Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

22-09-2006

by Damien Mulley

Friday is OneWebDay, the mission of which is to create, maintain, advance, and promote a global day to celebrate online life. What better way to celebrate this then to look at how blogs are celebrating online life.

The "We make money not art" blog talks about an umbrella straight out of Blade Runner. The Pileus umbrella, as well as trying to keep you dry from the rain, is a camera and a photo browser. A built-in projector at the base displays photos on the inside of the umbrella canopy. It's still a concept device but it won't be long before we're praying for more rain so we can show off our photo collections.

The internet can help you get free money, according to Brian over at dogg.ie. He notes that a few bloggers have discovered that some ATM machines are using the default passwords that came with the machines, and these passwords can easily be found using a web search. It seems some of these machines were reprogrammed by some members of the public to give out free money.

The Out Law blog notes that a former British spy, banned from publishing his book revealing details of his life as a spy, has turned to the internet to release the book. The first chapter of the book is already online.

Joe Drumgoole points out that Amazon's latest service allows you to physically store your goods in Amazon warehouses. The service means that Amazon comes and picks up your goods and then ships them to anywhere in the world when they are sold through their service.

Donncha O'Caoimh reports that there are now even bloggers in space. Anousheh Ansari is one of the first space tourists and has been blogging about the preparations before going into orbit; she has promised to blog while in space too.

Techcrunch reports on Citizenbay, a service that wants bloggers to act as reporters for local news. Citizenbay will then allow the audience to decide which are the best stories and will in turn pay the contributors for them.

We've had the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon where bloggers helped write and market a movie, and now Smartmobs reports on film project called "A Swarm of Angels" The project aims to collaborate online with 10,000 people to finance and produce a film and then give it away to a million people.

Lastly, we all know how waif supermodels won't get out of bed for less than USD10,000 but Pat Phelan points out that the 22 year-old boss of Facebook wouldn't get out of bed earlier than 8am to talk to Microsoft even when they were offering him hundreds of millions of dollars for his company.

Happy OneWebDay!

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