New Year’s Resolution #42: blog more. Major changes coming, but in the meantime:

I have previously written about some pretty amazing-looking lightbulbs. But imagine if you could have lightbulbs that do more than light your room, look great and save the environment. Imagine if you could wirelessly stream your music through them too.

You can, and there’s more than one way to do it.

The Klipsch LightSpeaker System does just that. It includes recessed spotlights that you screw into your ceiling, a transmitter, and a remote that you can control your invisible sound system with. However, the bulbs themselves are disappointingly standard in appearance, and there’s this ominous sentence in the description: “Not intended to replace home theater speakers.” Sounds to me like the sound quality could be a bit poor. Shame.

But don’t despair. You could get this version, designed by Castiglione Morelli (great name). They look absolutely stunning, and come with a handy attachment to transmit directly from your iPod. Bad news if you’re not an Apple junkie, though.

Finally, for those who don’t like lightbulbs, or love ceiling fans, or something, there’s the Hunter Concert Breeze Ceiling Fan. It’s a ceiling fan that can integrate into your existing sound system. There’s also an attachment for a lightbulb as well. It even works outdoors, apparently, although I’m not sure what you’d attach it to. Bad news is, you can’t buy one yet.

Still, these ideas add a whole new dimension to the idea of surround sound.

My online journalism teacher showed me this – a film called ‘The Archive’ by Sean Dunne. God knows what blogowitz was trying to teach us, but I appreciate his tip nonetheless. Take a look:

It did the rounds about a year back, but I’ve never seen it before.

I own an original 1927 HMV gramophone and collect records I find in charity shops and at markets, so maybe I’m more inclined to sympathise with Paul Mawhinney, but I can’t help feeling that a collection like this should be incorporated into some kind of state library.

I tried to find out what has happened since this film was made, and came across this. Apparently he put the collection on eBay and received a winning bid of $3milllion, but it turned out to be a scam. The collection is still for sale.

Everyone (or rather, 32ish million people at last count) knows about Youtube sensation Susan Boyle.

But the most recent episode of Britain’s Got Talent offered us a contender to her feel-good crown: a 12-year-old Welsh boy called Shaheen. Observe:

[UPDATE: you'll have to click the picture to get the video. Youtube have disabled embedding for all versions of the video, and who can blame them. If he gets even a fraction of the hits Susan Boyle did, their advertising revenue will be off the scale and they want you all on their site, not mine.]

Obviously, the kid’s a fantastic singer, and is going to be a millionaire. But this clip made me realise something else – that is, Simon Cowell is a genius.

He’s still a git (you can practically see the dollar signs appearing in his eyes when he looks at this child), but here for once we get to see the acumen that has got him where he is – he knew the child was singing a rubbish song, and put him under greater pressure and got better results.

He’s still doing all the things that music moguls have always done: auditioning and scouting new talent, releasing their records, managing their image and coaxing them to stardom and riches, but he’s come up with a way to get paid for every part of this process, instead of just when an artist successfully reaches the final stage.

Perhaps I’m a bit behind here, but that is absolutely brilliant. I’ve spent many years derriding the man and his programmes without realising quite how cleverly conceived they are. Maybe if we could somehow sell the process of creating and printing newspapers as ‘entertainment’, the future of journalism would be assured.