While I’m not a fan of the execution of the widget which I find overly complex, I’m a supporter of the cause, so have embedded the widget below. Click on ‘grab it’ on the bottom of the widget to do so yourself and select ‘videos’ from the option.

You can check out progress by clicking on the yellow leaf icon on the bottom right of the widget.

Update: boo, it’s stopped at 100k trees. Not bad going all the same.

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To get a simple feed of thumbnail images to appear on the blog, I experimented with several of the Flickr plugins available on the Wordpress Plugin Directory, but was frustrated that either my version of Wordpress was not compatible, the plugin resulted in a code error or it wasn’t the functionality that I wanted. I won’t name names of the plugins, but needless to say it was a very frustrating evening messing around with code…

Equally frustrating was not spotting the Flickr badge tool buried in the Flickr site nav. Setting it up through the simple wizard was quick and intuitive and mercifully it worked first time.

If only I’d read a blog post like this, I could have saved myself a considerable amount of time…

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First up is a fake joint venture between Virgin and Google to setup the first colony on Mars, complete with a toe-curlingly awkward video from Google’s founders themselves (embeded below).

Second, is actually a pretty amusing and bold effort from YouTube who are RickRolling all of their featured videos in the UK and Australia to redirect them to Rick Astley’s cheesefest ‘Never Gonna Give You Up‘ complete with his hypnotically strange dancing.

A good day to throw off the corporate shackles and show you have a sense of humour.

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In an impressively off-the-cuff talk, he gave his opinion on the history and direction of enterprise software design, which reaffirmed my belief that simple common sense is one of the most valuable qualities in business.

Among my takeaways as a non programmer:

- Make whatever you design reversible, e.g. Object Orientated Programming

- Design (software) and code at the same time

- Stay technology agnostic, keeping to general principles

- Look backwards, not forwards: The role of technology gurus is spreading awareness and take up of existing technologies rather than the dangerous game of trying to second guess where individual technologies will go

- Communication, communication, communication: Find a common language to communicate with your stakeholders and involve them often and early.

- Drink lots of water when you’re speaking…

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Perhaps the most interesting in the post is the Forrester prediction that Facebook will overtake MySpace in terms of registered users by end 2008. Feels about right until you look at the stats on display.

The stats claim 60m active users at present versus 110m for MySpace (but don’t state registered user numbers) - would it really double in a year given its high penetration in the key US market (85% of universities)? And yet, there’s the stat about active users doubling every six months, so it’s possible.

And what about MySpace’s likely growth, particularly when you consider one of the other statistics? Facebook’s average of 250k registrations a day versus MySpace’s 300k. Some catching up to do surely?

Brings to mind the old adage about the three types of lie: “lies, damn lies and (social networking) statistics”, as Jeremiah alludes to in a follow up post.

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However, it may still need a little work…

I was more than a little surprised to see the top recommendation coming from the delicately named, Arseblog. Even more delicate was the description (hopefully the blog editor’s not Google’s): ‘It’s f**king excellent’!

Fortunately, further explanation is at hand with the additional descriptive text identifying it as ‘an Arsenal blog’. Oh.

Among the work feeds, I also subscribe to the BBC Sport feed, so I can understand how it may have picked out a football blog for me. Leaving aside the question of picking out a specific club’s blog (notoriously dodgy ground), you’d hope that Google would invest in some kind of swear filter to protect the minds of innocents.

As for me, the swearing I could cope with, but the recommendation of club was the real insult!

See below for the offending screengrab (’oops’ icon added by me).

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No longer. Some influential soul discovered TechnoCloud and gave it the thumbs up to recommend it to other users. Cue a relative flood of traffic to the site.

Having enjoyed some brief spurts of traffic via Digg and Reddit in the past, the Stumblers seem a slightly different breed. Rather than the crash and burn mentality of leaving at the first click, Stumblers stayed longer and actually read some additional pages to see just why some of their fellow Stumblers thought it worthy of a thumbs up.

(It should be pointed out that this is partly due to a thumbs up for the homepage rather than a specific page, but I think the point still stands.)

See the record day in the chart below and happy Stumbling!

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Passing over the fact that most of the old favourites are there yet again, a piece of viral marketing for the album caught my eye.

The viral, also available as a Facebook application, allows you to create your own version of the famous ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video where Dylan nonchalantly holds up lyric cards. In a neat piece of creative you can add your own lyrics to the cards and watch Dylan flick through them followed by a plug for the album.

You can share it via Facebook, email the website version to a friend (with the classic subject line ‘Bob Dylan has a message for you’ or embed it on your blog or social network after the slightly annoying step of having to provide a url and email address.

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Quite why a search company like Google wouldn’t include the ability to search your feeds as feature no. 1 was as baffling as it was ironic. Finally this has been addressed (but no explanation as to why it took so long) with a simple and effective search field at the top. Job done.

Another source of frustration was with the number of posts display. Once it got to over 100 on an individual feed or on all items, it simply said 100+. So after more than a few days away, half an hour’s feed reading through the likes of Mashable and Techmeme refused to make a dent leaving me wondering just how long I should persevere. A source of stress when you don’t want to miss any nuggets, but do have a finite time to do research.

This has also finally been addressed ramping it up to 1000+ leaving it perfectly clear just how many posts I need to plough through to catch up. Perhaps ignorance was bliss after all…

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fun and easy way to get to know your neighbors, create local communities and keep tabs on the neighborhood.

I can’t help but think there are more effective ways that involve less technology.  Maybe next we’ll see a social networking site that provides a fun and easy way of establishing a relationship with your children.

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