I’ve recently became addicted to a new game, and sad as it is it’s a great way of making the money go further as we troll our way through the current recession, and it’s called Nectar points! It’s surely another clear example that I’m now in my 30’s that I’m getting excited about Nectar points rather than what next weekends plans are (monthly shop at the local Sainsbury’s and a catch up with a few mates on Saturday night if you’re interested), but my monthly shopping is now so much more exciting for it. With each shop comes more points which I dutifully load on to my account, handing my Nectar card over to the cashier with great glee, and then I bask in the glory of achieving another 27 points to my ever growing Nectar bank balance.
Quite what I do with these points I’ve yet to fathom, and from checking the website I can roughly deduce I need enough to bail out a mid sized financial institution but one day I’ll get my monthly shop free, or more likely I’ll use it to buy several bottles of red wine.
Making shopping more and saving me money in the long run, what more could you ask for when every penny counts?

Someone at the bbc has finally seen the light and brought Danny Baker back to where he belongs to host one evening of the football phone in on Five Live.

Nothing too out of the ordinary there you may think, but Danny is probably the best phone in host in the uk with his irreverant manner and a huge love for the game.

But this is not just your normal footy phone in with spurs fans moaning, mackems dribbling and some loon making a case for Fowler to be brought back to the national side. Nope, this phone in on tuesday evenings at 10pm does away with all of that and focusses on the joy of football and what makes it great, the fans. This is the pirate of football phone ins!

Take a listen and be amused by tales of the smallest places people have played football (a lift is so far the winner I think), the strangest places, the shortest time anyone has ever spent at a football game, the longest run people have gone without seeing there team win (these are now clocking up to several years) and possibly the greatest rendition of Bohemian Rhapsodey with all the words replaced by those of the names of footballers!

If 10pm tuesdays don’t work for you they always make an amusing listen via podcast going in and out of work, so Mr Baker welcome back.

You’re probably sitting down when you read this, just as well because what I have to say will knock you off your feet, have you rushing for the nearest internet explorer window, and thinking that enlightened beings have given divine wisdom to us all…

conde Nast have decided to launch a *drum roll…………………* social networking site for teenage girls. Flip.com

Yep, flip.com

flip, flop, flip, flop, flip,

Exactly what we the internet needs!

The marketing blurb about the sites read “These girls are so creative, they create shrines within their environment”. “It must be the hormones – they customize everything”

Does it offer anything you can’t already do on facebook, myspace, bebo, and the host of other sites already sucking minutes, hours, days out of our lives just wondering if any of our ‘friends’ have ‘popped’ by?

Not really, in fact it’s hard to look at it as anything more than an application where you can make a digital flip book of photo’s, images and music which reflect the user. In some ways this isn’t even untapped as slideshow applications have been kicking around for years.

It’s hard to see the site bringing people back to it after they ‘customised everything’ because the content can then be plugged into other social networking sites. It’ll be interesting to see how the site grows and develops, it just smacks a little bit of ‘me to’ and stealing the pennies off dead mens eyes

The music scene doesn’t just start and stop in London. Whilst V festival has an off shoot up north (somewhere), most of the festivals still tend to be found relatively close to London. Obviously so a bunch of horrific sloanes can have a ‘festival experience’ and complain at high volume about the mud/people/the dust/warm booze (delete as applicable). Stay at home and watch it on BBC3 instead, please!

Anyway in Scotland they tend to get on and do there own thing and have the excellent T in the Park and also a less well known affair called Triptych which has showcased some of the worlds best alternative, creative and avant garde music which sadly comes to an end this year.

Out with the old, in with the new though as Tennent’s, the festivals organisers, have hit upon replacing it with Tennent’s Mutual which will take place in Oct and Nov 2008.

So far fairly so what. That is until you learn what makes Tennent’s Mutual something really quite interesting, it allows everyday people to be involved with putting on the festival. You have to sign up before 30th June, and starts with a start up fund of £150,000, and members then can vote, nominate, debate who the acts should be, which venues & decide ticket prices!

Will be interesting to see how the event gains momentum but with something that brings the passion out in everyone it can’t fail to be a success I think and really harnesses the community aspect of the internet as well as truly democratising it

Could initiatives like this be the start of the next facebook or myspace?

http://www.tennentsmutual.com/

After bouncing balls, exploding paint, plasticine rabbits now it’s foam. Exactly what this has got to do with cameras and camcorders is pretty much anyone;s guess but it looks like someone had a lot of fun filling a few square blocks of miami with foam and letting it all float about a bit.

Guess it’s not something you see eveyday so probably worth a picture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpP_BlSDBgc

Amazing what you can do with plenty of time on your hands, a good computer and an idea for trying to show off your creative talents. One such chap is Kobayashi a young animation director living in London who decided to have some fun with Sony. Quite how they feel about this ‘unofficial’ video is anyone’s guess, but if nothing else it’s impressive what has been done on probably a budget of nothing more than blood, sweat and tears.

click on the link to take a look

http://www.koba-yashi.co.uk/

Podcasts have been becoming more and more talked about over the past few years, largely due to Ricky Gervais producing some podcasts in a hiatus between the office and Extras. In fact, podcasts have been around for longer than some may think, and on Easter Monday BBC Radio Five Live had a 1 hour show discussing anything and everything about podcasts, and surprise surprise it’s available as a podcast now!

It is an interesting listen starting off with the basics for the uninitiated, then moves into some of the areas of how podcasts will develop and probably most importantly, how do you make them a commercially viable form of media which works from a platform where people expect content free.

The thing is in the vast majority of cases you can’t. Ricky Gervais had to give his podcasts away to build an audience before charging, and the BBC who have had success with podcasts for years can’t charge. The crux of the matter is having enough content that people can’t get anywhere else and are willing to pay for.

Or there is the adfunded model, but advertisers will need to be demonstrated that a significant number of downloads are taking place to warrant costs of up to circ £5k per podcast. Not the cheapest eh?

Interestingly in the show Channel 4 offer their views as part of 4 Radio, as do the Guardian, who drop the interesting nugget that they will be offering advertisers the chance to do spot advertising in some of their podcasts at the end of the year

If you want to learn more about pod’s and all their glory click on the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/pods/ and download For the Love of Pod from 24th March

PS My favourite podcasts at the moment are Fighting Talk (top notch sports banter from the BBC) & the now sadly defunct Baker & Kelly podcast (more comedy ramblings about football) which you will have to search high and low for on the internet but it’s well worth it.

Seems like things are bad down at terminal 5, wait sorry no it’s the sequel to the cadbury’s gorilla viral ad. Seems someone has spent far too long watching Pixar’s Cars, and has ditched Phil Collins for a spot of glam Queen instead.

No doubt it will spread like wildfire before being on TV, but if nothing else it’s great to see a great British brand doing some great creative advertising.

No idea what airport transport vehicles have to do with chocolate but’s it’s quirky and different and for that I quite like it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRso3oR7Zi8

Wow 2nd time I’ve ever blogged, I could become a serial blogger. I was going to blog about something really interesting but what ever caught my imagination has fluttered out of my head like a butterfly. Instead I’ll fall back on the new Rajar figures, which frankly are dulllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll, Chris Moyles is still obnoxious and is the most listened to show in the UK. To be honest I’d rather sit next to some half deaf old man on the tube trying to talk to his completely deaf wife about what they’d like for dinner than listen to chris Moyles. Oh and 4 of the 5 biggest digital only radio stations have lost listeners in the last 3 months. Really? So is that now half a dozen ‘early adopters’ listening to it? Did anyone not realise that they actually weren’t very good and offered nothing more than what is already available? Get a frequency or take yourself home please.

I really like Time Out, not just for it’s listings of what’s going on in London but also for the fact it tells me a little bit more about this sprawling city that I live in, and not being a Londoner there’s quite a lot to discover.

Thankfully the new refreshed Time Out makes it an even better magazine. The content is pretty much still the same but it’s been shuffled around to provide more of the insightful and interesting editorial in the front of the magazine rather than scatter it liberally throughout, making it a better read and leaving a lot of the listings towards the back of the mag.

The only downer is maybe how long Time Out might be around and relevant, as the deluge of free publications is continuing to grow, supplanting what you may get from great reads like Time Out, plus the internet means you can find all the listings you might desire free at the touch of a button.

Maybe Time Out’s next major step will be to go free?