Bedpost: Track your sex life online

Internet dating must mean that more people are having dates and meeting up than ever before. Invariably this means that people are also having more sexual encounters, right? I’ve always wondered how, if one was so sexually active, you’d remember all the different people you encountered. Oddly enough about 4 years ago I had the idea for this site – an online diary of who you slept with and how they were – but I did nothing about it!

Bedpost lets you create an account where you can track your sexual activity. You tell it who you slept with, how long it lasted and give them a 5 star rating. It’s all a bit impersonal but if you’re the woman/man about town, maybe it’s just what you need.

The site is currently in private beta but I see so many applications for it. You could be reminded to have a sexual health check-up after every x number of shags, or if it starts to notice you’re having an enjoyable relationship with someone, suggest chocolate, flowers or sex toys as a gift. Do dating sites ask you to rate someone after you’ve met them? This is just a natural follow on to that.

It appears they are launching a ‘partner account’ which I can only assume would mean people in regular sexual relationships could rate each other and see if there was a differing of performance opinion. I’ll watch this site with, ahem, interest.

Plan your journey with an iPod playlist

I’m no driver but I like new sites that mash things up and give you some sort of tangible output. harman/kardon Aplified Journeys does just that.

The premise of the site is you get driving directions along with a personalised playlist for your journey.

The playlist is based on either an artist of your choice, a genre of music or your mood.

You can then decide whether your playlist is built based on driving directions (so the Oversley Mill Roundabout on the A429 for some reason triggers It’ll Take Millions in Plastic Surgery to Make Me Black by Kid 606), dictated by landmarks along the route (which resulted in nothing for the Evesham to London route I looked up) or by bands that are linked to places on your journey. Apparently the 4th exit on the M40 ramp to London/Banbury is linked to Coco Lee, whoever that is, and her song Belly Dance.

Once you’ve picked your playlist, you can email it, print it or export it to your iPod. If you print directions out, you are told the reasons for match, which in most cases for my route were either because ‘London’ was in the track name or the song, was considered ‘upbeat’, my chosen journey mood.

Right now I think it’s a great bit of fun to have a site suggest tracks for you to listen to in addition to the Google Map directions output but I don’t yet see its value.

What would make this a useful tool is it suggesting music I already own, or letting me pick what percentage of new music I’d be willing to buy for my journey.

Should I ever start driving I’ll give it a go and tell you how I get on!

Company Blocks ‘Reply All’ Email Function – Brilliant Move

I love this so so so much. Nielsen, the audeince measuring company, have blocked the use of Reply All in the Microsoft Office email clients of every single one of their 35,000 staff. What a fantastic idea!

According to an email sent to all staff:

Eliminating the “Reply to All” function will:

• Require us to copy only those who need to be involved in an e-mail conversation
• Reduce non-essential messages in mailboxes, freeing up our time as well as server space

We waste so much time reading emails that aren’t really intended for us or have no relevance to our daily lives and though I understand that this move was because of a cock up by an employee last year, I hope it sets a prescience.

Source: techcrunch

Bad NASA – They Faked an image

I wouldn’t be able to tell if this is real or not. It all looks a bit Star Trek to me.

Apparently a blogger at Discover Magazine picked it up straight away!

Online Pawn Broker – Borro

Has the bank refused you for a credit card? Can’t get someone to tide you over until payday? Find it really difficult to walk into a pawn brokers in case someone spots you? Well this might be a great way of getting cash now and worrying about how you’ll pay it back, if at all, later.

The site launched back last year and offers short term personal loans with a valuable item held as a guarantee. Gold, jewellery, even cars with a resale value over £25,000 are all acceptable pawning items. The item is checked into Borro’s site and valued. A courrier comes to collect it and then on receipt and accurate valuation, Borro dumps 40% of the object’s resale value into your bank account. Should they take the plunge, the borrower couriers their item to Borro, receiving their loan via bank transfer or postal order. The interest rate is “4% simple interest per month” (a whopping 53.8%APR), and for loans of less than £1000 charges are 6% “simple interest per month” (an eye watering 85.0%APR) but you are expected to pay the loan back in 6 months to get your item back, so it would be unfair to compare this to a longer term method of lending, such as a bank loan. Unless you fail to pay, that is!

This sitebrings a  shady and poorly marketed industry into a more modern and acceptable arena. It will be interesting to see at this time of credit crisis crunching capers whether it becomes a viable method to borrow over a short term.

Source: Borro

Brilliant Flickr Tool

I love it when I find things like this. The Multicolr Search Lab allows you filter images from Flickr that have a Creative Commons license by the domiant colours. I’ve used tools like this before where you can pick one colour but this one lets you pick up to 10! Arghh I am in love. At least for the next day or two until I get bored.

Aside from being available for Flickr, it’s also available for Alamy stock phototgraphy.

AOL’s probably going to sell Bebo

I’m not really that surprised though.

Design Student? Run run as fast as you can!

As the recession bites it seems that senior industry figures who have experienced working through a recession, unlike anyone born in the late 70s or 80s, are willing to dispense lots of advice. The latest bit? If you’re a design student you’re wasting your time as there aren’t enough jobs.

Ian Cochrane, managing director of management consultancy Ticegroup, is quoted in Design Week as saying “‘Look for jobs in industries that have vacancies – I mean, if you want to design restaurants, it is good to have worked in one or two”. I have to admit this made me smirk, I used to be aghast at the quality of candidates we’d receive CVs from directly or, worse still, from recruitment agencies.

Many of the design candidates I see for Acknowledgement come out of university with a portfolio that would put GCSE students to shame and a CV with more spelling and gramatical mistakes than this blog (and that’s saying something!)

They don’t spend time researching our company, the clients we work with or have a critical view of our past work. In addition many couldn’t effectively communicate their own creative process. What many of them do for three years, or more, at University baffles me (but doesn’t keep me awake at night).

Occasionally you’d come across gems: they we the polor oppositie of everything above and seemed to have a passion for doing a great job. We would hire those ones, or at least try to as they’d also get snapped up by the competition.

So I think it’s very wise to advise design students, as Cochrane has, to seek alternative routes to employment but what about those currently studying a design course with their sights set on working for a digital agency? I think there is still a market out there for great digital talent and here are my (non-designer) tips for standing out:

• Be a good designer. Sounds daft but if you can’t create digital media akin to the stuff you see major brands turning out then maybe this isn’t your industry!
• Have an online portfolio that demonstrates you understand the full breadth of digital work. So aside from webpage designs, include banners, widgets, sites that are focused around typography, email designs, ecommerce designs, interstitial pages, rollovers, video players.. anything that goes beyond just a website/banner design will stand out.
• Your portfolio should contain lots of real world brands even if you haven’t actually worked on them.
• Show you can use Flash and also have a good understanding of ActionScript – you wouldn’t believe how much more desirable you become
• Have a critical view on digital design. Be prepared to criqitue the work of others constructivly and suggest how you would make improvements for the benefit of the client and end user. It’s often easy to forget that as a digital designer you’re working to please three groups: the place you work, the business that’s appointed them and the end users of said business.
• Become immersed in social media: twitter, myspace, linkedin, last,fm.. any of it. Use it often, do it well. Make it part of your portfolio. Try to use the same username across everything you want an employer to find but at the same time, watch out for those pics of you trashed at a friend’s house part on flickr also with the same username!
• Make sure your spelling is perfect. So many design student CVs I’ve reviewed have spelling mistakes so those who can spell, use apostrophies and know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ really stand out!
• Ask for feedback if you get turned away and tell them you want some honesty. Usually people I’ve turned away never ask why but when they do I try to be as constructive as possible. I imagine many other people would do the same.

I can’t draw for toffee and I’ve never opened an adobe application apart from PDF viewer. I can, however, count on one hand the number of entry level digital designers who’ve done just half of the above. They really do stand out!

Anyway, careers advice over. I’m off to get myself a geography tecacher styled cardigan.

Facebook & chums beat porn in the UK

Old news, as apparently the BBC covered this last week, but still it’s worth mentioning as it’s gone against a trend that I have grown up with: the most popular stuff on the internet is porn.

Hitwise reported something that in the UK social networking websites are now more popular than adult sites. It adds this happened in the US mid-2007 but since then there hasnn’t been a clear and outright leader.

It’s quite interesting to see that as we start to embrace the internet as a daily part of our lives, rather than a source of.. ahem.. entertainment or something we use at work, how the online norms I’ve lived with in the past 15 years are now being challenged.

Source: hitwise

France gifts every 18 year old with a newspaper subscription

Turning 18 in the UK means you can now legally do a lot of the stuff you’ve been doing since you were 12 (drinking, smoking, watching dirty films, etc) but France are going to mark this milestone with something a little more special, a newspaper subscription. Aside from this being a nice, if novel, gift from President Sarkozy, it’s also something that’s being put in place by the state to ensure the longevity of the press industry.

The majority of people turning 18 in western Europe will have grown up with the internet being a significant part of their daily lives so this feels a little like the state trying to get people to watch black and white TVs when there really isn’t any need. Especially as I assume most French newspapers will be online. I started to think this level of protectionism was silly and unnecessary, then I remembered RBS and Lloyds bank!

Source: Google