August 2008

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Steve Jobs’ Obituary

August 30, 2008 in Technology & Science

Oh my. A simple enough mistake, somebody hit ‘publish’ instead of ‘save’ when updating Steve Jobs’ Obituary at Bloomberg. It’s a bit cringeworthy/spooky that they’re writing an obituary for the yet-to-be-deceased 53 year old, and it certainly won’t help Steve and his family with their worries over his health, but I suppose in the world of media today it’s somewhat understandable that they have to be ready with a researched story for an event that may be likely so that they can be first to press, even if that predicted story is someone’s death.

For those who don’t know, Steve Jobs had pancreatic cancer and his health isn’t the best these days as he’s recovering from some operations. Read the full story here.

Update: Found this video of an SNL sketch from 1996, very apt!

Show Off Your Subscribers

August 29, 2008 in Blogging

Blogger announced yesterday that they have a new feature that will allow you to show off your subscribers (if they choose to be shown) on your blog. I suppose it will look a bit like the “currently reading” widgets that some blogs have.

I think this is great news for small blogs like myself. As Darragh Doyle mentions in his award winning post, commenting on other people’s blog is a great way to get to know other bloggers and also a great way to get known and to encourage visits and comments on your own blog. In the same way, this new “followers” widget should providing a win-win for all involved. By becoming a follower, and electing to appear in the widget as such, one gets the exposure as being seen as a follower, and so people reading that blog may decide to check out your blog as you obviously have common interests. On the flip side, the blog you subscribe too gets one extra follower and looks even more popular!

Just one more great step in enriching the blogging community. Go Google!

ReadWriteWeb also noted that this may open up the process of subscription to people who may not have fully understood RSS, but get the gist of following. Their article is well worth the read.

Blogger end the post with this little teaser “We are also in the process of integrating with Google Friend Connect so you can give your readers more engaging social features.” The mind races with possibilities!

Monitter

August 26, 2008 in Technology & Science

I’m sure plenty of people who are heavier twitter users than I have already heard of this site, but I thought monitter was still worth a mention for others, like me, who hadn’t. For those of you familiar with twitter (which I’m assuming is most people by now!), it shouldn’t require much explanation. You can type a word or a phrase into one of three columns, and watch as it updates in real-time with tweets from the twitter-sphere relating to the word(s) you enter.

Some terms just whizz by with tweet after tweet, try Obama as a good example. Others are slow and steady (try McCain for example 😛 ).

It’s still not perfect, some very old and out of date tweets appear, but it’s pretty cool if you have a website/blog and you’d like to see if people are noticing it and tweeting about it.

Through monitter I also discovered the very handy feature of Twitter itself – being able to subscribe to an RSS feed of certain terms as they’re mentioned on Twitter. (http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=typephrasehere). I’ve already added a few rss subscriptions to my reader (e.g. for my website “zulunotes” being mentioned on twitter), very handy indeed. Now if only my Google Alerts picked up comments on twitter…. then we’d be suckin’ deisel!

Quotes of the week

August 25, 2008 in Quotes

As this is just a new blog, I only have two candidates for my favourite quotes I’ve heard this week (i.e. not necessarily said this week!):

“Science works; planes fly. Magic carpets and broomsticks don’t. Gravity isn’t a version of the truth; it is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth floor window. Evolution too, is reality.”
–Richard Dawkins, “The Genius Of Charles Darwin“

“He has the memory of an irresponsible goldfish”
— John Oliver, on “The Bugle” episode 41, in response to John McCain’s statement that “In The 21st Century Nations Don’t Invade Other Nations” (talking about the Russo-Georgian conflict)

Yahoo’s TV Internet Widgets

August 21, 2008 in Technology & Science

I just saw this over on ReadWriteWeb. Basically, what Yahoo are planning to do is give people the chance to have widgets display at the bottom of their TV, kind of like a news ticker on Sky/BBC News, only these will be pulling directly from the internet and will be fully customisable!

Yahoo are also opening this up for anyone to make a widget that people can select to view on their TV’s. Some examples proposed so far have been news tickers, weather updates etc. One interesting comment I read under the ReadWriteWeb article was a from somebody delighted at the thought of the twitter widget being at the bottom of his tv screen, so they could watch tv at the same time as their friends and have a kind of a group chat experience. E.g. “Peter says: ‘what a goal, that was amazing!” coming up at the bottom of your screen when you’re at home watching a football match! I think it’s really clever and could definitely create a new level of interactivity with what has always been a distinctly one-way medium.

I really can’t wait to see what widgets get made for this. What does anyone else hope to see? Or does anyone else plan on having a go at making a widget or two? (I may give it a bash myself!) I think some sort of RSS headline reader could be useful, or maybe an Alarm widget, that reminds you to do stuff, or what TV show’s are on, when you’re watching TV.

Hello world!

August 19, 2008 in Uncategorized

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Productivity at the Google office

August 17, 2008 in Uncategorized


After stumbling across this post on the Google Blog, I made me think what sort of reaction something like the pic about would elicit where I work! Basically, they moved floors within their building, and decided that would be a good excuse to redecorate the place by building a huge k’nex ferris wheel. I know in my place of work there would be instant jeers and jokes about them obviously having too much time on their hands and not an awful lot of real work to do, and to be honest I don’t know if I’m envious of them or if having that much free time in work would be the death of me!

Would you get away with something like this in work?

SouthPark.me

August 12, 2008 in Uncategorized

I got a little swept up by the hype of the launch of the new .me TLD and decided to take my first adventure into buying a domain name for the sake of it. Everything seemed to be snapped up pretty fast, but I managed to get one:

I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. I thought it might make a good site for those animation software type things where you can make your own south park avatar (for a facebook profile pic etc.) I’d be willing to sell it on too, but I’m not sure how one goes about something like that, not sure if it would fetch good money….