Will Francis

Want this Camera

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:44:00 +0000

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

Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip MySpace Webchat: Watch Again

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:59:00 +0000

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 :)

Tumblr Now Allows You To Add Pages To Your Blog

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:36:29 +0000

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…

Now testing: Pages

You can now add static pages to your blog, with a few very useful options. Head to your blog’s Customize page and click the “Pages” menu to get started. There are currently three types of Pages you can create:

Standard Layout. Create a simple page with a title and body using your current theme.
Custom Layout. Create a page with a completely separate layout.
Redirect. Forward a route to a page on another domain. Useful for maintaining links when moving your domain name over to Tumblr.

Developers: Check out the Theme Docs for instructions on implementing the new {block:Pages} tag.

Tech Disappointments of 2010

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:54:15 +0000

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…

This realism was no doubt due to the space race cooling off and the harsh realisation that space travel is actually quite hard and even getting someone to Mars would be a bit of a ballache. Whilst coming to terms with our unstellar, essentially-medieval-but-cleaner present and future existence we’ve made some truly amazing advances in more useful, mundane technology which allows us to make telephone calls on the move and listen to any music in the world from the comfort of home. There are however some aspects of consumer technology that really need to pull their socks up:

Video connections - should it still be this hard to send and receive moving images with sound, in the same room? We still have no standard, other than HDMI which is still far from universal. The DVI out on my MacBook Pro has to be converted into VGA and I still have to pipe the audio out from my headphone socket into the TV or a hi-fi. Too many cables and hassle. We really should have a wireless, lossless video transmission protocol which is adopted by all TVs, DVD players, computers etc.
ETA: Development is slow and offices the world over seem happy with a VGA cable limply hanging out from a flatscreen TV for those who dare to risk looking like they can’t operate their own laptop. I’m setting the flux capacitor to 2015 on this one.

Internet connectivity - use a laptop? Who doesn’t? And yet it’s still a stroke of luck if you manage to get wifi anywhere. I rely on my jailbroken iPhone and an app that lets me turn it into a wifi hotspot for internet on the move. It seems crazy that modern laptops don’t come with 3G as standard, and that 3G isn’t quite a bit faster.
ETA: The iPad will put the pressure on laptop manufacturers and 3G (or even forthcoming 4G) will become standard in 2012

File-sharing - use a shared drive at work? Crap, isn’t it? Ideally we should all be working in ‘the cloud’, perhaps on Google, though even Google Docs is a tad hokey. It really feels that by now we should have full Microsoft Office-level publishing software that allows seamless collaboration and publication.
ETA: Feels close, with the likes of Dropbox and Google, not to mention Microsoft Office Live, I expect us all to be working nebulously by next year.

Mobile internet - thank the Lord for the iPhone. Without Apple’s groundbreaking dog-and-bone we’d still be struggling with mashed up, half-loaded webpages on screens the size of postage stamps. But it feels we’re still a long way off the dream of mobile internet access being anything other than a crippled ‘lite’ version of the real www. And then there’s document management. We need to be able to make PowerPoint presentations, images and webpages on the move. Maybe the iPad will resolve this but it remains to be seen how portable we’ll feel Jobs’ latest creation to be.
ETA: Another job for iPad. Expect mobile devices and networks to step up their game this year. We could be living the dream of a full web experience on mobile by next summer.

Media-sharing - remember when Bluetooth came out? Suddenly the future of effortlessly swooshing files between devices wherever you were started to look like a reality. Not quite… it’s slow and still not universal. And the marriage of TV and internet has hardly been idyllic. We all access an increasing amount of music and video online and yet we will always, even in 2510, want to just sit back from time to time with a box of Tunnocks teacakes and a cup of Lady Grey on a welcoming, tattered sofa and just watch. No interactivity, no options, certainly no plugging in DVI cables, audio cables, transferring files to/from games consoles etc. Apple TV was supposed to address this but has too many restrictions and is far from widely adopted. Recent Boxee integration might help.
ETA: Getting better, and with an increasing amount of new TVs coming with net connections this could be two or three years away.

Video game purchases - most home connections can download 3GB in an hour (if from a fast server). I guarantee that on average people spend longer than that travelling to and from physical retail stores to obtain video games in plastic boxes. It’s frankly madness that I can’t just buy and download any game through the Playstation Store or Xbox Live. If anyone can explain the business sense of this to me please do in the comments below.
ETA: Plastic boxes will start to die out in the next 12 months. Expect digital game releases to dominate by Christmas 2011. This is admittedly optimism on my part!

In writing this I’ve been pondering why these gaps (and others, please discuss them in the comments) even exist. I think a large part of it is the lack of standardisation. In some ways standardisation isn’t good for the tech industry as it often relates to monopolisation and the lack of competition can leave development stagnating. It can however be great for the consumer as advances in functionality and usability can be concentrated on widely adopted products and formats instead of spread thinly amongst millions of them. An example of this could be on the horizon in the form of the proposed universal mobile phone charger which some major mobile manufacturers have agreed to conform to. As well as making consumers’ life a lot easier this initiative will inevitably cut down on waste, which is another great reason for widespread standardisation.

I guess it’s a delicate balance to strike between a free marketplace that fosters innovation and one which provides individuals what they need to innovate but in controlled parameters. A bit like liberals vs socialists then. Which makes me a technology commy. Does that make Steve Jobs the tech equivalent of Lenin? He’s certainly getting the look.

The xx - Live on Pitchfork CCTV

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:00:00 +0000

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 :)

Thought Shower: Is the web a democracy or a meritocracy?

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:54:52 +0000

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…

I’ve pulled out the definition for democracy and meritocracy. Both words, like almost all words, have several definitions listed but here they are with the appropriate definition for the usage we’re discussing:

de⋅moc⋅ra⋅cy

[di-mok-ruh-see]

the common people of a community as distinguished from any privileged class; the common people with respect to their political power.

mer⋅i⋅toc⋅ra⋅cy

[mer-i-tok-ruh-see]
a system in which such persons are rewarded and advanced: e.g. The dean believes the educational system should be a meritocracy.

(Thanks to dictionary.com for the definitions there)

So if we were to build a dictionary definition for the webocracy what would it look like? Let’s list the characteristics:

The internet is a place where almost anyone in the world can create or curate, and then share content.
Each morning when you look at the internet it has changed from what it was yesterday. This constant change is informed by its billions of nodes. Each node is a human in front of a computer, just as you are now. Hello node.
Money can buy the creation, development and exposure of any content. This money can come from anywhere and need not have been generated through online activity, meaning a previously offline entity can immediately enter and penetrate the online market. Success, however the creator measures it, is not guaranteed.
The content you create (ie personally author) or curate (ie find and gather together) is, if you wish, viewable by anyone with access to the internet, meaning that potentially your reach is the number of people in the world with internet access.
You have almost complete freedom of speech on the internet, though within the mainstream (ie outside of the likes of Freenet and underground groups) there are widely adopted standards that do not permit subjects such as terrorism and paedophilia. In reality this degree of freedom is similar to that of a western country in the physical world.
The internet is not significantly affected by Earth’s geography.

So in conclusion, the web is a level playing field where some people just rock up better equipped than others. Talent will often out but artificial help is a definite advantage. Here’s the dictionary definition, I’ll get on the phone to Oxford English Dictionary tomorrow as I expect to see this in their next edition:

web⋅oc⋅ra⋅cy

[web-ok-ruh-see]
the unique social system extant on the world wide web in which every user operates a terminal of potentially equal value, resulting in a broad and vast cultural environment driven by the open choice of consumers and publishers, two groups that the webocracy has rendered indistinguishable. The paths between consumer and publisher are now many million times more numerous than previously existed in non-digital media.
E.g. OMG, my video of the cat licking the mirror has got like forty thousand views on YouTube, that’s twice as many as that stupid Wrigleys ‘viral’. Webocracy FTW!

Thoughts? Shower me in the comments.

All About Chatroulette

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:06:00 +0000

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.

To the girl in this screengrab - I’m sure you’ll never read this, but sorry for using your image… tho srsly - how could I resist using this one amongst all the men with hungry looks on their shady faces.

What is it? It’s a very basic site that switches your webcam on, and shares it with another random user, whose webcam you can see. Whilst watching and hearing each other you can also exchange text chat messages. When either user clicks the ‘Next’ button the connection is severed and you are both instantly paired up with another random user. Repeat ad infinitum, or until you get sick of seeing hard cocks and guilty-looking, young men’s faces.

At the time of writing - 17:30 GMT, Saturday afternoon - 16,300 people were on Chatroulette. That might not sound a lot next to the millions of hits sites like MySpace.com and BBC.co.uk get each day but that’s just people on the site right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if their daily traffic is well into the millions.

I’m still pretty mystified by its spectacular ascent. It’s very reminiscent of the chatrooms that were so popular in the mid-nineties. Its appeal is obvious enough but why is this trending in 2010? 1999 maybe… 2002 at a push, but 2010? The year the iPad will revolutionise content consumption? The year OnLive might (and I mean might) open up the ability to play any multiplayer video game from any computer? The year that Google’s dizzying array of disparate products start to form into a mighty beast that will dominate social media, the web, computing and broadband? Well yes, people like to see people. People like to see freaks and be surprised by who they might find. “Who might they find?” I hear you clamour. Well, in the interest of accurate reporting I just cycled through 70 cams (I planned on seeing 100 but started to feel ill). Here’s a summary:

As we can see it’s mostly boys, probably hoping to come across a beautiful girl who will chat to them and be their friend… oh and get naked and rub themsleves down with baby oil. I found only six girls but I must say that they all looked normal, sweet and attractive. There were four groups of mates and five guys with a handful of sausage (I suspect this would be more at a later time of day). I even saw a woman giving oral sex which for the time of day was admirable. Also, a lonely man with white hair and a bemused expression on his face made me chuckle. Whilst befuddled, he was obviously sticking with it, which I respect at his age. Finally, the four people I’ve labeled ‘broadcasters’ were 1. a rather good singer-songwriter 2. someone playing loud hip-hop videos on YouTube 3. a handwritten message promoting something in Russian and 4. a neck-down black & white shot of a body hanging by its neck in a room. This last one unnerved me a bit, well… a lot. It made sense - the perfect modern suicide and the best way to bring some attention to a hitherto lonely and ignored life. I panicked, and as I was wondering how I could help or report this to someone I got bumped. Someone had clicked ‘Next’. Just a prank. A good one. I’ll be having a go at that.

Well, enough from me. Go play at chatroulette.com ! It’ll be interesting to see where this one goes, whether it burns bright and burns out fast or whether it evolves and gets acquired by a bigger player (it seems too risky to get acquired but who knows?). If the elusive owners are seeing a couple of million daily hits and rising, they’re sitting on a tidy revenue stream with more ad and sponsorship potential than they’re currently exploiting with Google ads, I wonder if they’ve approached Logitech for sponsorship… or maybe even Fleshlight :P

"Each morning when you look at the internet it has changed from what it was yesterday. This constant..."

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:36:36 +0000

“Each morning when you look at the internet it has changed from what it was yesterday. This constant change is informed by its billions of nodes. Each node is a human in front of a computer, just as you are now. Hello node.”

- From a forthcoming blog post on the ‘webocracy’.

Google Buzz - Review

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:17:00 +0000

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:

The initial experience of entering buzz.google.com into your iPhone browser is good. Like all iPhone versions of Google’s key products it’s a tad slow to load but when it does you’re immediately prompted to add Buzz to your homescreen. This sticks the Buzz icon amongst your apps and to all intents and purposes it acts like an app when opened.

When you’re into Buzz you can see a list of any new followers and a timeline of buzzes from those you are currently following. If you click on ‘Map View’ you see this:

This is nice. Here we can see a map with me at the middle and local buzzes displayed as speech bubbles dotted around the map. In this screenshot I’ve clicked on that speech bubble bottom-left, turning it blue and displaying the buzz info at the top of the screen (I was having a curry when first trying Buzz).

The button with the blue dot will centre the map on you. If you click that ‘Buzz’ button in the bottom-left of the map you get local buzzes in list form as in the screenshot below:

Back to the map and click the ‘Menu’ button and you get options to clear or search the map as well as choose other layers of info to display on the map like satellite imagery, traffic info, buzzes and Latitude - Google’s original location-based service which never really took off.

Here’s the map with Google Latitude data on. I don’t really have any friends but you can see my Latitude flag on there. Nice to see Latitude integration as it’s not likely to succeed as a standalone product.

Finally if you hit the ‘Local’ link in the top Google menu (where ‘Web’, ‘Maps’ and ‘More’ sit) you can not only find local businesses as before but also see buzzes posted from each place. I love this. Imagine a time when this is widely adopted. You search for a restaurant and not only can you find one, see its opening hours and read reviews but you can see real-time feedback and conversation such as “the risotto is better than usual tonight” or “the Final Fantasy group are sat at table 5. Spare seats if you wanna come join”. You might think that Twitter has this covered but when you think what a messy workaround hashtags are in connecting conversations around events etc and how short their geolocation currently falls it starts to look like Buzz might clinch this one.

So the massive question that Google Buzz raises is “who’s lunch is Google eating here?”

I personally don’t think this is a threat to anyone immediately. I predict that if people start to adopt it - and unlike Google Wave which is ultimately useless in its current form they might, due to the massive existing GMail user base - it could see off Foursquare and Gowalla by Christmas.

Some people are pitting Buzz against Twitter which doesn’t make sense. Twitter is about abstracted conversation around common events such as sports, TV shows, celebrity deaths etc and the beauty of it is that it is not tied to geography, which is why I disapproved of their introduction of local trending topics. Buzz is completely tied to local mapping. You could say that Twitter is the mind of social media, whilst Buzz is the feet.

The addition of Buzz to Google’s existing suite of admirably innovative but under-performing products such as Wave, Latitude and Profiles is no doubt part of a longer term plan to create the ultimate social platform. This vision is only now starting to peek over the horizon and if you spend just twenty seconds thinking about where we would be if all these services were bundled up with GTalk, GMail etc in a well-architectured way it starts to feel incredibly exciting, and being a self-confessed Google fanboy I’m more than happy to at least try to adopt these services and would be quite happy if Google quietly took the social web throne from Facebook.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below on the future of Buzz and Google’s campaign to dominate social media. And of course look for me in Central London on Buzz and follow me :)

The internet is full of rubbish...?

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:33:00 +0000

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.

In fact, by that same principle, you would be able to locate the needle amongst any number of other objects such as the pieces of grit in the rings of frigging Saturn so long as, just like every webpage on the internet, there was text content or metadata and there had at some point since the needle’s appearance been a process of indexing (when search engines do this it is known as ‘crawling’ which refers to automated ‘spider’ processes that index ‘the web’) but somehow I don’t think that explanation would have resonated with him.

The fact is that the Internet, much like the world it reflects with increasing fidelity, is mostly rubbish. Or more accurately it’s mostly not what you are looking for. It’s largely forests of photos, oceans of apps, wastelands of wikis and mountains of music when all you really want is a shop that sells .46mm Jim Dunlop guitar picks in packs of five or a photograph of your hometown in the 1920s.

Bad searching infuriates me. People should be given information packs when they buy a computer, or even at birth, on how to search properly. If anyone out there is putting together such a document here are four tips off the top of my head:

There isn’t someone at the other end. And there definitely isn’t a butler, whatever search engine you use. So don’t type in full questions unless you think words like ‘what’, ‘do’, ‘find’, ‘to’ and ‘is’ are unique to the thing you seek (unlikely).
Start specific. If you’re looking for a recipe for something with pine nuts, mozzarella and aubergine and you think you saw Gordon Ramsay cook something a few weeks back on Channel 4 search “pine nuts aubergine mozzarella gordon ramsay channel 4” as this might immediately serve up the recipe on C4’s website. If that fails, take a step back by removing the most obscure term. Repeat until you find something.
Trying to find a guitar with a floating tremolo but definitely not interested in a Fender? Simply search ‘electric guitar floating tremolo -fender’. Because of the minus sign next to ‘fender’, Google will return results for ’electric guitar floating tremolo’ omitting any which contain ‘fender’.
Use www.google.com and change your default search provider in your browser to google.com. It has become the standard and for good reason. Whatever you do, do not use Ask unless you are trying to build a convincing case for a free council flat.

Without search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! navigating this growing online world would be linear, lengthy and laborious. But with any one of them and a little bit of thought even the hairy old guy in the charity shop has access to and control over a depth of information beyond that of any human mind or even library at their fingertips. Enjoy it. Contribute to it. Be thankful for it. Use it to buy a shower on eBay.

Vodafone's Twitter Account Hijacked With Obscenity

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:42:00 +0000

‘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.

Office worker caught looking at porn on national TV!

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:20:00 +0000

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 :)

Top 9 Songs For Geeks

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:04:00 +0000

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:

Datarock: The Blog - Listen

OK so not the best track on Datarock’s recent album ‘Red’ but with a Tim Berners-Lee sample and a condensed history of the Internet, definitely the geekiest!

Autechre: Flutter - Listen

Created in response to the Criminal Justice Bill of 1994 which banned ‘repetitive beats’ in public places (or anywhere with over 21 people present). No two bars of this ten-minute tracks have the same beat. Quite a feat, and surprisingly listenable… considering.

The Smiths: Frankly Mr Shankly - Listen

The fantasy resignation letter every geek wants to hand to their idiot boss.

The Beatles: Tomorrow Never Knows - Listen

As any annoying pub quiz veteran will glibly tell you, TNK is officially the first ever techno track, and it’s from 1966!! Not bad considering it was done on a 4-track at a time when the charts was home to the likes of Jim Reeves and The Four Tops.

Slagsmålsklubben: Kom Igen Kommissarien - Listen

The story goes that SMK were just another cool Swedish pop band until their guitarist/singer didn’t turn up for rehearsal one day and they plugged an old Casio keyboard into his guitar amp and just rocked out the bossa nova accompaniment.

Barenaked Ladies: The History of Everything - Listen

The theme tune to every geek’s favourite sitcom ‘Big Bang Theory’ charts quite literally the history of everything, with a middle eight that ponders the future of everything too, so you really have it all there in one two-minute song!

The White Stripes: Seven Nation Army - Listen

A massive hit upon its release in 2004 and an instant classic, this track was on the band’s second studio album ‘Elephant’. The album was recorded in two weeks at Toe Rag Studios in London which is famous for it’s 1960’s setup - have a look here. The White Stripes were reputed to have used nothing post-1963 in the recording of Elephant. That’s basically off the geek-points scale.

Jonathan Coulton: Code Monkey - Listen

‘JoCo’ is a singer-songwriter and basically an alpha-geek, a power-geek. He’s turned his nerdiness into admirable achievments such as his ‘Thing a Week’ project where he released a song a week, Code Monkey being the most well-known. He releases his music under a Creative Commons licence to encourage people to make remixes, videos and other crazy mash-ups with.

Avenue Q: Teh Internets Is For Porn - Listen

The hilarious theatre musical ‘Avenue Q’ is responsible for this internet hit in which Trekkie fesses up on all our behalf to the real reason we love t’interweb. In terms of geek-factor this World of Warcraft mashup says it all.

YOU in a Video With 50 Cent, Alicia Keys and more...

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:07:00 +0000

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.

LOL - Shortcut to getting an Apple MacBook :P

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:43:00 +0000

LOL - Shortcut to getting an Apple MacBook :P

My Two Conclusions on Apple's iPad

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:20:00 +0000

1. Its success will rely on the apps that developers make for it.
They’ve been given the SDK so many are hard at work to have apps out for the March launch. If the iPhone’s history is anything to go by there will be some mindblowing applications. Only then will potential buyers see the device’s true potential.
Also, Adobe are upping the pressure on Apple to adopt Flash support which would open up a lot of content to users.

2. It will take at least another version to become a must-have, game-changing product.
Again, this draws partly on experience with the iPhone. With Apple’s revolutionary mobile telephone, it took annual revisions based on what users were clamouring for, and what hackers were building into custom firmware, to arrive at the 3G and 3GS. I predict the inclusion of a camera in the next iteration as frankly I was amazed that the iPad wasn’t launched with one. Some might say that holding back such features is a cynical strategy on Apple’s part to sell more units to an avid fanbase who’ll happily fork out for every new version.

See you in the queue on launch day ;)

What's the first thing you'll do with your new Apple iPad?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:34:00 +0000

Last night’s live video stream at Crobar with @MySpaceUK...

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:00:03 +0000

Last night’s live video stream at Crobar with @MySpaceUK massiv!

Twitter Launches 'Local Trends' - Does This Dissipate The 'Global Conversation'?

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:35:00 +0000

Twitter have just switched on the ability to display trending topics from a range of locations (or keep it Worldwide)

Countries: Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, United Kingdom, United States.

Cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, São Paulo, Washington, D.C.

Nice to see non-US locations included at launch, though doesn’t this start to dissipate the global conversation, one of the phenomena which makes Twitter so amazing?

Flashback: The Smiths, Live in Manchester, 1983

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:52:13 +0000

twentyfourbit:

The Manchester District Music Archive has uncovered the first ever known Smiths live review (see below), from the City Fun fanzine, of the second Smiths gig ever (and first with their classic lineup) at Manchester’s Manhattan Sound. You could pull any number of quotes from this fascinating artifact for Smiths fans and music ~~nerds~~ historians to enjoy, but my personal favorite is this bit at the end, which refers to the band’s 23-year-old frontman: “If the boy’s head is anything to go by, The Smiths are going to be B-I-G.” Well played, indeed.

Check out this awesome document below, via Manchester District Music Archive, and for more info on this show, as well as a brilliant archive of Smiths live info, visit Passions Just Like Mine. (Thanks for the tip, George!)