A blog by Ben Gilman

It is a fact that band websites usually annoy me - there’s normally the hand of a record company in there somewhere and the personality of the band never quite comes across. I discovered the opposite whilst listening to one of my favourite bands The Notwist and perusing their official website:

Their website is a maze of bizarre and intriguing things utterly in-keeping with the style of their music and the image they portray. There’s also a chance to listen to one of their latest records which is always good.

Go have a play and indeed listen to The Devil, You + Me, their new album or just, or just buy it - you won’t be disappointed!

Shuffling through my bookmarks on the lovely new Delicious I stumbled across the first time I’d bookmarked the excellent WalkIt.com.

WalkIt is a route planner for pedestrians. As an example here’s a route between two of my regular Soho beer haunts: the relatively flashy Sun & 13 Cantons and the no-nonsense Green Man on Berwick Street.

The route gives you distance, duration, calories burnable as well as CO2 avoided as well as turn-by-turn instructions. It’s a great little web application planning routes now in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and more.

Fingers crossed there’s an iPhone version is in the works?!

I love Brand New, at the time of writing it’s one of only two blogs to make my blogroll - along side that of my colleague Carl Knibbs and I see him five days of the week so there was no saying no.

Still, to get to the point of this post…this logo rebranding leapt out of the pages of said Brand New blog primarily for the sad loss of the unique elements that made the old version what it was…

The new typeface is rather unattractive and the new shadowed ball immediately gets me thinking of the first Flash application anyone evers make, the bouncing ball, drawn with one click with the circle tool - I almost want to click the edge and discover that the stroke isn’t connected to the fill, just for old times’ sake.

But then again, if you want your established status to stand out from the crowd of upstart Web 2.0 companies, apparently a red circle leaves you looking pretty unique.

In the next of my unintentional series of minor iPhone discoveries/achievements - here comes the iPhone icon!

Our weekly release has put the new iPhone/iPod Touch web clip icon live to the world - not exactly the most impressive of achievements but that jester’s face staring out from behind the shiny glass window is certainly a satisfying vision:

Thanks to Artistan.org for the tips on how to get the rounded border.

Enjoy!

Just found Automattic’s iPhone WordPress blogging application buried in the lower half of the App Store Top 50 so thought I should give it a go.

The application is immediately very usable and like many of the better-developed iPhone apps, more feature rich then I’d expected. It’s also proving pretty stable - a quality not yet evident in all the apps! Adding that picture up there was very easy - it’d have been even easier with a cut+paste function though It works with Wordpress.com hosted or self-hosted blogs.

Still, some of my best blog post ideas come to me when i’m away from my computer so hopefully this app might be the tool to at least stop me forgetting them! That might be all though - the iPhone keyboard is good for many things but maybe penning long blog posts won’t prove to be one of them…

Check the WordPress application out in the store or Wordpress.org - it’s currently sitting pretty at rank 30 - one below the not-so-criticaly-acclaimed AOL Instant Messenger app. iPhone iChat anyone?

Fairground rides on Santa Cruz boardwalk - it makes me feel a bit sick just looking at it!

Wordle is an excellent web-toy that generates word maps based on RSS feeds or Delicious accounts. It found the RSS for my blog slightly troublesome so here’s my Delicious bookmarks mapped out instead.

Wordle discovered via SimpleBits.

Continuing evidence that About.com covers everything that falls through the Wikipedia cracks… I present to you a German-English animal sounds dictionary.

[(CC) photo from Max XX]

To put it simply, the German language (naturally) describes the sounds made by animals with different words. As the related article puts it:

Have you ever heard a dog actually bark “bow wow” or a rooster enunciate “cock-a-doodle-doo”? Only some serious cultural conditioning leads us to believe that’s what they’re saying.

So the next time you need to discuss politics with an Angeln Saddelback, remember, it’s grunz grunz.

With a healthy nod to Monty Python, it’s the gloriously hatstand Hold Steady from their album Boys & Girls In America.

Just back from a trip to Suffolk. This rather strange isolated tree is at Covehithe. Wikipedia tells me this coast has lost 500m in the last 150 years or so leaving trees like this one.

See some more in the set on Flickr.