hackbash

Love this, from Response Source:

Hint: if you need to ask, you want the button on the right.

Tags: PR, The insanity of Kevin Eldon

How’s this for a paper trail? Dave writes a blog post bemoaning the distance between him and Marmite, I take a photo of my breakfast and post it on Flickr, somebody writing about whether wholemeal bread is healthy asks to use it to illustrate their post, I end up blogging about the whole thing.

Correct: no paper involved, but it’s still an interesting example of the random and unpredictable way that stuff pans out online, and it served to introduce me to NowPublic, which had previously escaped my attention.

Which might not be a good sign. I’m not pretending I’m at the centre of the net or that I know which way the digital wind blows, but I spend a lot of time looking for news stories and double-checking them on the internet. Either NowPublic has never been relevant to a news story I’m researching, or Google just doesn’t like its face.

I’ve been scornful about citizen journalism, but mostly because I just hate the term. NP’s clearly a big community and there ought to be plenty of good stuff on there. I need to spend more time looking at the site, but most of the stories I’ve looked at involve a brief introduction by the writer, followed by the wholesale quoting of a recognised news source. Hardly the news-gathering force implied by the NP blog’s “army of reporters” hyperbole.

I can see the point of gathering news in one place, but on early evidence I’m not sure that NP is as clever as the papers, as quick as tweets, or as interesting as blogs.

Tags: citizen journalism, Flickr, Marmite, NowPublic, toast

Because that’ll work.

Tags: login, Microsoft, stupid

Yeah, I know, it sounds like self-help bullshit, but allow me to explain. Last night saw a cracking thunderstorm over Brighton. It lasted for maybe three hours, with a good couple of hours of forked lightning and proper pyrotechnics.

I was trying to work. Consequently, by the time I’d finally realised that it was a special, once-in-five-years sort of a storm, it had retreated eastwards a bit and started to look less dramatic - witness lack of said lightning and pyrotechnics in the above. I spent an hour hand-holding photos on the office 400D, but I should have been outside doing it properly with a tripod and my FE2.

And here’s the thing. After last year, when circumstances saw me stuck inside freelancing on almost every fine weekend of the summer, I vowed I wasn’t going to miss out on the best of Brighton through work. I’ve been sticking to that at the weekends, but I realise last night was a slip-up: I should have been soaked through, on the beach, trying to keep the camera dry and get the perfect shot.

I’m angry at myself that I wasn’t. I know someone who would have made sure I was.

Still, last night’s pictures (I’ll put more on Flickr later) made me realise why shots from the 400D look disappointingly soft: it’s that damn kit lens. It never quite looks in focus, and focusing manually last night I discovered that it never is - touching it is enough to affect the sharpness; there’s more play in the mechanism than my 50mm Nikon lens, and that’s been dropped more than once.

Another irritating quirk is that, unlike any other lens I’ve used, turning the focusing ring to its stop doesn’t bring it to an infinite focus - you have to back it off a fraction to get a sharp picture. I’d been shooting for ages before I realised.

Tags: Canon EOS 400D, Nikon FE2, photography, self-help, thunderstorm, work

While writing Sunday’s post I remembered that the Nokia Suite lets you connect your phone and browse its text messages. At least in theory. Version 6.something of the Nokia Communication Centre seemed to hang once it had chalked up a couple of bars on the progress meter, so I’ve downloaded version 7.0.7.0 - didn’t the European Union do away with ridiculous version numbering in a 2003 directive?

The new version works, after a fashion. After an eternity, also. I’ve got a lot of messages on my phone, to be fair, but I can back up the entire thing in a fraction of the time it takes the erratic progress meter to crawl across Nokia Communication Centre’s screen.

When it’s done, I can see my texts, but I managed to hang it earlier trying to save the important ones and clear the rest. Since then it refuses to update properly. Frustratingly, I’ve received a text I still can’t read.

I don’t remember a version of the Nokia PC Suite that ever worked perfectly. If I’m deciphering the version number correctly it’s on the seventh revision of the seventh release; it should be better than it is.

Still, I suppose it’s Nokia’s way of telling me to get a new phone.

Tags: mobile phone, Nokia Communication Centre, SMS, texts

Ah nuts. My mobile, which has been hanging on gamely since an unfortunate incident last October, looks to be finally shuffling off this mortal coil. It’s still working, but the screen isn’t, so I’ve no idea who’s calling me, or who’s texting me and about what.

I was pondering this, and what a pain in the arse it is not being able to tell everybody not to text me at this particular juncture, and realised that there might be a point to Twitter after all - it’s just on the wrong platform.

People already use mobiles to update Twitter and their Facebook status, but why only use the phone as a middleman? What price a mobile phone contacts list that displays individual status?

Consider:

- Chris is in meetings until 4pm. Please call after then.
- Dave has his phone turned off.
- Handolio is on a plane. If he calls you back it’s the Valium talking.
- Tom is abroad. Retrieving a voice message will involve him in an international call. Please at least make it interesting.

I suppose it would have to work through data rather than the phone or text network - and people would need to sign up to it - but if selecting a contact brought up that person’s status you’d be able to see at a glance what they were up to, and whether they wanted calls, texts or neither.

Hey ho. Until someone invents it, or until my phone manages one last death throe, Handolio can’t see text messages due to an inability to manage soft drinks. They shall remain unread.

Frustratingly, perhaps ruinously unread.

Tags: Facebook, mobile phone, status, twitter

As regular reader(s) will know, I read BBC News Online a fair bit. Even so, I’ve never noticed this before. I’m slightly embarrassed that it’s in such a story of prurient interest, but there you go.

So, searching the Beeb for Newstracker reveals that, at least in theory, this has been running since 2004. It’s seemingly hardly been used until the last month or so, when it’s started to appear in the side bar on a few stories. Clicking any of the links serves up the BBC’s 404 page, though.

Now I think about it, I seem to remember a time not so long ago when the BBC served up active links to other news sources in the right-hand pane. Maybe I’m misremembering, but I know that someone was doing it, and who more likely than the publicly-funded Beeb?

I was going to write ‘less commercially-minded’, but perhaps one of the downsides to an increased awareness of SEO among news sites is that they now better understand the value of an outgoing link, and are less inclined to use them freely. Even the BBC, which can’t make money out of them.

Tags: bbc, Newstracker, SEO

A while back, exactly six months back in fact, I wrote a How-to guide covering del.icio.us. At the time, a redesign and rebrand to just Delicious had been in the pipeline for ages - it was overdue at the time and had conspicuously failed to appear since.

Until now - I just bookmarked something to be greeted with a shiny, new-look window, and the site finally looks like it was probably meant to months ago. The URL’s changed too; from http://del.iciou.us to http://delicious.com.

It’s late, and I’m about to go to sleep, so I won’t attempt to list the changes. It looks cleaner and more modern, though, and it appears to be a bit easier to navigate. Good stuff, but not earth-shattering: what took them so long?

Tags: bookmarking, delicious, redesign

I don’t know. In my day there were only two stupid things to do with a balloon: Let go of an inflated one at a family party so it blew a salivatory* raspberry, or untie a helium one and pretend to be a chipmonk.

It turns out there are at least two more stupid things to do with a balloon that I hadn’t previously catalogued. The first is tying a multitude of helium-filled ones to yourself and going for an ultimately fatal jaunt to 20,000 feet.

And then there’s the fourth stupid thing to do with a balloon, which I would apparently have encountered earlier had I been to a festival lately. It seems that yoot use balloons to concentrate and inhale nitrous oxide for recreational effect.

It’s debatable whether this is strictly stupid - I haven’t tried it - but I’m going to call it stupid for one simple reason: I’ve never felt older than when I realised that said yoot weren’t, in fact, trying to be chipmonks.

Learning: it’s not like it was in my day.

*The jury’s out on whether this is a real word. I don’t care.

Tags: balloons, chipmonks, Darwin award, helium

Noun: When performed by a sub editor, the act of shattering a writer’s fragile ego by presuming to change A. Word. Ever.

(See Coren G. v Owen, Amanda and Ben - 2008)

Usage: I can’t stand it, I know you planned it
I’m gonna set it straight, this Watergate
I can’t stand rocking when I’m in here
‘Cause your crystal ball ain’t so crystal clear
So while you sit back and wonder why
I got this fucking thorn in my side
Oh my god, it’s a mirage
I’m tellin’ y’all it’s subotage

Tags: definition