Water balloon

The Roots latest album is out on Monday, Read this Guardian article and for gawd sake buy the album.



http://music.guardian.co.uk/rock/story/0,,2275858,00.html

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rising-Down-Roots/

Spiritualized and Farrow

If you make something that's beautiful and with passion, it has value and it retains that value, and not in a monetary sense.

Great article about Spiritualized and Farrow and their collaborations over the years, from CR.

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/spiritualized-and-farrow-made-for-each-other/

My my my

Domain names trends .. First there was E - think eBay, eGroups and eTrade. Then it was I Apple iMac, Compaq iPaq and the i-Opener. Today, according to The New York Times:

The Web is awash in sites that begin with that most personal of pronouns, and not simply MySpace. A few quick clicks will connect you to MyCoke, My IBM, My Subaru, MyAOL -- even MyClick, a mobile-phone marketing company. Collectively, they amount to a new world of Web sites designed to imply a one-on-one connection with a corporation or large business.

The story says:

The "my" prefix has become an easy and increasingly popular shorthand for suggesting that bond between consumers and corporations. Matthew Zook of ZookNIC, a business that analyzes domain names, said domains that start with "my" more than tripled between 2005 and 2008, to 712,000 from 217,000. According to the government's Patent and Trademark Office, the number of trademark applications to register marks that include the word "my" increased to 1,943 last year from 382 in 1998. Through March of this year, the number of applications has soared to 530.

QRC - You know for kids.

I'm sure I came up with this idea...

QRC or Quick Response Code is a barcode that can be read by a mobile phone, you take a picture and you can then go to the url.

This seems to have been out for a while and is popularish (well in japan) and I hadn't heard of it before, which annoys me, not that I think they stole my idea, 'cos clearly it's an idea that any child who sees a long url on a print ad would think about, but it annoys me because it's right up my street and I haven't used it and now I've found it my mobile phone isn't supported by the readers I've found.. bah!

The best looking reader - http://reader.kaywa.com/

This is what I look like in QRC apparently (untested)

There is also a company that is printing QRC codes onto tshirts, ideal for people who want to encourage strangers to photograph their chests. (emmacott.com)

Come on people, sort a QRC reader out for the Sony Ericsson K850i so I can join the party.

Google to allow UK trademark bidding

Google will allow UK advertisers to bid on trademarked keywords for the first time from 5 May 2008.

Critics suggest that this is just to drive more business for Google in falling PPC revenue.

From May 5, however, anyone can bid on a trademarked term such as "Dragonfly Teas" so a search for the Tea brand's name will bring up adverts from competitors who have also bid for that word.

Google have said that trademark owners can request that it protect their trademark by banning rival companies from using the trademarked name in the text of the sponsored advert.

As a result a rival company would not be allowed to place an advert along the lines of "Cheaper and tastier than Dragonfly Teas".