BuzzMoo.com

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, quite good by all reports, is the subject of an impassioned Elroy cartoon this week. He’s worried that it like so many other good TV series will be cancelled and encourages you to watch it. He certainly doesn’t mean illegally download it because you don’t have Pay-TV because that might rub the sponsors the wrong way. I haven’t seen Dollhouse (maybe I will at some point, I’m not really a Whedonite) but the general theme of Elroy’s video is spot on. For example, I’ve just finished watching Mission Hill and I wish there was more, I was barely satisfied by the Dead Like Me movie and regret that I’ll never see a fresh episode of Earth 2. Checkit!

The e-Shack has just churned out another episode of Powers Cosmic. Having just watched I Am Legend for the first time the other day, Powers Cosmic Episode 5 is pertinent to my interests. But you don’t need to have watched a Hollywood movie to have ever wondered what it’d be like to be the last person on earth. I assume the idea has wasted many hours of human thinking time. For a definitive analysis Elroy and Furious take us there.

I’m developing a list of recommended extensions and plugins for members of CASE. There is some excellent free software out there. BuzzMoo.com has been running on Wordpress for quite some time now and there are a few plugins I just can’t do without. Here are my current top three! (in the top three because they’re the ones I always install as default).

Akismet  for Wordpress: Anti-spam. If you’re running WP you’re probably already running Akismet. It’s a fantastic anti spam plugin that fights against the scourge of comment spam. If you aren’t running Kismet you’ve probably got a lot of jibberish comments from Russia. If you’re not running it, you must set it up immediately! You’ll need an API key for this, but getting one is a simple process. Akismet = ftw.

NextGEN gallery: Photo Gallery. This is a fully featured but simple to use gallery plugin for Wordpress. It uses the nice Lightbox transition effects to display your photos and there’s an option to turn those photos into a flash slideshow. It’s got good thumbnailing, tagging and watermarking options. I’ve tried a few gallery plugins and this is definately my most favourite to date!

Cystats: Cystats is a great web-stats plugin with a good layout and a comprehensive set of views. It lets you see who visists, when and where. I use Cystats for “blog-only” traffic data which for some people is going to be their focus. Free, well supported – a must have!

So there you have three essential plugins for a multimedia website. Check back later for additions to this list!

James has won his first photography competition with the image below. Damn straight!

Click here to check out the other contenders.

For those of you who missed “Over The Front” at The Austalian War Memorial late last year, some related footage has found its way online and ended up on liveleak. Cool.

In Australia we talk about Fox news in the same breath as we the Comedy Channel. We can laugh and cry just as hard at both. One of my favourite features is how cable news seems to take Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show as an actual news program. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t always like that, but now anchors take on Stewart as though he was an anchor too. That might be because “A 2004 Pew study, for example, found that these Americans cited comedy shows like Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show almost as frequently as newspapers and network news as a primary source of information about campaigns. ” according to The Weekly Standard’s Gary Andres. I’m quoting from his recent article “Are You Laughing Now?” which is a great read – in fact it might be one of the best things I’ve read on TWS ever, since it details the very real damage The Daily Show has done to conservative politics. If that’s up your alley, read the whole article here!

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting to day that Telstra and OPEL have failed to secure a contract to roll out a national fibre network in Australia. This is potentially good news. The same political logic that says private business is the best and most effective choice for a service provider also says that there’s no way any business can provide broadband to the bush without losses. It makes no business sense to roll fibre out to rural areas. In Australia at least, the Internet should be seen more like a utility alongside water and power. Given our vast geographic arrangement, only the government has the capacity to provide this for our entire population. But have they got the tech smarts to pull it off?

In a shock decision this morning, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced that none of five bidders including Optus and Melbourne group Acacia for a national network were up to scratch.Under the new plans, the funding for the network offering speeds of up to 100 megabits per second will be provided by a national broadband network corporation in which the Government will be the majority shareholder.

$15b national broadband network (NBN) on way

I keep forgetting to mention that I’m slowly producing a series of simple video tutorials for Joomla 1.5. They’re for CASE (since we’re all about Joomla these days) and all available on the CASE Youtube channel.