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Friday, May 24, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Happy birthday, Bob Dylan

Happy birthday, Bob Dylan. Happy 72nd birthday. Well, what can I say. To recall the words of Forever Young:

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young

It’s hard to explain how much Bob Dylan means to the generation that grew up to his songs. His videos have become so hard to find on YouTube. Here are some of the songs I love. Continue Reading

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Thursday, May 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment

GIF and Gatsby’s ‘orgastic future’

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
(Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2)

Huh! That’s not how writers and creators feel. Ask Steve Wilhite, the man who created the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).Continue Reading

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Thursday, May 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment

The Great Gatsby

F Scott FitzgeraldWhat’s behind the enduring appeal of The Great Gatsby? The lives and dreams of its star-crossed lovers? Or the fact that it reads like a dream?

Reading it again, I was utterly entranced, such is F Scott Fitzgerald’s gift as a writer. He can show you beautiful people and places and make music with his words.

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Tuesday, May 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Your free Flickr account got bigger than your hard drive

Now you can shoot the whole neighbourhood and never worry about where to store the bodies. Stash them in the cloud. Your free Flickr account just got bigger than your hard drive.

Flickr announcement

Flickr announcement

Visit Flickr and see what it says: “Smile. Everyone gets a free terabyte.” That’s equal to 537,731 6.5 megapixel photos, it helpfully adds. So, shoot. Snap away. You can be as click-happy as you like and never worry yourself sick about storage space.

Can Flickr be this generous? A whole terabyte? Even laptops normally don’t come with that much space.

Know how much that will cost you on Google Drive? $49.99 a month.  And Flickr is giving it for free.

Marissa Meyer

Marissa Mayer just became my favourite calendar girl. She has the looks and, now it seems, the heart. Giving away a whole terabyte for free!

The Yahoo CEO is really making waves, amping up Flickr, revamping the site and paying a cool billion for Tumblr, the playful microblogging platform crawling with animated GIFs that will have you laugh yourself silly.

Whoever thought Yahoo would one day buy Tumblr? They are as different as chalk and cheese. Yahoo, the mail carrier, if you still use Yahoo Mail, Yahoo, the news provider, if you still check Yahoo News, and Tumblr, a social media upstart founded only in 2007.

Yahoo has to reinvent itself, say observers, to attract the young who favour Tumblr and Facebook and God knows what else. Well, the reinvention’s on – a billion for Tumblr, a terabyte at Flickr. An old Yahoo user, who got his first news feed from Yahoo, I am rooting for Marissa Mayer. Attagirl!

Not a dab hand at animated GIFs, I am doing the next best thing and posting a video to share my joy. Here’s Helen Shapiro singing Walking Back to Happiness. It’s an oldie. But what did you expect? My life on the internet began with Yahoo.

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Tuesday, May 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment

(Bleep) yeah, rock on, Tumblr

Did you read the Guardian riffing off me, reminding Yahoo screwed up big-time with GeoCities?

David KarpAnd did you read Tumblr founder David Karp’s memo announcing the marriage with Yahoo? He signed off with the F-word and a “yeah”. Rock on. This guy’s copacetic.

He was not being rude. It was Tumblr being Tumblr. And that is? Horny, “porny”, according to its critics, or just corny, funny, irreverent, unusual. No CEO ever signs off a staff memo with an “F… yeah”.  But Karp had to get his message across to Tumblr users, carping at the deal, not to get their knickers in a twist but carry on as usual, that the marriage changes nothing.

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Monday, May 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Tumblr’s billion-dollar content

Yahoo is ready to pay $1.1 billion for Tumblr, many of whose users want nothing to do with Yahoo. I have been tracking Tumblr posts on Yahoo and here are two examples of how Tumblr users feel about the deal.Continue Reading

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Saturday, May 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Wishing Tumblr better luck than GeoCities

Let’s hope Tumblr survives a deal with Yahoo, which pulled the plug on GeoCities.

Remember GeoCities, an online community like Tumblr? Founded in 1994, GeoCities was the third most visited site on the World Wide Web by 1999 when it was bought by Yahoo for $3.57 billion in stock, according to Wikipedia. You could build your own website for free on GeoCities. But it became less popular after Blogger, WordPress and other blogging tools and social networks were launched. Yahoo closed down GeoCities in 2009. Now GeoCities is available only in Japan.

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Wednesday, May 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Dr Johnson, Addison: Proto-bloggers?

Addison

Addison

Did blogs come first or newspapers? The Daily Courant, first published in 1702, was the first British daily newspaper, we are told. It was a one-page newspaper, with advertisements on the reverse side, according to Wikipedia. Better known by far, however, are the periodical Tatler (1709-1711) and the daily Spectator (1711-1712) founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele – and what they wrote were essays.

Dr Samuel Johnson continued that tradition, writing essays which appeared in the periodical, The Rambler (1750-1752). He even wrote about not wanting to write. This essay, which appeared in The Rambler, begins almost like an entry in a personal blog:

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Monday, May 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Magazine changes and the Oxford English Dictionary

The pen is mightier than the sword. Look at what happened to the word, “magazine”.

There was a time when it meant an arsenal, an armoury, a storehouse for arms and ammunition. Maybe that is how the cartridge-holder for rifles and machine-guns came to be called a “magazine”.

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Sunday, May 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

From St Audrey to “tawdry”

Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak can’t be happy with The Economist calling his a “tawdry victory” in the recent general election. But how did a saint lend her name to something so cheap as “tawdry”?

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