With bloggers all over the world exchanging recommendations and MP3 samples, MAP is getting new music to a broad global audience It was a weird day on 16 July 2009 for the Holy Roman Army, a tasteful, glitchy electronica duo from Carlow, Ireland. The brother and sister group are small-time, with just over 37,000 profile views on MySpace, 1,485 plays of their most popular song and two upcoming gig...
From those folks at CXO, a quick way of assessing whether your password actually stops bad people, er, passing Photo from Flickr. CC-BY licensed Those folks over at CXO have been playing with Google Mail's password strength meter. It turns out - as if you needed to be told - that simple dictionary words such as "princess" or well-known phrases such as "biteme" (yes, Bart Simpson, I'm t...
Reuters has published some social media guidelines in its handbook of journalism. Dean Wright, Reuters' global editor for ethics, innovation and news standards, announced the new guidelines yesterday. While the guidelines encourage Reuters journalists to use social media and stress that it is a powerful new tool, Reuters journalists are asked to get in contact with their line manager if they...
Many Catholic priests and religious have abused children in their care. But is the church's record worse than the world's? There seems to be no end to the scandals buffeting the Roman Catholic church about the abuse of children; most recently in Germany , where the headmaster a school associated with a choir once run by the pope's elder brother Georg Ratzinger has been exposed as an abuser. And ...
Jesse Divnich of EEDAR recons this is just the beginning of a new industry power struggle... Last week began with two staff members allegedly being escorted from their development studio by burly security guards. It ended with a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the biggest games publisher in the world. And while gamers are frantically trying to work out what the Infinity Ward/Activision sa...
Rather than axing a brilliant, distinctive service like 6 Music the BBC should close down BBC2 daytime If 6 Music played classical music, the BBC wouldn't touch it. But pop music can be distinctive too and Phill Jupitus was right to call the proposal to axe it "cultural vandalism". The BBC's management should change their minds, and if they don't the BBC Trust should turn this down. I admit ...
It's surprising that we haven't had a dedicated Twitter feed for our games coverage before. Well, now we do Let's be brief. You're a busy person. You can't be checking the @guardiantech Twitter feed all the time to see if there's a new games review or blog post up. No, you've got places to be, people to frag. So we've set up a dedicated Twitter account just for games coverage: @gdngames . It'...
New figures suggest Facebook's financials are healthier than expected - with the site on course to break a billion dollars of revenue by the end of the year Yes - and perhaps even more than that, according to new figures . New projections suggest that the company made as much as $635m in 2009 - around 15% higher than previously estimated - and could be on track to rise to around $1.1bn by the e...
Long-awaited 360 exclusive nears release Alan Wake was first announced in 2005. Four years on and the game is finally ready for launch. The long awaited Xbox 360 exclusive mixes Silent Hill, Twin Peaks and a stack of other literary and movie influences to create something that looks hugely promising. I'll post my hands-on thoughts later in the week but first up is a short interview I had with O...
Predicts Natal to outsell Arc by 5 to 1... Nothing like a bit of console sales skirmishing to brighten up a depressing Monday morning. Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter is predicting that the Xbox 360's Natal addon will outsell the PS3's "Arc" motion control camera by 5 to 1. Unsurprisingly Pachter thinks the games will be key to the success of both peripherals. What do you...
The place where the Beatles recorded is full of wonder. So why are we so bad at preserving our pop-cultural heritage? A simple fact: the British are crap at preserving their pop-cultural heritage. In the States, you cannot move for Halls of Fame , proudly curated museums, and streets named after everyone from Dave Grohl to Elvis. In the UK, however, if the sums fail to add up, in come the demoli...
A Berlin literary scandal poses the question – when everything is available free online, what is the meaning of copyright? The news that a 17-year-old Berliner, Helene Hegemann, has run into a s torm of abusive publicity over the authenticity of her cult teen bestseller Axolotl Roadkill looks like another of those plagiarism rows that surface from time to time in the European press. See, for ins...
What are the skeletons in your gaming closet? Videogames are like relationships. Some last forever, providing an endless perfect balance of joy, challenge and satisfaction. Others, we enjoy furtively, afraid of what our friends might think, knowing they're all wrong. And there are those we go into for a quick mess about, certain nothing serious will emerge and feeling happy about that. But ot...
World gasps in collective surprise. As we're a video game blog it would probably be remiss of me not to mention this... In one of those conference calls to investors yesterday, Mike Griffiths, head of Activision Publishing, confirmed that a Call of Duty title is lined up for Christmas 2010, but wouldn't confirm the developer. (It's Treyarch.) While Modern Warfare 2 sold an impressive 12 million...
If the film rights to JD Salinger's cult novel do go on sale, who could possibly direct it – or play Holden Caulfield? On hearing of JD Salinger 's recent death, most fans probably experienced a single emotion: sadness. Over in Hollywood, however, the hills shook with the cackling of a hundred avaricious studio execs. Finally, someone will get to make The Catcher in the Rye film. Salinger never...