Category: Websites
Google Street View car in SENSELESS animal slaughter shock – pictures included
For the love of GOD, won’t someone stop them?
Google’s roaming fleet of privacy-invading world-mapping cars caused a bit of a stir yesterday, when one of the people who spends their every waking hour combing Street View for photos of hookers, drugs deals going down, shootings and sunbathing ladies found this – the moment the Street View car flattened a deer.
You’d think the driver would’ve said something and told his bosses not to upload the pictures, but no. Although the photo has since been removed from the service, to…
eBay Nutcase of the Week: Jon Ward auctions date with himself for… £46
Spurred on by the sorry tale of that American slapper who auctioned her alleged virginity for several million dollars, long-term Potters Bar singleton Jon Ward decided to sell an all-expenses-paid night out with himself “in London” on eBay.
The listing’s ended, but you can read Jon’s excellent self-oriented sales speak here.
The result? A lady called “sexysarah2009” bought an evening with Jon…
GMail gets offline access
Picture the scenario – you’re at home, and your internet connection’s gone down. You want to ring the providers, but all the info is in your GMail, and you can’t get to it, because you’ve got no internet connection! What do you do? You stop panicking, because you’re turned on offline access for GMail.
It’s a new feature for the popular webmail client that’ll allow users to keep a local cache of their messages so that if your internet connection drops for some reason, then you’ll still have complete access. It’ll also work in situations with no connection at all – on a plane, for example, or a bus.
To activate offline access, go to the Labs section of your GMail. It should be in the list there. If it’s not yet (it’s not for me) then give it a few hours and it should show up. Once activated, click the “Offline 0.1” link in the upper righthand corner to set everything up.
(via Official GMail Blog)
Related posts: GMail adds themes | GMail adds voice and video chat
British Film Council launches FindAnyFilm.com: first thoughts
Film fans, this story’s for you. The British Film Council has spent £1 million on developing a new website called FindAnyFilm. It’s been seven months in development, and aims to combine cinema listings with links to buy DVDs or downloads, or watch films online.
The implementation is very simple – just put in the name of a film, actor/actress, genre, or the name of a cinema, and you’ll be presented with a list of relevant results. It’s well-implemented, though I ran into a few launch-day bugs, like not being able to display a map of where a specific cinema was. I’m sure that kind of thing will be fixed by the end of the week.
Mozilla and Wikimedia Foundation throw their weight behind open source web video
Pay attention, because this one’s important. Web video has issues. It has issues because it’s closed, and proprietary. The vast majority of web video is delivered in the Flash format, which owned by Adobe. This means that video sites have to suffer restrictions and pay license fees. Wouldn’t it be better if there was an open source version?
Enter Theora. It’s an open-source video codec which, when combined with the Vorbis audio codec and the .OGG file format, could replace Flash as the dominant form for web video.
Internet comes of age – social networks more popular than porn sites in the UK
Times were, back in the old days when the internet was mainly for “hobbyists,” easy access to vast reserves of pornography was the big seller of PCs and, you might argue, was instrumental in the uptake of broadband. It was in my house, at least. But not any more.
Web traffic counter Hitwise reckons traffic to social networking sites out-stripped that of porn providers for the first time in the UK late last year. Hitwise says it’s all women’s fault, with 55% of social net traffic coming from lady browsers uploading photos of cats to Facebook, and, as a result, they’re spending…
Wikipedia eyes introduction of 'flagged revisions' worldwide
Wikipedia is considering banning unregistered users from making alterations to certain articles. It would be a radical policy change for the Encyclopedia whose slogan is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”.
Last week, during President Obama’s inauguration lunch, US Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were both taken ill, quite seriously in the case of Kennedy. They have both since recovered, however shortly after the event, their Wikipedia entries read that they had died.
Although the changes were removed within five minutes of going up, the site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, went on record saying that a “flagged revisions” system would have prevented the problem. Such a system has been trialed on the German Wikipedia, and means that any unregistered edits have to be approved by a ‘trusted editor’ before they appear to the public.
Having a bad day? Bailiffs taken away your netbook? Tell the world at F*** My Life
Here’s a new social networking micro-blogging toy that Stephen Fry hasn’t signed up to yet – F*** My Life.
Founded as an IRC channel and quickly growing into full micro-blog status, the idea of FMyLife is to broadcast an unrelenting stream of misery and examples of forehead-slapping idiocy people have encountered, creating a nice antidote to the cheerful, kitten-related rubbish spewed out by most vacuous…
Less is more – new socially-networked nano-blog Chirp gives you ten letters to express yourself
New tech start-up Chirp is the hottest new, lime-green-coloured, nano-social-blogging tool on the web, offering users a chance to “Keep fellow Chirpers up to date with your every thought” – in ten characters or less.
So if you find that Twitter is simply too long-winded and you can’t be bothered doing a whole sentence-worth of typing because you can never think of as many interesting things to say as Stephen Fry, give Chirp a go.
It is, of course, a joke. And a very good one. The sort of joke most of us will go to the grave without having created…
Bush's Googlebomb hits Obama
Remember when bloggers, a few years back, “googlebombed” former US President George W Bush by linking his official biography to the phrase “miserable failure”? Well, along with the war in Iraq and a devastated economy, poor Obama looks to be inheriting Bush’s googlebomb, too.
Searches for “miserable failure” on Yahoo! and Live Search both bring up Obama’s bio. Google has successfully killed the bomb on its own search engine, however. In the meantime, one enterprising blogger has started a campaign to link the words “Cheerful Achievement” to Obama’s biography. Sounds good. Sign me up.
Cheerful Achievement (via SEO & Web Marketing News)
Related posts: Daily Mail journalist suffers the wrath of bloggers | Rumours of Google planning an incredible unlimited cloud storage service
