There have been many established experts commenting on the public sector strike this week but none has garnered more media attention than Jeremy Clarkson calling on striking workers to be “shot in front of their families”. At the last count, complaints to the BBC topped 20,000. Yet where did this pearl of policy come from? A cabinet minister? Nope, the host of a TV programme about cars and established wind up merchant who’s other gems have included:

The only people who can’t navigate instinctively are women and anyone trying to find Malpensa airport in Milan.

The only person who looked good in a 4-seated convertible was Adolf Hitler

I don’t understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?

I don’t often agree with the RSPCA as I believe it is an animal’s duty to be on my plate at supper time.

Of course he didn’t mean it (indeed he subsequently came out and said so). The fact that it has become such a ‘story’ is largely down to vested interests in the trade unions and left leaning media to distract from the catastrophic failure of the strike.

Top Gear is the highest grossing brand for BBC worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC which principally makes its money from selling programmes oversees. This has helped grow record profit to £160m. That’s £160m that doesn’t need to be funded from our licence fees. Those that are calling for his head (including many that actually work for the BBC) need to think about that and whilst they do so, get a sense of humour and perspective.

Thanks to http://www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk/jc-top-gear-quotes/ and http://www.inquisitr.com/2783/the-best-jeremy-clarkson-quotes/ for the quotes.

Online and apps is the future of the newspaper industry and print is dead right? Well if that is to be the case then newspaper owners will have to get better at monetising the content. Recent financials from the Daily Mail General Trust bring this into stark reality.

The Daily Mail is widely regarded as being the content kings of the newspaper industry – its website is the highest read out of all the UK national newspapers and it continues to grow strongly with almost 66 million unique visitor numbers in  March. This was 68% higher than March 2010 and averages a daily 3.7 million unique visitors.

So by any standard the visitor numbers are a stellar success but what about the commercial figures? This is where it gets interesting. Across its entire newspaper operations, advertising revenues were up 2% at £183 million. Yet print display advertising (mostly in Metro and the Daily Mail) constituted the lion’s share of this at £148 million and classified rose 5% to £26 million. Online, although it increased 50% only constituted £8m of this – a fairly insignificant 4.3% of the total.

Therein lies the challenge – how to make this content pay. Currently whilst a market exists for display advertising (most if it fuelled by high street retailers keen to get their punters into the shops at the weekend) the concern for newspaper owners is less. But the day is quickly coming when most of us won’t look at print newspapers anymore. What then? On these figures, online ads won’t fill the gap.

So just why has Microsoft paid a whopping $8.5 billion (or ten times earnings) to acquire Skype today? In my view it’s a canny move simply because of the amount of platforms that Skype can be use and integrated with.

It’s a ready-made competitor to Apple Facetime which will surely help it shift Windows mobile handsets – something it has struggled to do. Want to make cheap video or voice calls direct to your Outlook contacts with one click? No problem Microsoft will integrate the functionality as soon it’s able. What about video chats from your Xbox 360? Again, this will be easy to do and will also keep out of reach of competitors such as Sony and Nintendo (if it chooses to do so). Microsoft software is also used extensively within personal video recorders so there’s every chance Skype will be bundled within there too.

So in short, it’s a platform grab which is likely to have massive ramifications. Apple and Google are unlikely to be pleased but Nokia, HTC and other Microsoft partners are likely to be pretty chuffed.

The privacy / location debate was again ignited this week with news that Apple has fixed the bug that supposedly meant that the geographic location of its user’s iPhones and iPads could be mapped over the course of a year.

When this story first broke mid April my reaction then, as it is now is ‘so what’? Most smartphone users willingly hand over this location information anyway. Four Square and Facebook are the obvious examples in the social networking space but download pretty much any smartphone app these days and it will ask you if you’re happy to submit your location details. In the main this is simply to improve the way one interacts with the app – there’s no point you searching for a restaurant and it gives you eateries in Berlin, when one’s actually in Bolton at the time.

Of course, the distinction (and it is a crucial one) with the Apple situation is that users haven’t opted in to this process. However, we don’t necessarily ‘opt in’ to allow mobile phone companies to track our movements or Transport for London to record our Oyster Card data but they still do it anyway.

The furore around this issue has been much less compared with the Google Street View privacy controversy a couple of years ago. Sure, the issue was slightly different but it could just be that we’re moving to a world where we accept that in most cases we recognise that providing location information brings more benefits than negatives.