Views: Still in my twenties!

Come Friday I'll be out on the town "celebrating" my birthday.
A couple of weeks ago when I looked at the calendar to see what day my birthday landed on, I was well chuffed it was a Friday, It meant a birth-weekend rather than day!

Double checking, sure enough as is the norm, Saturday would definitely be the day after and therefore another chance to don those dancing shoes and fire into town.

However, as my last few weeks of being a twenty-eight year old descended, I realised I am heading full force into the final year of my twenties... final year!

I'm now concerned.

I'm concerned because I still make funny noises at work. I still use slang language, still wear trainers with my jeans and still get disappointed when the lights come on at 3am on a Sunday morning and I have to make my way home.
I'm concerned because I still put product in my hair, I still watch Hollyoaks and I still call The Arctic Monkeys "The Arctic Monkeys"... not Arcade Monkeys or Arctic Fire!

To make things worse at my place of work we take on Placement students from universities. This week I was looking through the CVs and what caught my eye was the birth-date. As I was entering the last year of my twenties... The new student would be entering the last year of their teens! They were, all but a year... born in the 90s! That makes them a totally different generation.

They can't remember what Michael Jackson looked like before his nose fell off or the importance of when defending yourself knowing the technique of "wax on, wax off"!
They couldn't sing the theme tune to fraggle rock, know the lyrics to Ice Ice Baby or dance "Hammer style".
They wouldn't have a clue what you would drink in the Congo, who you would write too to "fix it" or what you would do with a "cassette"!

Problem is, I still feel young (and immature!)... I still feel 21. So I just know, if not this weekend, then soon, I will be uttering the words "It's not how old you are, it's how old you feel". When I do utter them words, I'm hanging up my dancing shoes, buying slippers and no longer watching Hollyoaks, I'm watching Emmerdale. Done!

Views: Big Brother 9 - 2008 - All over before its started?

Apparently Big Brother 2008 (Big Brother 9) which should start around 23rd - 3oth may (as these are both Fridays) is going to be scheduled in a "graveyard" slot much later than it's in-the-past-popular prime time slot of 9-10pm. This has to be an indication that C4 bosses have lost faith in one of their flag-ship shows.

Personally I think it's a bit of a shame. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a massive Big Brother fan, in-fact over the last few summers I've probably only watched a handful of the shows.

The reason I think it's a shame though is because it was an original concept and when it all began way back in 2000 it was compulsive viewing.

Endemol had an absolute monster on their hands and although you could quite easily criticise the voyeuristic nature of the show, it was a brave new program that would obviously lead to not only copy-cat shows, but a whole splurge of reality shows for virtually every channel on the box.

It's almost too easy to mock Big Brother and the wanna-be celebrities that audition for the show. The fact is though, this show can so easily turn the whole negative public perception around by inviting "normal" people into the house.

It's not hard to see that the show started to fail when it became a circus freak show. Viewers found themselves laughing at a transvestite that was quite clearly unstable or turning against a chav-like-lady that was 2 sandwiches short of the proverbial picnic! After laughter though came the harsh realisation that you now feel uncomfortable so you inevitably switch off.

The first series was quite clearly the best. The house mates didn't have any idea what they were letting themselves in for and therefore had no game plan. This meant from a sociological perspective it was fascinating to see how people act when confined to such claustrophobic surroundings with total strangers; body language of the various housemates gave away so much.

Big Brother was not only pioneering from a tv perspective. It also brought in other forms of media such as the Internet where viewers could watch a continuous 24-hour feed from multiple cameras on the web. Not to mention mobile phone updates - which must have made them a fortune!

No doubt come the summer there will be a wealth of people jumping on the "Big-Brothers-dumbing-down-our-nation-we-hate-wannabe-calebraties" bandwagon. Then those same people will scoff, then pick up the latest edition of heat magazine.
You see, we're all obsessed by celebrities and deep down everybody wants at least 15mins of fame to see what its like.

That said, apparently only one hundred people turned up to audition for the Channel 4 TV show in Newcastle... Perhaps it's not only Big Brother that's dying, but the whole "being a celebrity for absolutely no reason" syndrome that has somehow exploded over the last few years.

So this year I'm going to tune into the first episode of Big Brother and give it a chance. Because, if by some miracle they have let a few normal people in to the very abnormal surroundings of the BB house, you never know... we could be in for a treat!

Views: Widget box - fonejacker tv-soundbox

After my initial blogs about Widgetbox and creating a facebook app (Pitch to the Dragons). I thought I'd investigate what sort of fun widget I could create using flash and Widgetbox.

I love fonejacker - It's one quality program with some excellent characters. It's also a tv show that lends itself to a little application that lets you here from all the best characters on the show. So I set about creating a flash app that lets the user select a character and then play a series of sound clips from the show.

Once complete I set this up as a facebook widget through using Widgetbox. Once again the process was very easy and within minutes (although the flash app took me several hours!) the widget was up and running.

So... five stars again for Widgetbox.

If you have facebook you can add the fonejacker tv-soundbox to your profile.

It contains all the best characters such as Terry Tibbs, Brian Betonde, The mouse, George Agdgdgwngo, Mr Doovde and the Chinese lad who likes to pirate dvds! I only added this to facebook and promoted it in a few fonejacker groups a couple of days ago and it has already surpassed the dragons app I did weeks ago.

If you haven't got facebook, you can take a look and play around with it here.

I've also included some code on the page incase you would like to embed it in your own website.

Views: Use Widgetbox to promote your blog

I came across Widgetbox when I was looking into developing a Facebook widget I had an idea for. As with most bloggers I want as many people as possible reading my posts, so I look into every avenue of marketing my website. The social network boom has made this an obvious place to look, with every person having so many friends viral marketing has never been able to spread so fast.

For my Facebook application I delved into FBML and already had knowledge of php so was able to develop my widget in about a week. However when I came across Widgetbox it looked on the surface like I could have saved time simply registering and going through their wizard.

That wasn't quite the case although the features it does support are still quite impressive.
With php and mysql you can obviously create a far superior application than what is basically possible on Widgetbox. But it does let you interface with Flash and Javascript so there is scope to make a decent application.
As it interacts with Flash there are already loads of games that have been made into Widgets.

However the quickest and easiest way of creating a widget is by first creating a Blidget. This is a Widget of your Blog.
Widgetbox guides you through the process seamlessly, even loading Facebook within a frame to enable you to set up the necessary parameters.
You can then promote your new widget through Facebook, through a blidget promo badge you post on your website or on other social networking sites such as MySpace or Bebo.

You see, even though I've banged on about facebook, Widgetbox supports the OpenSocial container as well. Although Facebook is not developed on the OpenSocial platform and is at the moment the most used platform, OpenSocial is Googles attempt at standardising social networking... and I wouldn't bet against Google winning in the long run, would you?

So all in all Widgetbox is a great tool for developing a widget to promote your blog really easily.
Infact you can install my Widget to have a look at what it's like by clicking on the "Get My Widget for your site" on the left hand side of this page.

It looks like this...


I've only touched the surface of what Widgetbox can offer, but I can see that it will help loads of people out there spread their hard work to a far reaching audience.