duncanriley.com

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  • Dam Busters to be remade…but what about the dog?

    dambusters

    According to The Register, Peter Jackson, he of King Kong and Lord of the Rings Fame is going to remake one of the best films of all time: The Dam Busters. The report indicates that Jackson’s version will be more accurate to the real story of the Dam Busters as much of the actual mission was still classified as secret when the original was shot in 1954. But of course I can’t help but ask: if it is going to stay true to the actual story of The Dam Busters, what about the Dog? Of course, the story about the Guy Gibsons dog wasn’t something made up in the film, it’s factual. But can they use that word in a film made in the 21st century?

    (image from The Sterling Times)

  • Browzar launched

    A new web browser from the people behind Freeserve in the UK: Browzar. Lots of buzz around the place that I won’t bother repeating, their main goal is to provide localised private web browsing by deleting/ not recording the web sites you visit using it. But that’s not why I find it interesting…nope, I like it because it’s small and quick. Quick you may well say? well it’s so small (about 270 odd kbs) it loads probably just about quicker than any program I’ve ever used in Windows. Click, its up straight away. Sure, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Firefox, but these guys have gone back to basics and it shows in the speed and small file size. Wouldn’t it be nice if all new programs could do more with less code?…food for thought.

  • The best ever time zone/ time tool ever!

    http://www.qlock.com/time/gmaps?map=1

    The GMT time (+/-) plus what time it is there now, all in Google map glory.

  • HP Printers are crap

    I never buy HP printers…and here’s a classic example:

  • How to get out of the Echo Chamber

    Darren has some good points here based on a post by Chris Pirillo. A great read, but I’ll add some of the things I do regularly:

    1. Read the blog list at BlogAds
    Want to see different blogs that are doing amazing things, the BlogAds blog list does it for me every time. Yep, I know it sounds silly because the list is actually there for advertisers to look at, but it also provides an easy to read resource with ad views as well, particularly pertinent when you also want to look at new stuff in consideration of traffic as well…great way to get fresh ideas

    2. Visit Digg and Netscape…
    and make sure you take a look past the first couple of pages, particularly past the listings for the Weblogs Inc blogs…also try the newly submitted pages as well, sometimes you just find interesting blogs

    3. Ask people for their opinion on stuff you might already thought you are right on
    Sometimes people will disagree, in disagreeing though you might learn something different and could even change your position as well. The biggest problem as a blogger you can find is the situation of everyone saying that your right, yes men and shills are poisonous to objectivity.

    4. Spend 30-60 minutes at Wikipedia
    …and keep following the related links on stuff. You’ll find out about amazing things, some of which you could end up blogging…otherwise I find it mentally stimulating anyway

    5. Play Second Life
    What can I say…my only problem with Second Life is getting out because I could spend forever on it. Occasionally people say Second Life is boring, usually its because they see Second Life as a multi-player online game. It’s not, its a virtual world that just also happens to have games in it. Tringo is the best game ever created…I could (and often do) play it for hours, but there’s a whole pile of other games in world as well. There’s also a lot of other things that can be done, interacting with other people (like a chat room), playing tourist (it would take 1000’s of hours to visit every place in Second Life), even playing a virtual game of Sim City if you like through the ability to own land and improve it, and if you like, sell it later for a profit that is convertible to US dollars. Ever wanted to be a fashion designer, a builder, and pimp or night club owner…all these and more are possible in Second Life. As the slogan goes: “Your World. Your Imagination”.

    6. Type crap into the Technorati search box
    Sometimes you get some amazing results in the blogs that they list.

  • Any one up for a online radio show?

    blogtalkradio

    Stumbled across this site the other day: BlogTalkRadio. Fascinating concept, basically live podcasting with the ability to take call ins (upto 5 people on air at once, unlimited queue in for others).

    The killer feature: the ability to do the show without the need to edit or record the audio yourself. It works by users (show hosts) calling in to a show specific phone number, from which they then run the show in conjunction with a control panel on the website. Shows are streamed live on the net and also archived for use as podcasts as well.

    They’ve got a fairly decent FAQ but nothing I can see on testing call quality… that sort of thing, which I suppose would be my only concern (basically would Skype support the call in, in terms of quality?). Control panel access is only available to registered users, which is unfortunate because I would have liked to have been able to see what goes on behind the scenes before considering using it..even if it was a matter of an instruction guide and/ or screenshots.

    As “radio” goes they don’t have a universal stream either, like say Webmaster Radio does, which is a feature I’d think they should add.

    But aside from these little things, what a bloody good idea. I’m tempted to give it a go…or maybe someone else can and I can play guest caller 🙂 Definitely worth a look.

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  • Chicken Noodle Soup Video

    Grawolf’s update on his stats based on the Chicken Noodle Soup Video are up. Intesting stats, particularly the fact that his second higest post is for “My Butt is Big” :-). My personal stats for the Chicken Noodle Soup video come in at 1668 page views month to date, but I’ve fallen off Google’s main page for Chicken Noodle Soup Video at the time of writing even though at one stage I was in 6th spot, just after Greywolf himself for Chicken Noodle Soup Video. Still at third though below 2 Youtube results for Watch Chicken Noodle Soup video, which isn’t too bad I guess. And if you’ve got no idea why I’m writing a post about the Chicken Noodle Soup Video, make sure you check out the Chicken Noodle Soup video here…and read a book about SEO 🙂

     

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  • OK, so Feedburner is pretty cool

    I’ve always had issues with Feedburner in the past, mainly on the basis that you’ve got to give up control of your feed to use the service. Here in lala land (TM) we’ve got our hands on the top notch, whole kit and kaboodle version of Feedburner, the one that you get to host on your own URL, although at the time of writing we seem to have URLs in two spots (but that’s another story). Obviously I’ve never had this full functionality before, and got to say it’s pretty cool…ok, probably more than pretty cool.

    Just added an image and description to my feed. Cool.

    Getting cool stats like this (for duncanriley.com), note that these stats seem to be going up daily for all our blogs, I think it takes maybe a week or so of updates to get to the true figure, but it’s still cool:

    feedburner

    Lots of other coolness there as well, half of which I’m not exactly sure what it does so I’m hesitant to turn it on.

    Lot’s of fun. Great service. I still think the verdict is still out though whether it actually makes any difference at all in terms of blog readership, but I’ll leave that argument to a later day 🙂

  • How to apply for a blogging job

    Darren has an excellent guide up on how to apply for a blogging job. It’s amazing from the other end the variation you do get from applications for blogging positions. Sure, the blogosphere and blogging are generally informal in their structures and general usage of the English language but this doesn’t mean your application should be totally informal (and by extension done lazily) as well. The rule I would recommend to others: treat applying for a blogging job the same way you would (or should) apply for an offline job. You need to grab the employers attention, you need to be at least a little bit formal, and you should justify your application, for example show examples of your work, talk about what you’d think you’d bring to the position etc….

  • Aint nobody knows RSS

    Dead 2.0 has the stats, only 9% of Americans know what RSS is. Only 2% subscribe to a feed. I’d suggest though the actual subscription rate would be higher, it would be similar to the blog conundrum: that in the same way people read blogs without knowing they are reading blogs, I’d reckon that people are subscribing to sites without knowing they are using RSS.

    Interesting also is what people are using to read the RSS they don’t know they are reading that are. As announced here, b5media now has feedburner stats. We’ve never had this sort of service before, and after a few days we’re finally getting some juicy stats.

    What’s really interesting is what people are using: feed readers that don’t necessarily need a RSS feed to subscribe to (or more correctly via): classic example, early stats show Google Desktop and MyYahoo! in the top 4. What’s really interesting though is once you strip away our tech blogs it changes again: Firefox Live Bookmarks and Google Desktop come out in front. Compare to our tech blogs alone: Newsgator comes in a 3, myYahoo doesn’t get a look in.

    I’m going to spend some more time looking at these stats, but all in all it’s fascinating to see the differences across different demographics…but it’s also important to remember that the kiddies reading celebrity blogs aren’t going to likely be as tech savy as, for example, the readers of a tech blog. KISS + give them easy ways of subscribing. That’ll do the trick.