I’ve just added a BlogMap to the blogroll - it’s right down at the bottom if you want to have a look. It’s quite an interesting idea that uses GPS coordinates to locate blogs, and displays them on a map so that you can see nearby bloggers. There aren’t very many around here, apparently…Closest is in Acocks Green (no apostrophe). The site uses Microsoft MapPoint instead of the wonderful Google Maps, so isn’t quite so versatile as the GeoBlogging system, for example. Also when I first added my site using GPS co-ordinates it located me in the centre of Yorkshire, which was chilly, and I had to email to get it set up correctly. Still, I like the concept. I imagine there’ll be people who wouldn’t want to put their GPS location on their blog, and I thought twice before realising I was heading down the well-worn path of privacy paranoia (don’t get me started.)

IT’S HERE! I present to you the Eurovision Song Contest Decision Making Tally Counting Act Judging Generator Machine! This astonishing chart will enable you to judge this evening’s Eurovision acts with previously unheard of clarity! Carefully chosen criteria will allow you to decide on your ideal winner, ensuring less stress, a fuller life, general happiness, sexual fulfillment and your choice of Caribbean islands! And you know what? It’s free. Yes, I have chosen to supply this incredible piece of spreadsheet perfection for no material gain.

A crack-squad of impervious monkeys have analysed every act in Eurovision history, and before hurling themselves into the nearest blast furnace produced the following categories:

• Originality (based on what you’ve seen before, not including this year)
• Amusingnessness
• Dance Routine - Energy
• Dance Routine - Innuendo
• Overall Campage
• Catchiness
• Level of Irritation
• Size of Chesticles / Package of main singers
• Visibility of Chesticles / Package of main singers
• General Exposed Flesh
• General Clothing Style
• Croonage
• Cheesy Smiles
• Lyrics
• Cringeworthiness
• Singing Ability of main singers

This nigh-on miraculous generator also takes account of the proclivities of the public. If you are a massive fan of croonage, for example, you may award 10 points for a Michael Bolton wannabee. If you are not, however, you may award only one point and what is more remember which standard you have used for all 24 acts of the evening. Stunning. Or. What.

Excel Version
OpenOffice.Org Version

Enjoy.

Anyone seen the new BBC Weather displays? They’re cool! You can see where rain / sun / clouds are predicted much more accurately than before. I always felt a bit sorry for Wales, which generally had just the one logo overhead. Now you can see small pockets of cloud and rain appearing as the hours go by. Once I figured out that light = sun, shaded = cloud, I could see what was going on very easily.

Hopefully they’ll be able to use the new technology to compare these maps with the actual results, so we’ll be able to see how accurate it is. I’m not making any sly references there - I studied some meteorology briefly and sympathise hugely with anybody who tries to make any predictions! When chaos theory comes into play, you know you’re dealing with some complex systems. Incidentally, the computers than power it are ’standard’ desktop machines:

• Dual 3.06GHz Xeon Processors (533MHz FSB / 1MB cache)
• 2 GB Dual Channel DDR 266Mhz ECC SDRAM
• 2 SCSI 73GB (15,000rpm) hard drives
• Ultra 320/M SCSI Controller Card
• NVidia FX6800 Ultra 256MB graphics card

Damn, apparently my computer wouldn’t be up to displaying the weather map. This calls for an upgrade.

This is just brilliant. Add the latitude and longitude of the photo location to your flickr tags and this site will display a google map with a photo preview at the location marked. For example, this shot of York Minster should work…I don’t know if this’ll catch on as it’s a bit of a fuss, but it’s very, very cool.

Update: flickr have linked to it from their (excellent) blog, so hopefully that’ll get the traffic up somewhat.

You owe it to yourself to listen to this. It’s all taken from genuine speeches, according to boingboing. I’m in awe of these kind of remixes.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for a few weeks now, and it’s Just Great. It’s an online favourites manager, and is easily the best I’ve ever used in that department. Once you’ve signed up for a free account you simply add a button to your web browser, and you click it whenever you want to save the page you’re reading. You can then add ‘tags’ to the link, to help you find it again later. Tags are basically keywords, so if you added wongaBlog you’d probably tag it as ‘blog’, ‘weird’, ‘monkeys’ and similar. All links I think people would find interesting are tagged with ‘wongablog’, and you can see these are displayed in a box on the blogroll. My entire links list can be found here. The front page of del.icio.us shows all the links that people have added, which is fascinating to browse. All tags (both general and specific to you) are available as RSS feeds, too.

Tagging, incidentally, is turning out to be way more intuitive than you’d think. flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us make heavy use of tags over more traditional folder structures, and I’m starting to agree with a blog post I read recently in which the author said he wished his hard drive could be organised in a similar way.

There’s also populicio.us, which displays the most popular links from the last 24 hours. This is a great way to find interesting sites in advance of the major websites catching on - I’d read the World Greatest Hacker post way before it started getting worldwide attention.

One of my favourite blogs is Lifehacker, and catching up on posts today resulted in many new del.icio.us links. For example, I’ve just set up the suggestions in this article on iTunes management, and it’s working great! I also found a tutorial on cheaply making a tivo-like machine, as well as learning that if you eat something 8-10 times you’ll start to like it (there’s apparently no genetic reason for us not to eat anything, it’s entirely learnt).

Most importantly, though, there’s this list of why geeks make good boyfriends, which you should forward to everyone you know.

Also somewhat Yoda-like. Utter genius. Link via Ben Hammersley.

Yahoo purchased flickr last month, and today the flickrblog has news of the first benefits from this deal. It’s very cool, actually. Standard users have double the capacity and bandwidth - 200 photos and 20mb/month respectively. Anybody who, like me, purchased a pro account before yesterday gets a similar doubling of bandwidth up to 2gb / month. They also get a free year’s extension on their account as well as two free pro accounts to give to anybody they wish. Very interesting and much appreciated - thanks, flickr!

Google Maps and Google Local today launched in the UK. I’m happy to say it works just as well as the USA one, with a local search for ‘pizza’ finding all the local procurers of said delicacy as well as pinpointing them on the map. Google SMS is apparently also working in the UK, so if you’re standing in York you can text ‘york.coffee’ to 64664 (6GOOG), and receive locations for the nearest Starbucks etc. That could come in really handy! UPDATE: The wallet-sized tip sheet is probably worth printing off, too.

Yahoo, despite putting on a great appearance of being old-and-busted, yesterday launched a Creative Commons search engine. An excellent idea, although I’m rather hoping Google sort out their own version soon. And yep, we‘re in it already…

You know what I just typed? I’m such a failure. For I have, for you, another boingboing link. But it’s a cool one, so you’ll forgive me. Won’t you? Please? I present to you the anti-gravity room. I’m shutting the computer down now. I am.

Wooo, I like it. People have set their background images to photographs of the area behind their monitors. I’m going to have to have a go now!

Thanks to boingboing for the link.

Oh. Wow. I’m almost tempted to forget my exams and just buy one.