PigPog

Update: I’ve removed this now. It isn’t bad at all, but it did slow things down a bit, and after a few days, we hadn’t had a single conversation on it, so it was a bit of a waste of space. I still think it’s worth a go, though, if you’re in the market for such a thing.

After reading about it on TechCrunch, I’ve stuck a little chat box on the right side of PigPog, using InCircles. It’s similar to the Meebome thing we tried some time back, but where that just let you chat to me, this shares a chat session with everyone who’s on PigPog at the time. Which probably includes people who are more interesting than me.

Feel free to give it a go – just change your name at the bottom, then chat away with whoever happens to be around. If there’s nobody else around, you could probably talk to yourself, but you don’t really need IM for that.

If you’re reading this and there’s no ‘Chat’ box on the right from InCircles, it means that either you don’t have whatever version of Flash it needs, or we got bored with it and removed it.

If they could make it interact with other IM systems, so it could give me a nudge when someone appears on the page and tries to chat, without me having to sit with the page open all the time, that would be very cool. Maybe they could send notifications to an IM address somehow? Or even patch the whole chat session through to the IM client, so it could be used more like Meebome, but with the chat session shared between users still on the web site?

I did like Meebome a lot – it was kind of cute, watching in the online IM client, and seeing people coming and going on PigPog, and being able to talk to anyone live. Whenever I wasn’t sitting at a computer, with Firefox running and Meebo open, though, the thing was just wasted space – users couldn’t talk to each other on it, just to me.

From Boing Boing

“Penguin has released six classic titles with pure white, art-quality covers for people to design their own book jackets. Titles include The Picture of Dorian Gray,Magic Tales from the Brothers Grimm and Emma.”

What a great idea! More on the My Penguin collection on the Penguin Blog.

Cool set of photos of souvenirs taking place of the things they represent. Via Boing Boing. Interesting idea for holiday entertainment.

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If you like your rock music and/or enjoy a good squee, treat yourself to a copy of the December issue of Classic Rock. It’s the 100th issue and to celebrate, has a feature on 100 icons of rock, as chosen by the stars. All the GuitarPr0n favourites are there…

• Matt Heafy of Trivium (ask your kids) honours Kirk Hammett
• Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains honours James Hetfield
• The Rev of Towers of London (again, ask your kids) honours Slash
• Kip Winger honours Steven Tyler
• Paul Rodgers honours George Harrison
• Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers honours John Bonham
• Nancy Wilson of Heart honours Jimmy Page
• Alison Seabeck MP honours “Percy” (also occasionally known as Robert Plant)
• Brian May honours John Lennon

Also with the magazine is a CD featuring classic tracks from Whitesnake, Motley Crue and Dio; a book of extracts from biographies of rock heroes including Metallica, Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd; and a CD quiz that proved just how pitifully bad my knowledge of classic rock really is.

Anyway, it’s out now, and it’s £4.25 in the UK. Visit Classic Rock Magazine’s web site to find out how to get hold of a copy.

“Not half as much fun as the GuitarPr0n Hall of Squee” says rock legend Page

On Thursday night Channel 4 broadcast the 2006 UK Music Hall of Fame ceremony, which was packed to the rafters with the cream of the music industry, and there were plenty squee moments to be enjoyed too. Inducting Led Zeppelin was one of LadyM’s favourites, Queen’s Roger Taylor, and giving love to the Zep boys in a film clip from the studio (where he’s no doubt busy with his VR pals getting on with that goddam second album already) was the curly haired squee monster known as Slash…[image:1746 size=original].

And then, accepting on behalf of the band… Mr Page himself. No doubt WOTW will be along shortly with her assessment of the great man’s appearance. What a lovely fella. Shame he didn’t get his bow out. Actually, it’s a relief he didn’t get his bow out, because I don’t think WOTW’s ticker could have handled that much squee.

Then later on in the show, a little bit of old-school squee, courtesy of a man who rocked just about every teen girl I knew at the time, and for good reason too. He was hot. And a bit of good old fashioned talkbox action (the talkbox being the ultimate squee inducing tool for any guitar player) proved that the boy’s still got it. So here’s a bit of GuitarPr0n love for the king or the talkbox – Mr Richie Sambora.

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Bon Jovi. Seen a million faces. Rocked them all. Good on ‘em.