Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

I’d not really seen much of Dave Chapelle before, but an online buddy from Norway sent me this video. I don’t usually like to put videos on my blog, but this was awesome!

I see London’s Metro is keeping up-to-date. They ran an article this morning “scooping” the fact that “criminals” are selling items and currency for online games such as World of Warcraft and Everquest. This is old news: it has been happening ever since Everquest was released in 1999.

On a more up-to-date note, Wired Online ran an article about musicians holding virtual concerts in a MMORPG setting.

MMORPG stands for “Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game”, an online computer role-playing game (RPG) in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world. Players appear in the game as “Avatars“, graphical representations of themselves.

The article describes artists, such as Suzanne Vega, holding a concert through their online avatars. The concert was attended by perhaps a few dozen people in “person” (ie. their avatars were there). This was due to the technical limitations of the MMORPG they were playing: the system simply couldn’t support any more people in the virtual concert hall. The BBC itself has also staged its “Big Weekend 2006″ in the Second Life space.

Of course, a lot of the addictive draw of online gaming is to do with the grinding for cash or items and other so-called “Time Sinks“, but the social element is also very important to a lot of people. The “just another couple of minutes” effect is often to do with a positive feeling of not wanting to let your friends down, rather than purely a negative avoiding real life reponsibilities. People really are building viable communities and friendships online that often spill out into “Real-Life” interactions.

The ability to interact with, not just watch, your entertainment is clearly the way things are going to go. Check out what is happening with Windows Vista and Web 2.0. We’re moving from a publishing/ Media consumer model to a model that supports user-driven content and social networks.

Back to the concert. Sure, it was limited, but big things start small. With the gradual convergence of traditional TV technology and digital/ broadband in the near future, could this be a viable future channel for celebrities and their fans to interact?

I’m looking at upgrading my mobile phone. I’m not sure which network to pick as T-Mobile has crappy reception in my area but is fairly cheap. Vodafone seems fairly reliable and is very expensive.

I’m considering either sticking with T-Mobile or switching to maybe Three (on price). Any advice on a good network to go for would be appreciated. 

Imagine my amusement this morning, on visiting the Orange site and keying in “N80″ (the model of the handset I’ll likely go for) and seeing this search result. It seems that Orange isn’t too keen on selling me a phone!

One of my all-time favourite gags!!

Some girl in America has linked to an image on my site without asking permission, taking the sunset from a diving holiday in the Red Sea and using it as her background. She didn’t even make a copy of my image - she linked directly to it, taking my bandwidth and not even crediting me with the photo, although I think that’s more some image sharing site’s fault, rather than anything malicious on her part:

Here’s her lovely MySpace page, before my improvements:

And here’s her site after I decided to have a little fun by renaming some files on my site and moving a few things around:

The site has been updated since, to undo the improvement, but not before several visitors remarked at how… curious her new background was.