I was upset to read today that Ricky Gervais’ prostate cancer ad has been earmarked for post-watershed transmission. Media Guardian tells us: “In the ad Gervais plays a doctor who sticks his finger up the backside of a patient - a “digital rectal examination” to check for the cancer, which kills 10,000 men in the UK every year. The RACC has told the Prostate Cancer Charity that the advert’s “squish” noise must be removed and has recommended that it be broadcast only after 9pm and before 6am.”

A comedy squish noise - what’s that compared to the swearing, the violence, the graphic scenes now shown on TV even in the middle of the day? As Gervais says in the MG interview, the main reason a lot of people die of cancer is that they don’t get regular checkups. Surely if the advert is going to do anything to change that, it must be shown in primetime hours.

The decision of the RACC is totally diabolical, short-sighted and pretty draconian.

Now this is quite lovely I must say. NewsMap, developed by Marcos Weskamp, is a bright and breezy Flash news displayer, which aggregates news from Google News sources. Here’s the official blurb:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

The concept is admirable, and very interesting, and even if you just want to see some news presented in a different way, it’s a good visit.

NewsMap

The BBC echoes my sentiments (actually, that’s probably a little self righteous - I’m sure they’d have said that anyway!) on how the web has created a fantastic outlet for both journalists and citizens in passing on the latest news about disasters.

The bombings in London in July, and hurricane Katrina this month have sent all sorts of citizen journalism through the roof. From up-to-the-minute first-hand photographs of the bombings aftermath, to Wikipedia’s constantly-updated Katrina page, the will of everyday individuals to pass on what they know has quickly created a very respectable source of information.

Storm blogs offer Katrina insight [BBC]

Techie blogger Nugget thinks that Google are walking away from a chance to open up instant messaging in the same way as SMTP opened up the world of email by disallowing users of their Google Talk service access to the world’s Jabber servers.

All Google has done is create yet another closed-loop system. They’ve made it just a little bit more of a burden for people to reliably have IM connectivity to all their friends. They’ve made it a little bit harder for people to communicate. They’ve made it a lot harder for the overall state of instant messaging to progress.

His comparisons, or not as the case may be, with the state of email 10 or 15 years ago, make a lot of sense. All I hope is that Google sees sense and incorporates it in the future, perhaps when they take the ‘beta’ seal off of it.

Have a read if you’re interested.

On Google Talk, I apparently talk a lot (cheers to Oishii)

Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1 and injured many in Florida a few days ago, has reached New Orleans on the south coast of the USA.

Coverage is all over the Interweb of the terrifying windstorm - in which gusts of wind have been recorded up to 200mph. Here are some links to keep up with the news:

News sources

Hurricane set to lash New Orleans - BBC News
Reporters’ Log - BBC News
Hurricane Katrina Smashes Gulf Coast - National Geographic
Monster Hurricane Hits - Sky News
Google News search for ‘hurricane Katrina’

Other sources

Flickr Hurricane Katrina - including the amazing photograph of the Louisiana sky on the left.
Deadly Katrina - a hugely in depth specially made weblog detailing events.
Hurricane Katrina - another blogger’s story.

MyProgs.net allows you to keep track of all of the applications you use on your PC in the same way as you do links on del.icio.us.

You can tag programs and sort your favourite apps, and see what applications are ‘hot’ right now, by way of the Popular page.

You can now see my recent tagged applications down at the bottom of the right sidebar, courtesy of RSS2JS.

MyProgs.net

I posted a few days ago about the alleged subway pervert that began molesting himself in front of a young woman on a subway in New York.

The victim, as I said, took a photo of the man and forwarded it to police, also uploading it to the Internet.

Now, the picture has gone one step further - to the cover of New York’s Daily News.

Nice going for a camera phone picture, and pretty much what the freak deserves.

NY Daily News (via Boing Boing)

FLHurricane.com has a Google Map tracking the exploits of hurricane Katrina across Florida right now. It seems to update every two hours, and shows the wind speed and other measurements in the pointer pop-ups.

FLHurricane.com (via Google Maps Mania)

I swear, soon I’ll stop posting constantly about Google, but an article in yesterday’s New York Times just caught my attention. Entitled “Relax, Bill Gates; It’s Google’s Turn as the Villain”, the article bangs on about how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs think Google is taking over Microsoft’s evil reign.

One upstart even proclaims that “Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did”. You what? How can Google possibly be doing anything that halts innovation? Their products in the past couple of years have had a hell of a lot of influence, surely.

Their original selling point, when they were simply a search engine, was to me the simplicity. With MSN, even six months ago, you’d open up the search page and be bombarded with adverts, celebrity gossip and links to the Gardening section. All you wanted was to find out who won the 1978 World Cup, and it’s taken a minute and a half to open the page.

And now look at the new MSN search page. It searches web pages, news, images, and they even have their own version of Desktop Search.

And the Microsoft search engine isn’t the only system which has taken its cue from Google.

Look at the new Hotmail beta. Or their version of Google’s personalised homepage, Start.com. Hell, they might have had MSN Maps for years, but Virtual Earth was only put together after Google went forth and released Google Earth and Maps.

My understanding of ‘innovation’ is pushing technology to it’s limits. Doing something that forces even your stronger rivals to out-do you just to keep them on their toes. If that’s not what Google is doing, then I must be reading from the wrong dictionary.

Who bets that in a few months time, MSN will announce a new instant messenger, with better audio capabilities? Don’t doubt it.

Tags: Google, Microsoft

Having released two large-scale betas in the past week, Desktop 2 and Talk, Google are on the lookout for someone to play a key role in their “future video conference systems”, says a job posting on Yahoo! Jobs.

This definitely points to Google Talk as far as I can see, as well even a system pointed more at corporations in the future - email, video conferencing, and IM functions built into one product perhaps.

Yahoo! Jobs (via Search Engine Journal)