We have been getting a lot of comments and contact from a few other Scots school blogs (Loading ?take a look inside?, Primary 7 and Primary 7v Class Blog) along with 5/6P AllStars from Australia and more. I’ve been getting a little frustrated when trying to return the visits. Different blogs used different tech, some use flickr some bubbleShare, some Google Video and others file storage that we cannot download. Some of the other schools can see our Quicktime but not Flash.
I can fully understand why Authorities block various sites, but it can get a bit frustrating.
The second moan today is about bandwidth. Since we started podcasting our monthly bandwidth usage has been many time that allowed by our web host blacknight. Blacknight provide free hosting for primary schools and have been very generously allowing our misdemeanors. Recently when I thought to expand our podcasting into video files at Sandaig Television, I decided to use some dot mac storage that comes with my family pack. This worked ok, then was blocked in school by Glasgow, who immediately sorted it out when I asked. So tonight I was surprised to see none of the images or video files apearing on the blog. It seems we had gone over half our monthly bandwidth of 3GB before half the month of December had passed, so they cut us off:

If you are close to exceeding your monthly data transfer limit, you will receive a message from the .Mac team. You can use up to half of your monthly quota during the first 15 days of a month. If you exceed your data transfer limit, any site, blog, or podcast associated with your .Mac account is turned off and service will not be reinstated until the beginning of the next monitoring period (the 1st or 16th of the month, whichever comes first).

my italics, pointing to the fact I didn’t get a message.
I am fairly fed-up about all of this. The sandaig account is part of my dot mac family account, so I guess I could use my main account that allows 10gb per month, or i could scrap the account and spend the money on some real bandwidth.Perhaps both these moans are connected, maybe we need a Scottish service, trusted by the Local Authorities that would provide flickr, google video like storage. I know that not everybody thinks this is a good idea and I can understand the reasons, but in a practical sense it would move us and let more interesting sharing take place in Scottish schools.