BSkyB have confirmed that the content on offer will include the Sport channels, which in my opinion, are the only reason anyone would pay for their service.

So, this means, that Premiership football will be available to watch without an expensive Sky subscription, which is great news.

Of course, it remains to be seen what the subscription costs will be. Will it be pay-per-view? If so, how much would you be willing to pay for a football game?

Undoubtedly, the BSkyB media player will not be available for Apple Mac (as everyone except the BBC seems to have opted for Microsoft DRM technology). Still, I can live with that. Watching the game online will hopefully be much cheaper than a full Sky ‘box’ subscription, or a visit to the pub.

Blogging is most definitely alive. What has changed are the blog authors. When I first discovered the blogsphere I lived in Australia, and loved learning what the BritPack - a group of British web designers - were up to. A day did not pass without Andy Clark, Andy Budd, John Hicks, Jeremy Keith or Richard Rutter sharing some insightful thoughts on their blog. These days, you’d be hard pushed to receive one update a week between them.

It’s not that they’ve run out of things to say. Many have moved on to micro-blogging through Twitter and the like. I think Twitter is good, but it’s no substitute for a blog entry. I like the fact that a blog entry gets archived and discovered at a later date. To me, blogs are a great resource, where others provide tips on how to get things done Whether it be with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP or Java, the blogsphere is a great resource; a great community. It’s a shame that the web community blogs less often. It’s a loss to the community.

Whilst individual bloggers have departed, the big-boys have moved in. My blogreader receives daily updates from all the news sites, whether it be the BBC, The Guardian, The Register or TechCrunch. This isn’t really blogging; it’s syndicated news - which is initially what RSS was created for. News sites are however changing. They have now fully embraced blogging, whether it be a journo entry, or a host of comments by readers.

Of course, blogs have also been hijacked by the PR and marketing world. PR 2.0 is all about social interaction, and weblogs are great food for Google to swallow and regurgitate.

The thing is, my friends who are not in the tech industry, haven’t a clue about weblogs and RSS feeds and blogreaders. It passed them by. They know about Facebook. They don’t read or write blogs; they don’t listen to podcasts, and they don’t have a clue what Twitter is about. If blogging has died, they won’t miss it one bit.

But blogging is most definitely not dead. The bloggers have changed. Perhaps the audience has changed too. I find myself following the media on my blogreader, and the individuals on Twitter.

Perhaps even the blog medium is beginning to change. Not only do people share thoughts by blogposts, they now share video by YouTube. And yesterday, I discovered a great new concept put out by Jeremy Keith - HuffDuffer - it’s a podcast of audio files. Subscribe through iTunes and find out what other’s are listening to. Here’s a link to my huffduff.

Long live the blog, the micro-blog, the video-blog and the audio-blog.

It’s nice to get involved in sales pitches and speak to customers directly, unlike when I was a contractor. It’s great to work with a creative, and to be able to bounce ideas around. And it’s really nice to get positive feedback from customers and clients.

Stan seem pretty happy with the way things are going too. Howie is now officially, the new man at stan.

And that’s not all. There are numerous channels to choose from. I’m currently watching the women’s football semi-final (Germany are beating Brazil 10).

And below the Flash video (which can be played full screen) is a text commentary. no need to refresh the page: a funky bit of AJAX reveals updated text every 2 minutes.

Glad to see our license fee is going to good use. Not sure about my work productivity this week though

Ooh. Brazil have just equalised. Time to go

Aside from the much publicised recent outages, IM support still being turned off and SMS simply not working for me in the UK, today I discovered that my slowly growing network of followers has all but vanished.

and I’m not the only one. Over a summize, many people are complaining about this today. Some people are speculating that it’s only the spammers that have been kicked off. Well, in my case this is simply not true. I had about 18 genuine followers, and had blocked half a dozen spammers. I now have only six.

Hopefully this is a temporary problem. If not, I can see users leaving in droves to the new Twitter rivals, Pownce and Plurk.