MyNewZ | Daily Web News

related ness: angelina jolie in beowulf

toronto’s own fashion verbatim aka adrian is leaving our little blogger group and making his way to montreal to join the mive machine that is the fashion industry. i wish him the best of luck and he will be missed in toronto.

so what's going to happen in the next few months? here's pachter's take on things: ultimately, we think ea will make a deal happen...we believe that once ea walks away and no other dders materialize, it will be able to allow all parties to cool their heels, and will be able to back and complete the deal at a reasonable price.

technorati tags: google,

technorati tags: print,

technorati tags: control,

technorati tags: authorial,

… too. he is mvp and works for pocket pc magazine paper magazine so he could be there on behalf of that magazine.

i have met owner of pocket pc magazine - hal - several times as you can see for example here.

alrightee then. french tax payers will pick up the tab for people wanting to learn how to line dance in france. ga!

from timesonline:

“the french administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. authorised instructors who have been on publicly funded training courses will be put in charge of line dancing lessons and balls.

the rules, which into force next year, after the rapid spread of country and western in france, where an estimated 100,000 people line dance several times a week. jean chauveau, the chairman of the country section of the french dance federation, said: ?it’s growing at a crazy rate. there are thousands of clubs and more are springing up all the time.?

he said the french shunned the square dancing that is popular among country and western fans in the united states because it involved physical contact. ?they don’t want to take anyone by the hand or anything like that,? he said. but they were pionate about line dancing, where participants follow the steps without touching anyone else. ?i think this corresponds to the individualism of our times,? mr chauveau said….

mr chauveau said the trend ilrated france’s ?complicated and amguous? relationship with the united states. ?we love american magic and the american dream,? he said. ?but we hate americans when we confront the hard reality of their behaviour throughout the world. we go for the cowboy hats but not george bush.?

in a peculiarly gallic approach to the phenoon, french civil servants say line dancing should be mitted to the same rules as sports such as football and rugby. this means imposing training courses for line dancing teachers and a state-approved diploma for anyone s to give lessons or run clubs.

amateur instructors will have to take 200 hours of training under the new rules. professionals will get 600 hours, including such jects as line dancing techniques, ?the mechanics of the human body? and the english (or at least texan) language. they will also learn how to teach line dancing to the elderly.

the cost of the courses, about ?2,000 (£1,570) for the professionals and ?500 for the amateurs, will be largely met by taxpayers. mr chauveau said the regulations highlighted the french state’s obsessive desire to organise all public activity. ?france is the only country in europe apart from greece where sport is controlled through the state,? he said. ?line dancing is now ….?
read the whole article

tags: france line dancing french the french have gone insane

[via]

i know this is behind the game, and that the bleeding edge of blog reviews has moved well beyond online streaming service hulu (even though it's not yet out to the public). but i received my beta invite last week and have had all this time to play around with it.

my initial thoughts: none.

no, not one initial thought. hulu doesn't work in the uk. they don't tell you: "hey, if you live in the uk, you will be able to access and begin your hulu experience, but when you choose a show to stream, you'll be disappointed. have a nice day." you have to jump through all the beta hoops to get there first.

now, i know i should have known better, being a generally web-savvy chap. but after a few pre-reviews of the hulu service, i decided not to read any more blogs about it until after i'd tried it out myself. i knew not to expect too much, after reading the last review over at between the lines , but i my own experience.

since then, i've found dozens of blogs about how bad it is that hulu doesn't work in europe . aside from whingeing about the lack of support, i can't really think of anything more to write about hulu (apart from its ridiculous, trying-too-hard-for-the-web-2.0-market name).

but, doesn't this kind of go against point of the web? the idea that we can make connections, share content, stream and connect?

the principle of the internet is broken by this experit, and i don't think a platform intended to be a youtube killer should ever have been trialled in a geographically-limited network. sure, i understand private betas, but why limit this to the states? i don't think news corp really gets the web 2.0 thing. in fact, i wonder if they really get the internet?

it reminds me of launchcast (now yahoo music). when i first launched the player, all the content was free, and there was absolutely loads of it. i was thrilled! over months, however, content became harder to find due to advertiset interruptions and restrictions on skipping tracks. suddenly, launch re-directed to yahoo, and i could no longer skip any content without upgrading to a premium service which hadn't existed before. then, when i moved to britain, all the content was unavailable apart from a limited selection which i can only presume was intended for a british audience. (don't think my mates here would have agreed in a focus group!)

i haven't used a yahoo service since. no, seriously, i haven't used yahoo. as soon as konfabulator was purchased by yahoo, i uninstalled it. i was all set to set up a flickr account, when i found out it was yahoo. (i might go back on that one, once i get a decent digital camera.)

this wasn't really a boycott so much as a pre-emptive decision. i know that as soon as yahoo gets a hold of a service, its user-friendliness will dissolve into advertisets and 'premium services' (a contradiction in terms!) this is what hulu reminds me of. an attempt at grabng a market instead of a well-thought-out startup trying to sell a genuinely good service and make a profit on its quality.

what is web 2.0? hulu doesn't know, and it makes me think that news corp hasn't really got its head round it at all. i shudder to think what's going to happen with linkedin.

-zach (http://www.zachbeauvais.com)