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As a recent convert to the iPhone and the wonderful world of the “app” (Planet Rock, anyone?), it’s good to know that the future of app development is being bolstered by a Manchester-based course for young people known as The App School.

Creative consultants, The White Room, are running the free course - backed by the city council, Cornerhouse (Manchester’s centre for visual arts and cinema) and Manchester Metropolitan University - for 18-24 year olds interested in designing new iPhone applications.

And with the mobile app market forecast to reach $6.8bn this year, there’s a potential money making machine for the creative person with the right ideas.

But techno-phobes need not be discouraged. This is about people with potentially commercial ideas and not necessarily those who dismantle computer hard drives for fun.

According to Phil Birchenall, project director at the White Room: “What we need is plenty of enthusiasm and ideas, that’s all.”

I eagerly await the “help your kid with his maths homework app”, and soon.

For the last three weeks the BBC Two series ’The Virtual Revolution‘ (7.15pm Saturday) has been a highlight of the week.  It charts the very real impact that the Internet has had on our lives and forecasts how it might develop as access spreads around the globe.   The list of interviewees is stellar; Tim Berners-Lee, Arianna Huffington, Clay Shirky, Jimmy Wales, Steve Wozniak, Biz Stone and Evan Williams are just a small selection.  All of this hosted by the brilliant Dr Aleks Krotoski.  It takes on the big questions around politics, privacy, society and relationships bringing genuine insight into the changes driven by the web.

The web isn’t a channel like TV, radio or print it is so much more than that but it is critical that those involved in communications remember the residual power of conventional channels.  This series can be viewed on line but most are still watching on TV and tuning in on Saturdays at the point in time determined by the scheduler.  Mainstream media is still driving online traffic.   There is a very neat illustration of this if you take a look at Dr Aleks K’s twitter following.  She was already a respected authority on-line; Guardian journalist, blogger, presenter of the excellent Guardian Tech Weekly podcast, however her twitter following  went through the vitual roof when this series went live on the 30th January. 

TV along with many of the strands of conventional media is a channel of the future as well as the past and digital channels sit comfortably alongside.  It is the final episode of the series tomorrow and you really dont want to miss it.  Make an appointment to view and get a smartphone or laptop in hand for those live watercooler conversations. 

Hashtag #bbcrevolution. We’ll be virtually in the same room.

An interesting piece of research by broadband provider Talk Talk has revealed that due to high speed internet access, we’ve become a highly impatient nation with 70% of us “losing it” if we have to wait any longer than one minute for a page to load.

And this somewhat inflated level of impatience is also apparent in the offline world where in a restaurant, we’ll demand our meal after just eight minutes and 38 seconds, we’ll wait only 10 minutes and 43 seconds for a tradesman to show up and we’ll allow 10 minutes and 1 second for a friend before we burst with annoyance.

It’s clear that patience, once a Great British trait, is slowly wearing away as we embrace an era of high speed internet activity and that’s not just down to the advent of broadband. Twitter, for example, offers a unique feed of real-time conversation and sentiment with news being delivered faster than any other medium, providing us with an immediate global sense of events.

And gone are the days when journalists conducted a quick vox pop to gauge opinion, now they simply use the Twitter crowd as a source of immediate information and push out headlines and blogposts to Twitter via RSS and TwitterFeed.com.

A recent fault with Virgin Media which left many customers without TV and broadband, displayed not only consumer impatience (understandably) but infuriation at the fact that Virgin had not considered using Twitter to inform their customers of the problem, regardless of the fact that a number of people were tweeting about Virgin’s service issues which suggested a major outrage was brewing.

Clearly a massive oversight from Virgin and one which other service providers should take note of. Twitter is a critical vehicle for communicating information, instantly, and could quite easily have dampened the fire that was raging amongst its tweeting customers.

It’s clear we want speed. We thrive on being the first to know and unsurprisingly, it’s the 18-24 year olds who are least prepared to wait, which questions just how impatient future generations will be.

Public transport operators, call centre workers…. you have been warned.

A quiet revolution started this week in the small Yorkshire town of Whitby.

The Whitby Gazette became one of three newspapers from the Johnson Press stable to start charging for content. Readers of the Gazette as well as Northumberland Gazette and Southern Reporter now have to pay £5 for a three-month subscription - or 40p a week.

While it has been Rupert Murdoch and his News International titles that have caught the headlines about when they will charge for access, it is regional newspaper publisher Johnson that has taken the first bold step.

What is interesting is that this move covers local rather than the national and international content that Murdoch’s titles provides.

Johnson’s chief executive John Fry said that he felt that local newspapers offered a “unique” service for which readers may be prepared to pay.

According to HoldtheFrontpage it has seen an internal memo circulated by senior managers in one Johnson division that says “Customers are used to paying for content in-paper and we are simply transferring this thinking online.”

Is this all a bit of reverse psychology with the ultimate aim to drive people back to buying newspapers? Michael Woolf writing in Vanity Fair last month hinted that Murdoch’s aim in charging for content is to drive people back to buying newspapers. Certainly an interesting thought from a newspaperman through and through.

The issue of charging form content also surfaced at the recent Society of Editors’ conference where the editor of the Newquest title the Worcester News, Kevin Ward felt that local newspapers had: “more opportunity to charge for the web” than their national counterparts. He added:  ”What we produce is niche. Nobody else sits in our courts every day. Nobody else scrutinises our public bodies.

One thing that is for sure is that newspaper groups will be watching the latest move from Johnson Press with interest.

So Lily Allen is officially a neo-Luddite.

She’s quit Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and email, ditched her Macbook and BlackBerry and apparently, according to numerous newspaper reports, her only means of communication with the outside world is a home phone and an old mobile.

Putting aside for a moment the underlying message that Lily Allen is to become a recluse, her reason behind such a decision could well be deeper than we’re led to believe.

We all know that the Internet made Lily Allen (in a very real sense) but as a notoriously outspoken and sometimes angry user of social networking sites, has she laid herself bare, torn down every personal barrier and let the world see her for exactly what she is and what she believes in?

In celebrity world this can surely be dangerous. We all love a sense of mystery but with Lily, we’ve seen it, heard it and she’s probably worn a T shirt with it emblazoned across it.

But it works both ways. She’s encouraged opinion and some of it will have undoubtedly been hard to swallow. Random strangers calling you fat, ugly, brattish, vulgar must surely instil a sense of fear… which is likely to lead to silence.

Reports suggest that her boyfriend asked her to choose between him or Twitter, but could this in fact be a shrewd move by her management: “Ditch Twitter, keep your opinions to yourself for a while, be seen to disappear into obscurity, oh and let’s get a press release out …”

As for the effects this may have on her personal life, she’s hardly going to become a recluse. With A-list friends like Kate Moss and Agyness Dean, whilst gigging at some of London’s coolest venues, I very much doubt that her decision to log off will leave her short of party invites.

Latest research shows that more than a quarter of people have cut back on buying magazines and newspapers in the economic downturn in favour of free online content.

However, the results also reveal that this does not mean people are more open to subscription services. Just 11% said they currently pay for online media and a further 11% said they may begin a subscription in the next 12 months.

But this begs the question of why? Why would a consumer buy access to news online when they can get it free elsewhere?

Surely a precedent has been set after receiving it free for years and it’s too late to change?

Rupert Murdoch, whose global empire has made a huge financial loss, declared recently that the “free-for-all in online news has ended” and has pledged to shake up the newspaper industry by introducing charges for access to all his news websites.

I don’t doubt Murdoch’s ability to pave new ways, but is this really the best way of increasing revenue?

With the amount of blogs and social networking sites out there, far fewer people rely on traditional media for their latest news fix. That isn’t to say a paid for model won’t work for specialist media, where there’s a niche audience, but mainstream news is readily available, whenever we want it.

But many believe it’s purely down to behavioural change. As David Elms, media partner at KPMG, the company behind the research, says: “Monetising online content is the holy grail of the media sector. The challenge is changing the mindset of a consumer population that is used to accessing free online content.”

Steve Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online, which promises to help news outlets charge for content, says: “People have been exchanging cash for newspapers and magazines for decades - they just need to get into the habit of doing so online.”

But Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of non-profit NPR, who believes in making pay optional, said: “To think that we are so smart that we can retrain the audience, that’s an awfully elitist, condescending, and frankly old perspective.”

Instead of charging for subscriptions, perhaps newspapers should look at what they’re offering and provide the best online content to attract lucrative advertisers?

The Internet will score a first when England takes to the pitch against Ukraine in the World Cup qualifier next weekend.  It will be the first time ever that a a football match of this import has been broadcast live to fans via the web rather than on a TV channel.

The situation has arisen because the broadcast rights had been picked up by failed sports channel Setanta.  Following the collapse of the broadcaster, fans will watch this weekend’s World Cup clash on their computers.  Media group Perform will  stream the footage on a pay-per-view basis at www.ukrainevengland.com at a cost of £4.99.

This is a critical moment for television as a medium.  What is demonstrates is that TV is no longer platform specific, or more simply you don’t need a TV to watch TV anymore.  In fact the hundreds of pubs up and down the country who usually pack the bar for this type of fixture must be considering wiring up the PC to the big screen, and if not next weekend then they surely will as this trend continues.   What is really significant is that this is a sporting ‘event’.  Live events were supposed to be the saviour of broadcast TV and the Saturday night schedule reflects this.  If live TV can find a home on the net then how long before content follows advertising spend and goes digital? 

It seems the power of the PR ‘stunt’ to gain coverage is still well and truly with us - as the story of Winston the pigeon is anything to go by.

Winston was challenged to get a  4gb data stick from the offices of Unlimited IT in the town of Howick to Durban quicker - one hour and eight minutes -  than a transfer by an internet connection from the country’s biggest ISP Telkom.

Unsurprisingly, Winston’s pigeon post won delivering the data stick whilst just 4% of the data had arrived electronically.

The object of the exercise was to demonstrate just how slow broadband connections are in South Africa and give some profile to the IT company.

However perhaps this ‘stunt’, which gained global coverage, was timely as qualification games were taking place across the world and people were thinking about South Africa.

Today’s tournaments are so heavily reliant on the internet that the’ stunt’ offers a wake up call to the authorities and tournament organisers that its communication  network needs to be able to cope with the demands of the modern World Cup.

The last thing you want is a meltdown while the world’s media is in your back yard. Now where is that crisis management plan……

Most people who read a newspaper will have picked up on the story of Mathew Robson, a 15-year-old intern at Morgan Stanley who wrote a report into teenage consumption of the media which broke surface a little over a week ago. At first glance this smacked of a well executed PR stunt after the story made a huge splash in the nationals and had significant penetration online.

However, upon reading the report in its entirety – rather than reading what other people have said about the report, which is where most conversations have derived from – it is actually surprisingly simplistic, logical, and to someone who was not a teenager all that long ago, far less than groundbreaking than you might imagine. Everything contained in the report, well, it just seemed rather self-evident.

For instance, one of the key points that the media picked up on is that teenagers don’t Twitter. Of course they don’t. You actually have to invest some time in Twitter to get anything out of it. It takes months, if not years, to actually build up enough followers for one to feel their tweets are actually reaching an audience which could be, in any way, defined as significant. And even once you do, there is little content other than the oh so boring medium of text.

Compare this to the Facebook experience where you can jump into a ready made group, lured by a diversity of visually stimulating and engaging content, such as pictures, applications and games. It’s all rather Scrabulous.

Many of the other observations are fairly straightforward, claiming, for example that most teenagers don’t read newspapers or watch the news…is this news? Were you interested in global geo-politics or the lack of transparency within the political system when you were 14? No, thought not. Funnily enough, kids aren’t now either.

Most kids have mobiles on pay-as-you-go because they can’t afford contracts…hold the front bleedin’ page…the FT did.

So ok, this isn’t a PR stunt, but it does demonstrate a few things. Firstly, that if you want a report into the habits of media consumption – or anything for that matter – to have penetration, keep it simply and write it in language that is not impenetrable to the man in the street. Secondly, if you want to know how teenagers consume the media or anything else, just ask them. Thirdly, a story really does not have to be groundbreaking to get blanket coverage; it just has to be insightful, informative and PR’d within an inch of its life.

The report in its entirety can be viewed here.

Sky Sports have been hyping The Ashes for months in their own inimitable way and who can blame them with the money they have spent to secure sole television rights.

It is one of their older commentators, the former England player and coach David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd, who has taken on their coverage to another level with his tweets from the commentary box.

Reading his tweets reminds me of listening to the grandfather of cricket coverage Test Match Special (TMS).

Over the first two days we have learnt from Lloyd his views on the food being delivered, suggested player look-a-likes and that he even listened to the Inspiral Carpets and Mark E Smith on the way to the ground this morning.

It is not just the occasional tweet either from Lloyd there is regular comment and views through each session. While the BBC’s Jonathan Agnew is sending regular tweets, it seems as if Lloyd has edge. Perhaps Agnew, sitting in the TMS commentary box can add little to what is being said.

Both set up their accounts within days of each other last week and Lloyd has taken a first innings lead with Lloyd having 8885 followers compared with 6820 following Aggers. Interestingly, old stalwart Henry Blofeld has started up his own Twitter account - only yesterday - most of tweets seem to be just retweets.

Sky, along with Bumble, seems to have grasped the extra dimension that Twitter can bring to fans – some of whom are sitting in the office and can’t watch the TV or listen to the radio.