Idea

July 2, 2007 at 11:12 pm (On The Web)

I’ve been mucking around with a domain for a while now, somewhere I can build a collaborative blogging effort for people like myself. It’s not ready for primetime just yet, but its getting there. PopOpinions.

Two big things about PopOpinions that I want to share:

  1. The collaboration thing is so that the blog doesn’t depend on any one blogger - the community powers the site. I’ll build in some more social features along the line to support interaction between the members.
  2. It’ll be mostly about OPINIONS and cover a variety of topics - politics, entertainment, showbiz, religion…you name it. I want this to be a place where people can let rip their ideas about whatever takes their fancy. You can review stuff, or you can shout about something you heard on the news today.

Anyway, that’s all I’m saying for the moment. If might accept beta testers if anyone’s interested. Drop me a comment on this post and I’ll get in touch.

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Extending Unreality

December 28, 2006 at 10:21 pm (Internet, On The Web)

Unreality TV has been going great guns for the last 6 months. SEOmoz (a huge Search Optimisation company in the US of A) recently published their monthly stats and I was overjoyed to discover we were whomping them month on month!

I love the SEOmoz blog, by the way. :)

Anyway, we’ve been toying with other blogging ideas and the most likely at this juncture are blogs on music and regular telly. So let me introduce you to two of our works in progress:

  1. Unreality Music - Soon to be a place of music reviews of current tunes and past classics. I’ll be taking the lead on the music blog, and I want it to feature not only established acts, but unsigned acts a la MySpace. We’ll also be accepting guest reviews and contribution, particularly of recent gigs.
  2. Unreality Primetime - Lisa’s going to be taking the lead on this new blog, looking at other popular TV shows like The OC, Desperate Housewives, all that stuff. It’ll be a much bigger blog than the reality TV one, but it’s good to watch alternative shows too!

You can conclude from this that Lisa has definitely got square eyes. As do most of our readers! But we love them all and they love us back!

There will be boards on the Unreality Forum to support all of the new areas we’re covering.

We’re excited about how the Unreality blogs are unfolding. We’re going along to press conferences, working with production companies, getting 300,000+ eyeballs on our blog each month, not to mention the thousands of comments people have been compelled to leave for us and even for reality show contestants. These additional blogs will hopefully complement what we already have while creating a spot for people to discuss different types of music and television.

If you want to become a contributor to Unreality, please do get in touch with me.

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Migrating From Dreamhost

November 15, 2006 at 9:45 pm (On The Web)

Well, after my well-documented gripes with Dreamhost, I’ve started to pull the plug. I’ve signed up for the Media Temple Grid Server service, which will comfortably combine all my domains (up to 100 sites, actually) under one account.

Fantastic!

Anyway, I’ve taken the liberty of writing up a little instructional for those who are considering moving away from Dreamhost too.

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Me Around The Web

August 17, 2006 at 9:13 pm (On The Web)

Brian asked me about the number of blogs I had the other day when we were out visiting him. It got me thinking I’ve been using the Interweb for over a decade now and my various profiles are all over the place.

So, in an effort to rein in some of my online activities, this is the big list of me…on the web:

My Blogs

Professional Profiles

  • Currently using LinkedIn as a way of promoting my professional skills online. It’s a great social networking site, and if you’re a member, please look me up or add me to your network. My LinkedIn profile.

Social Bookmarking

  • StumbleUpon: Embarrassingly, I managed to email everyone in my contacts list from Stumbleupon - I will insist it was software misdirection, not user malfunction, until I die.
  • Del.icio.us: The daddy of social bookmarking tools and still my number 1!
  • Reddit, an up and coming social bookmarking site. Similar to Digg but not so many a**holes.
  • Ma.gnolia
  • Digg: A more tech oriented site, lots of interesting articles and discussions. Can be juvenile.
  • Shadows: An interesting social bookmarking, let down by too many spam links.
  • Simpy: Not the prettiest online bookmarking tool.

Blogs and Forums

Photography

Reality TV

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Google’s Online Office Application

March 10, 2006 at 9:46 pm (On The Web)

Gotta love this. Two juicy Google-related pieces out over the last couple of days:

  • Via Paul Stamatiou, TechCrunch is carrying screenshots of the new Google Calendar application, provisionally known as CL2.
  • Now, Google have bought Writely, the web-based word processor. Shrewd move, Writely is a very popular Web 2.0 app. Nothing I’d like more than to log on to it with my Google account details.

Now, is it just me, or does this lend serious weight to the argument that Google is planning it’s own OS? Let’s face it, with Gmail, a calender application and now a word processor, all they need now is a spreadsheet program and something to manage tasks and that’s Microsoft Office effectively replaced.

And guess what, interoperability issues (in documents) would fly out the window, because everyone would be using (X)HTML. And platform would be irrelevant, because it runs via your browser! Of course, you’d be completely screwed if you ever lost your Internet connection…..

I’m not going to go down the “Microsoft should be quaking in their boots” route, but since Office is a bread and butter product for Microsoft, an essentially free alternative via the web is an attractive proposition. It might also be attractive to those millions out there currently using hacked versions of Office!

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