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Directing amateurish movies has never been so much fun
The mission of Xtranormal, according to their website, is to bring movie-making to the people. Indeed, they say that it's going to be the most important communications process of the 21st century ( Read more... ) -
Suffering from website envy?
Two friends of mine had a major spat a couple of years ago over their respective website designs. The fact that they didn't much care for each other in the first place didn't help the situation, but one of them claimed - with some justification, it has to be said - that the other had swiped the overall look of her website and indiscreetly applied ( Read more... ) -
Sorry? You want 500 words on Michael Jackson?
I'm not sure that I'm up to the task, to be honest. I mean, I'm not used to grandly pontificating about the cultural significance of the passing of a pop star. I'm not sure that I can draw sufficient parallels with the unusual lives of other famous people who have unexpectedly died, skirt around the paedophilia accusations without saying something ( Read more... ) -
The quest for real-time search
A couple of years ago, someone predicted that Twitter would become "the pulse of society", and I remember thinking something along the lines of "nah, that's not particularly likely, because it's just full of people dispensing pithy one-liners or, more often, moribund observations about the weather." But as keying in status updates across services ( Read more... ) -
The folding plug
I was just in the middle of writing a more lengthy post about real-time search, when someone sent me a link to this video. For those of us whose love affair with the British mains plug never really got off the ground - and let's face it, that's pretty much all of us - this is a brilliant idea that a) I can't believe anyone hasn't thought of already ( Read more... ) -
What's the point in online petitions?
I'm aware that in even posing this question I'm setting myself up to be lynched as the kind of cynic who believes - in a non-committal, couldn't-really-care-less kind of way - that there's barely any point in doing anything, that expending any effort over and above the bare minimum is a terrible waste of precious energy that could be better ( Read more... ) -
The net's impact on the Queen's English
There's a post over at Everything2 which addresses the slow erosion of the proper order of fullstops, commas and quotation marks in online discussion. Apparently, keen to avoid mistakes being reproduced when placing code in quotation marks, geeks have taken to always putting fullstops and commas outside the quotation marks regardless of context. ( Read more... ) -
The two BNP victories were despite their vote going down
Apologies for straying from the usual technology-related matters on this blog, but having woken up this morning and being confronted with a barrage of posts on Twitter like this one ("Okay people ... what happened there? I turn my back for 5 minutes and the North of England goes fascist."), and general despair and fist-shaking at the people of ( Read more... ) -
Wikipedia bans Scientologists - but should they?
When I saw the news the other day that Wikipedia had banned contributions from IP addresses used by the Church of Scientology in response to them relentlessly pushing a pro-Scientology agenda on the website, my first reaction was that it was fair enough. True, stories like this one don't make me feel well-disposed towards Scientology, but this isn' ( Read more... ) -
The online business models that definitely didn't work
With the news that Facebook isn't quite as highly valued as it used to be, that Twitter is continuing to prevaricate over exactly when it might bringing in any substantial revenue, and with doubts blasting from all sides about the ability of online ventures to subsist on the meagre proceeds of online advertising, it might be worth reminding ( Read more... )