iTunes Store live in Australia!

It's alive! It's alive! Check the country selector at the bottom of the iTunes Store interface from within iTunes!

Flock you, flock us all

Main reason I like my first 5 minutes with Flock: it has the nicest set of toolbar icons I've yet seen for Firefox (and yes, I am a bubblehead if that is my main reason, and yes, I am a fool to admit it in a public forum, but there you go - it's who I am.)

iTunes Australia launching this month?

Not like we haven't heard rumours many times before (even stayed up all night trying to login to some AU iTunes Store server code that was left exposed) but The Australian says this time a launch date of 31 October is definitely, positively going to be announced this coming Tuesday. Sure hope so - my record label really wants to sell some music online to iPod owners!

#1 indicator that Flickr is a smart online player...

...they set you a monthly bandwidth limit, not a monthly storage limit. It's not about the storage. Will Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Google Mail wake up to that one day? I'm sure they will. USD2.00 a month for 2Gb of uploads? Great value.

Alslist, anyone?

Whoa! Create your own 'social application' (such as a classifieds, personals, photo sharing, tagging, news, or voting website) for free, using www.ning.com. You don't even need to know any programming to do it. More on this later when I digest this possibly momentous news myself.

First moblog - sprained ankle

First moblog - sprained ankle
Originally uploaded by bigyahu.

Well, it was either this or a photo of my butt, and there's nothing remarkable about my butt.

So this is not how I planned to celebrate my getting a data-enabled phone service and sending my first photos from my handset to flickr and on to my blog!

I sprained my ankle playing basketball with The MICS last night. I had thought I was over sprained ankles, having changed my training and rehab practices after a nasty series of sprains about six years ago.

This time, though, coming down from scoring a basket right under the rim, I landed on one leg, on the foot of a defender. He pulled his foot out from under me and over I went with all my weight, plus the force of the drop. Bummer!

Anyway, the point of getting a data-enabled phone service was to allow me to play with www.bluepulse.com. Why?

Well, because it's the future of the internet. No kidding. When I first started on the web in the '80s, nobody just found their own way around the web. Instead we all used nice safe walled-garden environments provided by our ISPs (in those days, Compuserve, AOL, eWorld and a few others.) Then, companies like Yahoo! and Excite taught us that we could find our own way on the web - find the stuff that worked best for us personally, not what some manager at AOL thought his customers wanted.

Well, right now, with your network operator providing you with a compulsory homepage on your cell handset, you're living in the '80s of mobile internet. And services like BluePulse will be the Yahoo!s and Excites of the second wave. Check it out, lemme know what you think.