So the World Cup 2010 is on. I’ve never been very good at playing football, but I’ve always enjoyed having a go and will continue to do so for as long as I can. I’m quite good at watching from the armchair, though. For this tournament, I’m running a wee Score Prediction Game online. When I conceived this labour of love, I envisioned a much bigger thing with prizes and everything, spreading virally around the Twitterverse. However when push came to shove and important things like work and family took priority, I only just about managed to get it implemented in time. I’m delighted to have the little group of 29 predictors battling it out throughout the tournament.
As the 2010 tournament begins to splutter into flame halfway through the group stages, I’ve decided to look back at my World Cup memories down through the years. My interest in football probably was just beginning to blossom in 1974 (aged 7) what with Cruyff, Beckenbauer and my “namesake”, Gerd Müller and Co., but the real strong World Cup memories begin in 1978. Read more…
Following my experiment with sampling the public Twitter timeline this morning, I ran another sample, this time for much longer and at a time of day, when many American users would be active to get a slightly more accurate breakdown of the top twenty Twitter clients. Read more…
This is an appendix to my post on Sampling Twitter to determine client breakdown. Below is the full breakdown of the client source of tweets sampled on 14 April 2010 for around 15 minutes from 12.30pm UK time. Total tweets sampled: 21912. Read more…
The arrival of promoted tweets on Twitter got me thinking about how people post their tweets, as the initial dipping of the Twitter toe into monetization will only impact users of http://search.twitter.com.
So, how many people actually use the Twitter.com website to post their tweets? What are the most popular clients? Read more…
…but the workaround is even worse
I’ve been a relatively happy user of Windows Live Mail since I started using it 18 months ago or so. But Microsoft gave me no option recently but to upgrade to the latest version of Windows Live Mail when I decided to install Windows Live Messenger and the current colour scheme is shockingly awful and what is worse there are no options within the application to set up a user-defined colour scheme.
The main problem is that on your list of messages, Windows Live Mail now displays the subject text of read messages in an insipid barely legible gray colour. I googled the issue and found that there is indeed a solution, though I suspect there never was a more appropriate case for using the term workaround as the fix is arguably much more annoying than the Windows Live Mail problem it addresses. Read more…
In the wake of the Rage Against the Machine Christmas No. 1 campaign, copy-cat campaigns have been bobbing up and down destined never to achieve the same success.
I saw a bumper sticker the other day for the “Ultravox Vienna for No.1″ campaign. When you delve a bit deeper on that one, you discover it’s just a self promoting campaign originating from Ultravox themselves on their comeback tour. I suppose just getting to No. 2 still rankles with them, but it’s not something that fires my imagination, in other words It Means Nothing To Me! As pointed out in Comment #1, I didn’t delve deep enough into the Vienna campaign and got the wrong end of the stick. http://ultravox.org.uk is the band’s official website, but it is run by fans not the band and the fans’ Vienna campaign pre-dated the RATM phenomenon by six months.
However the campaign to catapult Half Man Half Biscuit into the charts for the first time in the band’s long and admirable career gets my support because…
- It makes me laugh. In the spirit of band’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics, the campaign’s target chart position is No. 6.
- It’s one of my favourite HMHB songs: Joy Division Oven Gloves
- Behind the humour, there is a genuine reason for supporting the campaign, namely to raise awareness about the axe looming over the BBC 6 Music radio station, possibly the only radio station that consistently plays the music I want to hear.
Read more…
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