Internet
Twitter Joke About Airport Bomb Leads To Arrest
January 18, 2010
You may remember a few years back not that long after 9/11 a man was arrested for ‘quipping’ that there was a bomb in his luggage and since then successive arrests and police presence has saw the end to any kind of terrorist-related jokes (or in fact clothing!) within spitting distance of an airport, but not within the wider world. Until now!
Frustrated by the closure of the Doncaster based ‘Robin Hood’ airport a certain Paul Chambers posted on Twitter: “Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s**t together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” He was shortly arrested by police under the Criminal Law act of 1977 (which presumably has something in it about threatening to blow up airports!).
In true fashion (when it comes to terrorist threats) it wasn’t just a matter of explaining the frustrated joke, following the arrest ensued six hours of questioning followed by the confiscation of both his PC and his iPhone to check whether or not there was any evidence of any plotting.
Continue reading »Evernote Review (How To Get Organised & Remember Everything!)
January 13, 2010
It was purely by accident that I came across Evernote. Probably a result of some well planned marketing on their part, but sufficed to say, I was drawn in and carried out a little investigation into the service. I was intrigued and decided to download the program.
In the end I wasn’t disappointed. It is a simple idea which has been utilised to its full potential in my opinion. Basically, Evernote allows you to stay on the ball and organised with reminders, notes and more. They call it your ‘notable world’ and in all honestly I couldn’t have put it better myself.
So, I guess you’re all wondering by this point what it actually does. Well firstly, it allows you take text notes which you manually type in and store them in a pre-determined folder. This can include things such as shopping lists, to do lists and all things similar that you need to remember.
Continue reading »Dropbox iPhone App Review
December 24, 2009
You may have caught our look at the Dropbox online file sync service for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux a few months back, where I mentioned its availability on the iPhone platform. If you’re a user of Dropbox and have an iPhone or iPod Touch then you should definitely check out the free Dropbox app on the iTunes App Store.
When you’ve downloaded Dropbox, you’ll need to enter your email address and password to sync it to your account, and everything on your personal storage will be available to download and view. The interface is extremely simple to navigate, with 3 options at the bottom of the screen allowing you to switch between “Favorites”, “My Dropbox” and “Settings”.
Continue reading »Sky Songs – Online Music Streaming and Download Service
December 5, 2009
According to a journalist for the Telegraph, Sky Songs has the potential to rival iTunes as an online music provider. The concept is not a new thing; downloading and streaming music is widely available online including the increasingly popular Spotify. But coming from a trusted source such as Sky, who provide television, telephone and internet for many households already, gives this service a head start over other options.
The principle is simple. You visit the Sky Songs website, sign up and you have access to 4 million songs. You can choose whether or not to download albums, singles or even mix and match songs creating a ‘music pack’. Most albums or music packs are available for £6.49, rivalling the prices of the likes of Amazon MP3 Download Store and iTunes for top titles.
Continue reading »Darlington (UK) Appoints The First Official Town Twitter Tweeter!
December 1, 2009
If there’s one thing that Twitter is good for (excluding wasting your time!) is the distribution of information with it sometimes giving better results than Google, and in fact we heard not long ago about plans for Twitter to link up with news corporations to provide a stream of the latest real-time news.
So the town of Darlington have taken the initiative and have decided to make the most of the internet craze by employing an official “Twitterer in Residence” whose job will be to make sure that people across the town are kept up to date with news and events both within and outside of the town via the social networking medium.
Continue reading »Google To Lose Murdoch’s Newspapers To Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine?
November 24, 2009
Ever since the induction of Bing by Microsoft, they have been clear of their intentions to overthrow Google as the kingpin of search engines. But now the rivalry is stepping up another gear due to one Rupert Murdoch, Head of News Corp. Which is responsible for perhaps most notably in the UK, the Times and the Sun newspapers which in recent years have expanded their empire to the world wide web raking in 10% of their revenue from the Internet.
It is the Internet of course, which has sparked this latest debate between Murdoch and giants Google as he revealed plans to block Google searches from displaying any of his news articles. He claims it is not legal for search engines to display his articles and headlines as ‘news’.
Continue reading »Twitter Paid-For Business Account Benefits Coming In 2010
November 24, 2009
The question of how might Twitter actually make some money has been around for about as long as Twitter has been popular (you may we covered this back in March) but finally we have official confirmation of the business accounts that will provide Twitter with some revenue, and the businesses with “a special layer of access”.
But until now the definition of “a special layer of access” has been somewhat woolly, and whilst information is still far from clear cut we do now have a better idea of what will be offered to those willing to shell out that little more for the special accounts which will be available at the beginning of next year.
Continue reading »Growing Importance Of Geographical Location On The Internet
November 22, 2009
Wordpress is one of the biggest blogging platforms on the planet with over 7.5 million bloggers using their hosted service. Recently, they rolled out geo-tagging, which allows you to label your blog and blog posts by location, with the promise of new features coming soon.
The ability to search by area as well as “showing the location of your commenters, the location of poll votes, a live map view of blog updates on WordPress.com, or an annual report showing you where your posts were written and where your comments came from” will gradually be implemented and highlight the growing importance of location in the digital age.
Continue reading »How To Use Twitter’s New Retweet Button…& What’s Wrong With It!
November 12, 2009
Those Twitter guys have been busy recently, hot on the heels of the recent Twitter Lists feature, we’ve now got a Twitter Retweet Button being rolled out. Ever since the user-led inception of retweeting (reposting other people’s tweets) on Twitter, there has been a call for a designated button to avoid the hassle of copy and pasting every time you wanted to share something interesting. Finally, that call has been answered, well, kind of.
A couple of days ago, Twitter started to roll out an automated retweet (RT) button across some accounts. It’s still in beta so you might not be able to see it yet, but tweeters who can have mixed feelings. One one hand, it does make the retweeting process a lot easier, on the other there are some disadvantages to it which I’ll discuss later. First here’s an overview.
Continue reading »Swoopo.co.uk Online Auctions – An Innovative eBay Alternative?
November 10, 2009
Swoopo is on the face of it, a great place for a bargain, they advertise sales such as Nintendo Wii’s for only £20-50. Sound’s great. However, as always, there’s a catch, but perhaps not one that will deter you from joining in.
Basically, Swoopo is an auction site where you buy an amount of bids before you are entitled to place any. Quite different to the likes of eBay. Bids bought directly from the site cost 50p each and can only be bought in great numbers. So that is how they make their money. So it appears a win-win situation.
However, some users have reported spending more than £70 on bids before they were successful on any items. Some claim it is impossible to win just one auction, but users are advised to monitor some auctions to see just how the site works before jumping in placing bid after bid, literally throwing money away.
Continue reading »
