In case you’ve managed to somehow avoid all the excitement, the drone is caused by an incredibly loud and irrating plastic horn blown at football matches by everybody in South Africa: the Vuvuzela.  The effect on telly is like a swarm of angry wasps hanging just outside your living room door.

The catch is, you need to be watching the world cup on your computer using software that can use the plugin.  Still, we applaud the effort.

Tesco has become an absolute global monolith, but not just in terms of supermarkets.  Few realise fully the power which Tesco is now wielding, armed with massive reserves of cash, detailed personal behavioural information on millions of citizens (via shopping pattern analysis, “club cards”,  Tesco mobile phones, Tesco credit cards and a ream of other financial offerings) and a stranglehold which is killing off the domestic food industry, all led by a highly efficient, profit-maximising and ruthless international management.  The implications of this vast power are staggering and could lead to intrusion and exploitation in almost any area of people’s lives in the future.

This particular story focusses on Tesco claiming that it had ‘never heard’ of the slogan “Change for Good” being used by Unicef on Aer Lingus for the past twenty two years.  The Unicef “Change for Good” campaign, which collects change from air passengers, has been one of their most successful campaigns ever collecting over six million euro in donations since its launch in 1987.  Tesco has now adopted this same slogan for its recent cost cotting promotions to the dismay of Unicef and the disgust of many informed people. 

This is “the first time in Unicef’s history that a commercial entity has purposely set out to capitalise on one of our campaigns”, said executive director, Melanie Verwoerd.

John has picked this up, however, and as a counter gesture has initiated an online petition opposing the move based at www.EveryLittleHelps.ie.  Nice one John.  Shame on you, Tesco. *

* If Tesco are genuine in their claim that they were unaware of the ongoing Unicef campaign by the same name, I call on them to donate an ongoing portion of their profits to offset the damage to Unicef.

Claire, 24, decided to change her name when she was drunk one night and because “it would be a laugh and it only costs a tenner”.  She plans to sell her art from the site and the story has got her lots of interviews and attention.

The bank had no problem using her new name; Facebook refused, however.

See more here.

Bill signed up and promptly got 10,000 requests to be his “friend”, which he admits overwhelmed him.  He especially found the process of reviewing new friend requests too arduous.  I wonder how far he got?

Read the full story here.

• 80% of TV commercials are for fast food, candy, cereal and toys.
• Kids see more than a quarter of a million commercials aimed at their appearance by age 17, with the result that The number one wish for girls ages 11 to 17 is to be thinner; boys 11 to 17 want a physical ideal that can only be achieved through steroid use.
• Watching a lot of sexual content on TV greatly increases the chance that a teen will have sex at an earlier age.
• 1 hour of TV per day are 4 times more likely than other teens to commit aggressive acts in adulthood.
• By the time kids reach middle school, they will have seen 8,000 murders and 100,000 violent acts of violence on TV alone.

See the full article here.

..according to Glimpse of the Future by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod.

To give an indication of just how precious Ireland is about allowing a .ie domain to be registered, check out the latest worldwide registration figures (.ie appears very last but one).

This weekend, my mother-in-law asked me to enter a life of crime.

Not in the real world, of course – she’d like the father of her grandkids to remain jail-free. No, instead she invited me to play that Mafia game that’s so popular on Facebook.

Not interested in the game, I politely declined. But when my mother-in-law, who has just joined Facebook, becomes part of an online trend, that’s a sure sign that it’s hitting critical mass in the population at large.

Facebook is quickly becoming the immovable object that will soon butt heads with Google’s irresistible force.

Strength In Overwhelming Numbers

Facebook claims that its subscriber base doubled in size between February and April of 2009 – just sixty days. That’s not only impressive for a site as huge as Facebook already is, but it means that your mother-in-law is likely on Facebook just like mine, and one of them is probably about to order a Mafia hit on the other.

That growing audience means traffic to any website that gets a link on Facebook. How much traffic? The analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google – more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about web traffic is about to get turned on its ear…

Read on at http://www.copyblogger.com/facebook-killing-seo/

Sometimes seems to have problems displaying in IE7 so check it out using Firefox or Google Chrome.