Come fly with me

Following ‘Little Britain’ and ‘Little Britain USA’, Matt Lucas and David Walliams bring a wacky new series to our screens, ‘Come Fly With Me’. This new series differs from ‘Little Britain’  as it is filmed in a Mockumentary style unlike the previous comedy sketch show style of ‘Little Britain’. ‘Come fly with me’ documents the lives of employees who all work at a busy airport, although fictitious, this programme is very much like the television series ‘Airline’.

Melody and Keeley check-in girls for FlyLo airline

Many of us have come across characters like those in the programme which makes this series so appealing as Lucas and Walliams have captured the mannerisms and personalities of the characters the flawlessly, as usual, and altogether it makes a hilarious watch.

This is a short clip of one of the characters: 

To watch more episodes visit BBC iplayer

Read more about the programme and its characters: BBC ONE

Picture story: Snow over Christmas

These are some pictures of the thick snow that arrived in Devon just before Christmas, that left most of England at a standstill

before one of the busiest times of the year. (Apologies for the picture quality I thought they were still nice images anyway!)

This is the beach near where I live, it’s quite surreal to see snow on the sand!

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Designer Dogs

The rise of the designer dog accessory has been a popular fad amongst celebrities and Wags for a few years now since the likes of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, stars of the gaudy programme, ‘The Simple life’, sauntered around with what could only be described as balls of fur attached to dog leads.

The unfortunate popular breeds at hand include the Chihuahua, Pug, British Bulldog and many other small lapdogs that have been cross bread, consequently ending up with the most comical sounding names, Labradoodle, Pompoochi, Puggle and Schnoodle, along with this comes the designer price tag which for their size seems ludicrous.

After the initial endearing girly noises one might make at the sight of one of these fluffy creatures I’m beginning to realise how strange this whole trend really is! Since these dogs seem to be showcased wearing their own little designer outfits, collars and leads and many have also been pictured in specially made dog carriers created by designers such as Juicy Couture and Louis Vuitton. However it doesn’t stop there your pet needs something to store it’s garish outfits in, don’t forget the dog sized wardrobe.

British Film Director Shane Meadows

Being British I am always interested in the people who are constantly shaping and molding our culture and in past years I have become a great fan of one film director in particular, Shane Meadows, I believe his films are a great product of  how I and many others see our country. Shane Meadows films celebrate British culture and reflect how varied and diverse it is. I have seen many of his films and they have never failed to impress me and the messages and meanings within the film have stayed with me.

Shane Meadows is renowned for his low budget and gritty realistic composition of film.  He takes, unknown actors, infamous places, real life situations and without fail produces some of the most memorable and significant British films of recent years. This is what I believe to be the most distinguished elements comprised within each film, as I enjoy films that actually mean something significant to the people that watch, star and create them; it invokes a more compelling watch.

Shane Meadows became involved with producing films whilst living in Nottingham and working for free at Intermedia Film and Video Ltd. In exchange he was allowed to use their camera recording equipment. He started off by making a few short films and then went to to produce his longest film in 1996. ‘Small Time’ (1996) was one the first long films Shane Meadows created with a budget of £5,000 which follows a group of crooks living in Nottingham, it features Meadow’s himself who is the gang leader.

In my opinion one of Meadows’ most popular films to date is ‘This Is England’ and it has to be one of my favorites amongst ‘A room for Romeo Brass’, ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in the Midlands’. Although it is set before my time it still appeals most to people of my age as we can relate to the nostalgia of what is is like being part of such a strong gang of friends. Since the release of ‘This Is England’ there has also been a hit TV series on Channel 4 ‘This Is England ’86′, here we re-visit the same group of friends and the new dilemmas they face. As well as this series, soon our TV’s will be showing us ‘This Is England ’90′ which has been given the go ahead, Woody and his gang will be back again and this time experiencing the highs and lows of rave culture and the world cup in the 90′s. I’ll be very much looking forward to the release of this new series as I hope its just as good if not better than the last.

To see more about Shane Meadows, all his films and the new series visit: www.shanemeadows.co.uk

Recent Shane Meadows release I’d recommend: Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, staring Paddy Considine.

BBC News and Sky News: Two competing Journalism websites

 

 

 

 

 

BBC news and Sky News are both journalism websites and originate from television broadcast companies, with Sky owning several channels as well as selling broadband and television packages.

As both websites have very similar content they are always competing against each other and one of the main factors that the general public my compare them on is how both of their websites perform. I have studied certain features of both websites such as, usability and design features, usability, design and layout, as well as interactivity and content to see which of the two websites are the most simple and straight forward to use.

It would appear that the usability of a website is the main factor in creating an effective website this represents how it is designed and how the layout makes it easily accessible for people to use. The main homepage on the website is one of the most important pages of the whole website as this is what people see first when they visit the site, and gives them their first impressions of it. If the homepage is badly designed and the layout is unstructured and difficult to use, many people will take one look and navigate off of the site.

Both websites contain established features such as newsfeeds, apps for your mobile, podcasts and the ability to share press releases via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. As well as this UGC or User Generated Content, has been thoroughly established on the both the BBC news website and Sky news website and Sky have even  released an iPhone app that users can use to upload information such as pictures and video footage at the scene of an incident.

Both BBC News and Sky news’ websites are very similar in terms of their content, with their main focus to inform the general public of current affairs and breaking news stories. They are both constantly competing to strive for the best and most frequent up-to-date press releases and do their utmost to provide the public with great quality journalism. After studying both websites and defining what makes a website user friendly it would appear that the website with the most effective and overall usability
would be BBC news.

FAQ: Mulberry

Mulberry is a British Fashion Company that possess a “Quintessentially English style”, as well as their traditional clothing designs and now after popular demand their new Mulberry Home range.

Who founded Mulberry? In 1971 Roger Saul and his mother established the brand, they made leather goods in their garage in Somerset.

When did the products first appear in shops? It wasn’t until the 1990′s when Mulberry products started appearing in shops across Britain.

What is the company best known for? It is a British fashion company known for its luxury leather goods such as; leather-bound Filofaxes, or datebooks, and handbags.

What is one of the most must have Mulberry items? The Bayswater bag. A bag designed by Luella Bartley, a former Vogue fashion editor and made popular by the British model Kate Moss,

How many stores worldwide sell Mulberry goods? There are currently just 90 stores worldwide selling the goods.

Does Muberry have a Flagship store? On 1 December their UK flagship store moved to number 50 New Bond Street, a few doors down from its previous London address.

Does Mulberry have a website? Yes, you can purchase shoes, clothing, bags and accessories for both men and women at: mulberry.com. You can view the latest furniture, fabric and home accessories at mulberryhome.com

Facebook sign off in aid of charity

Stars such as Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake, amongst others, are taking part in a social media sign off in aid of a charity campaign, called Digital Life Sacrifice. The stars will sign off o f their soc ial netw orking websites such as Twitter and Facebook until the charity reaches 1 million dollars. The money will be raised on Tuesday for Keep a Child Alive, which supports families affected by AIDs and HIV in Africa and India.

Donate to Keep a Child Alive

Students march again in protest against tuition fees

Yet again students throughout Britain are protesting against University Tuition fees being increased further as they could reach up to a colossal £9,000 per year. Students at Universities around Britain are now joining marches in their local areas to campaign to their local council. I have been able to witness the marching protest first hand on my way to University this morning, it seemed to be fairly tame compared to the footage that was seen from the protests in London although the police were not far from the crowd. Most of the students that have joined the marches today are particularly students that are studying their A-levels at the moment and are looking to hopefully join University in the next coming years, as these are the students it will affect the most if the fees were it increase as well as these students there were also many students already at University.

The story in my local area: Bournemouth.

Timeline

27/10/10

Twitter Time line

The first social networking site dedicated to status updates or ‘Tweets”.

March 2006 - Twitter is founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams

21 March 2006 – First Tweet by Jack Dorsey – “just setting up my twttr”

12 July 2006 – web developer Jonathan Markwell, is Britain’s first Twitterer, having been on the service since July 12 2006, as user No.51 of the 140 first people to sign up for Twitter.

July 2006 – Launched publicly

2007 - Twitter had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter

May 2008 – Twitter’s new engineering team made architectural changes to deal with the scale of growth. Stability issues resulted in down time or temporary feature removal

August 2008 - Twitter withdrew free SMS services from users in the United Kingdom and for approximately five months.

10 October 2008 – Twitter’s status blog announced that instant messaging service (IMS) was no longer a temporary outage and needed to be revamped.

2008 – 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008

5 January 2009 – 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator’s password was guessed by a dictionary attack.

9 March 2009 – According to Quancast, 27 million people in the US used Twitter.

11 June 2009 - Twitter launched the beta version of their “Verified Accounts”,  allowing famous or notable people to announce their Twitter account name. The home pages of these accounts display a badge indicating their status

12 June 2009 –  in what was called a potential “Twitpocalypse”, the unique numerical identifier associated with each tweet exceeded the limit of 32-bit signed integers (2,147,483,647 total messages).

25 June 2009 –  The death of Michael Jackson, Twitter server crashes after users were updating their status to include the words “Michael Jackson” at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.

June 2009 - According to a study by Sysomos, women make up a slightly larger Twitter demographic than men — 53% over 47%. It also stated that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity, and that New York has the most Twitter users.

6 August 2009 – Twitter and Facebook suffered from a denial-of-service attack, causing the Twitter website to go offline for several hours.

17 December 2009 – a hacking attack replaced the website’s welcoming screen with an image of a green flag and the caption “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army” for nearly an hour. No connection between the hackers and Iran has been established.

By the end of 2009 – 2 billion tweets per quarter were being posted

January 2010 - Obama makes his first Tweet

February 2010 – Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day

March 2010 – Twitter recorded over 70,000 registered applications, according to the company

11 April 2010 – Twitter acquired application developer Atebits. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award -winning Twitter client Tweetie for Mac and iPhone.

13 April 2010 – Twitter announced plans to offer paid advertising  for companies that would be able to purchase “promoted tweets” to appear in selective search results on the Twitter website.

May 2010 - a bug was discovered by İnci Sözlük users that allowed Twitter users to force others to follow them without the other user’s knowledge.

In the first quarter of 2010 – 4 billion tweets were posted

June 2010 – about 65 million tweets are posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter

14 June 2010 – a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the 30 second period after Japan scored against Cameroon.

17 June 2010 – The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets a second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory in the 2010 NBA Finals.

23 August 2010 – Lady Gaga takes Britney’s Twitter crown with more than 5,741,000 followers compared with 5,703,000 for Britney Spears.

21 September 2010 – an XSS Worm became active on Twitter.

 

My Top Five Favourite Websites

1. bbc.co.uk

2. facebook.com

3. amazon.co.uk

4. ebay.co.uk

5. youtube.com