39th Round plans show Richard hasn't got a Scu-by

Ever since the Premier League announced its plans to investigate the possibility of playing a 39th Premiership match abroad, anyone and everyone involved in English football - from supporters to club owners - has talked about little else. Of course, there are arguments for and against the plans, and we're not even remotely close to discovering the specific arrangements for when, where and how the games would be played. And even at this early stage, there are people within the game (such as Sunderland manager Roy Keane and Birmingham City co-owner David Gold, to name two) who are hailing the scheme as the future of football. However, the simple fact of the matter is this - it's a rubbish idea.

Richard Scudamore, the brains behind the whole operation, has said that the motive behind the scheme is to take Premier League football to the world for the benefit of supporters abroad. But it isn't. The idea is, in fact, to make even more obscene amounts of money from English football by using fans in countries where, previously, it was only possible to get a bit of cash from million-pound TV deals. Countries like Australia and Japan, whose own football associations have even said that they don't want the games to be played there for fear of damaging the progress of their own domestic leagues.

Anyone would have thought that the Premier League got the impression that English supporters just don't spend enough of their hard-earned following their team anymore. Truth is, they couldn't be more wrong. My beloved Tottenham Hotspur, for example, sell out virtually every home game each season, in every competition, and have done for almost as long as I can remember. Up and down the country, there are supporters who haven't missed a game their team has played since about 1952. And the thing is, just because these people have travelled the world supporting their football team since before Mr Scudamore was a glint in his mother's eye, doesn't mean they get any discount. Oh no, they still have to pay full whack, just the same as those of us who only go to one or two matches a season and, as sad and obsessive as it may seem, they'll continue to do so until they just can't afford it anymore, purely out of love for their team.

But that's just Premiership supporters. What about the lower league clubs? It's widely acknowledged that the gap between the Premiership and the Championship is bigger than it has ever been and growing all the time (just look at Derby County's league record this season), and this is largely due to Premiership clubs receiving more and more money and, as a result, clubs in other divisions making less and less as each year goes by. The Premier League is the richest league in the world, has the richest clubs and the best paid players. The Championship, on the other hand, is falling further and further behind, along with the teams who stay in the division for season after season because they just haven't got the money to compete with the bigger clubs and their millionaire businessman owners.

The Premiership is rich enough - instead of finding ways to make it richer, Scudamore should be teaming up with the heads of the Football League to try and prevent the inevitable scenario in which the Premiership breaks away from the Football League forever.

Amateur by Lasse Gjertsen - A YouTube Review

Modern, quirky and undeniably cool, Lasse Gjertsen's videos are the kind of thing that YouTube was made for. In Amateur, the Norwegian relies once again on the frantic editing style used in his first big YouTube hit, Hyperactive (in which he uses millisecond-long clips of himself making bizarre noises and facial expressions to turn himself into a human beatbox), this time using a drum kit and piano to take the place of bodily functions.

The concept seems simple enough. But it's the execution that has made Amateur such a success. Watching the video, it's hard to know what exactly to compare it to. You could argue that it's a music video - it is, essentially, a video of a man making music. But calling it a music video somehow just isn't enough in an age when music videos are largely just marketing tools to sell pre-existing songs and albums. You could call it a showcase of talent, but that simply makes it sound like a guy with too much time on his hands showing off to millions of people around the world that he's never met, when it somehow comes across as being so much more substantial.

It is, of course, a fantastic display of technical ability, both in terms of editing and musicianship (though Gjertsen claims he couldn't play either piano or drums before making the video - something which is hard to imagine given some of the drum sequences in the video). But what's even better is that Amateur so far has over 7,000,000 hits. SEVEN MILLION. That means that, in just over a year since it was uploaded, more than 16,000 people a day have taken three minutes out of their lives to watch guy in his early 20's with silly hair making music one note at a time, with a camcorder. And he isn't alone - a YouTube search using the terms "Lasse Gjertsen Amateur" brings up page upon page of of video responses to the original, and even a few results from users who liked the video so much that they've (dubiously) uploaded the video themselves.

At the moment, Lasse Gjertsen may seem like something of an Internet phenomenon. In 10 years time, videos with viewcounts as high as 7,000,000 may well be seen as the norm, providing YouTube and other UGC-based websites fulfil their potential to to change the face of video media the world over.

Who's Online in 2008?

Well, 2007 really. Some useful sites for net usage statistics:

UK Government Statistics - Very handy for finding out who's using the Internet in the UK and what they're using it for. Not porn, apparently.

PEW Internet and American Life Project - Similar to the above, only with the focus on the whole wide world rather than just the little island we call home.