middledigit.net | jonathan hopkins

Just found this rather fine blog by Antony Mayfield of Spannerworks. Well worth a read and adding to your bulging RSS reader. Reminds me, I must update my roll. (Sorry Jonny - I’ve had the wrong feed up there for a while now)

Still find it funny when I come across another Jonathan Hopkins, especially when he’s a criminal in Kansas City filming himself being chased by the police and trying to sell the footage to a local TV station for $10,000.

As I’m sure loads of people did yesterday, I was invited to take part in the beta test for the BBC iPlayer which launched today. All very nice but it doesn’t work on a Mac. I think it’s bit rubbish not to release a Mac version at launch, especially as it’s called iPlayer! I’m sure there’s lots of reasons why and the BBC has said that it is aiming to provide for Mac and Vista users in future versions (see cut and paste below), but even so - I feel a bit left out in the cold, especially after being invited to take part.

“To take part, you must have access to a PC with broadband at home. It must be a PC running Windows XP. The technology is not currently compatible with an Apple Macintosh or Windows Vista - although we are aiming to provide for these in future versions.”

Disclaimer - I work with Apple and have done so for the past 3 years.

Looks as though this launched a while back, but just been sent it and thought I’d share just in case you hadn’t seen it. Nice idea. We are becoming more accountable for every single aspect of our lives. Displaying white pixels joins the list.

“When your screen is white – Eg; an empty word page, or the Google page, your computer consumes 74 watts, and when it’s black it consumes only 59 watts. Mark Ontkush wrote an article about the energy saving that would be achieved if Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of page views, according to his calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year would be saved. In a response to this article Google created a black version of its search engine, called Blackle, with the exact same functions as the white version, but with lower energy consumption”

Bite is working with Peace One Day to help create the planet’s largest ever peace community and today we’re officially launching the world’s first “digiwristband” to enable people to make their own commitments to peace in support of Peace Day on 21 September 2007. (you can see mine on the right)

Peace One Day began as a film project founded by British filmmaker Jeremy Gilley in 1999 to establish the first ever-annual day of global ceasefire and non-violence. In 2001 the Day was unanimously adopted by UN member states as 21 September annually - Peace Day. Jeremy has amassed an impressive list of high profile supporters through his work including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Jude Law, Angelina Jolie, Chris Martin, Annie Lennow, Sam Taylor Wood, Jonny Lee Miller, Simon Fuller, Sir Richard Branson, Kofi Annan and others. In 2006, 200 countries committed to Peace including all 192 UN member states, directly involving 27.6 million people. Pretty amazing stuff.

On Peace Day, Friday 21 September, there will be activity taking place in hundreds of countries around the world. At Peace One Day’s flagship concert at the Royal Albert Hall a host of star names will perform live and contribute through messages and films. Annie Lennox, Corinne Bailey Rae, James Morrison, Beth Orton and Marc Almond will all perform live, and they will be supported by video messages and specially filmed pieces by David Beckham, Jude Law, Lord David Puttnam and others.

In support of Peace One Day in the run up to Peace Day and beyond, we are trying to make as many people aware of the project as possible and inspire individuals, schools and corporations to make a commitment to peace, create a “digiwristband” and help spread the word by displaying their commitment on their MySpace profile, Facebook, profile PC wallpaper, mobile wallpaper, email signature, blog or website.

The Peacemaker wall displays all Peacemakers around the world and you can see Jeremy Gilley at number 1, Simon Fuller at number 19, myself at number 27 (!), Corinne Bailey Rae at number 186 and Bite at number 219.

You can help support Peace One Day by:

1) Making a commitment and displaying your digiwristband on your blog, website, MySpace or other online profile that you can add HTML to
2) Adding the Facebook Peace Commitment app to your Facebook profile and inviting your friends and networks to do the same
3) Blogging about Peace One Day and encouraging other people to make a commitment and spread the word
4) Spreading the word about Peace One Day in any way you can by emailing your friends and colleagues, including it in a newsletter, featuring it on your website etc etc

Go on. Do it now. Help us create the planet’s largest ever peace community.

All images, logos and other assets can be found here.

Bit late posting this - just catching up on my RSS. But check out this great interview with Shigeru Miyamoto as featured on the Wired Game|Life blog. Still loving the Wii and still don’t think there’s been enough noise about how amazing it is to watch streaming flash video on.

Now I just need to complete Zelda.

Are a bit crap really aren’t they? Just heard (how I seem to be “watching” TV these days) the Curry’s advert and the tagline is “with you in mind”. And they haven’t even done any SEO/PPC on it. Other taglines over the last few months seem to be getting worse. Or is it because I’m getting more cynical?

Want to make sure your tagline hasn’t been used before? Check here. Or go here to check out some of the best (and worst) of all time.

I’m not the only one feeling this. I commented about this on the Bite blog a while back.

Also, I’ve been looking at this report from JupiterResearch that says social networking sites are having little impact influencing online retail sales and this (via Jonny) which talks about advertising on Facebook and the low click-though rate they are apparently experiencing.

The internet really is like a big blender really isn’t it? Everything is being chucked in and all sorts of stuff is cropping up - good and bad.

I submitted comment for this article in Profile magazine ages ago and it has just come out. I still agree with what I said, which is good . . . . (!)

Interesting article on Murketing about a company called Subvert & Profit that get paid to Digg stories to try and get them on the front page. More of this to come, blatently. Can it be called Figging I wonder?