Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Make money from blogging? Spamming’s easier and more lucrative

    Dan Lyons on – spit! – monetising blogs.

    My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I’d kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I’d ever had—and through Google’s AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81. Soon after this I struck an advertising deal that paid better wages. But I never made enough to quit my day job.

    The full article’s worth reading and includes some interesting numbers.

  • Windows 7 versions: come on, it’s not that complicated

    Me, on Techradar: OMG! 132 versions of Windows 7!

    We’re the first to mock Microsoft when the firm deserves it, but the Windows 7 line-up simply isn’t as complicated as some reports would have you believe. For the majority of us there will be two choices, just as there were with Windows XP. Home user? Windows 7 Home Premium. Home worker or small business? Windows 7 Professional.

    Also on the site: Become an App Store millionaire: how three iPhone developers made it big.

    “Look at it this way: most people show up to work, or school, or whatever, and they are eager to show their friends what cool new things they’ve got on their iPhone. Of the 50 apps they may have on their iPhone, they may only get a chance to show five of them to their friends. If your app is one of those five, and it can prove its worth in ten to fifteen seconds, then you’ve got yourself a successful app.” [Steve Demeter, developer of Trism]

  • Slightly delayed Techradar Tuesday: has Facebook jumped the shark?

    This one was slightly delayed because I’ve spent most of the last few days in bed feeling sorry for myself. Better late than never, though.

    It came from nowhere and spread like a virus. Suddenly everybody we knew was on it – telling us what they’d been up to, uploading photos, sending flirtatious messages and logging on as if the site were crack and they were addicts.

    In no time at all it had millions of users of all ages, and it was regularly name-checked in scandalous newspaper articles. People were using it to arrange affairs, or to waste time at work, or to post things they’d later regret.

    And then we all dumped Friends Reunited for Facebook.

  • What Jack Handey would say to the Martians

    I’m a huge fan of Jack Handey (bad Flash site alert), whose Deep Thoughts often reduce me to a giggling wreck. If you don’t find the following Deep Thoughts funny, there’s probably not much point in reading the rest of this post.

    One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. “Oh, no,” I said. “Disneyland burned down.” He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.

    I can still recall old Mister Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing a fresh load of tadpoles to the old board of his. Then he’d spin it round and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he’d yell out, “Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!” We all thought he was crazy. But then we had some growing up to do.

    Even though he was an enemy of mine, I had to admit that what he had accomplished was a brilliant piece of strategy. First, he punched me, then he kicked me, then he punched me again.

    So I was delighted to discover that he had a newish book out, What I’d Say To The Martians. Unlike Deep Thoughts and Fuzzy Memories, which are collections of one- and two-liners, WISTTM collates Handey’s longer pieces, such as the superb This Is No Game (from the New Yorker).

    When Handey’s good he’s very good, and some of the pieces had me in tears. But the book suffers from the same problem as Handey’s deep thoughts: he’s not consistently funny, and misses as often as he hits. When the next idea is a sentence or two away that’s not a problem, but when an unfunny gag is stretched over several pages it’s much more disappointing.

    Worst of all, entire sections of the book are dedicated to reprinting old Deep Thoughts and Fuzzy Memories. If you’ve never read Handey before you’ll probably damage something internal and important, but if you have read his stuff – or seen it in email sigs, or on the hundreds of websites that reproduce various Deep Thoughts – you’ll know these ones off by heart. They’re essentially Handey’s Greatest Hits or, as a publisher might put it, padding to make a pretty thin book look slightly less thin. You’ll read it in one sitting, and not a very long sitting either.

    Please don’t misunderstand me: WISTTM is very, very funny, and the screenplay for Zombies Versus Bees made me laugh so hard I pulled a muscle. But it’s also very, very patchy.

    This isn’t in the book, but it made me laugh: Handey’s letter to Obama, volunteering to be an ambassador.

  • Why Digital Britain dropped the “three strikes” policy

    Good point from No Rock’n’Roll Fun:

    Ed Stourton summarised the position of the Digital Britain report as seeing access to broadband as being on a par with access to power and water: an essential service for the way we live now. It’s impossible to see how you could square a belief that broadband is an essential service with arbitrary removal of that service on the whim of a record company.

  • Techradar Thursday: Macs, dangerous bullshit and Digital Britain

    A whole bunch of things are going up today. First, If Macs are so great, why isn’t everybody switching?

    Design, reliability, security… we all know why Apple addicts love their Macs.

    But despite fawning press coverage and the bad publicity surrounding Vista, Macs are still very much in the minority.

    So, why are PC owners sticking with Windows? Do Macs cost too much, or are PC owners masochists?

    Also, Think before you link:

    More often than not, we – that is, bloggers, forum users, Twitterers and the like – will link to an interesting or scary news story when it’s first published. How many of us go back to check whether the story stands up, and rewrite our blog posts if the story turns out to be wrong?

    And later on, some stuff about Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report. I’ll update this post with a link when that one’s up. And by “when that one’s up” I mean “when I’ve written it.”

    Update: here’s the Digital Britain piece: The Good, The Bad and the WTF?

    Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report isn’t an easy read, not least because some of it appears to have been written by aliens.Cut through the bureaucratese, though, and there are some interesting plans up the Government’s sleeve. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, and some are just weird.

  • Techradar Tuesday: why Windows is winning the netbook war

    It’s that time of the week again:

    In the beginning, there was the Asus Eee PC. And the masses looked at it, and they found that it was good. Verily, they said, this Linux thingy isn’t half bad.

    And there was much rejoicing in the land of the penguin, for Linux had the market all to itself. A pox on all your houses, Microsoft, cried the penguin lovers. We have found a category in which you cannot compete! Your Vista is too bloated! Your XP is too dead!

    Aha! Said Microsoft. We will resurrect Windows XP and give Vista a child, which will not be rubbish, and which will be pretty nifty on a netbook! Screw you, hippies!

  • Q Magazine: comebacks aren’t just for musicians

    I’ve been reading Q Magazine for as long as I can remember, but last year I finally stopped buying it. That was partly because I’d reached the age where I had absolutely no idea who any of the bands in it actually were, but it was mainly because Q became crap. Lists of songs are funny when you’re doing a collaborative playlist on Spotify; they’re dull as ditchwater to read.

    But now – as Smash Hits might have put it – it’s back! Back! Baaaaaack!

    q270kings

    Credit where credit’s due: rather than head further into Heat territory, editor Paul Rees (formerly of Kerrang, I think) has taken the magazine in the opposite direction. I’d hate to see the freelance bill, but Rees seems to have looked up the Big Book of Good Music Writers, hired them, and given them enough space to do something interesting. The result is a magazine that’s as good as, if not better than, it was in its heyday.

    If you’re a lapsed Q reader, it’s worth picking up again. The current issue even manages to get an interesting feature from a Take That interview. Really.

  • PC Plus 2.0 (and a piece about iPhones and Android)

    PC Plus has revamped its website, and while content’s pretty thin at the moment – it’s a start-from-scratch job rather than a makeover – it’s looking good. A few long articles are already up, including one I did a few months back comparing the technology, business models and opportunities for iPhones and Google’s Android.

    If you’re interested in the background to the new site, the gorgeous, pouting Richard Cobbett talks about it on his blog.

    Also online: some Windows 7 features Apple could steal and improve upon.

  • .net column: I read the news today, oh boy

    Another of my .net columns has made its way to them thar internets:

    There were four interesting news stories this week. The Home Office decided that it fancied a giant central database of everybody’s internet activity, something that would be perfect for data mining in search of thought crimes. A student was detained for six days under antiterrorist legislation for downloading documents from the US Department of Justice website. A well-intentioned but badly drafted new law could put manga fans in prison as suspected kiddie-fiddlers. And Boris Johnson banned booze on the London Underground. Only one of these caused UK internet users to take to the streets in mass protest. Can you guess which one?