DanBaileyUK.com Launched

Just a quick note to say that I've finally registered by own domain name (DanBaileyUK.com) and moving my blog to this address, if you have signed up with a feed don't worry you don't need to change anything. You can view the new blog here.

One last quick note about the name, DanBaileyUK.com, as a couple of peeps think that I'm British or something, don't worry I am 100% South African - the name just comes from a couple of years I spent in England and that was the only username going on GMAIL.

Kutcher's millionth follower will star in a future EA Game!

Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) currently has 912,624 followers, 3 days ago he only had 850,000 and he challenged Twitter users that if he reached 1million users before CNN or (@cnnbrk) who has 945,903 followers now, that he'll "ding dong ditch" the billionaire Ted Turner who is the founder of CNN. Video clip here:



The very next day Larry King gets involved threw down the challenge with these words: "Do you know how big we are? Do you know what CNN is?!"

King promises to take on any challenge from Kutcher and will even try get him and Turner in on his show, video below:



@EA or Electronic Arts then tweeted out that for the millionth user they will put into The Sims 3 and that the follower will receive every game that EA makes this year. Nice publicity stint by EA to join in on this coverage...

The final interesting bit about all of this is that the CNN account (@cnnbrk) isn't even owned or run by CNN but rather by a James Cox - CNN how ever has now acquired this account from James for an undisclosed amount, read here for more.

Think I may unfollow @aplusk and watch it closely to drive be the millionth!

Great new Microsoft Ad - The Homeless guy

So Microsoft have released a number of ads recently getting various people the opportunity to look for a laptop with certain specs under a price limit. The actors give off the appearance of giving Macs a chance but then see the prices and go running to Windows laptops... I am still using Windows as my OS and don't think I'll change, for me arrogance is something I despise and the arrogance that Apple's oozes puts me right off (though I may be getting an iPhone, maybe...)

Here is the latest ad with the homeless guy:



The one thing about this is that the homeless guy is like 'What the f$#k do I need a laptop for...' make sure you check out the end and what its used for in the end!

Coke Fest 2009

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to spend the day out on a beautiful wine farm near Somerset West for the Coke Zero Fest which was headlined by Snow Patrol and Oasis.

And it was a rocking day!

Snow Patrol are absolutely amazing and its the third time I've seen them live (once at the O2 dome in London and the other at the V Festival at Chelmsford) how ever Oasis were disappointing and I don't think I'll pay money to see them again live. They rated themselves too much and didn't really give anything into their songs, they are surely at the end of their run and its only their name thats carrying them now.

The South African bands also rocked with my favourites been The Dirty Skirts, Zebra and Giraffe, Cassette and Aking weren't too bad.

Next year I'll have to make sure I get into VIP as I heard Matt Damon was at the concert, anyway I hope if you were in the area that you managed to go!

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Wow, I came across this video earlier of author John Perkins who wrote 'Confessions of a Economic Hitman' and I think I'm definitely going to be buying this book.

It is amazing to see how corrupt our world is, be it here in South Africa or in the United States. The temptation that people fall for is unreal. Take a look at the first part below:

Twitter on your TV

A while back there were some stories of Samsung teaming up with Yahoo to develop a widget platform that would work on Samsung's LCDs/Plasmas.

Here is a photo release of what it will/could actually look like:



Currently there are a dozen or so working apps but this app could save a bit of time say if you watching the news etc. But not too sure if I would like little pop-ups every 5min while I'm watching a movie. The one thing that it will work well with is allowing us to comment to our friends while'st watching live breaking news events/sports events etc. Similar to what Facebook did with CNN this year.

Future apps coming later this year are 2 'premium' video apps from either Netflix, Amazon and/or Blockbuster.

Samsung says that this platform will only be placed on mid to high-end TVs.

Now this kind of thing will scare big corporates like SkyTV(UK based) and DSTV(SA based) as this will offer definite options to having satellite TV. For me instead of developing this we all should just be getting a computer/TV in one or have one computer for your household but have 3/4 different LCDs/Plasmas running off it.

Either way its got to merge sometime soon.

The cellular monopoly

As more and more cellular phones are released/manufactured these days they are generally 3G enabled, this allows the phones to access the internet at pretty decent speeds and has allowed for many innovative application to be made for these phones.

Network operators are loving it because finally people are using the expensive 3G networks they put up a few years ago and their profits are rising BUT there is a thorn in their side and that is to do with VoIP (Voice over internet protocol).

This has been led by Skype which have over 400million users, I use and love it. The problem is coming into factor now whereby cellular manufacturer's are including Skype services on their latest phones which is great for us users but not so great for the network providers.

What VoIP has been doing to the fixed line networks it now can do to the cellular networks and that is allow people to basically phone each other for free at the only cost of the data transfer. Nokia is leading this with the release of the Nokia N97 but network providers in the UK are threatening not to carry the device... now this isn't very nice of them!

Skype today released an App for the iPhone, as seen here in the image. Now this app is great and all as it allows you to chat (IM) amongst your friends and even make calls between users, it how ever limits the calls to when the phone is connected to a wireless network.

This pretty much makes it null in void unless you living in a well connected city.

In the UK 3 has released a handset with Skype capabilities and T-Mobile is also coming to the party the networks that are throwing their toys are O2 and Orange.

At the moment these services seem to all be offered only when on the Wi-Fi network, lets hope the day comes quickly when its all done via the cellular network!

You can read more about it here. Or if you are too impatient to wait head along to Fring a website that has made an application that should allow you to make free calls etc by making use of Skype.

I am a 'Hash One' Winner courtesy of 'From The Couch'

Courtesy of 'From The Couch' and their recent Hash One competition I won myself a nice little theme and all I had to do was write a little comment on their blog.

Now that is quite nice, think I'm going to use it for when I launch www.danbaileyuk.com

Thanks To Marc and David!

Oxford win 155th Oxford Cambridge Boatrace

Wow, what a race... from the start of the race I really thought Cambridge had the better rhythm and desire to win the race as even though Oxford had the first corner they managed to remain level and even pull ahead coming into their big corner.

Cambridge managed to pull ahead here by a length and really looked good but then Oxford counter-attacked and took the rating up to 40, I couldn't believe they took it up so high and Cambridge didn't respond. Don't know if their cox didn't pick it up or if they couldn't, heard on the TV that she asked for one more pip but that was only picking it up from 34 to 35 while Oxford was rating at 40 strokes per minute.

Oxford easily took a length lead then and going into the final corner through Barnes Bridge had the advantage. When you go up on a crew in a Boatrace you can just sit there and push away from the crew, suddenly you don't feel so tired and you just love every second of it. Oxford did that and looked so relaxed then with their stroke and Number 7 giving them an awesome rate.

Think they ended up winning by 6lengths, that is heart breaking for Cambridge but Oxford had one guy in their crew at 6ft 8 and the other at 6ft 9 - that is just crazy! All I need to do now is grow a bit...

Oxford vs Cambridge Boatrace 2009

For those of you who don't know and most of you should know about it, its the biggest amateur sport and draws millions and millions of viewers - its the rowing race on the river Thames in London stretching just over 6.5km. It draws some elite oarsman to race against each other who start training on the 1st September for the one race.

A friend of mine, Sam Pearson, was in the Goldie Crew in 2006. This Goldie crew is Cambridge's 2nd eight that races against Oxford's 2nd VIII just before the main race. Just to make this crew is no small matter.



Currently a friend of mine from Rhodes, Andrew Craig, who won the Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University has been in the Oxford squad for this years race. Unfortunately he didn't make the B crew (Isis) due to injury and joining the squad late but he has been there back up and here is an email I just received from him:

Three days to go and you can all imagine that the pressure is mounting. Last week there was an injury in the Isis boat, so I spent the whole week filling in in the two seat. It was excellent experience and we were able to make some good progress, and clock some fast times, in spite of having to reshuffle the order a bit. Justin is now fit and ready to go, and from here on in we are all holding thumbs that everyone stays healthy until the race.

There has often been a informal spare pairs race, which, when it takes place, sees crews race from the Mile Post to the start a few days before the main event. Because I had been in the eight the whole of last week, our coach decided that we shouldn't race this year, as he felt that having not spent enough time in the boat, it made no sense to go out and hack around in a unprepared combination. A little disappointing not to race, but at the same time, it probably wouldn't have been that much fun anyway.

For some reason, people involved in the Boat Race have an absolute fascination with the weights of the crews. Even in 1829 they had the vision to work out the average weight (in stone and pounds, naturally), so that 180 years later some statistician could get busy and throw all sorts of numbers at people who follow the race. I think the figures say that roughly two-thirds of all the races have been won by the heavier crew.

This year's weigh-in saw Oxford break the record for the heaviest crew ever, lining up with an average of 99.7kg a man. Cambridge tipped the scales at 96.1kg a man, which is the heaviest Light Blue crew in history. The lightest men in each crew make a bit of a mockery of the weigh-in hype. Colin Smith, at 87kg for Oxford, is an Olympic silver medallist, while Rob Weitemeyer, the bow of the Cambridge eight, just 79kg, won a bronze medal at World Champs in the M4- for Canada in 2005. So there you go, the number crunchers are happy that they have some new figures to play with, but at the end of the day it will all depend on who makes their boat go faster (as is always the case in rowing).

Conditions on the river have been pretty appalling most of this week, with some seriously rough water being served up. All of the crews have pumps fitted to their boats in case of bad conditions. The worst of the water usually comes just after Hammersmith Bridge. Predictions so far are for sunshine on Sunday, with some light wind, so I wouldn't take the bookies' long odds on a sinking.

Dan Topolski (the coach in 1987, the year of True Blue) is still involved with the Oxford squad. His official role is coxing coach, and so he is down on the Thames whenever we come to London to help the coxes learn as much as possible about the river. They are looking to take the shortest line around the bends, but also to stay in the stream as much as possible. I'll be surprised if the commentators don't mention the "second lamppost from the left" that is the supposed best line under Hammersmith Bridge.

The basic recipe for the race is that the crew on Middlesex (on your right if you were umpiring the race) has the first bend in their favour. The Surrey crew then gets a long bend that begins before Hammersmith Bridge and carries on to around Chiswick Steps. After that the advantage swings back to the crew on the Middlesex station.

http://www.theboatrace.org/article/image/243/full.jpg

The last two races have been won by crews on Middlesex, by managing to keep in contact until the end of the Surrey bend and then moving away. Even though last year Oxford won by more than six lengths, they were still half a length down after more than ten minutes of racing.

This year's race will be umpired by Boris Rankov. He won six consecutive races for Oxford from 1978-83. He also rowed in one losing and one winning Isis crew. His eight appearances led to the so-called "Rankov rule", that no oarsman shall row more than four races as an undergrad, and four as a post grad. People say that he has forgotten more about the Boat Race than most people will ever know.

http://www.theboatrace.org/article/introduction/featurejanuary07/umpiring

Last weekend our squad went to Henley to support the women, lightweight men and lightweight women in their fixtures against Cambridge. Here the crews race the Henley regatta course in reverse, a shorter race, but still the focus of their year's training. Oxford won both the women and lightweight women's races, but lost the lightweight men's event; the first time since 2001.

The broadcast in SA is on Supersport 1 from 6-7:30pm (delayed for some reason).

Cheers,

Andrew

Here is a video clip of last years race:




Good luck to the guys racing, I'm not quite sure who I support anymore - used to support Oxford but then Sam rowed for Cambridge so met quite a few of the guys there and supported them and now Andrew is at Oxford... think I'll support Cambridge as Oxford won last year!

Is it possible to get a Mac under $1000?

This is the question Microsoft posed in their latest ad promoting their PC's. They got a waitress and told her if she can find the laptop she wants under $1000 they'll buy it for her - she goes shopping, take a look.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:0bb6a07c-c829-4562-8375-49e6693810c7&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Laptop Hunters $1000 &#8211; Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion">Video: Laptop Hunters $1000 &#8211; Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion</a>

For me I'll definitely be getting a new Windows laptop when Windows 7 comes out and the closest I'll come to a MAC is possibly getting an iPhone.

Obama vs Zuma, an American perspective

I came across this video on Zoopy via Twitter and found it quite interesting, its an interview done by a Rhodes University (my stomping ground) TV journalist and she interviews an American exchange student.

Favourite line from the clip: American exchange student - "It doesn't seem like the parties here are campaigning, they are more like going around discussing ANC and corruption etc..." which is too true!

See the clip here:

Vote for Table Mountain as new 7th Wonder!

Wow browsing through the Cape Times this morning I found hiding away on Pg 7 an article about Table Mountain in the running to be one of the new 7 Wonders of the World - on Pg 7 only...

Currently we're number 27 out or 220 nominations lets try get it into the top 7!

New OnLive Service threatens traditional consoles

Wow, 2 new gaming releases on the same day... people are definitely starting to eye out the amazing amount of turnover the gaming industry is generating each year.

OnLive was introduced last night at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last night, all it consists of is a small (1MB) browser plug-in that lets you play games online.

OnLive has servers setup that handle all the gaming computation, graphics and anything else that gets generated then by means of a patent developed compression mechanism they stream the content to your PC/TV. These games that get streamed will be all your normal games from EA, Take-Two and Ubisoft etc.



OnLive has developed crazy algorithms which are able to push out 60frames per second over a 1.5mbps connection and 720p over a 5mbps connection.

This is available either via your PC or by a router sized device known as the MicroConsole.

Besides these ground breaking items the biggest or for me the most important is that it will be a subscription based service and customers won't need to purchase games anymore - they just select them on the service and play away.

Now image how many players get cut out:
1) Retailers and 2nd hand shops/websites who sell the games
2) Console developers like Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo
3) Graphics chip designers (though nvidia has been working with OnLive to provide the graphics cards for the servers.


The gaming companies are quite happy with this idea as it will basically cut out any pirate versions of the games they release - all they would need to do is update OnLive's servers. Due for release later this year, currently in beta testing.

3rd Gaming Console been released - Zeebo

A california based company, Zeebo, is releasing the worlds 3rd gaming console targeting gamers in developming countries.


The console is going to be available first in Brazil and then shipping around the world, it will retail for $199 but expected to drop pretty quickly. It will have a build in 3G connection to allow games/updates to be downloaded via the broadband connection. Zeebo is targeting this as they believe that 3G networks are more prevalent in developing countries than developed countries.

Major gaming companies like Electronic Arts have already committed to released copies of their games for this format.

The farce of the 2010 World Cup Tickets

Since February the 1st round of tickets available to us local South Africans have been available and to my knowledge will be open until the 31st March which is in a couple of days. Now I really want to attend some of the games here in Cape Town so last month I went online to register and request tickets. The website worked fine, I was required to register which is fine and then....

1) You need to apply for tickets for games you choose (ok)
2) Once applied you go into a lotto for tickets if over subscribed
3) You pay for all your tickets up front and no guarantee if you'll get the tickets
4) This is my biggest one - You have to supply your ID number and home address details which I find totally fine the problem is that if you buy more tickets for the game you have to specify your guests ID number and home details.



This is totally ridiculous, I don't know who wants to come with me next year. By that time I may have a girlfriend I want to take a long or some new friends how am I supposed to know. And from what I can see you can't change this once its in...

So, no I am not buying tickets for the World Cup 2010 until I can buy 4 tickets for a game and enter my ID details and no-one else's and receive the tickets or at least some notification.

So if FIFA wants to complain about the lack of interest here please stop preventing us from enjoying the World Cup 2010 by stopping us with red tape...

Lance Armstrong has fallen and gone to hospital

About 20min I got a message via Twitter than Lance has fallen during the Castilla and Leon race in Spain and has been taken to hospital.

Its possible he has a broken elbow...

Sad news, hope it doesn't effect his come back too much!

A great 'banned' Xbox 360 advert

Apparently this was banned because it was making 'light' of killing people, personally I just think its pretty funny and the sound effects are great - take a look:

Gmail outage bigger than Obama on Twitter

Earlier this week Gmail crashed for half a day and caused quite an uproar as personal and business accounts couldn't be accessed. Now if we compare the Twitter Trends over the last couple of days against the same time as the inauguration of Obama happened. Interesting stuff:


Something else that is interesting is that their is now a Google account on Twitter, does this mean that Google does not intent to acquire Twitter or is merely testing it out. Either way it would have helped if Google had the account on Monday to let us know whats happening with Gmail as a blog post about it took quite a while to come up.

Facebook offered $500million for Twitter last year... wonder how much its valued at now especially after it received another round of funding at $35million. There is a lot of talk that this could be the next 'google'.

Gmail has a bad day and the online world moans...

Wow, who would have thought how many people would be affected by Google's Gmail going down for a bit. You'll be pleased to know if you are reading this now that it is back up and working but no official explanation as to what happened.

When trying to load Gmail earlier you were greated with this image:

People who were tweeting about it on Twitter actually brought Twitter search down also due to the sheer number of people searching for similar tweets etc. I wonder what sort of spike Hotmail received today...

Coldplay + The Killers + Bono = ridiculous amazing concert

Unfortunately for us here in South Africa it happened this week in London at Shepherd's Bush but was for a good cause - 'War Child' a friend of mine went and I am very bleak I missed out.

Below is quite a good video of one of my most favourite songs ever been sung by The Killers + Coldplay + Bono, enjoy

The bundling of Social Websites on Cellphones

Facebook, just the word is been used everything to suddenly make everything online hip and cool or at least that is what the big corporates are thinking as they slowly wake up to the Web 2.0 social scene.

And in order to appear that they are with it they are starting to try make everything work with Facebook and especially with your mobile phone. Apparently Nokia and Facebook are in heavy talks with creating more interactivity between Nokia users and Facebook.

Nokia has to face the decision to we try use our vast user base and create our own social network or do we jump on board with Facebook?

I certainly don't think they should create another new social network and that they should use Facebook like Apple and Blackberry are doing. Soon when going through your contacts on your phone you'll be able to see who is online etc. and start a chat with them - I like that idea.

BUT and for me this is a big BUT:

Is Facebook going to be the new Microsoft?

And this question is with reference to how Microsoft was so 'cool' back in the early nineties and started to bundle everything together and eventually got slapped with law suits and paid millions and millions in fines.

If I was from My Space or Orkut I would be upset and cry FOWL when all these cellphones start coming out working so closely with Facebook. This time it won't be Facebook/Microsoft that could get fined but rather the cellular companies like Nokia and Apple.

If they don't give their users the option of selecting which Social Engine they would like to connect to when using their phone it could be seen as creating a monopoly for Facebook. If I was Facebook I would be pushing hard to strike up these deals with the phone companies as fast as possible.

Calvin and Hobbs explain bank bailouts

A mate emailed me this, funny stuff.

Twestival heads to Cape Town - 12 Feb 2009

So after this rapid arise of charity driven twestivals held around the globe Cape Town is to get its own and best of all the funds raised will go to the charity : Water.

If you don't want to donate your hard earned money to 'water' then go along and donate your bucks to Cycle2Learn.org - mates of mine who are cycling from Cairo to Cape Town to build 2 classrooms for a rural school in the Eastern Cape.


Jennifer Connelly in charity: water Public Service Announcement from charity: water on Vimeo.

CharityWater is a legit site and is looking to raise $500,000 and awareness so join in for an evening of fun and games. CharityWater is trying to bring water to the people in need, a worthy cause if I say so myself and knowing that hundreds of cities around the world will be doing the same thing on the 12th is awesome.

Will each phone company have their own App store?

They way its going it certainly looks like it... I wonder where the common sense is in these big corporations when they just don't get together and launch one common App store? Do they really think that developers will create and maintain Apps for each different store - what a nightmare!

So far the following have or are indicating that they will launch an App store soon:

The Apple App marketplace which was the first I reckon

Blackberry is releasing one soon

Nokia has mentioned one (though a bit quiet on it at the mo)

Google's android market

Palm with their App Catalog

Samsung


The one problem with Samsung's App store is that they don't control the platform it will be launched on like Apple, Google, RIM and Palm. So in the near future everything could be a big messy market.

The coolest guy on the internet

So, recently on a couple of websites there is a competition going around to see who can get the highest placed position in Google's organic search results for the wording 'The coolest guy on the internet' - the guys at the MIH group started it with Justin Hartman writing the first blog. He posted a random video of this 'cool guy', here is my random video of my vote for the coolest guy - though with over 112million views I think he comes in pretty close to the top for the coolest guy on the internet!

For me this was also the first video I watched on YouTube... was definitely one of the first videos that I got sent which spread virally.

Win R3000 for yourself and a charity of your choice!

A competition run by Afrigator and Ukash is offering R3k to the winner and R3k to the winner's chosen charity. All you have to do is write a small blog about the chosen charity and send the link to ukash@expandsa.com.

Here is my chosen charity: The Tomorrow Trust

Reason: Education is the building blocks of everything, without education we can't progress very far and for kids who are orphaned or in vulnerable positions this is really really important.

The Tomorrow Trust's mission is to make a sustainable impact on these kids and to empower these kids. When everyone else has turned a blind eye to these poor kids this charity is coming through for them and for this competition they could receive a further R3k to help them in their efforts.

Take a look here for more details on the trust.

To tweat or not to tweat?

So, after slightly manipulating Shakespeare's famous words into a Twitter like feel I can start my article on the pro's and cons of Twitter.

For those of you who don't know and really there seem to be so many lines like this (everyone should know by now) - Twitter is a blogging/social service that limits your blogs to 140characters and only people who 'follow' you on Twitter will receive your 140 characters.

You can have thousands of follows or none and follow thousands yourself, you can even follow me but if you don't say anything useful no one will follow you! So why use it when you can just use Facebook updates and let all your friends know whats going on, for me this is what kept me off Twitter for ages. I signed up towards the end of last year and only really started posting my 'tweats' this year, think I just reached my 100th tweat!

I've come to realise that Facebook is nice to keep track of my friends and see whats going on in their lives but with Twitter for me its more business like in a sense that all the people I follow are people I find interesting and who I think have interesting things to say. If you just had your mates on there there would be just random crap going to and fro.

Now I can get updates of John Battelle or Guy Kawasaki which I find pretty interesting except that post tweats at an incredible rate. Its a great way to network with all your relevant peeps and keep track of what they are up to, its also a great way to market yourself, your website or anything basically.

Now what I have against it is the potential spam one could receive from it - you can setup an outside/external program to twitter to run through all twitter profiles and add them as your feed. All these people will receive an email saying that 'YOU' are now following them and generally they will click through to see who you are and if they want to follow you back.

Now if you do this with 20,000 peeps thats not bad marketing, whether its good PR is another thing. I don't think it is, I'd rather have 20,000 people re-tweeting away about a new blog I just posted or website I just launched.

Twitter was recently rumoured to have been valued at $250million which isn't too much but this is the first rumour... the next one could be way higher considering the press its starting to receive and the increase in traffic.

Either way I find Twitter very useful and urge you all to sign up and to start tweating away!

Tweetmanager.com - good or bad?

So, over the last couple of days I've been getting quite a few more people following me on twitter. I was wondering how they found me as they had around 20k followers and they themselves were following around the same number.

Now, I've only been on Twitter for a short period of time and still only have a small following and don't follow too many people yet. So how did they find me?

JonIn60Seconds tweeted about it and I replied and then he wrote an article on it.

In his article he managed to find out what was causing this to occur, Tweetmanager.com. Jon was quite upset with this website and looked to get more people to spread the word about it. He even had Bill McIntosh the founder of Tweetmanger.com comment on his story trying to justify it.

I think the arguments they both make have their merits:

Jon states that its a spam tool and that its harmful to Twitter

Bill states that its not a spam tool but rather a tool to make things work better and that he likes Twitter.

I haven't logged in or used Tweetmanager yet so I don't want to state too many things, I will how ever sit on the fence and agree with both of the chaps.

1) Its spammy in a way when you get lots of people following you (normal etiquette for some people would be to follow them back) hence a way to increase your follows based on certain key words
2) For Tweetmanager for the guys who have lots or follow lots of peeps its hard to keep track and sometimes an automated reply system or search engine to follow people talking about certain events helps.

Think the one thing that is irritating is automated @ replies to tweets...

YouTube as/is a search engine

Recently on the NY Times there was an article on how a 9year old kid was using YouTube to do research on an Australian animal.

Is this the real reason why Google bought YouTube?

To control all areas and methods of searching? The 9 year old said that he uses YouTube if needs help in some of his video games or on his card collection, if he can't find what he's looking for on YouTube he'll use one of the other search engines.

Now according to comScore in November last year people in American did nearly 200million more searches on YouTube than on Yahoo, this moved Yahoo into third spot for search engines.

Surely Microsoft and Yahoo must be wondering how this has happened, how another website (one that is owned by Google) has surpassed them in the number of searches run.

Currently YouTube is busy setting up deals with Sony and Nintendo to be able to allow their users to search and view YouTube videos via the game consoles on the TV, notably not on the Xbox.

I give it another 5 years before we don't even need a satellite/cable service for our TV's but simply connect our TV to the internet and watch everything through that. And why not, currently we just PVR/TiVo everything and fast forward the ads, why not just select what you want to watch and download it or stream it to your TV.

Goodbye to the big TV satellite companies...

Hudson crash landing shown on YouTube

Amazing footage of the crash landing into the Hudson river, the plane comes into site just after 2min into the video from YouTube. Amazing how social media is bringing the news quicker to the people.

This video was posted by the Cost Guard and National Transportation Safety Board.

What a Jack Russel...

Now I've known one or two brave Jack Russels with amazing personalities but as for as tricks go or bravery this video click is amazing, just take a look...

2009 is going to be a good year

Well it has to be after an awesome holiday in the Eastern Cape, wow - what a place!
Weather wasn't the best, think Cape Town here had better weather but I definitely want to start kite surfing now.

On my way back wow I was driving 40km/hour on the national highway due to road works I saw some sneaky traffic officers hiding in bushes and catching guys speeding. The limit was 60km/hour and they must have caught everyone that went by...

I thought to myself that a little website people could use to put up the sneaky officers would be quite useful and also where the regular cameras are...
I get back to Cape Town and see that there is something similar starting up here in SA - www.getroadsmart.net

But this site is more targeted at city centers for now and more for drunk driving checks and speed checks it is also quite costly - R50 a month subscription and R2 per sms... this could quite easily be just done on a website that they check now and again. But we'll see how it takes off.

Will it encourage drunken driving? Will the website be in someway liable? I'd be bleak if a drunken driver crashes into me cause they are taking a detour trying to avoid the road block...