Fun – Page 61 – Changing Way

Zlango Has a Way to Go

Zlango 1 Zlango is an icon-based language. Here are a couple of recent takes on it.

Israel-based Zlango will announce a $12 million round of financing tomorrow… launched the Zlango icon-based SMS service in the middle of 2006… The press release for the financing… was written in Zlango with an English translation.
Zlango could evolve in all sorts of interesting ways, particularly if its users are allowed to innovate and determine how new symbols should be added.

I want to like Zlango, but found it frustrating to get the above very simple message into this post. What I wanted was a the URL of an image so that I could link to it. I ended up emailing the message to myself and uploading the file, which was one of four attachments to the resulting email.

I also wanted to use words not currently available in Zlango, such as share, to see the page on which “my” messages were posted, to link to that page,…

So I hope that Zlango will use the $12M of funding reported in the first of the above quotes to implent the advice offered in the second quote. Then “we help Zlango help us,” words such as we will be added to the language, and the above message won’t have to be a palindrome for ever.

Mobile Music (Station)

Yes.

Rather than just providing a grumpy old answer to the hip young guy in the picture, perhaps I should provide a little more detail about:

MusicStation, an all-you-can-eat (AYCE) full-track mobile music service which will be rolled-out in partnership with major music labels, mobile operators and mobile industry partners across the world.

There, now I’ve done it. But DRM certainly doesn’t make it more interesting…

Andi Watson, Artist

If you haven’t yet followed the link from the image to the comic, the caption tells us that “Maddy is haunted by the ghosts of relationships past.” That was a little weird to me, since my daughter’s name is Maddie Watson.

Even without coincidence of names, the comic is well worth checking out. So is Andi (short for Andrew, but it’s not me) Watson’s other work. I found out about this fellow Andrew Watson via Drawn!

New Camera

We recently got a new digital camera, a Canon PowerShot A540 6MP. So far, so good. It’s amazing how much camera you get for a couple of hundred bucks these days.

The previous camera, a Casio, gave up the ghost about the one-year mark. I liked the camera before that, which was a Canon my wife gave me as a present. So we went back to Canon. I was thinking of holding off on the purchase, since Canon are coming out with some new models soon, but it’s hard to be without a camera when one has young kids at home.

Flixster

Flixster is a movie social network, recently written up on TechCrunch and on Read/Write Web. Each of the writeups focuses on Flixster as a social network centered on movies.

That is of course an accurate way of looking at Flixster, but I’m inclined to come at it from the other direction, and look at it as a movie site including social networking. So my main point of comparison is IMDB, which is mentioned by neither TC nor RWW.

RWW does make the comparison with a couple of other movie sites: “the recent hit movie Dream Girls has been rated by 4,600 Flixter users… 5,000 times on… Fandango and only 300 times on AOL Movies.” IMDB has 6,300 ratings of this movie, and so is not so far ahead of Flixster.

I find IMDB annoying, partly due to its ugly layout, and partly due to its requiring registration to see the message boards. Flixster’s layout is more appealing, and it appears to require registration only for the things that it’s really needed for (e.g., My Friends’ Reviews).

So, a tentative thumbs up for Flixster as a movie site with social networking.

Sins, Deadly, Paired, and Indexed

Many things are indexed by Jessica Hagy. Much linkage ensues, but not, until now, from me. But I love this pairing-off of the seven deadly sins. My favorite is: Greed + Envy = Advertising.

M Ward Music and…

M Ward is one of those critically acclaimed folk-musicky types I tend to like. But I couldn’t get into Transistor Radio, his 2005 album.

I really like his 2006 album, Post-War. Having got into PW, I went back to listen to TR again, and was wondering how it left me cold, while I warmed so quickly to PW. I seems as though I need to listen more to both albums, and to his earlier work.

I also like:

I Am the Resurrection, the John Fahey tribute album MW worked on.
Being able to link to Amazon pages for CDs, books, etc. But it doesn’t seem easy to do this here. But more of WordPress.com, and the pleasure and pain thereof, in a future post.
The ease of embedding YouTube video here. For example, here’s the video for MW’s “Chinese Translation.”