Being pretty disapointed by eBay, I had a go to other online marketplaces; Gumtree and Craigslist. They are both free and have quite a large community. They are also much easier to use than eBay and you can have your items for sale quickly.

So I put an ad on Craigslist here to sale my camera gear and I looked at various cameras on Gumtree.

Well, in both cases (selling / buying) I had to deal with scammers… Here is how it happened:

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I instinctively managed to stay away from eBay for a while. Unfortunately I had to create an account and sell stuff on it recently. Interesting experience from a Web 1.0 pioneer. Here are my notes:

1. It’s incredibly complicated: It took to Rai and myself a good 20-30 minutes to put our first item for sale. And still more than 5 minutes for following items… You have to go through a painful procedure with countless clicks, drop down list box, popups and so on…

2. It’s expensive. You might think eBay is free. Well you’re wrong, very wrong! Everything has a cost. From adding pictures to your item, listing it to different categories and just putting it for sale… And of course they take a % (5% I think) of your final price… Before we even noticed, we were already charged AU$10…

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I hope you have nothing better to do… You might be wasting the next 20 minutes of your day watching videos on youtube…

You’ve been warned

There is no specific ranking, it’s just how it came to me…

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Irreversible
3. Beethoven: Immortal Beloved
4. The Godfather : Part 3
5. Apocalypse Now
6. Le Grand Bleu
7. Chariots of Fire
8. Requiem for a dream
9. Donnie Darko
10. Kill Bill
10+1. No Country For Old Men

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Master piece. Music is just one of the multiple element of this beautiful visual symphony.

2. Irreversible

Another use of classical music with modern cinematography.

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Unless you were exiled on a very remote island (yep, more remote than Australia) for the last few months, you probably saw one of those:

I personally don’t think the name merging thing will be so good. Especially when you ask yourself a few quick questions:

- What brand recognition does Microsoft have?
Here are the keywords that are coming to my mind when thinking about Microsoft: Failure, fatal error, blue screen, accounting, bug, IE, suit, closed, money, bill gate.

- What brand recognition does Yahoo have?
Here are the keywords that come to my mind: Outsider, backup search motor, ad market failure, slow, bling bling, old

- What is the best way to re-build brand recognition?
Change the name.

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Google Reader is definitely part of my daily tasks. It’s a great tool that brings me about 300 items every 24h and I checked it a couple of times per day. Direct consequence is that I spend more time scrolling over items on Google Reader that I’d like to! And when I’m happy with most of its ergonomic there is a few points that in my opinion could be updated in the next release…

My list:

1. Stop loading read items
2. Group items on the same topic
3. Hide / emphasis items based on keyword watch
4. Limit the number of characters displayed by default
5. Color code selected feeds

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I bumped into Mick Liubinskas (Tangler’s Chief Customer Officer) last saturday night during the opening of the Sydney Festival 2008. Mick and I exchanged a few words quickly and I said to Mick that I was gonna have a look to Tangler’s new release.

For those that don’t know yet what is Tangler (where have you been?? ;)), I think that it can be described in a nutshell as a webservice providing Live Discussion Forum (for free). You can find out more on their home page.

Here is my screencast:

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What makes a great video advertisement?

For the company advertising it’s probably the ROI, but for the average+ customer it’s probably a mix of fun, originality, extravagance, visual brio etc… What ingredients would you consider adding if you had to think on a video advertisement recipe?

Here is my selection of 10+1 Great Video Advertisement according to my culinary tastes

1. Cadburry Dairy Milk

2. Gnist Energy Drink

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I don’t know about you, but personally I use the Apple Remote Control everyday. It came very handy with my Mac Book Pro and iTunes. I have 500+ albums loaded into iTunes and I do an extensive usage of the “random” function. So I always have a random play list going on as a music background.

My remote control is always around my mouse so I can get my hand on it easily and skip to the next random track. So far so good.

When it gets annoying is when the random play list takes you to a nice track and that you feel like you’d like to listen to the rest of the album… At the moment what you need to do is:

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I love my Mac. I really do I’ve been a Windows PC user for about 10 years, I used to setup my own computers putting together the best pieces of hardware I could find, tweaking every bit of the system to gain the most efficient computer possible. So I probably had about 5 or 6 different computers running from Windows 95 to Windows XP. Last year my laptop Sony Vaio died, taking with him all my data by the way. That’s when I decided to jump the fence, Mac were affordable, especially with the student offers and it was possible to run Windows XP/Vista on it. Why not then?

So I’m now the proud owner of a Mac Book Pro 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of DDR2 SDRAM. I use it about 14 hours per day for both professional and personal purpose and, well, I couldn’t go back to a Windows PC…

In a nutshell, I would strongly recommend to anyone looking for a new computer to go Mac. But…

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Illustration: Cheksa

I always loved music video clips. Obviously they mixed two things I like; music and video and they are often an interesting source of inspiration for visual work.

So here I put a list of 10+1 music video clips that particularly stand out in my opinion. They are often the work of great directors such as French director Michel Gondry (N°2,6…).

1. Pearl Jam: Do the Evolution
2. Chemical Brothers: Star Guitar
3. Timo Mass ft. Brian Molko: First day
4. Gym Class Heroes: Cupids Chokehold / Breakfast in America
5. Bob Marley feat. Lauryn Hill: Turn your lights down low
6. Kylie Minogue: Come Into My World
7. The Prodigy: Smack my bitch up
8. Missy Elliott: Teary Eyed
9. Michael Jackson: Thriller
10. Smashing Pumpkins: 1979
10+1. Harvey Danger: Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitt

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