At 8:45am on the 11th of January, my first niece was born – Maggie Grace Lattimore.
Tina and Maggie returned home from the hospital today and are both doing well. Maggie was 6lb 9oz (2.98Kg) and was 48cm long, a dainty little thing! I think its safe to say that Jude and George are particularly pleased with the event, I know Claire and I are.
Sony BMG announced today that Emily Williams has signed a recording contract with them. From what I understand, immediately after Australian Idol finished Sony had all but said they were not interested in a contract with the runner up. Maybe after the lack-lustre record sales of Kate DeAraugo, they’ve realised that maybe the wrong person won the competition again and are now hot on the heals of the rightful winner.
The latest Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain has been released and its on the radars of a lot of people. Yesterday Milorad Ivovic published an excellent article discussing some of the issues raised, its well worth the read.
[Edit: 2005-01-13]
It has happened, apparently two North Queensland cinemas are not going to show Brokeback Mountain.
More interesting is a comment by the local Federal Member, saying and I’m paraphrasing here:
There are a very low number of homosexual people in North Queensland, so it won’t annoy many people that it isn’t showing.
Amazingly, he some how knows what the majority of North Queensland’s sexual orientation is and he assumes that only homosexual people would want to see a movie with homosexual people in it. By that token, surely homosexual people don’t go to the movies very often – since there are very few movies which feature a homosexual character, let alone that its part of the main story plot.
One day, maybe some people will grow a brain.
In July, News Corporation announced that it had purchased Intermix and all associated products for US$580 Million. Intermix owned and operated MySpace.com, one of the largest social portal sites on the internet boasting nearly 50 million members.
Everything was going along swimmingly for News Corporation, until they started censoring what their users were writing! It is the expectation that the internet is free and anyone can write just about anything and ultimately no one will care. It seems that News Corporation took offense to their users linking and discussing their competitors. When users would mention a competitor, the posts were being edited and the offending words, images and links deleted.
You would assume that MySpace were feeling threatened by their competitor and sought to weed it out of their site. Unfortunately, this manual intervention stirred the pot a little more than expected and a huge backlash followed. As soon as the backlash gained momentum, MySpace stopped censoring their clients information and restored all of the existing data – in fear of it escalating any further.
I think this would have been a very strong lesson learned for the new owners of MySpace. In an online business, even more so for a business driven by the power of social networking, you can’t suddenly go and change the rules. If you change the rules and your users don’t like it – your competitor is only ever a handful of keystrokes away.
