all talk and no action

The bandwagon is on a roll. Hot on the heels of the Million Dollar Homepage comes the Sexy Pixel Homepage.

In this case each pixel costs a cent rather than a dollar, and your pixel(s) will help to cover up "an unlucky lady [who] due to circumstance rare, has lost all her clothes - her body is bare."

If only Big D had thought of that idea to sell peanuts in pubs in the seventies and eighties - "pay for a bag of nuts to cover this suggestive photo!" The queues would have been, er, short.

There's an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal site that asks why software stays in beta for so long:

"I can't come up with anything else in the entire marketing world where marketers knowingly introduce a flawed or inadequate product [and] it helps grow your user base,"said Peter Sealey, a marketing professor at the University of California at Berkeley and former chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola Co.

Google News, the article reminds us, has now been in beta for three years.

It's not just free, web-based services that are being released to the public without full functionality. I bought an MP3 player last year with the promise that firmware to make it capable of playing PlaysForSure DRM-protected music would be available within a couple of months. A year later and there's still no sign of the firmware. Another MP3 player I looked at earlier this year claimed on the box that the small screen could also play QuickTime movies. Only it couldn't. That functionality, too, will be delivered with the next firmware upgrade, apparently.

When Alex Tew, a 21-year-old from Wiltshire, launched The Million Dollar Homepage I dismissed the idea as a stupid one that had come too late. After all, Save Karyn appeared much earlier, and while the owner of that site may have managed to scrounge $20,000 in 20 weeks to pay off her credit card debts, the internet community had got wise and it wouldn't be possible to pull off a similar stunt again.

Or would it? The Million Dollar Homepage, which sells pixels to advertisers for $1 each, has now sold over 680,000 pixels. That's over $680,000 in Alex's pocket. I feel sick.

Thankfully, American Copywriter has come to the rescue with five stages of dealing with the "why didn't I think of that?" syndrome.

I've passed stage four now:

Depression: "The now-famous guy behind the site is 21 years old and, as of today, has sold 62.4% of the page. Which means that he's probably made a good $600K in the last few months. What was I doing when I was 21 years old? Wait, I know -- getting myself into debt. And drinking."

And now I've reached the final stage:

"I should write a post about this."

I feel better already.

[via Adrants]

From The Scotsman:

A man is facing jail after slapping a passer-by with a fish.

Alan Bennie, 20, was walking through a park when he was approached by assailant David Evans, who was carrying a fish.

Mr MacGregor [prosecuting] said: "The accused asked the complainer 'Do you want to kiss my fish?'

"Mr Bennie made no reply and walked on, at which point the accused said: 'You answer me next time I ask you to kiss a fish', and slapped him round the face with it."

This is fantastic. If you're looking for inspiration for your Christmas lighting then watch this video at Engadget and be amazed. Make sure you've got your speakers turned on.

Read all about it.

This made me chuckle. Hitwise collates internet usage data such as popular web destinations and searches. The chart above shows searches for Thanksgiving recipes (in red), against visits to the major online dieting sites (in blue). It seems the two don't go well together.

[For readers unaware of this US custom, Thanksgiving is an annual event held on the fourth Thursday of November, when every US citizen is required to eat three whole turkeys followed by 27 slices of pumpkin pie.]

Does your site suck? Find out at Sitescore which scores your site according to how "well designed, popular and accessible" it is. Enter the URL of your site and Sitescore returns marks out of ten for its marketing, design, accessibility and user experience.

As expected, all talk and no action passed with flying colours. Here's an extract from Sitescore's report:

Popularity rating: very poor
Your website appears to be visited so rarely that there is not accurate popularity information available.

British legal requirements: very poor
All pages were found in violation of the the current W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Hmm.

On a more positive note, this site scored well for speed: "Your website responded in 0.85 seconds, and your homepage downloaded in 0.92 seconds. This is very fast and suggests your website is running on a sufficiently powerful web server."

So at least I know that the three people who visit here every year aren't waiting too long for their non-compliant pages to load.

A company that sells mobile phones to students has introduced a text service which condenses classic text books into annoying SMS talk. Dot Mobile reckons it can take text messaging, which has been blamed for contributing to poor literacy levels among young people, and re-invent it as "a valuable learning tool for students of English Literature", and so it's teamed up with University College London's Professor John Sutherland to create the "text books".

"The new service has been specifically designed to aid English students in both their choices of books to study and to serve as a valuable revision tool for exams," says the blurb on the site.

So what can subscribers expect? Here's the text version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet:

FeudTween2hses--Montague&Capulet. RomeoM falls_<3w/_JulietC@mary Secretly Bt R kils J's Coz&isbanishd. J fakes Death. As Part of Plan2b-w/R Bt_leter Bt It Nvr Reachs Him. Evry1confuzd---bothLuvrs kil Emselves.

And since Romeo and Juliet isn't a well known story, here's the translation:

A feud between two houses – Montague and Capulet. Romeo Montague falls in love with Juliet Capulet and they marry secretly but Romeo kills Juliet's cousin and is banished. Juliet fakes her own death. As part of the plan to be with Romeo she writes him a letter but it never reaches him. Everyone is confused and both lovers kill themselves.

The Beer Hunter is a truly inspired Google Maps hack that tells you where you can buy beer and wine. You can see at a glance which stores are open as the closed ones are represented by a transparent icon. Clicking an icon provides the store's phone number, address and opening times. Sadly, Beer Hunter only covers Toronto, Canada.

I now know this useful piece of information: you can't buy beer anywhere in Toronto before 9am. Once it reaches 9am, there are 10 places open where you can buy beer.

[via Digg]

Coca-Cola has created a world map of "chill" levels so you can see how stressed or relaxed the rest of the world is. England and the US are predominantly purple -- which is good because purple means chilled. Scotland, though, has a worrying number of red dots. That's not so good, because red means freakin'. I wonder whether one of those angry red dots is Gary.

[via Future Feeder]

Newsvine is soon to hit beta. When it's up and running it'll be a news site that will allow readers to comment on posted stories (which could originate from any news outlet will be sourced from Associated Press, along with contributions from citizen journalists). The company's founder and CEO Mike Davidson explains:

"You just read an Associated Press story about the fiery riots in France on a major news site. Why shouldn't you be able to comment on it like you would on a blog entry? At Newsvine you can. Why shouldn't you be able to chat about it with whoever else happens to be reading the story at the same time? At Newsvine you can... right within the story itself. We believe in turning news into conversation, and every page on Newsvine.com is designed to do precisely that."

Davidson also makes a statement I've long supported: "At Newsvine, we feel strongly that an article's life only begins the second it is published. It is only when readers interact with it that it achieves its full impact." This idea that a news story, opinion piece or even a product review is just the beginning is one I first saw in print in the late nineties in a book called Media Rants, by Jon Katz (ISBN: 1888869127).

Katz wrote: "Columnists on the web get the first word but never the last. We are just sparks. Unlike a Washington pundit or op-ed columnist, a critic here doesn't write from a position of authority but in full view of thousands of people who often know more about the subject than the writer and who instantly -- and often publicly -- file corrections, disagreements and concerns. I used to believe that everything I committed to paper was right. I'm no longer certain about that -- a column is just my best feeling at the time, the beginning of a discussion. There is no better tonic for a writer's arrogance than interactivity." I couldn't agree more.

The Newsvine service will also support tagging, so users can tag a story with, say, "world cheese shortage", and every story tagged as such will then appear at newsvine.com/world-cheese-shortage. Additionally, stories can be rated by visitors: "There is no editor behind a desk deciding what stories are most important. You decide that. Whenever you see a story on Newsvine you think is important, simply click the 'Vote' button next to the headline and you've just increased the importance score of that story," writes Davidson. That's a system already in place at the excellent Digg.com, which has seen its traffic soar over the last six months and which recently secured $2.8 million in venture capital.

On a related note, journalism.co.uk is reporting that DailyMail.co.uk now provides a readers' comment feature on all its articles.

[via TechCrunch]

8 Nov 2005: "We're as surprised as anyone that Olympus hasn't thrown in the towel on the m:robe line of audio players yet."

9 Nov 2005: "Olympus has announced it will halt production of portable DAPs."

There's an interesting article on The Wall Street Journal site about TV on demand that suggests that the 99-cent download model as available on iTunes isn't -- at least, not yet -- about making money:

"Technology ... is increasingly putting content at consumers' fingertips. At the same time, it is pushing the networks away from their decades-old model of broadcasting shows for free and selling ads to make money. The result: the networks want to train consumers to think of TV shows as products that aren't free -- and make the idea of on-demand ventures more palatable."

But will consumers cough up for TV on demand? A poll on the WSJ.com site asked visitors "Would you pay 99 cents to watch a prime-time TV-show episode on demand?" and the results suggest that many would: at the time of writing, 4295 votes had been cast with 35% of repondents saying they would pay.

[via David Card at Jupiter Research]

Berkeley Data Systems is offering free online backup space. The beta version of Mozy provides 2GB of storage with backups made automatically. Files are encrypted during transfer and on the Mozy servers. It's a free service but you must agree to receive email ads "once in a while".

[via therawfeed.com]

Yahoo! is reporting that file-sharing software firm Grokster has shut down. A message on Grokster's site confirms this:

"The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade copyrighted material is illegal. Copying copyrighted motion picture and music files using unauthorized peer-to-peer services is illegal and is prosecuted by copyright owners. There are legal services for downloading music and movies. This service is not one of them."

As this news breaks, I'm watching downloaded copies of BBC programmes free, and completely legally, with iMP. Go figure.

The BBC is at it again: you can now get BBC News television and radio via RSS. According to the press release, a wide variety of news reports in audio and video is available -- including the latest breaking news pictures, exclusive interviews, background features and analysis. Clips and packages are available from programmes including News 24, BBC One's national bulletins, Newsnight and Radio 4's Today programme. All the media is available in broadband (for UK users), narrowband, Real and Windows formats.

For more details, go to The BBC's RSS feed page.

I have to share this. This stuff is FREAKIN' AWESOME. It's called Chef Paul Prudhomme's Magic Seasoning Salt and it's a blend of salt, onion, garlic, chilli pepper, mustard, cumin, basil and ginger. It's fantastic on cheese-on-toast, chips, eggs, pizza, pasta and pretty much anything else. I got it at Sainsbury's for £1.79.

Because it's Friday: watch Matt dance around the world. This link to a movie file of Matt dancing was posted to Metafilter back in January and I must have watched it 20 times since then. It's a 37MB WMV file, but worth the download, even if you've seen it before and since forgotten it. You can get it in other file formats if you prefer.

Flu season is upon us and MSN Health and Fitness has a few tips to help stop the spread of germs in the workplace. There's the obvious, such as staying at home when you're ill instead of dragging your diseased body into the office, and throwing used tissues away (as opposed to putting them in a colleague's sandwich box, presumably). Then there's this one:

"During flu season, never let anyone lick your keyboard."

So that's where I've been going wrong.

[via Fark]

There's an interesting interview on The Washington Post site with Russ Wilcox, chief executive of E Ink Corporation, where Wilcox says that electronic paper could be publicly available by 2015. And it will be free:

"It's going to be free and the reason is that newspapers are spending $150 per year per reader on making the paper. (Figuring in cost of newsprint.) Within two or three years you've built up $300 to $500 of budget per reader so you can give it away for free because the device itself will cost less than $300."

This is my thinking, too. It makes perfect sense to give away an e-paper device to everyone who takes out, say, a year's subscription. The subscriber can then create their own personalised magazine: rather than paying a fiver for a 100-page magazine about mobile phones when they know they're only going to read the odd review, they can opt for the lead review from that title, a couple of news spreads from a PC mag, a tutorial from a web design mag, an opinion column from another mag and the crossword from their favourite newspaper. So for their five pounds they get a magazine that's entirely tailored to their interests.

That could push the quality of writing up: once it becomes possible for editors to track which articles and writers are popular they can change their commissioning accordingly. A scary thought for writers, though: perhaps they'll start to find themselves paid not per word, but per download.

[via cyberjournalist.net]

The BBC has made beta copies of its interactive media player (iMP) available to testers and so I've been playing around with it over the last few days. It's impressive.

So what is it? Here's the BBC's explanation:

iMP is an application in development offering UK viewers the chance to catch up on TV and radio programmes they may have missed for up to seven days after they have been broadcast, using the internet to legally download programmes to their home computers. iMP uses peer to peer distribution technology (P2P) to legally distribute these programmes.

Seven days after the programme transmission date the programme file expires (using Digital Rights Management - DRM - software) and users will no longer be able to watch it. DRM also prevents users emailing the files to other computer users or sharing it via disc.

The initial download of the set-up file was quick and then it only took a few more minutes for the program to install itself. The BBC has done a great job of making the player really easy to use. Once installed, iMP will download a trailer file that gives you a taste of some of the stuff you can watch. Being a bit sad and wanting to see Grant and Phil's reappearance in a recent episode of EastEnders, I picked that as my first download. Weighing in at 168MB I didn't really fancy the wait but I had the complete file in about 20 minutes via my 2MB broadband connection. On the peer-to-peer front, iMP was pulling the files from about 10 different places at once. A nice touch is that iMP also lets you "book" a series so it'll download automatically after each episode has been broadcast and you don't have to remember to keep checking back for episodes.

There's really not a lot more to say about iMP - it works and it works well. What I love is that while other parts of the entertainment industry is busy suing its customers into bankruptcy the BBC is forging ahead with developing new ways to get its content to viewers. It's licence-payers' money well spent.

Yesterday I was in London at Life Squared, a technology showcase being held by Microsoft. The event, which runs until February, aims to demonstrate to the press and Microsoft's partners how Microsoft sees its technology being used in business and at home.

We got a demo of how businesses could use Microsoft products to become more efficient, followed by a quick look at a portal technology that allows parents to find out whether their kids have handed their homework in on time (poor kids). Then there was the Xbox 360 and Media Center. But sitting on the right-hand side of the flat panel display in the living room was an intriguing device: an IPTV box. What this unit does is allow anyone with a broadband connection to get the full range of Freeview channels streamed over the internet. The unit we looked at came with an Electronic Programme Guide that looks almost identical to the one used by the Media Center.

BT has partnered with Microsoft to launch such a box some time in 2006, and there may be other partnerships to come; different partners can then choose which channels and services to offer via IPTV.

TV-watching aside, the IPTV system offers a nice social touch: if you're signed into instant messenger, you can see which of your friends are online and what channel they're watching. You can then join them on the channel and chat while you watch or invite them to watch a program with you. Once you're both on the same channel you can also send annoying animations, such as a rocket which flies across their television screen, though I suspect that joke will get old fast.

The system also allows you to set up your own TV channel, where you upload photos and movie files to your provider and then invite friends to subscribe to your channel. Once they've accepted your invite, it shows up in their EPG along with all the standard channels. This could prove popular not just with businesses, or families who want to share wedding movies, but also with video bloggers. If it takes off it will mean that everyone will have their own TV station. Whether that's a good or a bad thing remains to be seen.

The Daily Record is reporting on a baked bean war that broke out yesterday when Branston launched an attack on the £250 million market, currently dominated by Heinz. Premier Foods -- owner of Branston -- claims that its Branston beans have a "richer, more tomato-tasting sauce and a better texture."

In the nineties, the baked bean wars got me through my college years, when the supermarkets frantically pushed down prices until you could pick up a can of beans for a penny. In an effort to contain the resulting customer frenzy, they then limited purchases to four cans per customer, and used sophisticated iris-scanning techniques to thwart shoppers who tried to sneak in an extra purchase with the aid of a false moustache and a plastic nose. The baked bean wars saw a number of smaller skirmishes, too, such as the spaghetti hoop wars and the tinned tomato wars. If the present conflict escalates, we could find ourselves in a similar situation. Start your shopping trolleys...

[via Fark]

I must have been asleep when this was announced because it's the first I've seen of it. Google now consolidates movie reviews from around the web. Enter a movie title in the search box and you get a link to a page that offers a bunch of reviews, an average rating, the ability to sort by date or rating, and to filter by positive or negative reviews. The URL www.google.com/reviews also works and takes you to a page called Movie Reviews, although it's actually just another window onto the standard Google web search page. It doesn't work for all movies, but try a search for Saw 2 to see it in action. A quick web search suggests I'm only about six months late in discovering this.