London and other cities will have own web addresses

New Web Domains Set to Flood the World With Cybersquatters

News circulates that Buckingham Palace has bought up a large number of website addresses for the Royal Family to ‘protect their online identities.‘ Domain names such as the princessroyal.org, earlandcountessofwessex.com and princessbeatrice.org have been secured.

This links up with the fact that the world is about to wake up to the advent of well over 1000 new web address endings as new suffixes are approved and come into use.

Dwarfing the 22 approved now in use (.com, .net, .uk and .org) what are called ‘generic top-level’ names will open up the web in a revolution that is as big as any in recent times.
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Are Bitcoins Gaining Acceptance As Everyday Currency Yet?

To paraphrase the old Beatles’ song – Bitcoins Can’t Buy Me Love

Ali Spagnola, a comedienne from the USA sent me a link to the 2 minute mash-up of 33 famous songs about money she created to celebrate Bitcoin, the digital, virtual currency that is trending all over.

It is described on the Bitcoin website as ‘an innovative payment network and a new kind of money.’ It’s outside the normal currency regulatory frameworks that govern global money and it has been causing quite a bit of controversy lately. We thought we’d give you a few pointers, in case you wanted to invest in some.

There is a pdf available describing ‘a peer to peer electronic cash system’ which discusses the problems with banking systems, trust and the internet. There is a simple guide to the idea on YouTube.
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Human relationships are not programs, are they?

This blog is about how Humour Makes Unintended Serious Points About Relationships

Somebody sent me the following correspondence between people and IT support. All very funny, and quite clever.

But in portraying the human relationship in this pseudo software style makes a quite serious point about society where they reckon within a few years the majority of relationships will be formed by internet contact rather than the old fashioned way of just meeting each other at work, socially or wherever.
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How will every TV screen send out personalised ads?

Are You Bored With TV Progs? Never Mind, Watch Your Own Ads Instead!

You may be from the generation that not only accepts more personalised and relatively intrusive advertising, but you may actually like them!

Regular MBF Blog readers will know I don’t share that pleasure.

Indeed, in a comprehensive survey I carried out among a range of people over 45 (well, three people) we all agree. We don’t like personalised ads and we don’t want them on our TV screens when they are bad enough on our laptops and mobiles.
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Want to make serious money out of social media?

No – Making Money From Social Media Not As Easy As It Sounds.

You know how you can retweet something on Twitter? So you get some rubbish that somebody you ‘follow’ likes and thinks you want to see? Well occasionally a nugget is retweeted.

One such is from Re/code, a technology blog, retweeted and reported by Harriet Denny in the Daily Telegraph and covered elsewhere.

It seems that Twitter have a plan to stem their dramatic losses. They are going to sell directly from the site in a new project called Twitter Commerce, to tap the market of 232 million users.
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