Category: General

After seeing the sale of sex.com, I thoght I’d take a look at who was up for sex.eu. In the first 10 minutes after applications opened, 131 requests Although many appear to be multiple requests from the same buyer through different registrars. They’re nearly all claiming prior right to the word as a national trademark. […]

Standing Guard Originally uploaded by RachelC. The Chancellor Gordon Brown is trying to promote Britishness. Britishness is a very artifical thing – there is not actually a country called Britain, Although we’ve shared a monarchy since 1603, it was not until 1707 that Scotland formally joined England and Wales in the Kingdom of Great Britain, […]

Elvis Impersonator Originally uploaded by RachelC. I spent some time yesterday at the Russian New Year festival in Trafalgar Square. There were a few stalls, a couple of bars and a big stage. Various Russian acts performed; as a metal band came out and really rocked, this gey walked up, took off the coat and […]

Shelley Powers has started a must-read thread on DRM, the agruments for and against. Personally, I’m in favour of looking for business models that reduce DRM. Having lost a number of albums due to a hard drive failure, the only way to get them back at the moment seems to be to repurchase. I’ve bought […]

The BBC have just shown an ‘exclusive’ interview, on the main nightly news,with Eric Schmidt of Google promoting the new video service they are going to announce in 2 hours time at CES. It’ll probably follow on their website soon.

Yahoo! are running a poll to find the most popular find of 2005. There are serious categories: Community has things like the Can Do Exchange to share skills and knowledge; Educational looks at things like the Mars Rover site But the papers (or at least the Metro) are covering the wilder side, the weird and […]

Update: Goowy responded to this very quickly, commenting on the various posts, changing their sign up and posting an apology on their blog. They’ve recognsied the problem and corrected it; It was still a fundamental mistake to make in the first place though. Marketeers love the concept of viral marketing. Brand teams and agencies talk […]

…if you’re running away from security guards after being suspected of being involved in a robbery. Do not, under any circumstances, climb into cage with an annoyed Bengal tiger. The odds of getting out alive are very low, as a this suspect found out. A criminal suspect on the run ended up being mauled to […]

The BBC are reporting a study looking at the accuracy of scientific articles on Wikipedia and the the Encyclopedia Britanica. In the articles examined, 8 serious errors were discovered, 4 in each of the sources. In order to test its reliability, Nature conducted a peer review of scientific entries on Wikipedia and the well-established Encyclopedia […]

Looking Up Originally uploaded by RachelC. Here’s photos from Paris and from the London Geek Dinner

Champagne and chips Originally uploaded by RachelC. Last night we had our team Christmas night out; early due to holiday commitments. The meal was not booked until late, so here’s the perfect start to the evening – champagne and a bowl of chips. Later on we went to Floridits’s, a Cuban retaurant over in Wardour […]

Not enough time to do what I need to. But if I was in London this weekend, I could be up for a game of Hide and Seek around Covent Garden. There’s a plan and a vague indication of how to pla y. The idea is that everyone meets at noon and then moves to […]

Sam, a Chinese-Crested dog that won the ‘World’s Ugliest Dog’ Competition 3 times in a row and garnered plenty of press interest, has passed away just short of 15. Sam became a little bit of a blogging phenomenom, as evidenced by the number of posts that I can find about him.

Sony are currently facing legal action over their DRM on CDs, the implementation of which acts as a rootkit. Cases are being bought in California, New York and Italy. Meanwhile, the first trojan virus that utilises the cloaking in the applications has been spotted. So Sony got caught poorly implementing protection that they believe will […]

Two new searches were announced yesterday. Yahoo is adding blog search, not as a separate section but as part of their news search. The tool displays the blog searches in a panel, which can be expanded to explore deeper. You can save things directly to MyWeb from the searches. Tthe search results are currently confined […]

One of the sessions at Web2.0 was a conversation with 5 teenagers (17-18yo) from the Bay-area, California. Jeffrey Mcnanus and Kareem Mayan both post about this talk. As with the Social Computing Symposium back in April, (notes here) there seems to be some surprise about how this group of people are using the tools, and […]

Following up on my Rude Britain post, YesButNoButYes actually finds pictures of some of the place as well as pointing to the full list. The British Library project Turning the Pagesâ„¢. Is just wonderful. Works are filmed, turned into 3D repesentations and presented virtually. You view the original publications, interacting with them, and can listen […]

I tried out a couple of new tools the last 2 days. The first is Google Blog search and the second is an alpha of an online messenger client. Google Blog Search has the same characteristics as the rest of the company’s products, a nice clean interface, simple to use, same presentation of results as […]

The BBC have an article about the recent Flick and Yahoo identify spat. This one has a long way to go; I’m not going to switch again until they have eased the login issues and ensured any changes to ToS are not disadvantageous. Via plasticbag.org, hackdiary has an article about a new tool that can […]

One of the more compelling blogs about Katrian is Interdictors, who has been blogging from a data centre all week. What was a faily mundane livejournal has been turned into a must read account of the hurricane and the aftermath. Somehow they are geting fuel and supplies though to keep the generator going. The writer […]