Martin Wright.tv

We chose our hotel for the weekend very carefully. It could be said that we exercised more care than the hotel.

We were given a room from the 70′s. Then got the room we had paid for as seen on the web site. The shower overflowed. The food in the restaurant was great. The service in the restaurant was great. Our shower was overflowing into the kitchen. Getting back to our overheated room was not so great. It’s summer in England and it’s hot – don’t complain. The music from the pub up the road is deafening. Close the window. Sweat. Sleep. Wake. Sleep. Sweat. Wake. Sleep.

Explain our situation to today’s receptionist. Trek to a room at the opposite end of the hotel to use the shower. Great breakfast. Great service. Great discussion about how we can’t stay there for another night and decide to cut the weekend short. Discussion with receptionist results in early checkout without charge.

The web site makes no reference to refurbishment. We lucked out on the room we had. Check the Trip Advisor reports for the Spread Eagle at Thame and you’ll see similar unhappy customers. Hopefully you’ll see them before you become one.

• 62% of travellers do not recommend

• “The sink is the size of a lunch box and far too small to be practical in any way.”

• “The website is very misleading, our room was not refurbished like some and felt more like a 3 star hotel which would have been fine but for £100 we were expecting something a lot better.”

• “Stayed at this hotel a year ago when they must have recently started the refurb, and a year on, they don’t seem to have made much progress. I gather about a third of the rooms are complete and there is a new reception desk, but otherwise the public areas/corridors are in a poor state of decor.”

Read more bad reviews of the Spread Eagle, Thame, then book to go somewhere else.

I’ve been patiently waiting for the new iPhone to be announced since my contract on the iPhone 3G finished in February after 18 months.

I’ve not really had any problems with O2 so was fine to carry on with them. Need to remember to monitor my data allowance use now that its capped/charged at 500MB/month. Preferably need to find an app for that. Difficult to predict how much I’ll use as adverts all state in terms of emails sent and websites viewed but not hours streamed on Spotify.

The charge not lasting any longer but as I’m doing more with it I suppose its holding up a bit better.

It is beautiful to look at and hold but I’m sure its going to get broken. That nice glass surface makes it much more likely to just slip and crash!

And nope. Not tried FaceTime yet.

Glastonbury Festival 2010 was amazing!

Not even a rubbish performance from our football team could dampen the heated spirits of 180,000 revellers in a field. And my god was it hot!

With Glastonbury, but not other festivals, the best bits are not the bands, but the sights and sounds you see on your travels. And travel you do with it taking about 45 minutes to cross the site. The Healing Fields and Green Fields have the true spirit of Glastonbury and are a must see visit. The Park is a recently added area which give great views over the whole site and this year apparently saw Radiohead playing! Arcadia, Shangri-La and assorted other ‘weird’ areas must be seen to be believed.

Relive the experience with videos and photos. Listen to the bands on Spotify.

Spotify has really come into its own recently and that’s because of its accessibility from elsewhere.

iPhone
The ability to run Spotify as a background task on the iPhone has finally made it usable on the device. Until then, it restricted doing any other task until music had finished playing. Now with background operation and integration with the iPod controls it finally offers a great experience. Also, with a 16gb phone I can download a ton of tracks for offline listening.

ShareMyPlaylists
ShareMyPlaylists.com is a great service that provides user generated content of playlists for Spotify. It provides a massive ecosystem for discovering and listening to music. Their iPhone app also works with the Spotify app.

Spotify has still not broken through into the mainstream yet. It still seems to be a tech audience which gets it. Perhaps the success of the iPhone 4 willl lead to success for Spotify too.

At a loose end in Nottingham this weekend? Don’t be.

• Live Music at Jam Cafe on Good Friday
• Short films at Nottingham Contemporary on Good Friday and Saturday nights. Music from Ed Lamps on Saturday. Rest of the weekend look around Star City before it finishes. Local real ale on sale in cafe.
• Afternoon Tea at The Walk
• Another ride on the Wheel of Nottingham
• Go on the Ghost Walk on Saturday night
• Watch A Single Man at The Screen Room
• See the new Robin Hood Exhibition at Nottingham Castle
• Peter Andre at the Royal Centre on Sunday
• Get some comedy at the Just The Tonic – Easter Sunday Bank Holiday Special
• Watch Notts Forest play Cardiff City on Monday at the ground or in The Approach

This post is experimental paid content. Please pay $1 via Twitpay if useful.

At Mediacamp Nottingham 2, Glenn Le Santo was discussing the last ten and next ten years of media. Part of that discussion was inevitably about monetisation and how its difficult to do. When it is attempted there is a backlash and criticism as the Times has recently experienced with its paywall debate. But without monetisation it is difficult for independent content producers to generate income in the age of free.

So, how do we fix this? I would suggest that we start doing it more until it becomes commonplace, second nature, part of the culture. Part of how we use the web. All we need is a mechanism

Twitpay is a such a mechanism. All you need is an Twitter account and a PayPal account. There is then a simple format for making payment on Twitter:

@mawawa twitpay $2 for proposing feasible micropayment structure for indie content producers

And that’s it! At the top of your blog post, ask for payment. At the start of your podcast, ask for payment. At the start of your video, ask for payment. If you don’t ask you won’t receive. If you do ask you will receive.

On this blog, if I publish content that I think is worth charging a fee for I will ask for that fee.

This is all inspired by Mediacamp Nottingham and the problem of monetising content. Does this help? See you in the comments.