richardbarley.com

Twitter is having a bit of a strop tonight and, in amongst the Timeout errors and Fail Whales, was this image, which I have not seen before.

I’m not sure but I reckon the bird is looking a bit worried by the snappy instruments on the robot’s arms…..

Just a brief note to let you know that this site is now snuggled in a new home. I have shifted it across from being hosted by Wordpress.com to now being hosted in my own webspace. This has brought a redesign and some new funky widgets, which I hope will work out.

There may be teething troubles, but hey, as I am largely blogging to myself here it shouldn’t really matter

Everyone knows that John Williams writes the best movie soundtracks ever. Well this guy agrees and has maded this fantastic a capella tribute to some of his finest works.

Check it out, it’s really clever.

Oh wow, this has got to go on my Christmas list.

Check out this video of the latest toy - “Fly Stick” - and tell me you are not impressed.

All done with static electricity somehow, but sure looks like magic to me

Get the lowdown at ThinkGeek [www.thinkgeek.com]

Yesterday was A Bad Day. Not only did we witness the mockery that was the Ross/Brand affair descend to such depths of stupidity that now 27,000 people have complained and Brand has resigned…..

We also witnessed the end of an era.

The end of one of the finest pairing of actor-to-role that has ever graced the small screen.

As he accepted his much-deserved National Television Award last night, David Tennant announced that after the 2009 specials he will no longer be The Doctor.

Stunned silence met that announcement in our household.

Followed by cries of “Noooooo!” and “He can’t!” and “There’s no-one gorgeous enough to take over!” (that last one from my missus, just to be clear…)

It’s a hugely sad announcement as I had really hoped he would do at least one full season under Stephen Moffat. But sadly it is not to be. Russel T Davies, who will leave the show at the same time, has said that Tennants exit would be ”the most enormous and spectacular ending”, so I suppose we have that to look forward to.

But putting aside our grief for one moment, I do wish David all the success he truly deserves. he is such a huge talent and the world really is his oyster now. I can see him going from strength to strength and quickly becoming a global star.

And so, after the 4 specials, that will be it. Hopefully they will find someone to take over who can grow into another great doctor. Early front-runners are David Morrisey and Russel Tovey, neither of which I really know much about.

Perhaps the people’s choice is Stehpen Fry? I spotted a few people on Twitter last night asking him if he’d be interested.

Stephen’s response?

So there you have it! Or not…

Another year, another chance for the british public to go totally bonkers about something they haven’t actually witnessed.

Last time it was the Celebrity Big Brother racism scandal, where thousands of people screamed blue murder about being offended by something they hadn’t actually seen. But thankfully the media was there to tell them just how offended they should be, so they could all complain anyway.

And now here we are again, this time its Jonothan Ross and Russell brand stiring up trouble (nothing new there) by leaving rather unsavoury messages on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs (he of Manuel fame).

I heard the show on the Russell Brand podcast and found it pretty funny at the time, but I did feel that it all went a bit too far. Sachs is, from what I can make out, a pretty decent guy and not likely to take great offence at this kind of behaviour. But his granddaughter probably didn’t deserve the publicity to be honest. 

The funny thing for me is how the number of people complaining about this has increased so dramatically. After the original show there were only 2 complaints. That means 2 people heard it and thought “hey that’s wrong” and complained. Good for them, exercising their right toeedback to the BBC. And some people may well have heard the show in the podcast, perhaps accounting for a couple of thousand complaints.

But as I write, the complaints are up to 18,000! Count ‘em. Eighteen Thousand. how many of these people do you think have actually heard the show in question? And how many have just read the transcripts in the papers?

How does that work?

Joe Bloggs picks up “The Daily Mail”. Reads the headline “Thousands complain about offensive Brand and Ross stunt”. Reads the article. joe is so offended that he needs to complain to the BBC.

Why, Joe, why? There were 17,999 people there before you. Its unnecessary. And hey, you knew you were going to be offended because you read the headline, right?

It’s true, Brand and Ross crossed the line, but People Of Britain, please get a grip! This is not affecting you. It affected Sachs and his family. Yes the BBC should have stepped in sooner and not even transmitted the pre-recorded show. Then all this would have gone away quickly and quietly after they apologised to Sachs privately. No need for several days of front-page news. No need to waste everyone’s time, least of all Gordaon brown, who should really have more important things to worry himself about just now.

Twitter [www.twitter.com] is great. Its a really easy way to keep in touch with people you know, but also to keep tabs on people you don;t know but would like to, and also those who you will never know but only dream about.

My friends fall into 3 distinct groups:

• Real friends - People I know and have possibly even met
• Publishers - People who say stuff on Twitter that I find interesting and/or useful
• Celebs - Not just true celebreties but generally people who I will probably never meet

Got to get grouping!

Monitoring your brand

The must-have tool

I blogged a while ago [here] about the toss-up between Thwirl [website] and TweetDeck [website] as my Twitter client of choice. Having given TweetDeck a good run out, I did eventually go back to Twhirl, finding it just did everything I needed in a nice, slick, compact manner. TweedDeck was a bit rough around the edges and, although I really like the ability to group people and have their tweets visible in separate columns, i found the multi-column interface just too clumsy for me. I like my Twitter clients slim, trim and straight up-and-down .

However, a recent comment from Leezl [here] pointed me toward a new contender in the arena,  namely Feedalizr [home page]. So, always one to try out new stuff, I gave it a go.

Feedalizr (they just had to miss out a vowel somewhere) is an Adobe Air application, just like Twhirl and TweetDeck, that combines some of the best aspects of both rival clients into one pretty slick package. It manifests as a single column,  but with the ability to create separate tabs for items filtered by username or service (Feedalizr supports Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr and Jaiku). This is reminiscent of the filtering offered by TweetDeck, but not quite as flexible. The tabbed interface is a big improvement though, and is something that TweetDeck should really look at implementing.

Overall the interface of Feedalizr feels good. Everything is smooth scrolling and the flipping effect when opening the “options” dialog is cool, if rather unnecessary. Click on someone’s name and their entries will appear in a new column. A nice slick way of picking out the signal from the noise.

One very nice feature that  that both Twhirl and TweetDeck lack is de-duping of FriendFeed items. If Feedalizr spots that someone has tweeted something, and that tweet then appears in that user’s FriendFeed list, it will hide the duplicate entry so you don’t read what your firends are eating for breakfast two times over every day.

There are a few niggly issues that take the polish off this potential Twhirl-beater. It doesn’t have Twhirls ability to click on an @name to display that users profile. And the pop-up notifications for new messages contain a rather spurious explanation, which I found unnecessary and distracted from  my reading of the messages.

It is still early days for Feedalizr, which, naturally,  is still in beta, but it’s certainly a promising start and I shall continue to look out for updates. I have added a few of my issues to their site on Get Satisfaction [here] so I’ll see what their response is.

Could Twhirl finally lose it’s crown? Not yet, but maybe soon.

I have recently joined the team of writers on the newly-redesigned FMB Blog and my first post, “From there to here by the power of the net” is now live [here].

Go check out how I owe so much of my life very much to the wonders of the internet! And while you’re at it, why not join FuelMyBlog [here]. It’s a great community for bloggers and they are a wonderful bunch of people.

Just read some really sad news. My favourite Doctor Who blog, Blogtor Who [here, for now], has shut down. the site’s owner, Cameron McEwan [here on myspace], posted a brief message saying how he was fed up with people stealing his text and images and passing them off as their own:

It takes time to create all the audio and video here as well as sourcing stories and images so it’s incredibly galling for someone esle to take credit for it.

Well said! Whoever was doing this are really scummy.

So long Blogtor Who, you’ll be sadly missed.

Luckily, Cameron can still be found at his other equally great blog, Stuff on TV [here] and I urge you to go take a look.