Long time , no see...

Goodness me, it's been a while! I just have a couple of updates on Youniverse for you, which you may (or may not) have noticed...

Our available-on-Youniverse-only-for-a-limited-time VisualDNA Shops widgets are now no longer available on this site. Fret not, though, VisualDNA quiz fans - you can still get your hands (or blogs) on them at http://shops.visualdna.com.

On a slightly separate note, we've given our VisualDNA site a bit of a spruce up - totally worth checking that out here. Well done and thanks go to our hardworking designers and development team for that!

Who's that girl?

Know what these girls have in common?

Kayleigh
Julia
Angie
Rosanna
Rhiannon
Lola
Ophelia
Michelle
Valerie (twice)

OK, so actually they're not girls, but song titles. As many as I could think of, anyway. Which you'd probably guessed already. I would have included Layla, Barbara Ann and Billie Jean, but that might have made it (even more) obvious!

There's quite a range of pop music in that list - from some 80s power ballads to tunes by the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. The Fab Four certainly had a knack for getting girls' names into song titles - they even covered one called Anna. Good choice, guys, if I do say so myself!

The boys are involved too, although to a lesser extent - remember Jesse, Levon and Kevin Carter? Even Doctor Robert (Beatles again) and A Boy Named Sue get in on the action!

I'm on a roll now - I then started thinking of songs with loads of names in them, but none in the title... how about The Beautiful South's Song For Whoever or Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5? I'm not counting Ella, by the way, just in case anyone was thinking of Rihanna for that category...

Twitter may have its "Music Monday", but I think I'm going to make myself a new "names" playlist today, just because it's Friday and I feel like it. So if you can add to it, let me know! Is your name a song title, or featured in a song? Add it in the comments!

What is art, and can you make it exposed on a plinth?

Hands up who's been following artist Anthony Gormley's living sculptures venture on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London?



I've been keeping tabs on it sporadically, usually by walking past every other day and having an interested glance up to see who's up there and what they're doing, or by stories that inevitably come out of it - such as the guy who was ordered to put some clothes on after getting naked for Trafalgar Square to see...

In itself, the issue of whether nakedness can be accepted as a form of art opens up a whole other can of worms in the perpetual "What is art?" debate, so I'll leave that aside to comment on the more general concept of using the plinth as a showcase of living art.

For me, what Gormley has set out with this concept is unique, innovative and immensely creative, which I would imagine are required criteria for getting to demonstrate your work on the plinth. Gormley, then, is an artist in my book. His subjects up there are, I feel at least, less so. I have by no means been keeping a 24/7 plinth watch (I'll leave that to @PlinthWatch... clue's in the name), but whenever I have been past it I have always felt rather underwhelmed, bordering on disappointed, by what's up there.

That sounds very negative, I know, (especially to Mr. Naked Plinth Man) but I don't mean it to be at all. (I really don't, Mr. Naked Plinth Man!) I just feel the experiment shows that the intrinsic interest and, in many ways, beauty that humans have is best demonstraetd through their interactions with other humans. Talking, laughing, all that reacting to others and interacting with others that we do every day... In fact, most of the things that make us interesting and artistic are, I feel, closely tied in with being around other people and things. We're human, we live in society: it doesn't seem wildly outrageous that this is how we've managed to spend a few millennia on earth.

Take all that away and isolate an individual on a plinth and I feel that you almost get the opposite effect to what was probably intended. Everything around us that, without us realising it, makes us create and perceive things in the world, is just removed for those guys up on the fourth plinth.

But that's just my $0.02 - everyone has a different view on what art is. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

A return to the playground school of showing someone you fancy them...

"Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeee!!"

That, boys and girls of Youniverse, translates roughly (as far as I could work out at the time, anyway) as "Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!" followed by some sort of shriek/tyre screech in the background. All of which hit my eardrums at a rate of both knots and decibels when I arrived at Imagini HQ yesterday morning, ready for another working week . And to think I almost didn't rummage through my bag fast enough to get to the phone in the first place...

Turns out the reason for the call was that a friend of mine had "had an encounter with" (her words) a bloke who sometimes takes the same bus as her into work in the mornings and whom she has something of a crush on.



An encounter, eh? Ooh er. Was that some flirty eye contact? Maybe a cheerful "good morning" and perhaps then a conversation? An exchange of phone numbers??

Oh no. No no no. What merited the shrieks and howls was the fact that she'd (somehow) been too preoccupied to notice that this bloke had got on the bus with her that morning. This meant that when he was walking past to get off the bus, she suddenly clocked him and tried to subtly whisper to her friend that the hottie she'd been talking about was actually right there.

What she actually did, however, was essentially bury her elbow (repeatedly) in her friend's solar plexus and, while this girl struggled with being rather violently winded, shrieked, "Oh my god! It's the hottie from the bus!" and collapsed in giggles. Seems unlikely he couldn't have heard or seen any of that. Smooth. She may as well have just pushed him over and run away to another part of the playground...

She saw the funny side - when you're that mortified you can only laugh or cry, and the former is really the better option. Hopefully this bloke saw it for the compliment it was intended to be...

Dating - it's like riding a bike. That's reassuring...

When you've been in a relationship for a while, it can be difficult to remember how tough dating can actually be. I fell into this trap last weekend when one of my old university friends was in London and we had a catch-up over a lovely long lunch.

Casually asking after her love life, she said she was single and hadn't seen anyone since her last bloke. That ended *ages* ago - I won't say quite how long, to preserve some kind of mystery to this whole situation..., but we're talking months. And double figures at that. OK, mystery's pretty much gone.

When I'd picked my jaw up off the floor I tentatively tried to work out why she was still unattached.

When you meet her, she's friendly, bubbly and pretty. Good start, I'd say. If she realises that any kind of attention is on her, she gets a bit self-conscious, but not cripplingly so. I might be biased by the fact she's my friend, but all in all, I'd say she's a catch. (And she's 27, for anyone jumping to any conclusions about age...)

Her reason for prolonged singledom is that she moved to a new city about a year and a half back, so she spent a while getting on her feet and exploring there, and wasn't that concerned about playing the dating game while there was so much for her to discover, an exciting new job to be getting on with and new friends to be made. Now she's more self-assured, settled into her new life, and wanting to start meeting new (male) people. All well and good.

Her biggest worry? (And, believe me, she's worried about this.) That, in terms of dating, she's so out of practice that if you were to compare the situation to the proverbial "it's like riding a bike, you never forget it" analogy, she'd be terrified to remove the stabilisers and really go for it. Stuck forever on the rickety supporting wheels that might keep you safe and upright, but never let you really enjoy the freedom of cycling, with its wind-in-your-hair exhilaration and, yes, danger of falls.

That made me think - it's been a while since I've been outside the security of a relationship, so I couldn't really offer much advice, just reassurance that a) she's gorgeous and will find someone and b) she's not a complete freak for feeling so unsure of herself in that situation. I'm sure I would be too. Obviously, the stabilisers have to come off for biking to be fun, but how you get there is a personal thing, surely? So, has anybody out there got some tips for her (or others in a similar situation)? I'd love to hear from you in the comments or at anna@youniverse.com

Take a Real Shot

Creative and visual beans on Youniverse and, indeed, the interwebs, take note... an ace new photography site has just been launched.

Welcome to Real Shot.

This is the amazing brainchild of the creative team at Imagini (the company behind Youniverse's VisualDNA personality quizzes). The aim is to remove the posed, airbrushed elements often found in stock photo libraries and instead create a vibrant, exciting and very real collection. 

Every week, a new statement will be chosen. All you have to do is capture and upload an image that fits the statement for you. The winner will receive £100, and you could see your work used in Imagini ad campaigns. Just to give you an idea, Imagini have already worked with brands as diverse as mydeco, lastminute.com, Pepsi and hotels.com. You can find out more here. 

Interested?

Join Real Shot on Facebook, Flickr or follow them on Twitter - celebrate real life with a real shot.

Youniverse's personality quiz comes to VisualDNA Shops, as do a whole load of exciting new features

Lots of hard work from our team over the past few weeks has resulted in a ton of new features and fixes for our VisualDNA Shops widgets. For those of you who don't know what our Shops are, they are mini VisualDNA quizzes (of the sort you get on Youniverse) which profile your personality and recommend things you might like.

You can put one of these as a badge on your blog, and then every time someone buys a product they like from your shop, you make money as an Amazon affiliate. It's completely free to set up, although if you want to get more out of the experience, you can subscribe to our Professional Edition. This gives you the option to add specific products you think your blog readers will like, the ability to assign them to different personality types, and a detailed analytics page, so you can learn more about your users. If you're a Stephen Fry fan, let him give you a brief intro and a guide to adding products.

But I digress slightly... What I really wanted to do here was tell you about the new VisualDNA Shops features launched yesterday.

1. We've added a new shop! For people who wanted a more general widget to place on their blogs, we've developed a special version of Youniverse's personality quiz for our Shops repertoire. Perfect for fans of Youniverse and personality quizzes everywhere!

2. Our VisualDNA Shops homepage has been given a snazzy makeover to make it friendlier and easier to use.

3. You can customise a splash to fit your widget, so it can sit on your web page and fit in with your site's design.

4. Professional Edition users can also now turn off our VisualDNA product recommendations and only show their own assigned products. Personalisation at its best!

5. We've also added a VisualDNA Shops favicon. 

And you thought Chrome OS was big news! Ahem...