Happy April Fools

Friday Links

No topic is so surrounded by myth as the golden age of the press
Anti-newspaper diatribes bewail falling standards. Simon Jenkins says that’s rubbish, and the glory days they hark back to were dreadful!

Watch your ass
The Daily Mail and ITV battle it out to see who can supply Gloucestershire village Chalford with their first donkey since the 1950s

 The celebrity death-messaging service
Brooker on his latest idea for a world obsessed with celebrity death: eVulture

Malicious programs hit new high

Security software testing organisation AV Test reports that it saw 5.49 million unique samples of malicious software in 2007 - five times more than the 972,606 it saw in 2006

The World’s Leading returns

Glorious news has reached me that The World’s Leading is trying out a new format as a forum for discussions of a gossipy Tech PR nature. The blog, which has been sorely missed in the last few months, now appears in its new guise and apparently under new management. It can be found here.

For those unfamiliar with the original blog, it served (in its own glorious, descriptive words) as:

“A gossip site for those involved with technology PR in the UK”

 Best of luck with the comeback TWL, I look forward to more monkey madness.

Welcome!

Hello and do come into the new blog.

Feel free to have a potter about and check the fittings. I’ll, as ever, be spanglifying as I go and all comments on this process are welcomed!

Spring cleaning the blog

I have been whinging about it long enough. Well, not out loud and not constantly, that would be embarrassing in public places, but OCCASIONALLY I have commented in a dissatisfied manner that I should sort out how this page looks. I’ve also been told by (I’m sure) well meaning people that this looks bad (not the word used).

I throw my hands up in despair. My knowledge of HTML is limited and the templates that Blogger gives me aren’t the best. Does anyone have any recommendations for what I can do to spring clean my blog?

All suggestions welcome.

Scrabulous shutdown

According to the BBC, Facebook have been ordered to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel, who say it infringes their copyright on the board-based word game.

Now I may be over simplifying things but it seems to me that they have missed a trick here. According to the Beeb the add-on regularly racks up more than 500,000 daily users. I can’t remember the last time I played it for real. So it would appear that an otherwise fantastic brand revival is being thwarted, just for the sake of pride from the manufacturers. As one message on the ‘Save Scrabulous’ group wall reads:

I didn’t have any Scrabble sets when I started playing Scrabulous a few months
ago. Since I got hooked on that I have bought two sets.

Of course, there is more to this than meets the eye.

Now the real issue stems from who owns the rights to the game in the first place. Confusingly Hasbro owns rights to the game in the US and Canada while Mattel has rights everywhere else in the world. So perhaps in the race between these two to cash in on the growing popularity, they are destroying the very cash cow that laid the golden egg (as it were). How foolish.

Gizmodo at CES

Some of us didn’t get to go to CES (one day, one year) but it amuses me to see that not everyone was having a great time there. Several stands suffered a series of technical problems that were entirely to do with the bad men at Gizmodo.

A nightmare for the people at the affected stands, rather funny for the rest of us. But have Gizmodo gone too far? Apparently the guy responsible has been banned from CES in future, but what about the rest of the team. As someone points out on the site; Some of those booth people are pretty touchy and have long memories. Could this mean their chances of interviews, freebies and exclusives have been switched off too? What about sponsorship for the site?

Bloody funny though.

Twitter or Tumblr

What’s the difference and why should I care, I wonder…

Facebook is down again…

Hot, fat, salty tears of frustration.

UPDATE:

Appears not to be Facebook, just my account. Frustration turning to rage, if things happens on Facebook and I am not there to see it in my mini-feed, does it really happen.

Am starting to question my own existence - how did it come to this?

Yikes

OK OK - new job, new blog. But is this it?

There is going to be some wild experimentation around here - so sunglasses at the ready. Please let me know what you think and I will let you know once I have found a template that doesn’t a) give me a headache, b) make it look like a blog belonging to a Tweenie and c) doesn’t make me want to claw my own eyeballs out to stop the unspeakable ugly from flowing in.

Clearly this isn’t it.

Bear with me.