Moo, a British start-up masquerading as an American printing house (Dollar pricing, you see), does only one product. But it does it well.

These funky little calling cards have your own photos on one side, and your details on the back. Anything you like so long as it’s six lines or less. The pictures come straight out of your Flickr account and you can crop them with some judicious repositioning through the excellent Flash interface.

Mine arrived today; the packaging is almost as good as the beautifully printed, matt-finished contents.

Highly, highly recommended.

I came out of the tube at Liverpool Street this evening and walked straight into the middle of an enormous flashmob. The whole concourse was filled with people dancing, silently, to the music on their iPods. Thousands of them, on both levels, while around the edges businessmen in suits asked each other (and the police) what was going on.

A little bit of web digging, and I’ve turned up the rules for the event:

Mobile Clubbing returns on Wednesday 11 October 2006 at London’s Liverpool Street Station at precisely 19:24.

There are some rules to follow:

1. Bring your favourite dance music and walkman / mp3 / ipod / phone with you
2. Arrive at the station at around 19:15
3. No dancing before 19:24
4. Spread out throughout the whole station concourse
5. When the clock strikes 19:24 DANCE LIKE CRAZY!!
6. Try not to dance in one place
7. Dance like you’ve never danced before
8. Dance for as long as you can
9. Enjoy

Every minute they would all cheer, as though they were listening to the football on their iPods.

Those in the know say that the same thing was going on at the same time in Madrid, New York and Paris.

There are plenty of Stingray-inspired puns floating around today in the aftermath of Steve Irwin’s death by stingray sting.

Is the BBC is going one step further to show the event itself, or just incautious with its buttons and words?

I’ve not had any spam for weeks. Now normally that would be a good thing – nobody likes spam – but it does make you wonder what else isn’t turning up.

So, today I switched hosting companies. Not entirely hitch-free, since they emailed the login details to the new account, which meant that to access them I needed to use them to log in to the account inside which they were locked. Confused? Hmmm.

So, it’s been running on the new host now for most of the day, and my spam count had rocketed up to … a big fat zero.

Which leaves me wondering where all my spam has gone. I used to get over 3,000 a day, so I’d expect to have at least 1,500 racked up and ready to download now if that old account had been stripping them out, and the new account isn’t (I checked).

Either the spammers have given up on me (I hope they’ll forgive me for not being too hurt by that fact), or the spam problem has been solved in my absence.

I wonder.

Working in PR. It’s not all parties, lunches and chasing up journalists’ lost luggage. Someone working in just that industry dropped a mouse in the post to me this week, along with a piece of specially-commissioned research designed to show how important this vitally exciting new product actually is.

‘Computer mouse overtakes partner and pet as most loyal companion’, declares the headline. Why? Well, because apparently 41% of us spend more than five hours with our computer mice, but only 32% spend that long with a partner and 15% spend that long with their pet. Probably something to do with having to work for a living, I’d guess.

Yet despite spending so long with our plastic palm buddies, 80% of mice over ‘get less than £10 worth of accessories, treats and repairs a year’. Mice repairs?? A loved one, on the other hand (no pun intended) can expect to have over £1000 spent on them, and pets £100 or more in the course of a year.

‘We lavish so little money on our mice it’s no wonder they cause frustrations – 39% of respondents got irritated by the mouse lead getting in the way and 27% were tired of having to clean the mouse balls… While some respondents find themselves shouting and screaming at their mouse (19%) or switching their computer off altogether (17%), the clever ones have traded their mouse in for a younger model (32%).’

Are we really such a nation of dunces that less than a third of us would spend £10 on a new mouse to replace a dodgy mouse before it started to drive us insane?

The Independent posted a story about Defra Minister David Miliband’s blog and how, despite the fact that he apparently posts all the entries himself, it costs the British taxpayer £40,000 a year to maintain it. Why? Because it currently takes up 40% of the working day of two grade-seven civil servants to put it together.

Unfortunately it costs £1 to buy the story on the Independent site, but the Guardian has blogged about it here.

I’m sure whoever came up with the idea of this blog had good intentions, hoping to make the Department for Food and Rural Affairs more cuddly and approachable, but how can they justify an annual spend of £40,000? It works out – so they say – at £1 a word. (Which makes the £1 read-it fee the Independent is charging seem suddenly quite reasonable).

That’s an extraordinary sum when freelance rates for magazine writing, in the technology press at least, are hovering around £200 per 1,000 words, or 20p a word. 50p a word would be a great rate, but I know of at least one magazine that has recently cut its rates to £80 a page. With most pages requiring around 800 words to fill, that’s just 10p a word. Admittedly it’s inexcusably stingy, but it’s just one tenth the cost of that governmental blog.

Surely (surely) it would be better to rethink the whole organisation of the thing, can the in-house staff and hire the poor freelancers who have just had their rates cut to 10p a word to write it for, say 35p a word. Suddenly the site would cost just £14,000 a year to run. Still not peanuts, but a far more palatable sum for something funded out of the public purse.

On another note, if it takes 40% of the time of two grade-seven civil servants to put this together, and that equates to £40,000, it clearly costs £20,000 per civil servant. Do the maths and they must each be on a £50,000 salary. Are they the world’s highest-paid bloggers?

It’s an iPod dock and loo roll dispenser in one handy unit. Charge and play your iPod through its integrated speakers while polishing and wiping from behind. Includes a line-in port for your hifi but requires external power.

And I have the only one in Europe sitting on my desk. How special do I feel?

Niall Cook at PR firm Hill & Knowlton, has written a piece for its corporate online mag, Ampersand, about using blogs as PR outlets. It’s a bit light on practical advice, which is probably reserved for in-house briefings, although he does say:

…anyone who treats a [blogging] community as an ‘audience’ will quickly be in trouble and the natural urge to ‘control,’ ‘target,’ or ‘infiltrate’ blogs must be resisted. Attempts to do so will simply enrage these citizen journalists and the resulting fallout will provide perfect fodder for mainstream media. If you are more concerned about losing control than you are about communicating your position, then give it a miss – at least until you acknowledge that you have never really controlled your message – you’ve only controlled its distribution.

I’d question whether there is such a thing as a blogging ‘community’ beyond the tiny clique of high-hitting American bloggers that link in an endless circle to one another, or whether bloggers are citizen journalists, but his closing point is disarmingly honest: you have never really controlled your message, only its distribution.

I’d argue that in reality it’s controlled even less than that. PR firms may send out their clients’ releases, but only to the press (or blogs). They then go through a second tier of filtering and quality control before they make it to the page, and the next stage of distribution.

At that point it’s out of both the PR and the hack’s hands. The ultimate filter is the reader. They’re the ones who chose whether the message reaches its intended destination: their mind, where it may or may not be translated into a desire to buy, the ultimate measure of a PR campaign’s success.

That relies on a snappy headline or a striking image, which is why it amazes me that so many releases are so clumsy and long-winded, and clearly written to impress the bill-paying client rather than the time-pressed hack, or indeed the so-called blogging ‘community’.

The full article can be found here.

Apple opened a new store on New York’s Fifth Avenue on Friday. His Jobsness himself was there to oversee proceedings, and to celebrate its minimalist glassy genius, the Apple people set up a time lapse camera to record all the comings and goings of the first 24 hours.

For the most part, it’s fairly mundane, but scooting through the 5am – 6am slot this morning, I spotted this guy. Who is he? Who is Uschi Lang? How did he know he should stand right there to propose? Was she watching?

Did she say yes?

I’ve just stumbled across the BBC Programme Catalogue. It’s one of those oh-wow sites that appear from nowhere, and I can immediately see me using on an almost daily basis.

Here’s an example. Let’s pick an old show at random: That’s Life. Typing it in, we find there were 448 episodes, broadcast between 1968 and 1995. Let’s get more specific and look at That’s Life episodes from 1973, the year I was born. There were 13, all well detailed. The 18 August issue was the one closest to my birthday, and the running order was as follows:

ITEM 01: Administrative errors with AA membership ITEM 02: False calims of dodgy mail order companies, new laws to prevent this ITEM 03: Linda WEBSTER and Mike WALJER get to do a round in Brands Hatch. ITEM 04: Dodgy new and second hand cars. Esther i/vs David TENCH from the Consumers Association. ITEM 05: Judith and Stephanie sing ‘Rack and Ruin’ (2m35) ITEM 06: George presents a humerous look at the autumn programme schedules ITEM 07: Finding foreign objects in food ITEM 08: Esther helps Joan DAVIES to remove her manure heap by donating it to gardeners.

Item 8 would no doubt have been the highlight of the night. Clicking on any of the names in there, though, takes you to individual records for each ones, and there are supplementary links for all the metadata attached to the show.

The most extraordinary thing about it all, though, is the sheer scale of the undertaking. The database contains 948,329 items, covering every news story ever presented, every feature on any BBC radio show, every contributor to help out… And with it stretching back to the 1920s, a lot of it has been transcribed from the original handwritten notes, as they only started using computers to log things in the 1980s.