Something Close To Nothing

Skins gets Dis:connected

2008-04-09T09:27:00.000-07:00

I've been a fan of Skins and it's whole philosophy since before the first episode was even shown. Now I've discovered a new teen show that could rival it.

The second series of Skins is drawing to a close and each episode seems to have become more bizarre and depressing. The first series was fun and frivolous but in the second series the characters have spent most of their time dealing with some pretty heavy problems. There was something vaguely nightmarish about the most recent episode in which Chris died and Cassie suddenly found herself in New York.

In contrast, the BBC recently piloted a drama about teenagers, called Dis:connected. It was clearly following in the Skins tradition - characters each with their own story to tell, brightly coloured fashions, touches of comedy and an overall sense of style. For me, it felt much more realistic and engaging than Skins has become. I hope the BBC makes more of it.

Your Facebook legacy

2007-11-08T01:35:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I got to thinking. It was the news story about the British student who was murdered in Italy that started it all off.

If you were to die suddenly, your Facebook profile would live on after you. It would be the most concrete reminder of you that was left behind.

Not only that, but if you were to die in a news-worthy way, photos from your Facebook profile would end up in the papers. That's what happened to the girl who was murdered in Italy.

And you don't just have to be dead for your Facebook photos to make their way to the press. The flatmate of the murdered girl, who is apparently prime suspect, had some fairly embarrassing photos of herself splashed accross the Daily Mail yesterday under the headline 'Foxy Knoxy'.

So, just in case you happen to do something news-worthy like get murdered, kill someone, or anything else, think about the photos of you that may end up in print. Can you trust everyone on your friends list not to sell an incriminating photo to the Daily Mail?

And have a think about the Facebook legacy you're leaving behind, just in case your profile out-lives you.

Facebook. It's bigger than us all. We've lost control!

Why the extra click, Hotmail?

2007-10-16T03:27:00.000-07:00

I log in to Hotmail every day and I've noticed that they've recently decided to add an extra click to this process, for no reason at all. That means at least 365 extra clicks per year. My mouse-hand is already over-worked.

The Hotmail sign-in screen presents you with your username ready-typed in the username box and then makes you click to bring up the password box. What was wrong with having the username and password boxes displayed together, straight away, like they always have been?

What Facebook doesn't tell you

2007-10-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

Well, I've done a fair amount of talking about Facebook on this blog and I decided it was about time I created something out of all these opinions.

One of the best things about Facebook is the way it strikes the perfect balance of keeping some actions hidden and putting some on display. We want to know what our friends are up to, but we don't want our friends to know EVERYTHING we've been doing on Facebook. We made a new friend or we uploaded photos - nothing to be ashamed of there. But ignoring a friend request or repeatedly looking at a certain person's photos - those are the kinds of things we'd prefer to keep hidden.

Just imagine if the mini-feed on our profiles looked like this...
www.sarahbromley.co.uk/facebook

What if Facebook put all these guilty secrets on display? Of course, people would turn away from the site immediately. It's Facebook's ability to aid clandestine snooping and stalking that was its initial attraction for me. And although I'd love to know more about exactly what my friends are doing on there, I certainly wouldn't want them to know exactly what I get up to.

Spanish on the web

2007-09-21T06:09:00.000-07:00

This week I finished my Masters in web publishing. I’d been working on a dissertation project about how language learners can use the internet to get access to authentic foreign-language material and native-speakers. The product of the whole dissertation was a website (http://www.ineedpractice.com/) that Spanish learners can use to access audio, videos, articles, etc in Spanish.

I’m pleased to see it already ranks number 7 in a Google search for “free Spanish audio”. What great SEO skills I have!

I’m going to continue working on the website and I really hope it becomes popular because I think it’ll be a great way for people to practice their Spanish.

I just want your extra time and your kiss

2007-09-13T06:05:00.000-07:00

This post isn’t really in-keeping with the rest of the blog theme (which appears to have developed into complaining about Facebook) but it’s a post I have to make because it refers to Prince, whose song Rasberry Beret gives this blog its title.

I went to see Prince last night at the O2 Arena. When my friend and I bought our tickets a few months back we thought this would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to see Prince, we didn’t realise he was actually playing 21 dates at the damn place. When I found this out I was worried he may be getting bored of this mammoth residency which is about to end. I was hoping to see him perform with energy and enthusiasm… and that is exactly what I got!

The stage was in the shape of the Prince symbol and he had two amazing twin backing dancers. He can still dance, he can still sing and I still definitely would.

Most amazingly of all, he did two encores. The second happened after the lights had gone up and some of the crowd had already left. I had a feeling it may happen because his last words before he left the stage was to tell us take out time leaving and I also spied a roadie hoist a keyboard onto the stage when the lights went down at the end of the first encore. Prince was transported back to the stage in a box and proceeded to play a random collection of hits on the keyboard.

I was also impressed at how he also chatted to the crowd in such a comical way. He is so obviously a born performer. He wasn’t at all the pretentious superstar I may have expected.

You had a pocket full of horses,
Trojan and some of them used.
But it was Saturday night,
I guess that makes it all right.
And you say what have I got to lose?

My TV is feeling neglected

2007-09-03T04:02:00.000-07:00

I have not turned on my television for over two weeks. It's not broken but I've been busy and the little time I have spent watching anything has been TV and videos online or DVDs on my laptop. It's not that I've been making a special effort to boycott TV, but I find that what I can find online satisfies me so much better!

A website such as http://www.tv-links.co.uk/ lets you watch just about any great TV show from the last few years. It feels so efficient to be able to pick exactly the show you want, instead of being restricted to the TV schedule. I also like 4OD from Channel 4, the closest thing to real TV, in my opinion. I've tried Joost as well, although wasn't as impressed with the content and found the colourful, snazzy graphics a little unnecessary and distracting. Then of course there's YouTube, which is great for a quick fix.

Unfortunately TV Links, my favourite, seems to only stream content which exists illegally. I look forward to a time, hopefully soon, when lots of quality, well-known TV and video content is available online legally. I wouldn't mind paying a little bit to watch it, although I do kind of feel that everything online should be free.

I predict that in five years, or probably less, traditional television as we know it won't exist. All TV will be on-demand and online which, in my opinion, will be an exciting change for the better.

Sitting in silence

2007-07-26T04:30:00.000-07:00

I’m currently working at Yahoo! (the ! is obligatory branding, not an indication of my excitement).

When I was shown around the offices on my first day and saw the quirkily named meeting rooms (named after pubs, festivals, movie stars etc), the students union-style café and the enormous, amusing images on the walls, I thought – this looks like a wonderful place to be. The quintessential internet company.

It wasn’t long before I realised things were not as they seem on the surface. The walls may be colourful but the atmosphere certainly isn’t. People generally don’t speak to each other, not on my floor anyway (I’ve heard rumours things are a little more upbeat on other floors). There is no witty banter and not much idle chit chat. Something I soon realised was that, although people are not talking out loud, they’re often chatting with colleagues on Yahoo! Messenger. People are communicating but not in a way that lets other people join in. Most of the time Messenger chats replace phone calls, so you don’t even get the chance to listen in on a phone call to find out what’s going on with someone.

There’s also a big international mix. British, Americans, German, French and the odd Spanish or Italian. Does this cross-breed of nationalities mean that perhaps people don’t share the same sense of humour with the people sitting around them?

I’m only at Yahoo! temporarily and if I don’t stay on I’ll know that I want the atmosphere at the next place I work to be a little more irreverent and the people to be a lot more willing to chatter away with the kind of jokey comments that keep you sane when you’re staring at a computer screen all day.

No more secrets

2007-07-04T15:51:00.000-07:00

The web as it is today leaves very little room for secrets. From the mistreatment of a whole community to the lies of a disloyal boyfriend, the web lets us find out the truth and make the truth be known.

When the mainstream media holds back from showing the true extent of voilence in a war-torn region or the police use excessive force during an arrest, there's likely to be someone there with a camera phone who can record the whole thing and put it out to an audience of thousands on YouTube, or any similar site.

When you suspect your partner may have been cheating, you can search their Facebook profile for evidence and make contact with any of their friends to find out more.

Could this have an affect on society? Knowing how difficult it now is to cover up anything we'd like to hide, could it really make us more careful about how we behave?

The decline has begun

2007-06-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

I am a grammar and punctuation Nazi and I'm not afraid to admit it. A missing or misplaced apostrophe makes me feel decidedly uncomfortable so you can imagine the horror I felt when I saw, staring back at me in large letters from the back page of The Sun on Friday, the headline 'Lamps War'.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2002390000-2007290814,00.html

The article was talking about a war belonging to Frank Lampard. Surely 'Lamp's War' is what it should have said.

I find it hard to believe that an institution like The Sun would show such a careless disregard for punctuation rules. If this is the case then it must show that the decline has begun! In a few years written English will be a confusing flow of unpunctuated nonsense.

Maybe there's another explanation for this headline. Some type of pun perhaps. If anyone can shed any light, I'd be pleased to hear it.

(I seem to complain a lot in this blog don't I? I sound like a gumpy old woman! I'll post something more positive next time...)

Hands off my news feed!

2007-06-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

This week I spotted the first advert in Facebook's news feed, craftily disguised as an album of photos. The row of thumnails were advertising a credit company.

Add this to the fact that Facebook is now awash with 'applications', and it all seems to be going down hill for Facebook's honest and straight-forward approach.

I already long for the Facebook of a couple of months ago where, once I'd logged in, I felt I was in my own little digital world of friends and news. Now I'm sharing this world with advertisers and 'applications'. I wonder what Facebook will look like in a year. Or perhaps by then there will have been a backlash and we'll all be steering well clear of it.

(I must apologise that this blog is becoming rather Facebook orientated, but it's been giving me a lot of opinion fodder lately.)

Facebook, please don't tickle me.

2007-06-21T04:51:00.000-07:00

It's difficult find the time to keep up with this blog, although it's always there at the back of my mind. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking - Ah! The Blog! The blog!

My latest opinion is one about Facebook. I really don't like the new 'applications' which have been added to the site. For starters, they add little value in terms of community building, are clearly a money-making technique and clog up the newsfeed with uninteresting news.

It's always been enjoyable to scan through the newsfeed to see who's now friends with who or photographic evidence of what someone got up to on Saturday night (all useful Facebook gossip). However, it is not interesting to know that someone added a Fortune Cookie application or a Tickle Me application. This is not juicy Facebook gossip, just irrelevant Facebook spam.

Hold the front page!

2007-06-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

Kate Middleton went for a night out and her feet got dirty. This, according to the Evening Standard, is front page news.

Facebook is spreading lies about my love life

2007-05-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

I recently came to the realisation that to be too open about your life on Facebook is a potential mistake.

Yes, you may only add people you know you to your friends list, but you never know what that old school friend may have turned into or what intentions a friend of a friend may have for you. With this in mind, I changed my Religious Views to ‘Thou shalt now share too many personal details on Facebook’ and removed all my other profile information.

Removing my relationship status, caused Facebook to send out a newsfeed item to all my friends declaring ‘Sarah is no longer listed as single’, accompanied by a candy-pink heart. In the week following this announcement, four people said ‘So, tell me about your new man’. I had to disappointment them and tell them that it was all just gossip spread by an over-enthusiastic Facebook.

Terry Wogan - Douze Points

2007-05-15T02:30:00.000-07:00

Ok, time for something a little more light-hearted after my last post.

I watched the Eurovision Song Contest at the weekend. Last year I watched it in Madrid and my English friends and I noticed it really lacked something without the sarcastic comments of Terry Wogan.

This year I watched it in London with five Greek friends. The Greeks thoroughly appreciated Terry's wit and said it made it all the more enjoyable. In Greece (as in most other countries, it seems) Eurovision is taken ever so seriously.

Perhaps some less-enlighted European neighbours wouldn't appreciate a cheeky commentary quite so much. To them it may be sacrilage - perhaps similar to the way we would feel at having someone make smart-ass quips over the top of World Cup Matches.

Sound advice from a geezer with a beard

2007-05-13T14:32:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, BBC News 24 placed the story of British 3 year old missing in Portugal above the news that 30 people were killed in a car bomb in Iraq. "Rewards totalling £2.5m have been offered to anyone who can help with information leading to her safe return" (BBC News Online).

Does this mean that the disappearance of one British girl is of greater significance than the death of 30 Iraqis? Does it mean that the death of Iraqis is now such a common occurence that it no longer qualifies as news?

If you check out the excellent new track Thou Shalt Always Kill by Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip, you'll hear the lyrics warn you that "Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-english speaking countries as to those that occur in english speaking countries".

Sound advice.

Something Close to Nothing

2007-05-13T14:13:00.000-07:00

"I was busy doing something close to nothing, but different than the day before."
Prince, Rasberry Beret

And I welcome you to this blog with a quote from the musical legend that is Prince. 'Something close to nothing' is more or less what I waste most of my time online doing. I love loitering around the internet and starting a blog is another excellent excuse to be here.

Becoming a blogger is idea I've entertained for a while because I love the internet and I love committing my thoughts to writing. I'm not expecting very many people to read this, that's not why I'm doing it, but it will hopefully give me a sense of satisfaction to know that my thoughts are out there.

Here are my plans for the blog:
-- to air my views on internet trends, current affairs and the media
-- to not labour over my posts for too long (just keep them coming thick and fast)
-- to post regularly and not lose interest

Let's do it.