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OnePlus One Invite! Competition!

I am pleased to announce that I have a OnePlus One invite to purchase a 64GB Sandstone Black model.

The competition is fairly simple: to enter all you have to do is follow me on Twitter and retweet my tweet embedded below. Once you have shared the tweet you must paste the link to your retweet as a comment on this blog post. Tomorrow, Wednesday October 1st at 7pm BST, I will randomly choose a comment on this post, verify the entry and then contact the winner and provide them with the OnePlus invite.

Get retweeting people!

How I'm Following The London Riots

Today is a sadly eventful one as far as news and the "London Riots" are concerned. This blog post is not about the rights or wrongs, it is not a criticism or condonation of events. I would just like to explain how I'm following what is going on.
Mouse and the two smartphones I'm using at the moment.



While at work today I was on a break. In the staff canteen the TV was on and someone had the SKY HD box on Sky Sports. As usual, I was checking my Twitter and Identica feeds on my smartphone (using Mustard!) and noticed some recent tweets and dents about more "London Riots". We switched the TV over to BBC News 24 and started watching the rioting and looting in the Hackney area of London. Between tweets, dents and the live BBC News 24 coverage it was all very involving.
My computer desktop with the BBC iplayer and Gwibber for Twitter and Identica
I am now at home, and still following the events that are continuing to unfold live. I have realised that the way the news is being reported and the way I am following it are fundamentally different from how I followed news ten years ago. Ten years ago (2001: Genova Riots at the G8 and 9/11) the way I followed the news was entirely passive and curated by the news channels and agencies reporting. Now, as well as the curated BBC News coverage, I am also actively following and engaging with people over Twitter and Identica over the news. It is a completely different experience and in many ways much more engaging.

This is the sort of thing that Gina Trapani, Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis discuss often on This Week in Google. Now that I think about it while experiencing it, I understand the whole technological and social shift in news more. Is this just the beginning of a more federated news service/system? With this sort of news technology so widely available, do print newspapers have any point apart for conveying specific journalists' and opinionists' take on the situation? Do most people prefer today's news today or yesterday's news today?

This is not a complete thought train by any means. It is just my ramblings regarding how and by what means news is reaching me now compared to just a few years ago.

As usual, feel free to leave comments and/or questions below.

A New Jolicloud Later This Year

Last night a tweet popped up in my Twitter stream from the official Jolicloud account.
"A new Jolicloud is coming this fall, register for the beta: jolicloud.com"

Of course the first thing I did was head over to http://www.jolicloud.com/ and register. The Jolicloud homepage is now openly inviting users to register for the beta of the service.


I registered and updated the details of which platforms I use and will be using Jolicloud on, and that was it! Easy Peasy! (No pun towards the Ubuntu Netbook derivative intended...)

So as I continue to use Jolicloud through the web browser on my Desktop/Laptop machine, and as an OS on  a partition of my netbook, I'm looking forward to seeing what Tariq Krim and the rest of the clever people working on Jolicloud are going to come up with.
You can read more about Jolicloud 1.2 here. As usual, feel free to leave comments and/or questions at the end of this post. If you liked and/or found this post useful, please also Google +1 it.