Anyone else visit http://www.google.co.uk today and think their monitor was being screwwy?

The usually white background was black, with the text in white.

Apparently it was all part of Google’s attempt to raise the UK public’s attention to ‘Earth Hour’ and attempts at conserving engergy usage.

Earth Hour wants people across the globe to turn their lights off between 8pm and 9pm (local time) on Saturday March 29th. Cities all over the world are also holding events to show their commitment to energy conservation. http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/earthhour/

Google state on the page linked to above, that whilst they’ve ‘turned the lights out’ to raise awareness of the issue, there’s no actually benefit to giving Google a black background generally as contemporary monitors use the same amount of energy regardless of what they display.

And for all your web developers with a great idea that’ll help save the world… Google are taking suggestions for other campaigns to back/promote; just drop them an email.

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I was just stumbling through the Internet and came across this interesting article about logo design… Is there really such a thing as bad publicity!?

Also anyone who thinks the original ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana was a little grungy might appreciate this Tango version - made me smile, very random.

Two videos doing well on YouTube at the moment pretty much sum up the Facebook divide - you either love it or you hate it.

I was shocked last weekend when a friend said “I’ve heard Facebook are going to start charging… that would annoy me, but I’d pay!”. After laughing at the mere idea of them charging to use the site, I then very strongly declared I would NEVER pay to use it! Like Tom wrote in his post Facebook on the Decline, I used to have it permanently open on a tab - but now I can go weeks between visits. For some people though, such as my happy-to-pay-friend, it still hasn’t lost it’s charm.

Overall I’d still say I’m in the ‘Love It’ camp - but only because I’ve always ignored apps I don’t want to add, and don’t let it ruin my day when someone writes on my ‘Superwall’ and I can’t access it (because I don’t have one). Having said that - I do wonder why my friends insist of sending group messages through it, rather than just a group email. They’d get a much quicker reply from me if I didn’t have to log-in there first!

So - watch these two videos - and let us know your verdict… Facebook - do you love it or hate it?!

Lovers:
Facebook Song

Haters:
Facebook Anthem

It’s an increasingly crowded online marketplace, with everyone competing for the top spots on the search engines, beating each other up with adwords and fighting for all the traffic they can get. You might have the best products in the world, but if nobody knows you exist then it’s hard to get noticed.

That’s why we’ve just released some rather cool little widgets for online shops that bridge the gap between you the merchant and the user, giving you tonnes of free exposure for your coolest products. All in a simple bit of Javascript that brings all your best products to the naturalbornshopper.com community. Just add a couple of lines of code to your product details pages and you’ll get a lovely little badge showing how popular your products are. Complete with a link that lets our users vote you up the homepage of NaturalBornShopper.com and the associated shopping guides.

For more information take a look at the widgets page on NBS.
http://www.naturalbornshopper.com/widgets

Or contact us with your specific requirements and we’ll be happy to discuss how we can bring the NaturalBornShopper community to your site.

I was just reading on the fantastic mashable.com how the readership of Facebook has apparently dipped over the past month or so, although some are putting this dip in user numbers down to ’seasonal’ factors.

There’s no denying the impact Facebook has had over here in the UK, everyone’s been talking about it over the past 6 months, but I think the recent ‘blip’ on their way to world domination is probably just the natural re-adjustment that always happens after a boom. People have just got bored and moved on… All those little apps which were fun to begin with are now just annoying, and you’ve added pretty much every friend you ever knew… Now what!? Play silly games with them? I used to login every day, but I have to admit it’s more like once every couple of weeks now.

Facebook’s not going away, and it’s great for sharing pictures and keeping in touch with people. If the folks in charge can keep a lid on the app spam, not loose the usefulness of the site and keep it ‘relevant’, then I’m sure we’ll all be logging in again soon.

Meanwhile I’m off to checkout my new twitter account…

The MocBook Air fits perfectly on any design conscious persons desk. The Air weighs an astonishing 0.0kg and it’s sleek design gives it the illusion of being so thin it’s invisible to the naked eye. It fits so well into the background you won’t even notice it’s there.

The powerful ‘coupling’ technology of the Air means that it can fully utilise the screen, hard drive, DVD drive, memory, keyboard and mouse of any computer in the vicinity.

Well the MocBook Air might not exist, but the MacBook Air certainly does and it doesn’t come cheap either! I like the way they seem to be charging more and more for progressively less… I particularly like the way they advertise how it can use the DVD drive of your existing computer… Lol… Whatever next!

It does look nice though

If, like me, you get bored of the same old songs being played over and over again on commercial radio, or find Chris Moyles just a little bit too loud on the more delicate of mornings. Then you might have trawled the Internet looking for good and original radio stations. So I thought I’d post links to a couple of stations I think are particularly cool.

The first is a station I discovered many years ago while still at uni. If you like hiphop, free-styling, James Brown, funk or any combination of the above then check out wefunkradio.com; some kind of student based station from Montreal, Canada. Not to everyones taste I realise and I got a bit of abuse from the folks at existem when I played this in the office.

My second suggestion is radiomagnetic.com. Slightly closer to home, based somewhere up north where the sun only shines for half the year but people are that little bit friendlier (possibly because they have to huddle together to keep warm). I love this station, and it’s a great alternative to your average commercial radio noise. Great music to code by as well!

If anyone out there in the aether would like to contribute with some alternatives I love variety; it being the spice of life and all that.

Cheers and happy listening!

18a have recently acquired the site wrongwrite.com - “part education, part therapy. We uncover grammatical and spelling errors on commercial signage and advertising, and share it with our loyal readers”.

So hop over and check it out - and keep us in mind next time you see a shocking typo or atrocious grammatical error from those who should know better!

www.wrongwrite.com

For anyone who’s getting fed up of all those social networking sites out there, take a look at this brand new social network that’s taking the world by storm.

Check out The Original Social Network