It's always good to do a brief round-up, but it seems a little retarded to simply mention what's on the seven-or-eight posts below this one. Instead, what we've decided to do is help you catch up on some of those awesome "Possibly related posts: automatically generated" from the bottom of my missives this week that you may have missed.

POST: Me bringing that heat to Esquire magazine

RELATED POST: This is why we bother with all that "equality" stuff

JOKES BRUV: Women talks about how important it is to tackle standard discriminatory views of women, before then going on to mention how she plays bass guitar. Doesn't spot irony.

POST: The one with the "acne Lucozade" gag

RELATED POST: Jonas Brothers are "aristocratic rock stars"

JOKES BRUV: This generation actually too fucking depressing to crack wise on. Thomay101 asks you the viewer whether you prefer the Jonases (Jonai?) before or after they glammed up. Sadly the only response to date is from Autumn, who says "HOOTTTIIEESS!!!"

POST: Rocktimists: big up that crew

RELATED POST: Truth of the day

JOKES BRUV: "This page is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com"

POST: Some filler bullshit about that Muslim guy who's running for president

RELATED POST: Ich bin ein Obama

JOKES BRUV: Dunno, couldn't be bothered to read it.

POST: Passantino gets chippy e-mail, writes chippy blog post

RELATED POST: It's only rock 'n' roll but I like it

JOKES BRUV: A picture of this guy:

SPECIAL BONUS MATERIAL: The Obama post also got this spam comment:

Islamic Jihad | h7630kqv@muchomail.com | congresscheck.com/tag/islamic-jihad | IP: 67.207.71.252

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

It was Friday night last night... prime time for a suckfest. I spent the night reading Lord of the Rings. Yes. Reading on a Friday night can be counted as a valid suckfest. 

Saturday night, tonight, I resorted to throwing the TV remote control into the air, repeatedly, and catching it, before repeating the action. Then challenged myself by standing under the chandelier and throwing the remote up as close as I could to the chandelier without actually hitting it. It only served to momentarily seduce my boredom, not satisfy it.

There used to be something dignified in being a hermit, or even hermit-like after a series of lame - LAME - Friday and Saturday nights. But I think even the hermits have now the leeway, and impatience, to admit that we're quite bored.

And this is always an annoyance on Fri & Sat nights. Midweek one would hardly consider it!

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]]> http://dddsdsfdfdf.wordpress.com/?p=4 Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:53:16 +0000 dddsdsfdfdf http://dddsdsfdfdf.wordpress.com/?p=4 FREE SEX VIDEOS

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]]> http://ddssdfrgthj.wordpress.com/?p=6 Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:22:44 +0000 ddssdfrgthj http://ddssdfrgthj.wordpress.com/?p=6 Free Porn Videos and Pictures updated daily!

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]]> http://waiting4soa.wordpress.com/?p=88 Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:26:06 +0000 Cheery http://waiting4soa.wordpress.com/?p=88 [audio http://media.switchpod.com/users/ravostella/CraigDavid08Unbelivable.mp3]

Unbelievable - Craig David

Bon pour les oreilles...

Bon pour les yeux (pardon pour la qualité très moyenne de la photo, j'ai du le prendre en filature pour l'avoir :mrgreen: )

Halleluia! Vive les beaux mecs! :D

· Seeing as its now the middle of July, which give or take a few days can be summed up as being the middle of summer, and the middle of 2008, now is a good a time as any to sit back with a cup of tea and a biscuit and think about how the year's gone so far, technology wise.

Specifically, this week I'll focus on a trend that has really kicked off in 2008: Micro-blogging. Users of social networking behemoths such as Facebook and MySpace will already be well aware of the concept of micro-blogging, with built in features called "status updates". Put simply, it's like text messaging crossed with social networking -typing a short summary of what you're doing, and posting it for your friends (or the world) to see. I shall leave the argument of 'why bother' out of this review, because believe me, it's a potentially huge argument that'll do nothing but go back and forth until we all get tired, so to start I'll look at who the leading pack consist of, and who's not far behind.

Current 'King of the Hill' is a site that I've mentioned on and off over the last few months: Twitter. Built using Ruby on Rails, Twitter celebrates its 2nd birthday this month, so, perfect time to dissect it compared to its competitors. It finds itself in a unique position, one rarely thrown upon just any old 2.0 website, in that it's currently enjoying huge success as being a close potential as 'the next big thing' in the world of 2.0 technology, much like MyFaceSpacebook before it. Sadly, this surge of popularity has seen an absurd amount of downtime, to the point where the same people who built them up are trying to knock them down, and find a replacement.

Replacements aren't hard to find, in fact, they're pretty much everywhere, each of them with their own daft 2.0 name. There's nation-specific services (such as Germany's Frazr), there's sites that try to combine micro-blogging with other micro-services (such as filesharing with Pownce, life-streaming with Google's Jaiku, and podcasts with Spoink), and there's even sites that don't provide anything different at all, and just seem to have tagged along for the fun of it (that award goes to Identi.ca). Is there anything amongst this mountain of websites, including Twitter, that has the potential to have its 15 minutes of fame?

My focus this week is on Plurk; yes, another odd name, and yes, another micro-blogging site for you to try. In their own words they're a very "snazzy site", and from the moment you arrive you cannot help but agree. The layout of the micro-posts (or Plurks in this case) is set out in a timeline effect, allowing greater visibility on your Plurking pals, following the events of what's happening and when it's happening in a unique way, but still keeping the general jist of micro-blogging. A slight difference from Twitter, which has more in common with text messages (described somewhere I read as clean-slate messages), Plurk makes everything slightly more friendly, with an emphasis on actions, not too dissimilar from Facebook circa 2007 (Andy is, Andy thinks, Andy likes, et al...). Each “plurk” is posted to the timeline with the ability of threaded replies, and the service also offers “cliques” for plurk distribution and various privacy options. Mashable recently compared both Plurk and Twitter:

"The [Plurk] service has an odd, quirky feel to it; it’s much more visual than Twitter, and it’s fun to use. It uses colors to emphasize your ‘moods’, and it introduces the concept of karma, which should be familiar to Reddit users; the more you use the service, the more karma you get. In this case, karma even lets you unlock certain features, which almost feels like a mini game (if you like very boring mini games). Finally, just like Pownce, Plurk lets you divide your friends into “cliques”, which is just a fancy word for groups."

So is it enough? Will all these 'snazzy' features be enough to drag people away from Twitter, the next time it crashes? Better yet, has it got enough oommph to be the next MyFaceBeboBookSpace?

Sadly, it doesn't look like it. Much like Simon Cowell would explain to some pug-faced Christina Aguilera-wannabe dressed up in their Sunday best - sometimes, talent just isn't enough, you need to have 'the look', there needs to be hype. You could be the next big thing, but unless you gain a following, and convince that following that they love you, you could just be yet another karaoke singer down the local. Take Bebo for example; Bebo is like the Paul Potts of the Internet: it's far from being the best at what it does, and not only that, its rough on the eye, its slow, sometimes to the point of being unresponsive, yet it took just months for it to go from an average social networking website to one of the most frequently used and most talked about of the last year, to a point where AOL paid £417 million for it. Much like Potts, you have to forget potential, forget aesthetics; if enough people talk about you, sign up, and tell other people about you, eventually it builds up and up until you don't need to spend millions of advertising campaigns, because the public are doing it for you.

Can anyone remember Friendster? The site still has a huge 65 million people registered, but when was the last time you heard anyone talk about it? Friendster is like Craig David: 5 or 6 years ago it could have called itself the forerunner of networking, but a mixture of the 'fresh new look' of Myspace, coupled with a huge dollop of luck, hype, and great timing with the aforementioned site, Friendster soon faded into obscurity, with only the Philippines using it on a regular basis. Suffice to say that the $30 million Google once offered to buy it for is a long way away from being repeated.

The thing about Twitter is that it’s not the most popular micro-blogging service out there because it’s better than others. Okay, it's a good looking site, and fair dinkum, when its not suffering from downtime, it's simplicity is pretty addictive in a strange way, but even after that, it's only offering so very little, and sites like Plurk haven't taken it a step further, they're just repeating a good main course with a slightly different salad. The same problem lies with all of the other sites listed above; they've pitched themselves as being 'the solution' to 'the gap in the market', but there is no gap, and there never will be a gap until Internet users say so.

Wood for the trees moment here - If entrepreneurs are serious about investing in Micro-blogging, seeing it as having the potential to one day be on the same plateau as social networking, then they need their head seen to. The future for micro-blogging, for me, exists within social networking, and we have enough of those already.

~

· Sometimes whilst reading random RSS feeds, I may click on one that catches my eye, and it's not long before I find myself nodding along and agreeing with everything I'm reading. Such occasion happened last week in a TechCrunch post regarding the death of voicemail.

"It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily."

Author Michael Arrington conducted a Friendfeed survey (yes, another microblogging site) in which he asked if anyone actually still used Voicemail, or instead preferred using email, text messages, Skype, or any other type of communication.

For me, I can't help but agree. I find voicemail terribly annoying, time consuming and ancient. Gone are the days where leaving a voice message telling people I was 'away from my phone', or 'asleep' were important, nowadays it's a pre-recorded message, if anything. My work voicemail hasn't changed in the 2 years I've had my number; it has always been some stranger who left the company years ago introducing himself to the caller, before directing them to an email address long since deleted... maybe this would be a big deal, but nobody cares anymore; If I were to re-record it, my message were to be simply "why are you phoning me outside of office hours?" or "I'm more likely to respond to your urgent message if you text me, or email me, or just call me back in half an hour".

Leaving voicemail messages is just as tedious, and sadly in my line of work its almost expected of the worker, if they can't get hold of someone. Stutterings of Ums and Ahs before hurrying yourself through the call, hanging up, and realising you left out some important information which you then have to ring up and leave as a second message. Even once you have one, it takes about seven steps to listen to it, which brings up another good point - how often do these people you're calling check their messages? If you work for the same people I do - almost never.

From a similar column that appeared on The Times website:

"In today’s busy, busy world of instant communications, voicemail seems quaint. There is no way of knowing if or when a message will be received, and the industry estimates that 20 per cent of the billions of voicemails left each year simply sit there, unloved and unheard."

I'll let the TechCrunch article sum it up:

"More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion). For now most people don’t have voicemail transcription services. So think before you voicemail, more and more people just find it annoying."

~

· One quick lump before I wind it up (and because I couldn't go this week without mentioning it...): iPhone 3G: will it blend?!?!

~~~

That was the week in lumps, a week in which: The Mail on Sunday thinks it has revealed the identity of Banksy, having a partner is all well and good, but having a 'friend with benefits' is much more rewarding according to these stats, we won't have to wait until next Spring for the new series of Heroes, Wimbledon kids champion Laura Robson may be British, but only just, Primal Scream are apparently responsible for the My Bloody Valentine reformation, 3 million of us will be attending a festival this year, and 'Fanboy' has made it inot the dictionary, as '[a] boy who is an enthusiastic devotee, such as of comics or movies.'

and this stupid German man beheaded a waxwork model of Hitler. The top Digg comment sums it up for me:

"Some vandalistic tosser gets his (christian) name in the paper for wrecking a waxcrafter's hard work on a drunken dare, and the German establishment applauds him.

Good going on being about *63 years* late with your big, daring political gesture Frank L. What's next? Beating up an actor because they play an unpopular character on TV.

I bet his mother's proud."

ttfn
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]]> http://timkennedy.wordpress.com/?p=18 Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:13:42 +0000 timkennedy http://timkennedy.wordpress.com/?p=18 [/caption]

My iPod is playing tricks on me. They brag about their big pretty screen and CoverFlow and what not but the album art on my iPod is all out of whack. Lots of the stuff on it doesn't have album art, but even those that do are lucky to match up. And then sometimes they match up when browsing but when you're actually playing the songs, it shows something completely different, as demonstrated with this pic.

Just to explain, the only reason Craig David has even found his way onto my iPod would be because when we were in London in 2005, he was shooting a music video (this one) right near where we were staying. The bits in the video where he's in the rain and people with umbrellas are walking past.

But yeah, if you can make it out, the song I'm listening to is Thank Goodness from Wicked, ie not Craig David. I end up trying to hide the screen before anyone sees. Sometimes the Grease Soundtrack pops up when I'm listening to Coldplay.. you get the idea. Everyone's got skeletons in their iCloset but it's hard enough trying to avoid freaky looks from public transport folk, having a shiny 3.5 inch screen shouting "I'M LISTENING TO RIDICULOUS MUSIC" doesn't help.

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]]> http://dancestoked.wordpress.com/?p=82 Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:02:23 +0000 dancestoked http://dancestoked.wordpress.com/?p=82