Archive for the ‘WWW’ Category
Fort Knox
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010I thought I’d post another satellite picture after last weeks picture of the boneyard. Being a fan of the old Bond film Goldfinger I thought Fort Knox and the United States Bullion Depository (the large building with nothing around it at the bottom of the map).
Tags: Bond, Bullion, Fort Knox, Goldfinger, Roleplaying, satellite, United States
Posted in Life Stuff, WWW | No Comments »
Aircraft Boneyard
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010I noticed that several newspapers had shots taken from Google Earth of the eleven square kilometer US Airforce 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group Aircraft Boneyard today so I thought I’d dig it up on Google maps to have a look myself.
Tags: aircraft boneyard, google maps
Posted in Life Stuff, WWW | No Comments »
Where Should Buzz Have Been?
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010Google launching Buzz has crystalized a thought that’s been running through my head for a while. Ever since the WWW came on the scene there have been a series of landgrabs for bits of the Internet. Bits that give revenue which might be page impressions giving advertising revenue or e-commerce giving cold, hard, cash revenue. Sometimes its been the potential for revenue or the myth of potential revenue. That’s where we had the first big crash when the bubble burst.
At the moment a pile of the players are going after the social networking pie. Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook and all the other general purpose networks are all busy trying to tie us into their set up. The problem from a users point of view is that we end up with our network fragmented depending on where our friends are. These networks are quite crude at the moment. Basically they tend to be quite private or quite public but with messages shared with everyone or just one person.
Then there are all the niche network sites built on old style forums where we meet up with people who share an interest. There are all sorts of sites which may have something you’re interested in from personal blogs by friends, news sites and everything else in between.
Keeping up with all of those takes time. RSS and Atom feeds made it easier to keep up with sites by letting us know when there was something to read rather than having to trawl over the sites every few days. TweetDeck lets you pull your social networks together in one place.
So after all the preamble here is my real thought – is the real winner down the road not going to be whichever social network grabs the most members or gets the model right but will it be the tool that we all use to keep up with Social Networks, RSS, forums and Email in one place. I don’t know if it will be a web app, something you install or a mix of both but I wish that was the Buzz Google had launched today instead of the one we got. That would seem to me to have been closer to Google’s mission to organise the world’s information.
Tags: facebook, google, google buzz, social networking, social networks, Twitter
Posted in Life Stuff, WWW | No Comments »
Edible Gobos: quite possibly as Tasty as Edible Underwear
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009Allegedly. I’ll come to that in a minute.
Most spam is annoying but once in a while the bots assemble two random concepts that make a slightly surreal or scary combination. Once in a while those are so out there and look so like real messages that they make it past the spam filters. Here’s one I got today (I’ve pixellated out the site’s info not because I don’t want to embarrass them but because I don’t want to give them any publicity) about my post about gobos the other day…
I’m not going to go into the rubbish about SEO other than to say if they’re link building this way how do I know they’re not doing all sorts of black hat SEO that’s going to get them blacklisted as a bad neighbourhood and do me more harm than good.
In this case the bot found some of my recipes and some of my stuff about gobos and decided that there was a chance that there was some sort of long tail search that it could optimize for. Given the money being mentioned for some of that kind of automatically written content it’s no wonder that companies are trying to get in on the act. This one though takes the biscuit. Or as the American’s might say the cookie. Cookies are made with Cookie Cutters which is a term sometimes confused with gobos although strictly speaking cookies and gobos are not the same thing which is why I think the bot may have made its blind leap of machine logic.
What I find funny is the idea that they would include gobos in a recipe database. Gobos. Pieces of glass that are etched or otherwise treated so as to project images or patters from lights. I can’t help thinking they would be a little bit chewy and might cause some indigestion. Not quite as funny as Monty Python’s Albatros or Crunchy frog but not too far away.
Anyway it amused me but I’ve not explained the Edible Underwear connection.
So what does any of this have to do with Edible Underwear? Not a lot really other than something that happened when out drinking with some friends who do a bit acting. They’d been eating the left over sugar glass props (bottles and some glasses used in a fight scene) from a play to see how one of the bar staff they knew would react. One young lady who was normally quite prim and proper who had probably had a bit too much to drink said it tasted like edible underwear and promptly went a fetching shade that matched the beetroot red of the wine bottle she was nibbling on…
Tags: black hat, monty python, rubbish, SEO, Spam, spam filters
Posted in Funny and Cool, Life Stuff, WWW | No Comments »
Blogging Differently
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
I noticed awhile ago that I was blogging less. Partly I put it down to frustration with the time it took me to add a page to my web site. If I couldn’t easily add a page about something I didn’t need to blog about the page. Partly it was a disatisfaction with the blog and site not being integrated. Partly it was a concern about what I was blogging about. I like posting about fun little discoveries – you tube videos, interesting web pages, announcement and all the other stuff thats going on. However I was always picky about how much of it I posted. I knew it could easily swamp out my own stuff in a huge noise to ratio disaster. Its bad enough that I choose to post on several different themes I’m interested in rather than focusing on one theme. Thats why I use categories and tags to classify my blog posts.
So I delt with the first two problems by switching my site to using WordPress as a Content Management System. I know some people will say WordPress isn’t a CMS. Frankly if it isn’t a Web CMS then every other Web CMS I’ve ever worked with isn’t either including the one those people are touting. Yes it’s a blogging platform but that doesn’t stop it also being a CMS.
The third problem, the noise to content issue, I’ve pretty much put to rest by the happy accident of using microblogging. Now I signed up to Twitter sometime in 2007 to see what all the fuss was about. I didn’t really do anything with it till this summer when I needed to know about it for work (and probably foolishly removed my few early tweets since I was using it to test a development at work). Anyway I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now for amongst other things the noise stuff and just consolidating the posts to my blog once a week. Twitter has the added bonus that unlike blog comments, which tend not to end up being conversational because the lack of a consistent alerting system, twitter can have at least a bit of a discourse.
And the point of this post? I’ve no idea really. Maybe that blogging, like the web, is still evolving.
Anyway I’m off to do something more useful instead. Just as soon as I’ve checked Twitter…
Tags: Blogging, CMS, Twitter, WordPress
Posted in Life Stuff, WWW, impworks | No Comments »
Kim’s Got Her Own Unofficial Fan Club
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
Kim Knox Rox my Sox Button - The Unofficial Kim Knox Fan Club
Kim’s now got her very own unofficial Kim Knox fan club. Won’t be too long before she has a has a twitter hash tag all of her own too #kimknox 
Tags: impworks, Kim Knox
Posted in Meme, Written Fiction | No Comments »
Tweeting Hash Codes Batman
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009I’m not really a twitter user, I’ve got an account but while I’ll post a certain level of boring mundanity here I’m not into the recording the minute up to the minute stuff. I just don’t think it or I’m interesting enough and while blogging is probably a bit weird tweeting just goes over the line. Odds are I’ll get into it about the time something new takes over in microblogging: in the same way I bought a PDA when they were about to start the slide to obscurity as netbooks took off.
Anyway today I’ve been doing some work on Twitter at work to get a live feed of tweets onto a site during a streamed video from a conference. It would have been absolutely straightforward had I not run into something a bit obscure to do with hash codes. Our friends at the vinspired wanted a hash code #generationdigital. Fair enough everythings up and running to pick it up and display it on the site. Except it just wasn’t showing up. After some messing around we worked out that the presence of digital in the hash code for some reason stopped it being picked up by searches. #digital exists and works. #digitalXXX seems to be OK too. #XXXdigital or #XXXdigitalXXX is right out. #XXX-digital or #XXX_digital also work but just feel a bit clumsy. No idea why digital runs into a brick wall or if other words can do to. Anyway, since the hash code hadn’t been publicised in advance we decided to just use a different hash code.
One odd little discovery along the way though was a hashcode in German that left us a bit puzzled. Our, admitedly school boy quality translation, was that the hash code would have been #nocheesecakeprincess_digital. The mind boggles.
Tags: tweets
Posted in WWW | No Comments »
The Onion on the New Star Trek Film
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Tags: Film, Script
Posted in WWW | 1 Comment »
Moondash Showreel
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009Daniel Munteanu’s show reel at the Moondash project is well worth a look.
Posted in WWW | No Comments »
Today Programme Viral Advert
Friday, March 20th, 2009I’m a bit late with this but it did amuse me. The Evan Davis’ blog on the BBC web site explains it. I found some of the comments amusing just because they say more about the commenters than the piece itself. A few obviously don’t get there is a difference between an advert being viral (which it could be if people do things like copying it to their blog) and guerilla (which this isn’t).
Tags: Script
Posted in WWW | No Comments »
