Useful Links and A bit of humour...

• Xkcd - http://www.xkcd.com
  • "A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math and language" - Updated every Monday, Wednesday and friday.
  • A great comic, including the classic:
  • 

News Feeds

• This is one of the larger (largest?) news sources coming from the middle - east, they used to have a great blog called "Don't Bomb Us!" which was written after the US bombed one of their buildings tragically killing a number of their reporters and other staff, I think they have discontinued it now.
• This site is great to get a handle on the opposing views of the vairous American based news agencies, 

• The English site is still very polictically correct and misses out on a lot, if you had handle the engrishitizations, I recommend reading the Arabic version,
• fortunately if you don't know how to read arabic, google has a nice tool for it:
• They also have some great live video news feeds.
  • Live streaming Video feed is here: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/
  • (RSS for  worldwide English Aljazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/Services/Rss/?PostingId=2007731105943979989)
  • Google gadget link: http://www.google.co.nz/ig/adde?hl=en&moduleurl=http://plug.purdue.org/~jacoby/XML/aljazeera.rss&source=imag
  • Aljazeera Front page Translated by google (using Auto -> english) :-
  • http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aljazeera.net%2F&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=auto&tl=en

• Living in A western country its almost impossible to have not heard of the BBC, and in most countries around the world, I don't generally follow the localised copies of the BBC news, I just follow the BBC World news head lines.
• Surprisingly enough I find that the news reported from BBC is much closer to the News reported from Aljazeera, than the news from the American Sources,
• Particularly when it comes to the quality of articles, and the intended audience, where the BBC and Aljazeera will have intelligently written articles which ar e usually attempting to state the facts and not be bias or emotive, the american sources seem to have largely forgotten how to write anything but opinion pieces.
• They too have some good live video news feeds, along with a huge range of podcasts, alerts, email updates, etc,
  • page listing all the feeds etc here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm

• This is the Google News Gadget,
• I wouldn't be surprised if they datamine to try to present news Items that they feel are more relevant to me!
• they tend to be strongly US focused, but do report things around the world.
• Gadget link here: http://www.google.co.nz/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://news.google.com/%3Foutput%3Drss&source=imag

• The Bankok post is quite interesting for getting a differrent view point on events happening around the world, particularly in the US, as Thailand has quite strong Links with the US they do discuss a lot of the US happenings, however it is a different viewpoint that the norm on the Events in the US.
• That said, they are largely focused on the Events in and around Thailand - as thats where the paper is from!
• feed: http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/src/breakingnews.xml

• I wont discuss this one too much, but it covers the news from NZ and around the world  - they are als o the only news site I have a google gadget for that implants ads - and therefore I wont like to them.

• I couldn't talk about news sites I enjoy without mentioning TheReg the register totes itself as biting the hand that feeds IT
• I highly recommend this site to anyone at all interested in IT stuff, particularly the Bastard Operator from Hell (BofH)
• They have a great policy of requiring for the Most part an IT angle in any article, and where this policy is not met it has to have a paris hilton angle!

Miscellanous Other things

• Shoutwire is good for a bit of comedy relief and to see how people fail much harder than one expects, especially on the internet.
• good for a laugh.

• You probably already know about geekzone if you are here, however the feed for the latest blog posts is
• http://www.geekzone.co.nz/allblogrss.asp

• When looking for a lol, you cant go past
• http://icanhascheezburger.com/ full of cute cat pictures,
• http://www.failblog.org/ - full to the brim with humourous fail.

Tag(s):  aljazeera  arab  shoutwire  geekzone  icanhascheezburger  failblog  xkcd  bbc  bankokpost  nz herald  google  google news  interesting sites  things to look at on the internet  the  the register  register  paris hilton  paris  hilton  bofh