Will Francis

Imagine the photos you’d get if you went around the city pointing and shooting this at people!

This week’s MySpace Live Webchat was with literate hip-hop duo Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip! They dropped into the MySpace London office this week to chat with me and more importantly you about their forthcoming projects. Nice blokes :)

Much like in Wordpress blogs, you can now add static pages to your Tumblr blog. Here’s the word from the official Tumblr staff blog…

OK, so here we are, well into 2010. A well-used date in the science fiction of the mid twentieth century, by which time we would be zipping between space ports, taking one-second ion showers in the morning and generally looking pretty sodding slick. It didn’t turn out quite how we expected, and we’ve seen it coming a long time.

Different versions of the future down the ages have always fascinated me (that’s a whole other blog post). It’s interesting that since the 1980s science fiction has started to be a lot more realistic with its timelines, placing plots 300 or 3,000 years hence, not 30 years ahead as in Back To The Future II which depicted people going about on hover-skateboards and wearing shit baseball caps made out of hologram-foil:

I guess they kinda got that last bit right…

You may well know how much I love this London indie trio. Here’s them doing a cool little set that anyone interested in music should watch to see how they make their minimal sound, but also just to enjoy the tunes :)

After a pub conversation the other night where various parties were espousing their views on the web and its democratic nature I argued that the web isn’t democratic at all, that in fact it’s meritocratic. This seemed to hold up for about a minute before realising it’s actually neither, rather somewhere between the two. In fact its characteristics are more than that and unique enough to require a name, albeit one you might get punched for using - webocracy…

Heard of Chatroulette? If not, you undoubtedly will very soon. It’s the first big internet craze to come to prominence in 2010 and it’s a surprising one.

Phew, so the hype following yet another Google product release is starting to settle. Having had a good play with it on my iPhone here are some initial thoughts:

In a charity shop recently I overheard a conversation involving a scruffy internet-phobic man in his fifties, whose ambivelence towards modernity clearly extended to hot water and shower gel. He said that trying to wade through the abyss of crap on the internet was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I desperately wanted to sidle up to him and suggest that if every piece of hay in that haystack had just one string of metadata, perhaps ‘title=”hay”’, and the needle also contained just one string of metadata, let’s say ‘title=”needle”’, you would be able to locate it within a matter of nanoseconds.

‘About an hour ago’ Vodafone UK’s corporate Twitter account sent out the message “@VodafoneUK: is fed up of dirty homo’s and is going after beaver”. They deleted the tweet shortly afterwards and have spent the last hour sending out a constant stream of apologies insisting that they weren’t hacked but that a member of staff breached protocol and sent out the message. My money is on a member of staff who’s just been sacked or a cheeky intern on their last day.

The question this raises is whether companies will start to attach more value to - and become more protective of - their social media accounts which despite being an increasingly potent communication channel are still very much the domain of junior staff, interns and anyone willing to roll their sleeves up.

Yes, really. In a live TV news interview from his office floor, Martin Lakos of Australian bank Macquarie happily gives some well-delivered thoughts on economical issues whilst unbeknownst to him a fellow banker coyly switches between his email inbox and photos of nude and partially nude ladies.

I mean, who hasn’t? Nothing wrong with that, right? Just not when there’s a sodding news crew behind you!!! I think he realises this just as the news piece ends. Poor guy, must be pretty embarrassed.
Ah well, at least a whole office of bankers now have something to laugh about. Makes a nice change :)

Ok, so I’m a geek, I came to terms with the unavoidable fact around about the same time that it became cool to be a geek. Until then I soldered bits of old radios together and kept a diary in the form of C64 code (stored on a cassette tape!) in the clandestine safety of my bedroom. Now those facts are the sort of things I’m happy to boast to the world about. And I have a soundtrack as powerful as Sequoia. Here are my top tracks to write PHP ‘for’ loops to:

So the amazing guys at BBH in London and Domani in New York made the MySpace Fan Video app as part of the second phase of MySpace UK’s Music campaign. You have to see these videos with your face in. I guarantee laughs all round. Just go to myspace.com/fanvideo and enjoy :)

Here are a couple of screenshots. To see my videos themselves click here.