It came, we saw, it went … er … POP. The Apple iPhone hit Britain yesterday with all the force of a gentle breeze from the Azores.

The Apple store in London was hardly beseiged with eager geeks and fashionistas (see pic below). As the “crowd” was let in at 6.02 (O2, gettit?), they were easily outnumbered by Apple store staff and bouncers, all in dark suits, and forming a snaking double-line honour guard for the hapless hopefuls to march through.

The first bunch ran through like Olympic athletes winning Gold. In fact they looked just like actors straight out of Chariots of Fire. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they were.

Less that ravenous hordes outside London’s Apple emporium

Make no mistake, this piece of kit will sell on price. Strip away a few poor little rich girls who “must have” it — for ten minutes, and a handful of geeks, the big numbers will come from ordinary Johnnies who will balk at the price. If you buy the top of the range locked-in deal it will cost you $2,654, plus call charges, over 18 months. No way, Jose.

The experts are telling us to wait for the iPhone to be launched in France in a few weeks where French law bans lock-ins. Jonathan Morris of What Mobile magazine said, “People who don’t want to be tied to contracts can simply wait until the iPhone comes out in France. Under French law there has to be an unlocked version so people would be able to bring it back buy a Sim card and use it like any other phone.”

Although the codes are different from the U.S. version, we’re told it’s already been hacked. Most geeks will get this done within a week. It’s interesting that the first thing the BBC reporter did when he got his was to head off to the hacker’s yard to boot out O2.

Steve Jobs is making criminals of us all.

Many of us have been saying it for years : “The BBC is not what it used to be.”

The reasons are many but one stands out. As London has gradually separated off from the views and values of the rest of the nation, so the Beeb has followed suit.

The once proud Corporation is now generally seen as run by a cadre of “metrosexual Guardianistas” — after the clunkingly leftist newspaper. The joke is that they are all balding 39-year-olds called Tristram. Not true, of course, but it strikes a real chord.

In fact, the Beeb is the biggest pensioner in the land, receiving around $6 billion (£3bn) in benefits every year in the form of the licence fee. This licence is levied on everyone in the country who watches television of any sort — even if they never sample the dubious delights of the BBC itself.

The Corporation is now so bloated and privileged — think of the International Olympics Committee where the President is addressed as Your Excellency — that it’s almost impossible to manage or control, especially by the small-beer programme-makers drafted in to do the job.

Today, we hear that the police may be called in to investigate alleged widespread fraud and misrepresentation.

The last Chairman, Michael Grade, a man of some stature in broadcasting, left suddenly to head up ITV, the Beeb’s main rival. Did he sense the disaster waiting to happen?

The previous top management was effectively decapitated by a rogue Government spin doctor for telling the truth about Iraq intelligence. So the Beeb is penalized both for telling the truth and for falsifying it. The lesson is that Government makes a poor bedfellow for any media organization priding itself on its integrity.

After the fiasco over the false allegations about the Queen, in which footage of a photoshoot with American photographer, Annie Leibovitz, was shown in the wrong order to make it look as if the Queen was storming out of the session when, in fact, she was coming in, the BBC has all but collapsed.

Its shaky amalgam of internal bureaucrats and outside production companies has been shown to be grossly inadequate. The once rigorous ethos and in-house training regimes have been largely abandoned in favour of roving freelance operatives who work on short-term contracts for every other broadcaster.

The oddly named BBC Trust has ordered an immediate suspension of all phone-in and interactive competitions after an internal investigation uncovered a string of editorial breaches. They include the flagship charity shows, Children In Need, Comic Relief and Sports Relief.

BBC Director General Mark Thompson (pictured) presented the findings of an internal audit to the Trust yesterday.

The Trust said it was “deeply concerned that significant failures of control and compliance within the BBC, and in some cases by its suppliers, have compromised the BBC’s values of accuracy and honesty.

“The Director General’s interim report to the Trust about additional editorial failings shows further deeply disappointing evidence of insufficient understanding amongst certain staff of the standards of accuracy and honesty expected, and inadequate editorial controls to ensure compliance with those standards.”

The recent debacle over the trailer for a documentary series about the Queen was just one example of many editorial breaches. It has also emerged that RDF Media, which made the series, used the same footage at a festival in Cannes, France, earlier in the year.

It’s now known that the BBC put fake winners on air during phone-in competitions for Children In Need, Comic Relief, Sport Relief and other programmes. It was fined $100,000 (£50,000) only last week for a similar event on the once much-loved children’s show, Blue Peter.

No word yet, though on sackings or resignations of senior BBC personnel, but after this catalogue of woes, it seems almost inevitable. At the least, Mark Thompson, the DG, and Peter Fincham, Controller of BBC1, should be participants in the head-rolling reality show.

Let’s hope they don’t have a phone-in competition for that.

Good news for those of us in Britain delicately poised between buying a Blackberry (I know I’m behind the curve here) and waiting for Apple’s iPhone to arrive. O2 is about to sign the much sought-after contract for the UK and may have it out for Christmas.

It means switching mobile networks for me — I’ve always bought Richard Branson’s Virgin-Motorola phones, and stuck with BT for broadband and landlines. O2, which started off at BT when I worked for them, is now owned by Spain’s Telefonica.

The BBC posted this at midnight last night, after spending most of yesterday at the top of Techmeme :

The agreement with O2 is reported to include Apple receiving a continuing share of the revenue generated for the network operator. The handsets are expected to be sold for about £300 and O2 will be hoping that the lure of the fashionable phone is enough to win customers from rival networks.

It certainly will — has done in my case — and will be a terrific boost to lacklustre O2.

I’ve been watching the hysteria around the iPhone in the states, and read so many reviews of it through the usual suspects, it would be hard to ignore the tiny beast when it arrives. And £300 is only $600, a smallish premium on the U.S. price. Normally, we can expect to pay double.

I wonder though why we have to be so far behind America in these launches?

Update: The Register has just published a piece claiming that the components in the 8Gb iPhone cost $220. That makes the expected UK price of $600 pretty fair taking everything into account. The $220 doesn’t include the cost of assembly, shipping, marketing, or the price of the software that makes the iPhone work. Clearly Apple is relying on lifetime revenues from O2, and sales of other media to make its fortune with this gadget.

Update 2: Bob Cringely is now reporting, “It is my understanding that Apple and AT&T are planning a fall rollout for full 3G iPhone service.” Let’s hope O2 is up to speed on that one.

It’s never pleasant deleting or permanently archiving poorly-performing sites that have become a drain on a network, but it has to be done. Apart from good housekeeping, they affect the bottom line and reduce the profitability contributed by other hard-working sites.

I’ve been pruning and paring for a while now, but the next couple of weeks will see a final push towards a more balanced network.

To begin the process, I’ve started with my own personal blog, which has been up for all of a week. Why? I’ve never been much of a blogger. I like to write about ideas, phenomena, events and things. I never like to write about myself, so I’m not much use as a blogger.

Blogging, in its native sense of web log, is writing about yourself. Any other form of writing, even on blog platforms, is really reportage and commentary. To me, blogs are introspective and usually egotistical. Twitter is full of bloggers who imagine there’s an audience for their “tweets” : I’m going to the coffee shop … I’m having a latte … I’m sending an email to Fred … etcetera. There are even feeds for this stuff. Birdseed for birdbrains.

Why do they do it? Dunno, but it must be cathartic to imagine there’s an audience hanging on your every move. It’s the everyday equivalent of the celebrity who won’t leave the house without a film crew in tow.

It’s the same with blog posts. When I moved Syntagma to its present domain, I read through 500 or so old posts intending to bring them over. In the end I transferred 50 or so. The rest simply didn’t stand the test of time. They were either hopelessly wrong, or just plain batty.

Blog posts are essentially conversations — one-way most of the time. If you were able to replay your recent voice conversations with other people, would you actually want to?

So when I read an article by Dave Winer yesterday on the BBC website, I was surprised that he’s prepared to pay a largish sum of money to Google or Amazon to host his online bloggings “in perpetuity”. He even suggests they might be beamed into space so they’ll last forever.

Interesting that he chooses Google or Amazon. Google is less than a decade old, and Amazon can’t have been more than 15 years in the online retail business. Can you imagine either of them being around in 50 years, let alone 50 centuries.

Ancient Alexandria was the intellectual and spiritual centre of the planet. The Great Library of Alexandria was a wonder, preserving the knowledge and science of the ancient world. To have your work on a scroll or codex in that place would ensure it lasted forever.

Then a bunch of fundamentalist Christians came along and burnt it to the ground. After that “success” they did it again later, with the works of the Gnostics, which were only rediscovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt where they were hidden underground in pots. The pots proved more durable than all of man’s artifice in protecting ancient knowledge.

Why would Google or Amazon fare any better than the Great Library of Alexandria? They won’t, for course. Nothing lasts forever.

I would suggest Dave carefully sifts through his online archives, choosing only the bits that are still interesting today, and have them printed into durable books on quality paper and in robust bindings. He should then donate copies to libraries around the world, like the British Library, the Library of Congress, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, etcetera. He would then have a better chance of his work seeing out the next 500 years than relying on Google and Amazon.

He should also bury a few copies in earthenware pots, in Death Valley, California, the Negev and Sahara deserts. Somewhere hot and dry, or they’ll rot over time. Climate change is the big imponderable here, of course.

On balance, I think he should just delete them, as I’ve done with my personal blog. Then, like Shakespeare and Homer, his work may be preserved in living memory by public demand, not by hosted servers paid ahead until the end of time.

Chronicles of wasted time … in praise of ladies dead and knights sublime. After Shakespeare