Partly because I want to see how easy (or not) it is to embed Youtube into this blog and partly because I think it is funny, I present to you the Bollywood version of the ‘Thriller’ music video.  (Note, it involves plug-ins and now my brain hurts).

[tags]Thriller,youtube,bollywood[/tags]

I’ve been using Twitter for a little while now, it allows you to post short snippets of text that get circulated to people who subscribe to your Twitter identity. For example, I may post that I’m making a cup of tea, everyone who has subscribed to that will get that little bit of information.

So far, so good, but it has something that makes it a little special. It integrates very smoothly with your mobile phone via SMS. I can be walking down the street and the desire to post overcomes me, I can then simply send a text message to the Twitter service and it will be pushed out to my contact’s mobile phones.

At first glance it seems utterly worthless, the posts are limited to 146 characters which makes it hard to write anything of substance. It is promoted as “A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?” and this lends itself to posts about making a cup of tea, or about how you hate tinsel. I am no better for my last Twittering was “I think, Like DG, I shall make myself a nice cup of tea before tackling WordPress install.“. Hardly ‘War and Peace’.

However, this belies the beauty of it. Once you have added a few friends (and more and more people are signing up as this meme spreads), then the inflow of short messages become like a Zen cloud of how people are feeling. Sure, Alice may be getting grumpy, but Bob is gearing up for a fun night out. You instantly become more connected to your friends even though this is a mostly one way communication.

In a world where many of our friends are our ‘blogmates’, where we are more likely to email than phone and where physically meeting people is becoming more of a rarity, Twitter allows us to feel more connected. The desire to keep in touch with friends, and to let them keep in touch with you leads to regular posting, and the less ‘important’ the post, the more you feel you are being allowed into that poster’s life.

It does spark some questions on privacy, while adults who have grown to use technologies like this are perhaps better prepared to self-censor, I worry a little about what children may divulge without considering the consequences. I also think that it is only a matter of time before someone drunkenly lets slip some ‘indiscretion’. We may have learned to not blog drunk, but with the ease of posting from a mobile phone it will be so much easier to slip. While you may make a fool of yourself at the office Christmas party, with Twitter you could reach a global audience.

I’m wondering what use other people or companies may put it to. It would be ideal for the organising of ‘flash mobs’ and on a more serious note it is an easy way to update people on the weather, local traffic and news or even sports results.

What Twitter may have unleashed is an ‘Open Source’ SMS subscription service and I am intrigued to see where it leads.
I think that Twitter is a lovely, lightweight web-app that may find surprising uses in the future.
You can see my Twitter here.

[tags]Twitter,social,sms[/tags]

These are my links for November 1st through November 9th:

• 8bitpeoples – 8-Bit music ‘label’
• higher intellect :: information at the speed of thought – A collection of free texts. Huge scope of weird stuff.
• YouTube – UK; Saudi visit. – Here is an idea, why not have the MCB publish what bits of the Koran are allowed under British law. Then anyone who steps outside it can be punished according to the law of the land in which they choose to live? (I’m all for freedom of worship of imagin

These are my links for October 31st:

• Man on sex register for having a wank – Man, in his own bedroom, with a locked door is interrupted while having wank (with a bike, strange, but who cares) and is now on the sex offenders register. I always thought that what went on in your own bedroom was your own concern. Apparently not.
• BBC NEWS | England | Hampshire | Christmas tinsel ban at hospital – Tinsel causes MRSA! Of all the fomites I can think of, tinsel comes pretty low on the list. I reckon that the panto cast and singers are more of a risk…
• BBC NEWS | Education | Brown threatens failing schools – Close ‘failing’ schools? Then where will the ‘failing’ children go? Into other schools causing more overcrowding than there is at present.

These are my links for October 30th:

• Television Tropes & Idioms – Hours of fun for anyone who shows any sort of interest in the form of writing, or filming, fiction.
• Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa – Yet another game I’m going to get sucked into while neglecting the washing up in my sink gaining sentience.
• Portal: The Flash Version – If you can’t run the real Portal (and it’s really worth giving it a try), you can try this 2D version. (And stop running Linux you weirdo)
• Sketch comedy from BBC3’s Man Stroke Woman. Series 1 Episode 6. Nicholas Burns, Daisy Haggard, Ben Crompton and Nick Frost. on Slide – Photo Sharing – From a comedy sketch show – I’ve been to jobs like this before…
• BBC – Radio 4 – iPM – A new late night Radio 4 show from the makers of Pods and Blogs
• foocamp 2007 – a photoset on Flickr – Stunning ‘light drawing’ portraits of Foocamp geeks. Beautiful.
• Why Games Matter: A Prescription for Improving Health and Health Care | Changemakers – A competition (since ended) looking at educating people about health via computer games.
• Freddy the Fox – a photoset on Flickr – Stunning photos of a friendly fox.
• Top 100 Independent Games by Game Tunnel – Like it says on the tin. Very good indie games.
• Geek to Live: How to assign a domain name to your home web server – Assigning domain names to a local web server.

I’m watching late night music TV. (Ian Dury on VH1 Classic to be precise). When one of those annoying adverts for ‘text message services’ comes on. Some bored sounding Irish woman is telling me to send off a text message to find out the initial of the man I’m going to marry.

It only costs £1.50

What surprises me is that you can even subscribe to this service so that ‘you can get your latest result every week!’.

Just how daft are people? I mean, it must work or the company would go bankrupt wouldn’t they?

And if it does work then I truly despair at the thought that the people using this service might be the same people looking after me when I’m old and infirm.

Looks like a cyanide capsule might be an essential bit of kit for my future.

[tags]SMS, somepeoplearereallydumb, latenighttelly, stabbyfeelings[/tags]

You know something – I’m really rather against guns.  Horrible shooty type things that the local hoodlums use to put holes in each other when they have money burning a hole in their pocket and they can’t be arsed with a knife.But there is something deliciously geeky about this concept weapon.

These are my links for December 19th through January 4th:

• cityshrinker – Fun little site that has lots of tiltshift photos of cities. The site itself is a bit slow, but it’s worth persevering with.
• MySpace.com Blogs – Nathan Fillion MySpace Blog – Nathan Fillion has a blog! Now if only he wrote in it a bit more…
• William Shunn : Manuscript Format : Short Story – How to format a manuscript so that it is more likely to be read.
• CR Blog » Blog Archive » The Bible According To Google Earth –

These are my links for February 27th through March 11th:

• The Obituary of Count Gottfried von Bismarck – A real ‘fictional’ character. Bizarrely written Obit.
• Mateba Autorevolver – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – A revolver with the barrel at the 6 o’clock position. Looks funky.
• cybersoc.com: should news orgs use images scraped from social networking sites? – Good posting on the use of Facebook and the like by mainstream media.

You know…

Some things are inherently ‘internet’