• The World Cup so far in photos.
• A cat could take better pictures than you.
• A NASA satellite photo shows how widespread the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is.
• The best album covers of all-time as chosen by Wired.
• Lemmy from Motorhead: just a big soft-focus heartthrob really.

What Twitter users are saying about World Cup games in real-time – http://twitter.com/worldcup/

The story of the colourful character behind file-sharing service MegaUpload – http://bit.ly/megaload

The Room: The awful movie everyone wants to see – http://bit.ly/theroom

Keanu Reeves makes a comeback through Photoshopped image memes – http://bit.ly/keanu_sad

How to solve the problem with music royalty collection societies – http://bit.ly/royaltysolve

The Universal Record Database
An alternative to the Guinness Book of World Records, URDB calls itself “the definitive site for human achievement” but is mostly filled with records like “longest time to balance 25 VHS tapes on chin” or “fastest time to open bag of Skittles and sort them by colour.”
http://urdb.org
 
We All Make Music
A resource of news, tips and inspirations for musicians by musicians.
http://weallmakemusic.com

Afrolabs
A cousin of Awesome Tapes from Africa, Afrolabs posts out of print music from Africa for download.
http://afroslabs.blogspot.com

With the World Cup just two weeks away and Ireland not present, we’ve been lucky enough to not have to endure a World Cup song sung by bland lifestyle-peddlers The Script. But there’s still some merit to football-themed songs (Put Em’ Under Pressure is a classic of course) and Irish digital label Indiecater recognises this.

Indiecater have spent a year putting together their World Cup compilation: Fast Forward together. 32 bands from across the world were asked to write a song about a country participating in the tournament in South Africa. The result is eight groups with four teams each with songs by artists like The Very Most, The Dirty 9s, Grand Pocket Orchestra, At Last An Atlas, Hunter-Gatherer, Spirit Spine and Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. The entire compilation can be streamed or downloaded for €5 at http://www.indiecater.com.

Meanwhile, music bloggers continue to bare the brunt of the music industry ambivalence towards their operations. After the IMRO licence situation in Ireland last month, Google is at it again – deleting the popular Scottish music blog The Pop Cop from its Blogger service. Jason who ran the site also runs the Music Alliance Pact (MAP) project wrote about the situation on http://musicalliancepact.blogspot.com.
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