Sillis Bang

Yeah, apologies for the radio silence. It’s true that my broadband was arbitrarily cut off by BT at one point in the last 3 months, but that’s not the cause. I’ve just been working etc etc. Anyway, I have been blogging, just over at my company’s new website. Here are a few of the posts to sample, like a grazing menu in a Michelin starred restaurant, only free and not nearly as edible:

• The exception that proves the rule: Apple bucks the social media trend
• Twitter is the new customer care line (Sad, but true)
• Social media is now about amalgamation
• That Twitter TV show could be hilarious for all the wrong reasons
• I want more robots on Facebook
  

Also hot on Meat In A Roll right now:

• Man mugged for his kebab
• Hooray for chicken shops with MySpace profiles
• Glastonbury’s racist Chinese takeaway
• Michael Jackson had disturbing beliefs about KFC
• Aspirational kebab photography is glorious
• KFC uses phone booths for subliminal advertising

We’ve been running Meat In A Roll for a month now, and while we’ve still not got a book deal yet, we have seem some ridiculous stuff including:

• Takeaways that sound like Israeli nightclubs.
• Giant baked potatoes battling Godzilla over Tokyo.
• Racist chicken shops.
• Takeaways named after celebrities and mass murderers.
• Fried chicken websites where dead cows stroke the food.

BOOK DEAL!

Hello. I’ve been very lazy of late, or at least on this blog, because I’ve been working and stuff. And frankly, Twitter is easier. Look, over there.

Anyway, I’ve launched a new website. It’s with a bloke called Wil Jones, and it’s called Meat In A Roll (http://meatinaroll.blogspot.com). Meat In A Roll is about Britain’s takeaways and how brilliantly rubbish many of them are. If you’re strange and find this sort of thing amusing, I suggest you took a look. Also, you can follow Meat In A Roll on Twitter too, @meatinaroll, so please do follow. I promise not to you spam you much, except all the time.

Oh, and if you’re a publisher who wants to make a Meat In A Roll book, holla at me.

Ah, the press. So good, it doesn’t need an oncologist to back up assertions that social networking causes cancer (here and here).

Mind you, it’s probably not worth stopping poking and twittering, since just about anything else you do will probably cause cancer too (see here).

Pretty comprehensive, but here’s a few more things that cause cancer we should all be getting scared about:

Light
Food
Air

That’s just about everything I reckon. What am I missing now? Water? Oh no, wait, that too. We are, like the print press, all doomed.

Look, over there. On the right hand side. You can see what I’m doing on Twitter right now. Frabjous.

Look! Following story after story of mine being pilfered by Gawker blogs, I’ve now also had a story nicked by the de facto world’s biggest gadget news site, Engadget. Huzzah! They obviously didn’t think enough of me to steal my rushed mock up of a Twitter logo hanging behind an INQ Facebook phone mind, but a link is a link.

Sorry for the fleeting nature of my blog posts here lately. I’d say I was concentrating my efforts on Twitter, but that’d be a lie. More stuff soon, possibly.

Yeah, pretty much. No sooner than I posted a story up on ElectricPig about the new Halo Wars game and some extra downloadable content (Or content that would have made it in to the game until Microsoft decided they could charge more for it instead), than big ol’ gaming blog Kotaku was all over it again. The cheek.

Admittedly, we did send the story over to them ourselves to get a few nice incoming links (Joystiq picked up on it too, amongst others) and hits, but still. The cheek. The cheek. Still, at least they didn’t steal my picture as well, like Gizmodo did a few months ago. You can even see me holding the camera, honestly.

By the way, if somehow anyone from Gawker is reading this, if you can’t tell I’m being tongue in cheek, you probably shouldn’t be working there.

As of tomorrow, I’m moving to Republic Publishing’s editorially independent news site, electricpig.co.uk, full time. I’ll still be working as a reporter, but expect to see a lot more of my stories popping up on the site daily, until I develop claw hand from using a laptop trackpad too much and it all goes off the rails horribly.

Oh, I forgot to mention entirely - my cogent thoughts on the Microsoft keynote at CES last week were quoted by CNN. Authoritative, eh?

I’m back, fresh from a tube full of pressurised air and sweaty tech journalists. I won’t bore you with details of Vegas itself, but you can read all my stories from CES by clicking here. In the name of SEO though, here’s a few highlights:

• The Smelling MP4 player: think iPod, but with a halitosis detector built in.

• CoPilot Live 7 on iPhone: an EP exclusive, one of the world’s first sightings of fully blown satnav software actually running on an iPhone 3G.

• The Sony keynote live blog: I was in the front row for Sir Howard Stringer’s bizarre and entertaining keynote, which saw Tom Hanks plugging LG, and Reggie Jackson being given a chocolate bar, but surprisingly few new products.

• The eBay slot machine that replaces gold bars and melons with category listings like “Shoes”.

You can also see my Flickr gallery of the trip here.

Ironically enough, the best gadget I saw in Vegas was actually at the adjoining AEE - Adult Entertainment Expo. The succinctly named “Virtual Hole” pushed the boundaries of interactive TV like nothing the big Japanese electrical companies could manage, and they were wheeling out 3D high-def TVs left, right and centre. It’s a brilliant idea: take your standard (!) artificial vagina, and hook it up to a porn DVD. “Things” start moving and tightening in time with the blowjob on screen. When I say brilliant, I mean for someone who enjoys that sort of thing. Obviously not me. Obviously.

Nothing quite beats seeing a middle aged Japanese man being ridden and spanked by a porn star though.