Tell The Internet

In this 21^st century ‘Web2.0 social networking’ twattery world in which we live, the next big thing is only ever just around the corner. For a while it looked like Myspace would rule the roost; then everyone over 13 realised it was just a migraine-inducing way for young boys pretending to be girls to talk dirty with other young boys pretending to be girls and moved onto Facebook.

Facebook was site du jour for a while and claims to have over 200 million active users. But, and it’s a big BUT; many people soon got sick of the enforced changes that made the site a pain to use, the constant barrage of advertising and the general “fuck you” attitude of the people who run it and lo! they leaveth for Twitter.

Facebook hate this. Not least because they have to have constant flow of people through the site so that they can sell page view advertising. So they hit upon a great idea to get people logging in. Somewhere, deep in the code is a tricky little algorithm that randomly disconnects a small percentage of people from the site. Just a tiny amount remember, just 0.0001%.

But, as they happily point out, the average user has 120 friends on the site. And most of these are within a text, tweet, shout across the office, messageboard post or phone call away from being asked “is Facebook down for you as well?”. The friend innocently pops over to check, they log in happily, spend 5 minutes checking their Scrabble game and being advertised at.

Thus Facebook keep their page impressions up…

Yes, I really am OCD enough to still have thisClick to make it bigger*

For this, you need to know two things:

1. Talent vacuums Peter Andre and Katie “Jordan” Price have separated after four years of marriage; and
2. Several years ago, for reasons I can’t fully remember now, I followed a year’s worth of predictions by newspaper “psychic” Mystic Meg.

Suffice to say, that Meg made a number of predictions for the coming (as was) year of 2006 in popular “newspaper” the News of the World. Over the following year I made it my tedium-filled internet business to see if any of these predictions came true. The results were pretty damning. Of the estimated 30 definitive predictions Meg made, five (5) came “true”, that’s 1/6^th of her predictions; let’s face it, you’d be able to make that amount of shit up for the next 12 months just as accurately. But Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t pay you for them.

Anyway, when the terrible news of the Andre/Price split broke on the world, I couldn’t help but recall that one of the five correct predictions Meg made was: “Jordan and Peter Andre will be lovers in 2006 and for ever…”

Oh dear. I’m not going to take any pleasure in Andre’s misfortune - he’s a close** personal friend; I am however going to take pleasure in knowing that “Mystic” Meg is even worse a psychic than I’d thought before. As a post-script, since I did all this crap, Meg has never made another series of predictions like this. Of course, she’d have known that I was going to check up on her…

* That’s what she said! etc.
** Well, I know his cousin

An odd side effect of writing my blog about old indie music - Because Midway Still Aren’t Coming Back - is that record promoters and pimpers email me and send me music to listen to in the vain hope of getting it featured on the blog. This is probably unlikely to happen for two reasons: one, none of it is a vinyl copy of a song from 1991 in the indie/C86/twee/Sarah Records genre and two, most of it is shit.

However, in an attempt to get the feel of writing about someone’s music that’s not a classic bit of twee, I thought I’d stick down a few notes about a CD I went out (well, emailed and paypalled) and bought with my own hard-earned cash. And it’s the one pictured above. It’s called “Regardez, Ecoutez et Repetez” and it’s from MJ Hibbett and the Validators, a band I’m a huge fan of.

MJ Hibbett is the man who brought us (in conjunction with Rob Manuel from B3ta) Hey Hey 16k, a lovely tribute to the old fashioned computers we had as kids, he’s also the only other person that’s featured on ‘Because Midway Still…’ thanks to Do the Indie Kid, a marvellous tale that we can all relate to.

Anyway, “Regardez…” is a proper album that that feature Indie Kid and 12 other lovely tracks. From the story of a chap who used to be in a famous indie band and is suddenly thrust back on stage in Japan (another of the side effects of ‘Because Midway Still…’ is having a long list of bands that never made it in the UK, but were big in Japan; which, along with having a lady singer, is pretty much the indiest thing you can do) and the lovely loves songs like “It only works because you’re here” - which will speak to anyone who’s ever been silently in love with a work colleague. Each of the songs is a snippet of life in the Half Man Half Biscuit mould, and each one is as good as the last.

I’m no NME reviewer, I’ll leave that to the professionals, but if you’ve got a tenner to spend on a cracking CD from a cracking band who know their way about pop, you can, and should, buy it from the band’s website, and avail yourself of the other offerings. I have, they’re great. The album is full of singalong numbers, helped by the fantastic innovation of it coming with a little booklet with all the words and chords in! Bloody ‘Girls Aloud’ wouldn’t be that kind to us.

It’s childish, but it’s fun…

click for big again

The Daily Telegraph web editors decided that, for Budget Day 2009, they’d have something called a “Twitterfall”, which is essentially a clever way of collecting everything anyone says about something, as long as they use a “hash tag”; if you don’t use Twitter, don’t worry. Try it though, it’s addictive and for reference I’m @mattkitson.

Of course, we childish internet people soon discovered that the web feed on the Telegraph budget page wasn’t filtered, so just by adding the tag “#budget” to one of your tweets, anything you typed would appear on the front page of one of Britain’s most respected newspapers pretty much immediately and without anyone apparently checking it for swears.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what sort of thing happened next:

Click to make bigger

The experiment didn’t last very long…