1960s Australian TV commercials

This is filled with classics like "Things go better with coke" - all lined up in a metal Esky line the model we had - and Graham Kennedy having a gay old time in Gloweave shirts in Fiji! Apparently these were all from an episode of In Melbourne Tonight.

Beatles 3000

This is very funny archaeological take on Beatles. One can only reflect on how this take reflects 21st century knowledge of various forms of earlier music.

Real Sophia Vembo on Youtube!

I have been pretty slack about keeping up with my Greek course on LiveMocha. I know the trigger for that was when the Greek course, like the others, added an oral component that was required to pass. I had been going great guns there until then - and surprising myself by being ok with the aural. However, the oral element was added and I slacked off using as an excuse that I need to get a new microphone for my PC. And I got that weeks and weeks ago but haven't quite got to the Greek again.

Today through a fairly circuitous route which will not add value by description I ended up on Youtube and happened to go to my subscriptions which I am equally slack about checking. And there were two little Greek gems there. They are both quite short scenes from a 1938 film, I prosfugopoula, and show Sophia Vembo actually performing songs, Poso i zoi ine orea, and Zito na se xehaso.






I have long been a fan of Sophia Vembo and have her on many vinyls and one CD but had never seen her perform in the flesh in her prime. There is a bit of footage on Youtube which has her performing in the 1976 which I had seen and favourited before and dates to the time when I first started to know about her and really when she was experiencing a revival. Finding these two clips today makes me realize, as if I hadn't before, just what gems are hidden on Youtube and also continually being added. I need to be vigilant!

Brizzly interface for Twitter

Thanks to @ladymidnight I have been spending time this afternoon experimenting with Brizzly, yet another interface for Twitter. Brizzly has some cute features: you can view full urls in tweets, see videos and photographs immediately without clicking and can divide your followers into groups. The extended url, and immediacy of photos and videos works well.

I got quite excited about dividing my followers into groups as you can then click the group and get only their feeds. As I have been struggling recently with the number of Twitterers that I am following I thought this would be great. And it is a great feature - but alas one is limited to five groups only! I wish I had known that before I started setting them up and I would have made the groups broader. So it's back to the drawing boards for me now with that feature.

Another interesting feature is that you can temporarily make people you are following "mute". I can see that this could be quite useful when people are live-twittering something that doesn't really grab me. The DM function seems quite useful too as you get threads and can see what you have sent. You can also favourite and retweet and there is an easy interface to allow you to work with more than one Twitter account. No, I don't have multiple Twitter personalities. However, I do post tweets to both my personal account and to the City of Boroondara Library Service one.

There's an introduction to Brizzly on Youtube:



And here's a short grab on the key features:



There is a lot that I really like about Grizzly and I think that Thinglabs have done a great job with this interface. It is interesting to play with all these interfaces and speculate what impact they will have on Twitter future development.