I love stackoverflow, it has the answer to just about anything. A problem which has been annoying me for ages is the lightbox over youtube video issue - the problem being that if you open a lightbox on a page with a youtube video, the video appears on top of the lightbox. The youtube video is normally flash, and it needs to have a wmode=transparent parameter to make it behave properly. However, if you're using the new youtube embed method, which is an iframe, you don't have access to the flash object.

Up until now I tried various methods to solve this. My last, partially successful attempt, was to use javascript to add a CSS class when the lightbox opened. The class hides the div which contains the iframe. Then the class is removed when the lightbox closes. This works for some browsers, but IE9 and Safari just don't behave. Safari (on windows) is worst of all. The youtube video stays put, ignoring the CSS.

Enter stackoverflow. And the answer? Just add ?wmode=transparent to the url in the iframe. Simple.

It's late and I'm adding the newest tranche of wine recommendations to supermarketwine.com. Now is a good time to do it. Most reviews are published are on Saturday - and right now it's just turned Saturday. There's an article in today's Independent singing the praises of sherry. Again. How come?

Over the past few years there have been a lot of articles about sherry. I mean a lot. And they nearly all go along the same line - brilliant drink held back by dusty old image. Or to put it another way - the public have been put off sherry by dusty old aunts and their dusty old sweet sherry. It's not a problem I've ever had to face - I never had a dusty aunt, but I love sherry. Not the dusty sweet stuff, but the salty or nutty dry stuff. Sainsbury's Taste The Difference Oloroso and Amontillado are two of the best value-for-money drinks in the UK. At least they have these at their Richmond store (which is a dig at Sainsbury's - if you're listening - because I didn't hear a peep out of them over my tasting the disappointment.)

But why another article on sherry? Haven't we got the message? Is it the filler-article when not a lot else is going on in the wine trade? Or is there a concerted effort to keep publishing sherry articles until Britain drinks its proper quota? Who knows? Anyway, it's a brilliant drink. I got the message, but either the rest of Britain doesn't care, or doesn't read wine reviews. Maybe we're a nation of dusty aunts. Whatever, but please, if there must be more sherry articles, move on from aunts. And to the Sherry Marketing Council (made up by me), there are better ways to promote a brilliant drink. I can't help thinking that you're barking up the wrong tree. If you're trying to change perception, stop reminding us of what you think turns us off. So not aunts. Oh and did I mention, I'm in the creative, branding business? Hint hint.

My take on two big announcements this week - Microsoft's acquisition of Skype and Google's Chromebook.

A quick, unscientific scan of the blogosphere reveals most opinion is against the deal. As one commentator puts it, why not spend one billion making your own Skype service, rather than pay 8.5 billion for something that won't integrate. I guess Microsoft would say that the money spent gets you to market immediately and with a huge user base. Microsoft have developed 'late-in-the-day' apps before, like Zune, which have sunk without trace. The same commentator sees it as the beginning of the end for Microsoft. And this is an interesting thought. On the consumer side, Microsoft is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Apart from Xbox, it doesn't figure in people's consciousness like it did 10 or 20 years ago. There's no reason now to have a Windows PC (as opposed to a Linux or an Apple or now a Chrome pc). Your phone doesn't have to have Windows. You don't need Microsoft Outlook to get your mail. Any information you want to share moves across platforms and media in an almost seamless fashion compared with previous decades when you had to have Microsoft software to open and read a file.

However, it's on the business front that Microsoft is still entrenched in hearts and minds. And nowhere more than the IT department. There must be thousands, nay hundreds of thousands of IT guys (and they are guys in their late thirties to early fifties) who feel a mild sense of panic at the mention of open-source, non microsoft software. They've spent years knitting Microsoft into the fabric of their companies, and they're not about to let that change. It's all they know and all they want to know. I blame them (again unscientifically) for the continued presence of Internet Explorer 6.

In my current role as a digital developer I've come across these IT guys a lot. If the solution you propose isn't .NET (Microsoft's web development platform), then either you don't get the work, or they see you as a maverick, not to be trusted. It's a hard cabal to break. So enter Chromebook. A leased laptop from Google (for $28 a month) that does away with IT. There's no hard drive to install software or store files. Instead, you're connected to the Cloud. All your software, including those Office-like applications, is in the cloud and all your files are stored there too. You just need to connect. No viruses, no nightly backups, no syncs, no asking why you still have to use Internet Explorer 6. Could this be the first nail in Microsoft's business coffin?

I'm not a betting man, so I can't say. What I do know is that on first sight Chromebook seems profoundly anti-internet. And as such, Google is becoming internet enemy number one. There a number of reasons for this. But first things first, Cloud computing is not all its cracked up to be. Amazon, the largest Cloud provider, had a massive outage recently. If we'd all been on its Cloud, we'd all have been offline for days.

For me, however, the issue is far deeper than uptime. I'll stick to two big issues. First is what constitutes the internet. To my mind, the definition of the internet is linked computing. Peer-to-peer. I have a piece of hardware, you have a piece of hardware and we're linked over a non-centralised network that routes information by whatever means possible. With the internet, the whole world is linked and no one is king. But with the new Google model, we're all clients linked to a mainframe. All our data is stored in a centralised place and we're no longer in control of it. In Google we trust.

When Chromebook was announced, Google said that one of the main benefits of using it was that data was far more secure. Users no longer had to worry about backing up data. That was the old way of doing things. For me, this is a bit like taking your photo albums down to Big Yellow Storgage because they're statistically less likely to burn down than your house. It's total rubbish. My data is my data. I'm responsible for it. I'll back it up. It may be easier to share in the Cloud, but that's of little consequence.

Ask yourself a few simple questions. What if Google does lose my information? What if Google decides to take ownership of my information? How do I contact Google? What comeback do I have? How can we be asked to give up our data to a centralised institution of which we know very little about? Right now, for all my disparaging remarks about Microsoft IT guys, I far prefer the idea of IT departments being their own centres of control, placing their companies on the end of peer-to-peer networks and taking responsibility for the continuation and archiving of data.

So you go to all that trouble of building a brilliant solution to solve a classic problem faced by guzillions of people only to find there's just one annoying snag you can't do anything about. The brilliant service helps anyone find a good (recommended) wine at their supermarket, because supermarkets themselves can't. How does it do this? It aggregates the wine reviews from the national press into an online, searchable database. Want a white wine under a fiver? Easy. Want an expensive red to impress, no problem. No problem that is except for that annoying snag. And the snag is that supermarkets don't stock the good stuff - well not all supermarkets - well not Sainsbury's Richmond.

This weekend I strolled down the aisles of Sainsbury's Richmond, smartphone in hand, casually, even nonchalantly - I've-got-a-smartphone-and-I-know-how-to-find-a-good-wine nonchalantly - scrolling the recent list of recomendations. First stop South Africa and a wine which has been recommended in the press three times in the last couple of months: The Bernard Series Whole Bunch Roussanne 2009. The prospect of this "rich, honeyed, pear" delight has got my taste buds tingling. The tingle starts to fade as it soon becomes apparent that this wine isn't on any shelf. There's not even the consolation that it's sold out. It's just not there. Or rather, it's never been there.

Ho hum, onto Australia and something a little more "elegant, dry and citrus", the Leasingham Magnus Riesling 2009. Hardys, Jacobs Creek, Banrock, Oxford, Wolf... hang on, where's the Leasingham? You know, the good stuff, not that big brand, big promotion, on-every-corner-aisle-too stuff. Let's try another riesling from Alsace, the Cave de Beblenheim Riesling Grafenreben 2008. But where is this crisp, zesty, nectar? Hiding in a cave, no doubt. Surely the Luis Cañas Barrel Fermented Rioja Blanco 2009 will come to my rescue. It doesn't.

Row after row is stacked with safe, inoffensive, bland offerings. There must be ten pinot grigios to choose from. More than anything I just want a white wine I haven't had before. I end up buying Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Fairtrade Chenin Blanc. I've had it before. Somehow it doesn't taste as good as it should. It tastes of disappointment. It's the taste you get when you find out a brilliant solution has a snag. Now I'm sure if I shopped in Waitrose...

In a past life I made interactive CDs and then DVDs. I was actually in at the tail end of a big production company, First Information Group, which made produced some stunning work, such as War in the Pacific. The production values were massive, so massive that sales never recouped the outlay. And so the assets passed to Marshall Editions (and so did I). The market for interactive CDs and DVDs pretty much died. Modern computers are just too modern to play these media anymore - you need Windows 98 or lower. Most of the titles produced were a mix of audio, video and graphics (remember the term 'multimedia'?). Some had the accompanying book. But is was the kind of content that the internet couldn't handle (browser and speed limitations in particular). So these great products have been dormant for a decade.

That is until the tablet. I was reading a TechCrunch article on a new iPad app On The Way To Woodstock, when I had that light bulb moment. The tablet is perfect for interactive documentaries with rich media and the distribution model is far simpler than before. Well guess what, there's already an iPad app for War in the Pacific. The reviews are good, but I doubt it's a patch on First Information's.

I've been out of publishing a long time, but I would love to see publishers reworking their content or commissioning new content for the tablet and to go beyond the experience that was offered on CD. There must be a lot of 'multimedia' libraries gathering dust that could be ressurected, including First Information's. Suddenly I like publishing again.

This is my first blog post, so hello and welcome. I'd thought I'd talk about the end of Blueview Group the creative agency I was working for which went bust last week.

Its demise is sad for a number of reasons. First, it was a failed attempt to integrate different communications and marketing channels into a single entity. But call centres and creative agencies, it seems, don't mix. Second, it's left a lot of people out of pocket. Apart from one or two faces that came through the doors, most contractors or freelancers were first rate and delivered first rate work. Third, there were some good clients and good projects that could suffer big setbacks.

So why did it fail? To be honest, apart from the obvious 'cash-flow-kills-a-company', I don't really know. My take is this: it never generated the revenue from the start that was needed to sustain its operation. So it was always playing catch up. It was constantly paring back on staff and other costs. Eventually you get to a stage where the core isn't strong enough to power the enterprise. Towards the end it was very quiet, not a boss in site. And there perhaps is another clue: an absense of direction and leadership. A few people tried to take the reins, but, through no fault of their own, didn't succeed in making Blueview a cohesive force. Like I said, call centres and creative agencies don't mix.

Trying to be objective about it, as best I can, there were things that we did well and things we did badly. I don't know how much the things we did badly contributed to the downfall. It was a tough, competitive environment and we seemed to loose more pitches than we won. When we won, I believe we showed the client that we understood them and their industry and that we presented a story or a vision that they could buy into. On these occasions our research was excellent, we worked as a team, pushed boundaries and came up with clear and often innovative solutions to business problems or requirements. When we lost, we seemed to cobble together a document based on wishful and woolly thinking with individuals being asked to contribute their bit. Once we pitched a global automotive company to create an education tool. The client liked it and quite a few presentations were made. Until one day, a different division within the car giant took one look and said they'd already built it and were about to roll it out across Europe. A little bit of research on our part would have saved so much time and effort... just a little.

So there it is. I liked working for Blueview most of the time. I'm not going to shed a tear. I learnt a lot, I gave a lot. The work I'm proud of is still standing, such as imagemcs.com, gradu8.com and leasing4business.co.uk. It's a new start for me, new ventures, new projects and the rise and rise of supermarketwine.com (hopefully).