Alexia Blogs

Yahoo China mourns the Sichuan earthquake in black and white.

The definitive Facebook metrics guide for marketeers. Can someone pass this along to the IIA Congress attendees?

Compfight is another nice Creative Commons search tool for Flickr. There are so many. The UI is fancy, it doesn’t generate the handy embed code like JB’s one.

Cassettes From My Ex - mixtapes from past loves with a little blurb on the relationship.

Pr*on to save Cali’s budget deficit?

When I grow up, I want to be a more difficult woman. Great piece by Sarah.

An entire site dedicated to the Ampersand.

Threadless loses any kind of cult cred it had left. Ugh.

John Cusack in an Emmerich movie? His stock is falling. Fast.

The Amazingness exhibition in London’s Anna Hillman gallery. Very cool. Amazing things are all around us.

Sébastien Tellier ‘Divine’. Yeah, it’s France’s Eurovision entry, but it’s actually not bad.

Heard of Wikipedia? How about McCainpedia? Nope? The Democratic National Committee have gone all Web 2.0 and have built a Wikipedia clone stuffed full of anti-McCain spin. At least they’ve grasped the web, the Republicans are probably still sending telegrams.

It’s closed for updating. Pity that. I thought the spirit of Web 2.0 was all about opening up content systems for user submission. Here’s their spiel:

McCainpedia.org is a wiki run by the DNC’s Research, Communications, and Internet teams. The goal is to centralize research material, allowing the general public to use it as they see fit. Unlike some wikis, McCainpedia is read-only and can’t be edited by the public. This allows us to fully validate all of the information that appears, ensuring accuracy and reliability.

A read-only wiki? Love it. Now that’s not very Democratic, is it?

The Democrat love of wikis doesn’t stop there. Obama supporters have jumped on the bandwagon and created Obamapedia. Hey these guys are more democratic that the DNC web team. You can actually update some pages - Undecided Voters and Barak Obama Supporters. Two pages. Let’s jump up and down.Where is Hillarypedia in this ruck?

It seems that the Twitter’s scheduled maintenance for midnight PST has spilled over. Again. Going by reports I’m reading, Twitter devs were trying to clean up bot users that were spiking network activity. Twitter need to estimate downtime accurately, build in at least 20% more time than they expect into the schedule and and fix these issues.  

Interesting post on limits of Creative Commons licensing.

Vodafone banana-skinned on this. Badly. Way to lose a big-paying customer.

Great New Yorker piece on the decline of the Republicans from Nixon onwards.

While Google Health garners inches of press, third-party ads are going to be served right beside Google’s on its network.

Who knew that microwaving CDs makes great photos?

Suzy musing on Enda calling the Catholic Church to clarify it’s position re: Lisbon. Situ murky waters, methinks.

Laura is looking for girls who work in Open Source to get in touch. She wants to build out a community. Get in touch. Building communities is a great thing. Who knows where the next opportunity is? Everyone ought to stand up and do their bit to build out, whether it be a group of gardeners to swap war stories or parents looking for peer support during the Teenage Years. Or Open Source girlies. Talk to Laura, if you’re interested.

Check out some of the nature-inspired images over here at the Materialecology. Set up by architect and MIT doctoral student Noxi Oxman, ME studies the design of materials in the natural world using the interdisciplinary streams of ecology, computational analysis, engineering and architecture. Lots of MoMA love for ME too.

Today is Vesak, the day where Buddhists observe the birthday of Buddha. Every single day we obsess over little things that really don’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Some more than others. We obsess on the negative, more than the positive as it’s an easier play. A more seductive choice. Alarm bells ring, especially when painful home truths bubble up. It’s time to let go and grow.

A new RTE channel with repeats? Don’t we already have two of those? Blurb says it’ll air material not already aired on RTE1 and RTE2. So, just more obscure repeats then.

Russell has a very nice page here full of resources for those of you faced with planning.

Down with that sort of thing.

Why graphics designers don’t get tattoos.

Backlighting an Eee.

Just caught an abridged version of this ad last night for the Sony Cybershot W170. The Sony Foam City ad campaign involved flooding downtown Miami with a cloud of foam. Fallon London are the creatives behind this campaign. They’ve done all the infamous Sony ads and that recent Gorilla/Phil Collins Cadbury’s ad. Want more? Josh Spear has the lowdown for the Foam City ad.

Yesterday’s Photomeet was a lot of fun. Thanks Red Mum for setting this up and getting the word. We ambled about a yard behind the George Bernard Shaw pub in Portobello. After that, we walked up to the Temple Bar farmers market.

It was great to meet so many accomplished photographers. People whose pictures you look at and admire. People whose photos inspire you. Thanks. It was great to meet Red Mum, Gingerpixel, McAWilliams, Catriona, Eoin, Phil, Davy, Nathalie and Eoghan, Darren and Will. And it was fab to meet Deborah too. Great, but all too brief!

Oh and I’m posting a few pics a day from my snap haul. The ones I like. Some of the photos from the meet group are already up on the Toejam Flickr group. More will be uploaded.