Yesterday it filtered through that Wordpress had released an iPhone application. This is me testing it out.

So far my only compliant is that an ampersand is not rendered correctly in category list, but that's obviously easy enough for them to fix in v1.1.

I tried blogging using Safari on the iPhone and it worked but was a little clunky. The interface just wasn't built for this resolution, even with the great scaling available.

Back when the old days of advertising, when cigarettes were good for you, Speedy was the mascot used to sell Alka Seltzer.

Maggie brought home a DVD she found in the English department full of "classic" ads and I really liked this one. Here is Speedy in all his musical glory:

I love how he talks about the cotton fields in the south :)

Here's a direct link for those of you reading this through syndication.

In the last few days I've talked to a several people that are what I'd consider famous- they're well known in their fields and inspire others accordingly. For the purposes of clarity, I'd consider anyone that has the potential for "fans" as being famous. This means authors, musicians, sportsmen - anyone that considers their fan-base, regardless of size.

It's pretty crazy to think that I've been able to actually communicate with these people considering they're on the other side of the world.

10 years ago I'd have photocopied a form from a magazine and joined a fan club. I'd receive a newsletter every 3 months, maybe an autographed photo on my birthday and that'd be it. I couldn't ask any questions or wonder about their day-to-day thoughts. The information flowed one way and you either took it or left it.

Nowadays there's blogging and social networking, and celebrities understand just as well as anyone the benefits that these collaboration tools can provide. Every celebrity has a blog,  MySpace or Facebook account and understand that it's the best way to stay in touch with their fans. That means that it's not only two-way communication but it's recent, relevant and much more personal... presuming that it's not their publicist on the other end.

Over the weekend Wordpress 2.5 was released and it is available for download. One of the new features that has received a lot of praise is the inclusion of a new visual editor. It's based on TinyMCE.

It took me a while to work out that you actually need to enable the editor, via the Users menu option before it will appear. It's very pretty looking.

... I actually like it when I get Rick Rolled.