Just stumbled across a quality video of the Guillemots playing on the streets of Paris. If you're a fan take a look it's very entertaining (and it's worth persevering for the first couple of minutes).
Zo's birthday present is two tickets to see the Guillemots in a couple of weeks time. Hoping she's going to take me!
More goodness in today's Observer. www.thenewrevolutionaries tracks further developments in Silicon Valley and in particular points to the following applications;
The new MySpace is ... Blue Dot
Users click on a blue dot on their screen when they find something they
like on the web, storing it and sharing it with their friends. They
also receive a constant update of their friends' selections of blue
dots, a way of following their interests. Blue Dot spokeswoman Erin
Petrie said: 'You know what movies your friends have seen and what
restaurants they've been to. It makes for richer conversation.'
The new YouTube is ... Loopt
Loopt causes mobile phones to send a 'beat' to a phone mast or
satellite every 15 minutes, pinpointing their location. Phone owners
can share this information with friends' phones or computers for $2.99
per month in the US.
The new iTunes is ... Pandora
In every song, they study hundreds of musical details such as melody,
rhythm and lyrics. The point of it all is Pandora, a website that
invites users to type in a favourite song or artist, then finds songs
with a 'genetic match' and plays them like a radio station. The service
is free, supported by advertising, and has four million listeners.
The new Google is ... Powerset
today's products, such as Google, search only for keywords and cannot,
for example, distinguish between 'book for children', 'book by
children', and 'book about children'. But a natural language search
could identify 'function' words, understand that word order means
something and respect the importance of small 'stop words'.
The new Craigslist is ... Yelp
Volunteer reviewers, or Yelpers, write about their local restaurants,
shops, doctors - anything worth reviewing. Their eagerness to share
combines the best of social networking with the tools of local search,
such as Google Maps.
I haven't checked them all out yet, but Bluedot looks especially intriguing. I also like the sound of Squidoo, where you can build pages that demonstrate what you're passionate about in contrast to the blogosphere where much of the focus is on the individual.
Squidoo also donates to charities and they've already built a school in Cambodia and are funding research into diabetes.
My blog is worth $47,985.90.
How much is your blog worth?
As you do on your hols, I've enjoyed reading the papers more thoroughly than ever. Two particular themes of news have stood out:
It seems that that a war has broken out between supermarkets competing for the ethical consumer's weekly shop. Earlier this week Sainsburys announced it was shifting 500 of it's own brand products from plastic to compostable packaging and just yesterday Tesco announced a new 10 point community plan, including a focus on buying more products locally.Although the two themes are very different as I read one article after the other I was struck by the underlying similarity that increasingly the marginal voice which has been silenced for years is being listened to; the supermarkets are listening to consumers concerns about ethical issues and politicians are becoming wary of the blogosphere. In response to these trends there is the temptation for those who find themselves on the margins to cave in and join those occupying the centreground; to believe shopping at Sainsburys is fine because it's directors are taking the company in the right direction, to pledge allegiance to political parties who give the impression that they are listening.
In both instances I think it is important that those who have caused these changes choose not hop in bed with the enemy but instead stay in that uncomfortable place where your shopping costs more but you keep your local grocer in business and you earn less and have less power, but your posts are not effected by overfriendly politicians.
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