- The new World of Warcraft Alliance race has been announced and they are Draenei Not the most immediately exciting of the new races – nowhere near as cool as the Blood Elves, but then maybe that was the point…
Category: Random
- The Daily Mail has seven sets of secrets of the new series of Big Brother UK The most notable feature is the ‘golden ticket’ angle – wherein one of the contestants will be chosen randomly from people who find a ticket hidden in Kit Kat chocolate bars.
- Channel Four has more on the Big Brother Golden Ticket lunacy “100 golden tickets will be placed into KitKat four-finger single bars and Kit Kat Chunky single bars for distribution across the country.” Seems like it’s only one in four hundred odds of getting one, which is a little nerve-wracking…
- Caffeinated and Unstrung in Seattle… “This wiki is intended to be a guide to the best places in the city to huddle over a table with your laptop, a cup of something hot and get online”
- A new theory – and remember this is not generally accepted – says that our Big Bang may have been just the latest of many… It’s a pretty fascinating theory, although I’ve not got a sense of how it engages with concepts like space-time and how time exists before the Big Bang. I need more!
- Micro Persuasion reports on a study that suggests social media ad-spending is going to hit $757M in 2010 This is apparently a remarkably small proportion of the overall bin of ‘non-traditional media spend’ available. The site is suspicious of the figure – citing MySpace – and I have to say I’m not convinced either…
- Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music v2 I think having finally found a good starting niche of electronic music thanks to Mr Biddulph, I’m going to have a bit of a rapid explosion of intrest in the area. Ishkur’s awesome flash guide is sure to help considerably…
- Business Week wrote an article a little while back about the ways in which Microsoft and Yahoo are responding to Google’s dominance in the search ad market I’m obviously not going to comment on it in any formal capacity – it’s not an area that I work closely with for a start – but it’s a pretty interesting read nonetheless.
- Why Douglas Rushkoff has had it with religious tolerance I don’t really need to keep posting things where smart people talk about their problems with religion. I agree – and have previously stated – with his statements about the problems that emerge when religious people apply their values
- “Archaeologists have begun digging for what they think might be a pyramid hidden beneath a hill in Bosnia.” Fascinating. Awesome. Unbelievable. The more ancient cultures we can find the better.
Categories
Links for 2006-05-08
- Knickers (a weblog about lingerie) is having a London meet-up on May 17th I was so surprised that the person who is running the event should think I’d know people interested in going that I felt immediately honour-bound to try and drum up some support…
- The Ministry of Defence in the UK has released a study that finds no evidence of aliens of UFOs Obviously it’s not going to convince anyone, and – more obviously – it doesn’t mean that there isn’t life elsewhere or that creatures haven’t been bolding probing Americans.
Categories
Links for 2006-05-07
- An awesome OSX widget feeds you new links (with screenshots) posted to Magnolia I spent a fair amount of time on Magnolia, and my conclusion was that it wasn’t enormosuly interesting – but this widget is glorious and fascinating…
- Busted Tees – a shop for t-shirts covered in funny jokes Well, some of them are funny. I sort of want a ‘Tom is not my friend’ t-shirt. Although t-shirts never really fit me and I look like a bit of an idiot in them…
- Plotting the regional differences in descriptions of carbonated drinks in the US – the Pop vs. Soda Page My grandmother in Norwich always used to try and get me to stop, “drinking all that old pop”. But then she also used to declare me a “sluss pot” for drinking so many liquids. No idea if that’s a real expression or not…
- Howto watch ABC TV Streams outside the USA It’s hacks like this that will mean that gradually the gap between shows being broadcast in the US and the rest of the world will diminish rapidly – and also why media distrubution will go global…
- The Web 2.0 Startup Business Model It’s a piss-take obviously, although I’ve no doubt there’s a certain amount of truth to the whole thing. You have to be hovering over the sections to see the neat stuff…
- The full transcript of the Stephen Colbert talk It remains awesome. Not a lot more to say about it other than it remains awesome and if you didn’t watch the video you should definitely read the transcript.
- Swamp Thing – dodgy looking heap of weeds from the DC Comics universe – has a weblog He’s currently dealing with all the stuff that’s been going on around Infinite Crisis. Poor old chap. Stressful times to be an earth elemental…
- Matt Webb’s done a pretty brain-melting presentation at Goldsmiths on fictional futures, design and sci-fi Wait until you get to the illustrations of super powers he’d like to have (which would be better phrased as way-out body mods). The third is extraordinary…
Categories
Links for 2006-05-04
- if:book talks about how we will handle and publish literary correspondence in the age of e-mail My favourite part of this article is the conversation about how you’d create an annotatable, taggable and explorable resource around Dave Eggers’ Inbox. Not sure I’d be enormously keen to have my e-mail on display in the same way of course…
- Catherine Saillant of the LA Times writes about the negotiations she’s had with her daughter around MySpace A fascinating glimpse into the kind of things that teenagers are doing on MySpace and how confusing it can be for a parent working out how to handle, respond to and harness this activity…
- The KOMPAKT record label has a site where you can buy high bit-rate unencrypted MP3s of their output I can particularly recommend Hundred Million Light Years by KaitO – it’s a wonderful seven minutes of twinkling explorations in noise. It’s nice to find a new source of music to get on with…
- ‘The essence of rabbit’ is a shrine to the Illustrators love of bunnies It includes some work by the lovely Denise Wilton and a mandala featuring hundreds of different rabbits
- Doctor Who dog K9 is to get his own spin-off TV series The only important part of this story is that there’s a picture of a revised K9 that I haven’t seen anywhere else on the web. Has anyone seen a larger version?
- ABC.com’s full episode streaming allows you to watch TV shows online for free Obviously the model is advertising funded. It’s a pretty sweet angle because they can stop people skipping adverts. I don’t think it’s the model that ‘wins’, but it should sit nicely as one of the two or three along with season pass downloads…
- Think Secret posts notes from Apple shareholders’ meeting Most notable for the last line in my opinion and the (albeit tiny) response to questions about Microsoft’s Media Centre – a territory I’ve said repeatedly that Apple should just be invading right about now…
- The BBC’s review of Mission: Impossible III contains this completely classic line… “The only real problem is Tom himself, who manifestly fails to convince as a human being. With his plasticised musculature and ten kilowatt grin, he’s less of an action hero and more of an action figure”
Categories
Links for 2006-05-03
- “TouchGraph of BBC TV/Radio Collaborators” A nice bit of work that someone’s already built on top of the BBC Programme Information dataset showing relatedness based on whether people have been on the same TV or radio show…
Categories
Links for 2006-05-02
- poissons-cravates – a photoset featuring men and women wearing nothing but fish ties I don’t know what to say or think about this, except that it’s strange and interesting and entirely unsexual. Also the fish are cool. I wonder what it smelled like.
Categories
Links for 2006-05-01
- Colbert Lampoons Bush at White House Correspondents Dinner Stephen Colbert is increasingly obviously the most important man in America at the moment. “Colbert urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, ‘and reality has a well-known liberal bias’.”
- Mininova has the torrent of the Colbert White House Correspondents Dinner Found this courtesy of the Boingers, and looking forward to downloading it later in the day.
- A tiny video of some of the best bits of the Colbert speech I know I’m harping on this a bit, but it really is extraordinary.