Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

17-07-2007

by Damien Mulley

Barbies, clouds, bubbles and whacky police chiefs. Is Rattleblog losing the tech plot?

In the last episode of Rattleblog we made it an iPhone-free episode and so to carry on the "going without will make us appreciate it more" theme, we will avoid mentioning the largest search engine and advertising company in the world. Just this one time though. I'm sure we'll all cope.

She's a Barbie girl and in her Barbie world there've been 3 million people join up in two months. Yes, according to the Scientific American blog, the new virtual world for Barbie has seen millions of people join and it still hasn't officially launched. It took Second Life three years to get a million users, yet Barbie's World is signing up 50,000 people a day.

When the BBC recently launched its internet content player, a lot bloggers let rip because it used Digital Rights Management provided by Microsoft. Ian Betteridge points out though that the BBC had no choice as the very restrictive copyright and public policy laws mean that it has to restrict how many people can watch the BBC content online. Just like the aerials that Irish people use to pick up the BBC TV signals, we're sure that someone will come up with a digital version of this.

CNet reports on the hush hush Microsoft Cloud OS, which will store your data in the Microsoft data servers scattered around the globe, and all for free. It seems that this service is going to be launched before that other giant tech company that starts with a G.

The good ole bubble days must be back again as Techcrunch reports that a bunch of ex-Microsoft people have created a flower company; a virtual flower company. We're pretty sure some investor has funded them too. Maybe we'll see a virtual shamrock company form here. We don't mind as long as we get brought to the company launch and they have real, not virtual canapes and fizzy drinks.

Meanwhile, staying with the return of the bubble, the latest tech fad is Facebook and anyone that does anything with Facebook has cash just thrown at them, or so it appears. Now a well-respected investment company is investing in companies that build widgets for people on Facebook to play with. We really have to wonder how an individual can make money from building small software applications for Facebook, let alone an investment powerhouse that generally expects to make back 10 times what it put in.

Staying with Facebook, it appears it's no longer interested in selling itself off to the highest bidder, but instead might go for an IPO. Wasn't that the most overused phrase during the bubble, except for maybe "bubble"?

The modern seven wonders of the world were recently unveiled and there was lots of controversy over what made and did not make the list. The tech world also has many wonders, as well as horrors and the Remarketer blog has suggested a controversial list too, which includes the Hubble Space Telescope, the Industrial Light and Magic Data Centre, and the all-glass Apple store in New York.

Engadget tells us to ready ourselves for all new kinds of muscle aches where we never had them before as Nintendo releases its Exercise Board. Running, skipping, jumping and dancing could be all components of computer games in the next few months. With the weather we're having this summer, the Wii Exercise Board is perfect for kids bored inside their homes.

Lastly, what are the Aussie cops putting into their coffee? Bruce Schneier points out that an Australian police chief warned that the biggest threat in the future will be rogue half-human, half-robots, hell bent on causing crime. As the ever-wise Alf Roberts would say: that bloke is a few shrimps short of a barbee.

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and works as a technical writer in Cork.