Category: General

I’ve got my site back online, however there may still be some teething problems with various parts of my site.

Hopefully everything will be up, running and looking right within the next few days.

Currently in its fourth season, BBC 4’s “Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe” is a hilarious and sometimes cynical look at the week’s TV with Brooker’s own form of social commentary TV industries more ludicrous trends.

Of course if you’re already a fan of Charlie Brooker, you don’t need me to tell you about him — but lets say you haven’t watched the show, or you “don’t do youtube”… what is the show all about?

Its sort of like “Harry Hill’s TV Burp“, but with more swearing, and it can be more cerebral. And of course there’s a heavy wift of cynicism at the state of TV which always seems to be fresh and funny, regardless of how frustrated Brooker seems to be with TV.

Of course this isn’t the first time Brooker has been involved in such ventures. He was heavily involved with TVGoHome (now defunct), and writes in the Guardian every now and again and he was involved with “Nathan Barley“, which I never saw — but kinda wish I did.

Screenwipe has also lots of social commentary pieces. My favourite of these has to be “Aspirational TV” as it accurately wraps up the aspirational nature of modern TV shows.

The show has developed its own cult following on Youtube (and other video sites), which is ironic, because I believe the show could easily have been produced by a Youtube fan — assuming of course they could get clearance for that copyrighted stuff (oh wait, this is the Internet, I forgot!)

Anyhow if you’re inclined or just curious then you can catch Screenwipe on Youtube, or if you can stay up late its on BBC4 at a really late timeslot.

Links;

• Charlie Brooker’s “Screenwipe” (BBC4 website)
• Charlie Brooker’s articles (Guardian)
• Charlie Brooker’s “Screenwipe” listing (Youtube)
• Aspirational TV

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always admired Virals, they’re is a lot of creativity involved with making virals, in addition – it throws the marketing over to your customer. But I guess most importantly, they’re usually very funny.

Anyway, I found a site that “tracks” the most popular flash games, video virals, etc.

Although it isn’t tracking, for whatever reason, what I consider to be the viral with the most buzz, that of course being the fabled “return” of former WWE wrestler Chris Jericho (Y2J).

Anyway…

Links;

• Viralchart.com
• “Y2J Return” promo

Let’s say you’ve just graduated, or you’re in the cross-roads of your career, or like me — just want something unique, different but fun and challenging?

Where do you go to find agencies to work for?

Well, the answer in the past was to look in Web design magazines, via online galleries – or the Yellow pages.

But fortuently there’s now a list of the top 100 agencies in the UK (although you probably already knew of its existance), so – have fun, do your research and with hope, join an agency that does the things you want to do.

Good luck,

http://www.nmatop100.co.uk/

The biggest problem with “blogging” is that, unless you have a topic you can really talk about, you end up:

1. ranting,
2. talking about everything
3. writing posts saying how sorry you are you haven’t been posting
4. writing about nothing.

But the number one question I get is, “Can you really make money out of blogs?” The answer is yes, providing you’ve got good content, that is regularly updated and have lots of traffic to your site.

Of course this doesn’t mean you’ll make a lot of money from blogging, its likely when you start you’ll make a pittance, perhaps $1, $2 — naturally it depends on the type of marketing structure you have, how much traffic you have, etc; ultimately like with anything — you only get out of “blogging” what you put into it.

Some topics could be:

1. Movies
2. The upcoming London mayoral election (Political blogs are very popular in America, and I read once that DailyKos makes a few million from their site)
3. The upcoming general election
4. Your casual observations of the world (assuming you’re wanting to be a stand-up comic).
5. Some kind of viral marketing gimmick which leads to another viral marketing gimmick that leads to a product/service (remember all that buzz about the hoverboard which turned out to be a Segway?)
6. Blogging about blogging
7. Blogging about virals

I’m sure you can come up with better topics, even if I can’t

Anyone who codes with XHTML/CSS and integrates it with server-side code (ie: PHP) will know that there are bucket-loads of frameworks out there to help “simplify” the coding process, making it easier, faster, more reliable, etc; currently I’m trying to learn “CodeIgnitor”, a MVC rails-like framework built for PHP4 and, am looking at its main rival, “CakePHP” as well.

In terms of AJAX, there are literally thousands of frameworks – prototype, jQuery (my current favorite), mootools, DOJO, etc, etc…

But now there’s a framework for building CSS very quickly; blueprint.

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

I’ve looked at it, and it looks pretty straight-forward, I’m not sure how it would fare with bigger, or more complex CSS/XHTML layouts — but it looks like its a very good system, and there’s already a bit of a buzz about the framework.

It’s one to watch.

Links;

Blueprint (Googlecode)

Web 2.0 technology/APIs, and the constant endless discussion about which framework, API, method or whatever is the “best thing” just doesn’t float my boat.

Its not that I’m against web 2.0 technology, its just that I’m not interested in the technology, per say, but rather its application – it usage, and how businesses (both small and large) can use it to help promote themselves to a larger audience.

I guess you can say, I’m more interested in web 2.0 “branding”, then the web 2.0 “technology” behind it.

Web applications (and the technology behind them) is constantly subject to evolution, and market forces.

One day, MySpace and Linked are the main sites to use, the next day it’s, Twitter, Facebook, Ning, or Youtube. All of them are subject to “market forces”, ie: what the people want.

(more…)

Sorry I haven’t posted as much lately; I’ve been very busy with work.

To be honest, I’m not sure where else to take my website, I’m currently considering changing/downgrading hosting, as it is very expensive for me to run this site; in addition I’m playing with an idea for a new blog, probably to be run via blogger.com which will talk only about my passion for Hong Kong styled action movies.

At the moment, I’m currently writing down ideas for content as I want to make sure I have enough content, and ideas to follow it through.

Elsewhere, I’m still currently looking for full-time work but have decided not to persuit any roles in my current location and look elsewhere…

I hope to resolve everything very soon!

I have just returned from a 5-day break in Amsterdam and had a great time. A city steeped in history, wonderful canals, architecture and very friendly people really added value to my time in the Dutch city.

Some pictures have now been uploaded. Because of bandwidth issues, I’ve only selected a few

All pictures removed for time being.