Google admits defeat?

I can’t quite get my head around this one.  Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been announcing via Twitter that Google has kindly donated $2 million dollars to the foundation which is all rather lovely, but what does that mean for Knol? I remember no that long ago when Google launched the service indirectly claiming that it was a ‘Wikipedia challenger’ with many claiming it would be the end of the donation-based service.

So is this is a sign of Google admitting defeat and embracing the flawed information service that we all reference? It certainly looks like it but we’ll hear what the announcement brings tomorrow when the formal statement is released?

The state of the Internet

I like this a lot. It’s a lovely, simple piece of design that helps you get your bonce around the numbers for the digital wild west. Courtesy of Focus, it uses circles to represent 100 people and gives stats on all things web. Who’d have thought that the biggest percentage of bloggers was 35-44. More to say? Better life-expeience?Using it as part of their jobs? Either way I was a bit surprised.

It’s Superbowl weekend!

If you’ve been hiding under an English rock for the last 2 weeks you’d be forgiven for not knowing that it’s Superbowl weekend this weekend. Biggest TV audience, biggest sport… blah blah blah but one thing that everyone agrees with is that it’s usually when the big brands dump an epic 90 second ad to the billions.

Pub fact: Brands have spent $2 billion on Superbowl adverting in the last 2 decades.

This year Disney is paying the $2 million plus for the big spot and will serve up Burtons new Alice in Wonderland movie which I have to say is looking incredible:

Joe public won’t feel the full 3D effects that the ad spot delivers but it’s still going to be amazing without the stupid glasses. Although I took mine off for a peek during the trailer that ran during Avatar and it was all a bit bonkers. Definitely keep your specs on even if you do start to feel a little depressed.

Maybe when you’re a little older

This has been floating around the web today. A picture paints a thousand words as they say. I want to love you but I can’t right now. I just don’t have room in my life for you. Maybe in the future when you’re all grown up things will change. I’m sure you’re going to be incredible when you’re a little older but right now, I’ll ogle from afar.

Amen.

No chance of alien abduction then?

Any hope of being spotted by passing aliens on their way to an intergalactic KFC seem to be diminishing by the second. It seems our obsession with innovation could be the very thing that stops ET dropping in for coffee according to a few articles published by the renowned American astronomer and astrophysicist Dr Frank Drake.

According to the founder of SETI, the phasing out of analogue transmissions from television, radio and radar is making our planet electronically invisible from outer space. Bummer. I was holding out for two possible outcomes;

1. A War Of The Worlds style catastrophe where it’s everyone man for himself and we’re fighting to save the planet. I’ve always fancied a bit of that.

2. It all goes a bit Star Trek and we get foxy sci-fi ladies parading around who are anatomically spot on and make the tube journey into work a bit more interesting on a Monday morning.

One thousand M&M’s and take the brown ones out

Celebrities eh. We’re sick to death of seeing them in the national rags but we keep buying the trashy glossy’s with their arses plastered all over them. I’ve never really got it but then I don’t get what eating fish is all about;  it stinks. Despite not wanting to see what someone’s arse looks like dangling out of a trashy stretched limo, I was strangely fascinated with this article on the 15 Craziest Celebrity Backstage Requests.

I had to giggle at Amy Winebox’s request:

……all staff must be sober during her performance.

Thank god she doesn’t ask her fans to do the same when they go to her gig’s. If they did, they would all realise what a complete nutcase she is and stick to listening to her at home. Manson wants a bald hooker, Iggy wants dwarfs and The Hoff wants, well, himself naturally.

I had a rider for a few years. It consisted of a bottle of Jack , some ice and no casting judgement as to whether it was a problem or just binge drinking.

Who’s been sleeping in my bed?

This is just odd. Some Holiday Inns in London are offering a bed warming service. Not with a hot water bottle or an electric blanket but with a person. An actual person. Eeewwwww.

A spokesperson for Holiday Inn says….

‘Staff at two of the chain’s London hotels, the Kensington Forum and Kingston South branches will be dressed in specially designed all-in-one suits and have a lie down in visitors’ beds for five minutes to get the sheets nice and warm’.

I don’t know about you but this sounds wrong; all in one suit or not. I’ve a bit of a thing for cleanliness so this is my worst nightmare. However there is always an exception……

Tabling an idea

Brainstorm, ideation session. The terminology is bollocks but despite what you call them, they’re always a giggle if ran correctly. The output of this one took up the whole of the table in the Pipe & Slippers.

Skullduggery

I came across this via Digg and wondered who on earth would want to buy it. A Californian businessman called Paul Kaufmann came across the find in 1990 in his Mam’s attic.

The Huffington Post reports…..
‘While searching among his late mother’s possessions, he happened on an ancient, pear-shaped box labeled ‘Beethoven’.

I don’t know about you but for starters if I found a skull in a box in the attic, I’d be having a mild panic about what my Mam got up to in her youth. That said he kept his cool and subsequently saw dollar signs and got it tested for authenticity. Low and behold it turns out it’s actually old Ludwig Van Beethoven’s bonce after all.

And in keeping with today’s ‘let’s make a quick buck society’ he says, ‘The objective is to share it with the public. In my heart it should be in a museum.’

He also hopes that a compatible institution will pay in excess of $100,000. Go figure.

Rip A Manger

London is awash with little independant shops that take a little more than a leaf out of high street and well established shops; especially when it comes to branding. How many times have you seen a slight variant on Kentucky Fried Chicken in East London? Who can forget Dallas Chicken (which incidentally calls itself a restaurant!), Tennessee Friend Chicken or the closest to the original, Kennedy Fried Chicken? Anyway the reason for the post is because I went past a shop which at first glance, I thought was Pret A Manger but it wasn’t. Turns out it’s just a blatant rip-off of the Pret branding.

The question is,  do Pret even care? Would they chase them down or are they so insignificant that they don’t give a monkey’s?