This example of five star customer service speaks for itself (click images to enlarge!)

And Lily Robinson aged 3½ is right. Why is tiger bread called tiger bread?!

Giraffe bread makes much more sense.

Lily's letter to Sainsburys re tiger bread

Silly baker indeed!

And dictionaries, currency exchanges and all you other useful free tools. You can now no more send me to the pit of your murky online lair somewhere miles below ‘the fold’ before I find the answer to my questions (another one there, Q&A sites, aha!).

Nope, no more. Now that Google has realised how many milliseconds you take away from me with your location based ads for girls in Leeds and belly tucks in Bradford. You will soon fall from your lofty perches unless you change your ways and make my life easier!

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

It can only be a good thing (unless of course those ads are for Google?!)

As well as liking, @replying and tumbling, we can now ‘pin’.

And of all the social media platforms, Pinterest is one of the most useful.

Simple concept: see an image, pin it to a virtual board. It’s an indexable, shareable way of recording memories and inspiration, of virtually pinning interesting images to a cloud-based memory board in the sky.

Think an Evernote for pictures and a public timeline. Brilliant.

And it has great themes too. Like this from Pixel Union.

It’s the navigation that captured attention, I can imagine it being inspired by the secret compartment of a 1950′s Danish desk (you know, one of those that never sells for £550 on eBay but never comes down in price). Or perhaps a trip to Ikea, and all those cubby holes in Pax wardrobes?

Or a Muji desk tidy even? Perhaps it’s the tidiest top nav in the world?

Wikipedia closes it's doors for a day

The modern world’s most accessible knowledge base is protesting against controversial Stop Online Piracy Act tabled in the US of A. Congress have rightly been lobbied to do something about piracy online, but the SOPA legislation has bee described as too broad and ambiguous, and potentially very dangerous for the future of an open and free internet.

As a website owner in no position to defend myself, I’ll be watching eagerly.

In the digital age we tend to spend our lives looking at big things on little screens. Perhaps we sometimes lose our sense of perspective?

But it’s digital technology (on small screens) that’s allowed David Hockney to challenge that perspective, by putting a relatively small snapshot of the world on a relatively massive painting.

Bigger Tress Near Warter David Hockney

Bigger Trees Near Warter isn’t quite a 1:1 scale but where paintings come it’s not a million miles off. And given it’s of sycamore trees probably 40 – 60 feet tall, it’s not a bad reclamation of scale (the painting is 15 feet tall). The sense of scale and place is challenged further by the 50 panels – each 36×48 inches – which make up the woodland copse scene found near the East Yorkshire village of Warter.

Hockney achieved this giant painting by photographing the scene and painting the individual panels. By manipulating on a computer images of the panels the overall scene could be visualised. Layer by layer the painting built up as the daffodils and boughs appeared from the jigsaw pieces.

There are echoes of Hockney’ past photographic work – I couldn’t help thinking of the photo montage of the Grand Canyon that can be found at Salts Mill, Saltaire. A similar scene, built from smaller images, and with an emphasis on achieving the scale and wonder of the scene. And even more similar, A Bigger Grand Canyon, which celebrates/challenges a sense of space in similar vibrancy.

Hockney’s still life landscapes remind me simultaneously of our relatively diminutive size in the universe, but also the great leaps and bounds technology has allowed us to make in taming and capturing memories of our immediate landscapes. And he not only finds beauty in the vast and popular, but also in the local and forgotten snapshots of our environment.

It was always a pretty wacky world really (real life is always weirder than fiction of course). But lately everything just seems more surreal than normal.

For instance, NASA have been given jurisdiction over the Scottish Premier League television rights.

NASA?!

Not to mention the news has broken that Status Quo no longer exist but instead are zombies made from the breath of puffins.

What?!

And apparently Beverley Knight and Darren Day are due to star in a new TV show as a detective duo solving crimes through music

(The sad thing is people might actually watch that…)

Of course, it’s not real life, but the random pseudo-life coach / Mighty Boosh-esque warblings of Bet Fair Poker and their comedy road show twitter feed.

Adopting a completely non-corporate feel to their brand communications, Bet Fair Poker’s tweetings are a stream of Crazy Man Michael musings to give Noel Fielding a run for his money (“Interesting Fact: LL Cool J once tried to eat an entire ostrich from top to bottom, but only managed to get as far as the beak..”

The stream of consciousness often lingers over several hours or days in recurring themes (such as a love affair with Victoria Principal from Dallas) that blur enough reality with nonsense to cause most people to stop dead what they’re doing and scroll down through the reams and reams of craziness that make up a day in the Bet Fair offices.

Genius game-changing social media strategy or a business heading for disaster? (and litigation?!)

For the sake of the world and common sense, I hope Status Quo et al see the funny side of it…

Meet three women who’ve turned weblogs from a personal fanzine into full time businesses.

What I Wore Today blog Poppy Dinsey

The commercial details are a bit thin on the ground but it seems that Poppy, Lisa and Kat make their hefty annual salaries mostly from advertising. But I thought that digital content needed to find other ways to make money than by driving traffic and selling ad space?!

What I Wore Today in Marie Claire

Pop Sugar founder Lisa Sugar (click...)

Rock n Roll Brides founder Kat Williams (click...)

Click to see the full version (and thanks Happy Place!)

Where's the circle for "People, possibly famous, who I'd never admit to caring about but actually I'm quite keen on stalking anonymously." Not that I do that...

"Media moguls body discovered"

On Twitter, anonymous accounts also seemed to be divulging sensitive password information of (mainly former) News International staff including Rebekah Brooks. If hackers have found their way into the News International sysatem, who knows what the implications might be?