Former Conservative leader and Foreign Scretary William Hague was Sunak’s predecessor in the constitency of Richmond, Yorkshire. If you can get through the paywall, Hague’s article in The Times is a must read. But I’ll quote the key section here:

I represented Richmond in the Commons for 26 years until 2015, and I will never forget the scene when hundreds of local worthies assembled to choose my successor as the Tory candidate. “A farmer would be good, or a military man,” some of them said on the way in. “We need a local candidate,” said others, or: “Obviously they have to come from Yorkshire, that’s a given.”

Military men and strong local figures were all available to them. But when they filed out three hours later, they had chosen someone new to farming issues, with no army career, who wasn’t local, not from Yorkshire and was from an ethnic minority and brought up in Southampton. They were stunned but thrilled. They had chosen Rishi Sunak.

At the election that followed, local independents and Ukip fancied their chances against this newcomer. But they were all routed by Sunak, who turned out to be a highly energetic, bright, emotionally intelligent candidate.

We need someone who is energetic. We need someone who is bright. And we need someone who is emotionally intelligent. Of the candidates we have in front of us, Sunak ticks all of those boxes.

It matters, too, that Sunak is the preferred choice of our MPs. I do think it’s good that the party membership has the final say in our leader. But we need to be cautious about exercising that responsibility. We’ve already seen what happened to Labour when members installed Jeremy Corbyn despite their MPs wanting someone else. It’s happened to us, too. Iain Duncan Smith was the choice of the members, against the wishes of our MPs, and in retrospect that didn’t work out too well either.

If we were currently in opposition, then I’d be more relaxed about disregarding our MPs’ wishes. Sometimes you need a new broom to rebuild from the ground up. But in government, we need someone who is able to work with the people already there. It’s not the only consideration, of course. But we owe it to our MPs to take their opinion seriously here. Our MPs have the advantage of seeing the candidates close up in their day to day work, and can see how well they’ve been doing their jobs. Let’s work with them, not against them. Sunak is the Parliamentary choice, and should be the members’ choice, too.

Finally, there will, unfortunately, be an element of prejudice among those who would rather have a white face in Downing Street, and a more understandable fear that prejudice may harm our electoral prospects. But in an era when our main Parliamentary opponents have never had a leader who is anything other than white, male and British, the Conservatives have already given the UK our first ethnic minority Prime Minister (Benjamin Disraeli), our first immigrant Prime Minister (Andrew Bonar Law) and our first female Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher). It would be entirely fitting, and completely in accord with Conservative principles, if we give the UK its first non-white Prime Minister.

Rishi Sunak has the ability, the experience, the backing of MPs, the appeal to the electorate, and offers us once again the opportunity to make history. I’ll be voting for Rishi. I hope you will, too.

But one thing has always irked me about it. The original version, released in the run-up to Euro 96^[1], goes on about “thirty years of hurt”. But it’s not thirty years.

To be sure, 1996 was thirty years after we last won the World Cup. But for the first four of those thirty, we were the reigning world champions. There’s nothing hurtful about that. The hurt couldn’t possibly have started until we were eliminated from the 1970 finals.

But even then, I’m not sure it was really that hurtful. OK, we lost to Germany, which is always unpleasant. But, realistically, England were not the favourites for that tournament, and none but the most churlish of English football fans could possibly begrudge the eventual winners, Brazil – especially after that Carlos Alberto goal, which is still the Best Goal Ever Scored In A World Cup Final.

So you can put 1970 down as a blip. Won one, lost one, back next time.

Except that next time didn’t come. Or, rather, we didn’t come the next time. In 1974, we suffered the ignominy of not even qualifying for the finals – just eight years after winning the thing, we were out in the wilderness.

And that, I’d argue is when the hurt really started. And it carried on hurting in 1978, when we once again failed to qualify (and Scotland rubbed it in with Archie Gemmill’s glorious goal against the Netherlands). Even though we got back in in 1982, and haven’t missed out since, we still haven’t erased those memories of being on the sidelines.

So, in 1996 it wasn’t thirty years of hurt. It wasn’t really even 26 years of hurt. It was 22 years of hurt. And now at Euro 2020(+1) it’s 47 years of hurt. But none of them work as well in a song as thirty. So once again, poetic licence overrules reality.

[1] Football wasn’t Y2K compliant in 1996.

In particular, the debate revolves around the word “faggot”, which, while not a homophobic slur in the context of the song, is now widely perceived as one. Some people think that it’s wrong to use the word at all, because of its connotations to a 21st century audience, while others are equally firm that the only meaning that matters is the meaning it had when written.

For what it’s worth, I think the whole argument is overblown. Lots of songs are edited for radio airplay, and the decision on what to edit changes over time. Try listening to the uncensored version of most Eminem songs, for example, if you think that radio edits are a bad thing. Or, for that matter, the original wording of “The Sun Has Got His Hat On”. But, on the other hand, radio stations now play “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, despite it originally being banned by the BBC. “When I’m Cleaning Windows”, by George Formby, was once considered too obscene to broadcast.

Radio 1 is perfectly entitled to decide which version of any song, “Fairytale of New York” included, that it wants to play. Other radio stations are equally entitled to make a different choice. It seems to me that the BBC’s decision to treat the song differently on Radio 1 and Radio 2 is sensible. Radio 2’s audience is, typically, more mature and will mostly have grown up with the song in its original context. Radio 1’s listeners mostly don’t have that cultural background, and it’s unreasonable to expect them to have to take a history and etymology lesson before they can enjoy the song.

Personally, I prefer the original. But then, I’m of an age to remember the original, and recall that the word in the lyrics whch was most contentious back then was “arse”. The Top of the Pops version of the song from 1987 keeps “faggot” but changes the line “Happy Christmas your arse” to “Happy Christmas you ass” – although Kirsty McColl cheekily references the original line by slapping her backside when singing it.

These days, nobody has a problem with “arse”, but a lot of people have a problem with “faggot”. The perceived offensiveness of words is very much a cultural thing, and there’s no reason why Radio 1 shouldn’t attempt to reflect the culture of its current audience. In another twenty years’ time, maybe that position will have reversed again. My only hope is that, sometime in the next few years, society will develop a strong aversion to some of the language used in any Christmas single by Paul McCartney and radio stations have to stop playing them altogether. Now that would be a culture war worth winning.

This isn’t particularly surprising, and similar ideas have been floated for many years. But, obviously, now that we are commited to phasing out petrol and diesel vehicles, it’s become a much more pressing issue.

As a general principle, I don’t object to this. I think that the idea of road users being taxed according to their usage of the roads makes sense, and usage payments have the potential to be fairer than fuel duty. But there are couple of important caveats.

The first is that it has to be more nuanced than a simple per-mile charge. Charging by distance discriminates against rural users, who often have no choice but to use cars and have to drive them over longer distances. And rural users of uncongested roads are contributing significantly less to air pollution and accident statistics. These facts need to be reflected in the charging regime. Someone driving ten miles from a rual village to their nearest town should not pay more than someone driving five miles to work in a major city.

The second is that any scheme should encourage both the government and road users to keep roads flowing freely. And this is more complex than it sounds.

One often-floated suggestion for road pricing is that people should be charged more for driving on roads that are more congested. There is some logic to this, because it would tend to encourage people to spread out their journeys and make them at less busy times. But, on the other hand, it would create a perverse incentive for the government to artificially inflate road pricing revenue by starving the transport network of funding and forcing more and more people to use congested roads. And it would also unfairly discriminate against people who find themselves in a traffic jam through no fault of their own – for example, when a road is blocked by an accident or roadworks.

A successful, and politically acceptable, road pricing scheme, therefore, needs to be contstructed in such a way that both road users and the Treasury benefit most from well-maintained, free-flowing roads.

That’s harder than it sounds, and there will inevitably need to be some compromises along the way. But working out this detail is important if this proposal isn’t to end up a political millstone for whichever future government implements it.