Monthly Archive for February, 2006

Lalalover: troubles and fights

Published on February 28, 2006 in Belgium and music. 2 Comments

It’s been a while since I was really pleasantly surprised by a new Belgian group (Moiano comes to mind) but it just happened again. I was humming along to the little pearl “Troubles and Fights” by Lalalover – “Wow, who’s that?” – and then I find out it’s a Belgian group started by Tom Kestens – former multi-instrumentalist with das pop.

Check out the song performed live on “De Laatste Show” – the supporting singer is Belgium’s best soul voice Stef Caers, of Moiano and Krewcial fame.
WMV movie on www.delaatsteshow.be
(8MB – WMV file)
Continue reading ‘Lalalover: troubles and fights’

When (if) Spring comes, these are its Pantone colors

Published on February 28, 2006 in color. 0 Comments

According to Pantone, Inc., the global authority on color and provider of professional color standards for the design industries, blue dominated the palette, with three shades – Deep Ultramarine, Skyway and Blue Tint – placing in the top 10
from Pantone website

I took the liberty of converting them to RGB with the CMYK-RGB Converter:
Continue reading ‘When (if) Spring comes, these are its Pantone colors’

Parelvissers: back to front

Published on February 28, 2006 in Belgium, NL and TV. 2 Comments

(Post in Dutch)

De juiste naam plakken bij de gezichten van de Parelvissers was redelijk evident, maar nu heb ik uw hulp nodig voor iets moeilijker: de juiste naam geven aan elke rug op de volgende foto:

Klik op de foto om op Flickr mee te doen
Mijn kleine teentje zegt me dat de dames in het gezelschap eerder aan de rechtse kant zitten, maar het zijn allebei donkere types, dus dat helpt nog niet eens zoveel.

De volgende foto’s kunnen helpen omdat we kunnen veronderstellen dat de haarsnit en baardgroei (voor de mannen dan) erop dezelfde is als de foto hierboven.
De Parelvissers aan zee #1De Parelvissers aan zee #2

Uw inzicht in de menselijke fysionomie wordt op prijs gesteld!

Ancienne Belgique rocks

Published on February 28, 2006 in wifi. 0 Comments

I’m in the restaurant of the Ancienne Belgique and it’s only a few steps away from heaven:

  • I just had a wonderful dinner (fish – sea bass, I believe)
  • I was waited upon by the lovely Marie
  • The AB cafe & restaurant are smoke-free and that makes a big difference
  • there is an open Wifi-spot here (”Petra Netzwerk” – on Plazes)

All four things add up to a splendid evening!

Technorati: – –

ShockAbsorber: Baywatch and science

Published on February 28, 2006 in science. 3 Comments

Joey from “Friends“, as we all know, is very interested in bio-mechanics, certainly the topic of female movement on beaches:

Nicole EggertCHANDLER: So ah, whatcha watching?
JOEY: Baywatch.
CHANDLER: What’s it about?
JOEY: Lifeguards.
CHANDLER: Well, it sounds kinda stupid… Who’s she?
JOEY: Nicole Eggert. You’ll like her.
CHANDLER: Wow! Look at them run.
JOEY: They do that a lot.
(from The One With the Flashback)

ShockAbsorber - sports bra simulatorThe UK bra brand ShockAbsorber took it one step further and actually teamed up with Portsmouth University to explore the exact dynamics of chest movement during sports activity. Whoever said science was dull?

Teaming up with Portsmouth University
In 2004, we joined forces with Portsmouth University to update and expand our original research into breast movement during exercise. Established in 1992, the Sports Science Department has an impressive track record of research.
(…)
The results
Analysing the movement of a C cup, it was found that wearing no bra resulted in a 3D bounce of up to 6.7cm, compared to 6.4cm for a normal bra and 3.4cm when wearing a Shock Absorber.
Conclusion: Shock Absorber reduces 3D bounce by up to 74% (A cup; B989 style)
(from shockabsorber.co.uk)

They used the results to create the Bounce-o-meter: simulate breast movement for any cup size with and without sports bra. Joey would have loved it. One thing you notice when playing with the parameters: horseriding with a C-cup is a bad idea without the proper support. We live to learn.

(via i-wisdom.typepad.com)

Technorati: –

Black Eyed Peas: lose da humps

Published on February 28, 2006 in music. 2 Comments

'Lose Da Humps'This song has bothered me from the first time I heard it:

What you gonna do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get you drunk,
Get you love drunk off my hump.
What you gon’ do with all that ass?
All that ass inside them jeans?
I’ma make, make, make, make you scream
Make you scream, make you scream.
What you gonna do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get you drunk,
Get you love drunk off this hump.
What you gon’ do wit all that breast?
All that breast inside that shirt?
I’ma make, make, make, make you work
Make you work, work, make you work.
(Black Eyed Peas – “My humps” – from azlyrics.com)

I’m all for freedom of expression and stuff, but is this the kind of conversation we want kids to find normal? We already teach them to get rich quick, because then they can have dozens of semi-naked women dancing around their pool (thank you, MTV), but now a boy-girl conversation starts with “What are you going to do with all that breast inside your shirt?” And the girl is supposed to be amused or flattered?
I rather liked the Black Eyed Peas, actually. They made some clever music, with excellent recycling/sampling, and they had a strong woman singer. These are some quotes of them talking about their latest album:

“When you’re on bad terms with a significant other, you don’t want to break up. You tell her things and at the time you really mean them. But she’s saying, stop f****ing with me.”
“It’s a song about owning up and apologizing and realizing your faults. It’s about being a man or a woman – an adult – and confronting situations honestly”
from blackeyedpeas.com

All that grown-up stuff, and then you have Fergie showing off her bottom to strike a balance? Whatever. I don’t like the song (the synthesizer F-G-G# thing annoys me) and I certainly hate the lyrics. God, I’m getting old.

Technorati: – –

Edgeio: edge aggregator

Published on February 27, 2006 in Web2.0 and advertising. 3 Comments

Michael Arrington has just launched his new baby: Edgeio, a classifieds aggregator. Edgeio will spider and index anyone’s feed and aggregate the posts tagged with “listing”. It then clusters the other tags in order to attach the post to the right classifieds category. The revolutionary thing here is that Edgeio does not require you to post your offer on their own site, they go and take it from yours. Edgeio clearly states that they start with classifieds as an example, a proof of concept for a concept that is much broader than that (that sounds like an echo from the Google Base launch).
As I understand it from their specs, they use the standard RSS <category>listing</category> categories from the RSS spec, no microformats (see further).

Pioneer?

The pioneers of this type of aggregation are Technorati (specifically Tantek Çelik): they have been using the rel=tag microformat <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/music" rel="tag">music</a> (instructions for laymen and experts) since the beginning of 2005.
The people at Technorati also have created “Most Popular” pages based on the same principle:

  • Popular News: “The news stories people are talking about right now, ordered by new links to news sites in the last 48 hours.”
  • Popular Movies: “The movies people are talking about right now, ordered by new links to the Internet Movie Database in the last 48 hours.”
  • Popular Books: “The books people are talking about right now, ordered by new links to Amazon in the last 48 hours.”
  • Popular Blogs: “The biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by unique links in the last six months.“

The basic concept is: find a link type that identifies a topic/resource (e.g. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388795/ for the movie “Brokeback Mountain”) and aggregate all blog posts that have such a link. Whereas for books it makes sense to use Amazon as principal link source for books, it is more difficult to find a good one for music CDs (Amazon? iTunes? CDNow? CDBaby?), TV shows, political candidates, theatre plays, …

Competition?

  • I think Technorati, if it wanted to, could create a Edgeio-like spin-off in under a week. One small difference is that Technorati spiders sites (all HTML), not just feeds (post contents + metadata).
  • Google Blog Search certainly has the horsepower, but little experience in microformats. Then again, they have the worlds’ biggest war chest, they could buy talent and resources. And the PageRank reputation ranking could come in handy.
  • The ’smaller’ blog search players: Feedster, Ask/Bloglines, IceRocket, … already have the content, but would still have to develop the service.
  • Feedburner could move in that direction too, but then only for their own burned feeds. Or they could sell a service to companies like Edgeio to bulk download changed feeds from all Feedburner feeds in one go.

Edge aggregator

The direction Edgeio and/or Technorati could evolve to, is a “generic edge aggregator”. In the end we don’t want 5000 different services all scraping our blog feeds for each little niche application. The ideal would be a handful of aggregators that provide APIs to data and aggregation services, either paid, or monetized through contextual advertising. Image a hypothetical ‘edge aggregation’ provider “GoogRatiO“.

  • GoogRatiO spiders and indexes ALL feeds of all blogs. Oh heck, it even keeps a cached copy of each post.
  • GoogRatiO allows anyone to set up a new project on a URL myproject.googratio.com. In the project settings, you can specify which URLs should be tracked, the importance of recency, frequency and reputation, and it would automatically show a hitparade of the top 10/50/100. E.g. the dance music site Juno could set up juno.googratio.com that tracks all http://www.juno.co.uk/artists/…/ links in blog posts of the last month and shows an hourly updated Buzz chart of the top 20. GoogRatiO places contextual advertising on each page.
  • GoogRatiO has an API that allows a third party to use its database. It includes functions like Get_all_posts_for_URL_base("http://juno.co.uk/artists") and Get_aggregated_buzz_for_URL_base("..."). Below 1000 requests/day GoogRatiO is free. Above that: subscriber fee.
  • GoogRatiO also calculates a ‘reputation’ for each blog feed. This is needed to deal with splogs and other scam artists. So each link does not weigh the same. Compare it to Technorati’s “blog authority” or Google’s “PageRank”. For a company like Juno, a link from the Rollingstone blog is worth more than one from a Blogspot site a 14-year old fan just set up.
  • GoogRatiO will links blogs to actual sales (with money being paid and all). So it could come up with some inventive ways of redistributing affiliate fees

Imagine the ease with which applications like “Most Popular Youtube video“, “Most popular De Standaard newspaper article”, … could be created. The Long Tail at work!

Edgeio Buzz Timeline

As a professional reporter on Web 2.0 projects, Mike knows exactly how to plan the buzz for his new project:
Edgeio Buzz

  • 2005-10-07: Teaser: “Edgeio will give you the ability to do new and (we think) really exciting things with your blog” – Techcrunch
  • 2006-02-02: SDForum announcement “All Your Classifieds Belong To Us” – Jeff Clavier
  • 2006-02-09: “Teare spilled a lot of beans tonight at an SDForum online-classifieds event at the GooglePlex” – BusinessWeek, Dave Winer, Scobleizer
  • 2006-02-11: “We will be focusing on classified listings of any type to start” – 1st post on Edgeio blog
  • 2006-02-12: “Mike Arrington called me today and gave me a demo ” – Mashable (Feb 12)
  • 2006-02-18: “I was given a personal tour” @ TechCrunch NakedConversations Party – Dan Farber @ ZDnet (Feb 18)
  • 2006-02-20: Buzz acceleration – Buzzmachine, SiliconBeat, A VC
  • 2006-02-27: Official launch: Techcrunch, helped by Om Malik, Read/Write Web, WeBreakStuff

(There are obviously clear advantages in finding seed investors/business consultants/software developers/media buddies that are also A-list bloggers.)

This is certainly a project to follow!
PS: thanks to Bart and Francois for bringing Edgeio to my attention.

Technorati: – – – – – – –

Parelvissers geheugensteuntje

Published on February 27, 2006 in Belgium, NL and TV. 10 Comments

(post in Dutch)
parelvissers

Steven Noels publiceerde al een voortreffelijke legende voor De Parelvissers, maar omdat ik na de eerste aflevering nog mijn Guido, Xavier en Lucas nog niet uit mekaar kon houden, heb ik er de foto’s van de cast bijgeplaatst.
Ik vind het geweldig dat ze een pak nieuwe acteurs een kans geven, maar ik merk dat ik met bekendere gezichten (Tom Van Dyck, Marc Van Eeghem) minder problemen heb om personages uit mekaar te houden. Ik heb op een bepaald moment An Beyers en Sofie Deschryver verwisseld, en op een ander Xavier en Dick. Steffie is makkelijk, da’s de enige blonde. In wiens slaapkamer stond Guido met zijn zatte botten weer? An of Sofie?

Nu ja, ze hebben 6 weken tijd om de namen en gezichten erin te stoempen.

UPDATE:
op aanraden van Bart’s eega Gudrun, heb ik de foto’s van de personages gebruikt ipv de foto’s van de acteurs (bvb Lucas Blommaert heeft in de serie geen baard). Hierbij de nieuwe foto:
geheugensteuntje