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« December 2006 | Home Page | February 2007 »
London has some of the most ridiculous traffic wardens in the world.
Last night outside my house some unfortunate guy left his van running while he went to knock on a friend's door, and came back to find his van engulfed in flames.
This morning he got some more bad news when he returned to find a $200 parking fine.
(View a video of this on YouTube)
Starting today, when you search in Google Video you will see results from both Google Video and YouTube. This is the first in what will be many integrations between the two sites in the months ahead.
Since Google bought YouTube there has been a lot of speculation about how the companies will merge their operations and this is the first clear sign of this process happening.
More on this at the official Google Blog.
Our sister company Affinity Media, which specializes in sports news websites is launching some sites shortly for the American market covering NFL news, NBA news, NHL news and MLB news.
Already doing a sterling job for UK soccer fans with some extremely popular news sites for Liverpool FC, Chelsea and Arsenal fans, this move into US sporting news is long overdue.
This is more for the benefit of everybody's favourite search engine (the sites themselves are just placeholders for now), but they will fairly shortly I'm assured be filled with lots of great sporting content for fans of Football, Basketball, Hockey and Baseball.
The company is just putting the finishing touches to some very cool software called Newsfinity which is a comprehensive platform for news aggregation and which currently powers the UK sports news sites.
More on this in a future post...
The lads over at Gizmodo put this question to the test during the recent State of the Union address by George Bush. Since each network (CBS, ABC, FOX etc) was brodcasting the address live, and using the same feed from the same high definition camera, it offered an excellent opportunity to compare apples to apples.
Which network do you think had the best high def signal?
Answers here
Here at WorldTV we like to let off some steam occasionally and play video games - classic arcade games like Tetris, Pacman, Space Invaders usually. We're particularly fond of flash games but most of the flash gaming sites are filled with ads and annoying smiley 'oh my god!' pop unders which quite frankly are way over the top and which leave very little space on the screen for the actual game. We thought there had to be a better way...
A while back we began supporting something pretty amazing called the Free Video Games project which aims to bring free full-screen flash versions of old classic video games in a predominantly non-commercial setting. Ads, if any, are minimal and each game is hosted on its own easy to remember domain.
Here's the games the project has come up with so far...
Tetris
Pacman
Space Invaders
Sonic the Hedgehog
The Free Video Games Project will have more games coming over time, so do leave your e-mail address at the main project site.
Enjoy!
Came across this while surfing today. It's a Google ad which the Skype for Firefox extension has added a click-to-call link to. First time I've seen this.
It seems the Skype Firefox extension (which scans web pages for phone numbers to highlight them in this way) can pick phone numbers out of Google's javascript Adsense ads. This is different I feel from the 'happy' arrangement between Google and Skype's parent eBay last year where they were working together to test click-to-call links.
With the recent suggestions of a cooling in relations between the two companies, it may just be that this is a shot across the bow from the eBay camp.
Not sure how widely this peculiarly British media scandal is known around the World, although if the press here (and the makers of the television programme in question) would have you believe, it is of truly "global" proportions. In any event, the story is the trial by television of one young, and by her own admission not particularly bright young girl from the working class east end of London.
Jade Goody has been made by television and now she's being broken by it, in the most public way imaginable. She rose to fame through the fly-on-the-wall reality TV show Big Brother, a massive show in many countries around the world, although not in the USA (MTV's The Real World broke this ground). She rose to fame for being a loudmouth, but in that very British way of supporting an underdog. She became a celebrity for being ordinary, and that only usually happens in England.
Given this amazing opportunity, her street smarts and an army of 'helpers' led to her making a lot of money, and she built a large fan base of similarly disenchanted young women to whom she was a role model, the 'one who made it'.
Her mistake was being persuaded to go back into the Big Brother house by the producers and those who were supposed to know what's best for her. As she put it herself in one candid video diary, "coming in here the first time I had nothing to lose, this second time (I now realize) I've everything to lose".
The produers knew what they were doing. They wanted controversy, and boy did they get it. They squared her up against a Bollywood actress who is the Angelina Jolie / Keira Knightley (take your pick) in India.
Both women are used to being the centre of attention, although in very different ways. Shilpa Shetty is a well mannered lady, Jade a loudmouth take no prisoners tough girl. The inevitable flare up happened with Jade and two other 'yes' girls making fun of the Bollywood star. It all descended into accusations of racism which the media whipped up into a frenzy. That Jade called her Shilpa Poppadom and ganged up on her with two other girls was wrong, but it was practically inevitable considering the fishbowl circumstances.
The upshot of all this is more than 35,000 complaints to the British TV Watchdog, the show's sponsor pulling its sponsorship on Channel 4, debates in parliament, stories on all the evening newscasts, endless column inches in the newspapers, and people burning effigies on the streets of India.
Last night, perhaps unsurprisingly, Jade Goody was voted off the show by a public turned against her by the same media that turned them onto her. TV really did make the news here.
What a circus. And the real winners?
Incredible news from soccer land this evening. Footballing legend David Beckham has signed for the LA Galaxy in what must surely be the most significant event in US footballing history and the largest such deal in the world at $250 million. This is a brilliant coup for US soccer and will surely lead to an avalanche of great players coming to the States to play. How brilliant is that? No wonder Posh was reported to be out house shopping in LA recently. What a move by Simon Fuller who apparently orchestrated the whole thing. Kudos.
In celebration, we've launched a site covering all the latest LA Galaxy News at LAGalaxyNews.com.
Lots of people like to play tetris online - I know this for a fact. Free Tetris is a site we help support and its growth over the last few months has been phenomenal. Where are most of the Tetris players in the world? America. What kind of people like to play Tetris online the most? US office workers!
I know this because the other day I watched game players over the course of a few hours from 9am Eastern to about 5pm Pacific. The results were pretty clear. As soon as the office lights came on in the east, the play begins. The numbers grow until a peak around Noon when the West coast workers start their day. It's clear a lot of people are skiving off work playing Tetris!
Anyway, if you fancy a free simple game of classic Tetris check out FreeTetris.org. No download is required, it's all done brilliantly in flash by master games artist Paul Neave.
P.S. If I have time tomorrow I'll try to create a little animation of the map of users as it sweeps across the continent.
In an effort to provide a more useful service, one of my new year's resolutions is to start offering a reminder service here on the blog of upcoming TV industry events.
The Golden Globes are the annual awards chosen by around 90 foreign TV and movie journalists who happen to live and work in California. Unlike the Oscars they cover both TV and Film, and right about now the last ballots are arriving at Ernst & Young's offices to be counted next week.
New shows like Ugly Betty and Big Love are up for awards this year and the surprise omission is hard hitting documentary film United 93. The consensus is that foreign journalists are reluctant this year to nominate it in a wave of anti-American feeling. This is unfortunate for British writer and director Paul Greengrass who deserved better for such a courageous movie.
A full list of nominees can be found here. The awards themselves take place 8pm on Monday 15th January.
It's the nature of the Internet today that we surf from site to site, interest to interest with barely any premeditated thought. One minute I was reading a page about rescuing Linux root passwords, the next I was reading a Washington Post article on the reaction to the Sadam Hussein execution video.
A few seconds later I was on the WorldTV Charts looking to see if had shown up there (it hadn't), and the next I was looking on YouTube to find it. Never at any point during this whole procedure did I stop to think about what I was actually doing or what the result of my efforts might lead to. A simple warning about possibly inappropriate content was all that stood between me and watching DeathTV.
I started watching the footage and all of a sudden a strange feeling came over me. The realization that I was about to watch someone be killed. It's easy to be apathetic these days, there really isn't very much left that's taboo, but for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to watch it. I didn't want to watch it. The truth is, at that very moment I realized that despite all his undoubtedly horrific behaviour, the alleged crimes, the wars, the suffering he certainly caused, it was not right to take his life in revenge.
According to the translations, in the seconds before his death and as he was taunted by the spectators around him he is reported to have said "Is this how real men behave?"
It's an astonishingly valid question.
My buddy Chris Parandian based in Washington, DC has started a Wireless News Blog called the Mobile Diner. He's been threatening to do it for a few months now and it's great to see it finally up and running!
If you ever have any need of a wireless industry expert with his ear to the ground in Washington, Chris is your man.
Congrats on the new site!!
Came across this rather randomly today and it's an interesting guide to TV in Italy. I particularly liked the part "Italians... generally seek to make a crisis out of every drama, and their approach to the dubbing of foreign cinematic material reflects this".
Quite illuminating, and also an interesting insight to Italy in general from the perspective of someone who lives there.
