I see that Al Gore has decided he wants to be the next Bob “Give me us your fockin moneys” Geldof. Mr Gore wants to stage the biggest concert of all time ever. Rumours that the stage will be Gore’s forehead are yet to be confirmed.

Gore has given the series of concerts the oh-so-imaginative name Live Earth. Wait a minute that sounds like a Microsoft product. Wait a minute — it is! Shit me!

Hopefully this will knock Geldof off his perch a bit. Back when there was all that Live 8 nonsense I wrote plenty of stuff about the offensiveness of Geldof, a man who unashamedly makes a living out of starving Africans.

He is not content with giving an undue platform to bland rockstars who don’t have the faintest clue about politics or economics and bollocksing up his purported goals in the process. Geldof has also allowed his offensive sperm to turn into Peaches Geldof. I had my suspicions before, but now I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Bob Geldof is the most evil man on the planet.

As such, I hope Gore’s big concert puts a massive dent in Geldof’s ego. The problem is that Geldof will only be replaced by Gore on the “Massive Arsehole” league table. Soon, Geldof will strike back with his own massive concert, then Gore will hold another huge concert. Then Bono will come along and throw his weight behind the creation of a carbon neutral™ Benevolence Android™, thereby gazumping them both.

Despite the fact that Bono is firmly in third place on the Massive Arsehole league table, he might have the right idea with this carbon neutral™ Benevolence Android™. After all, it is surely true that a great deal of climate change is caused by the hot air emitted from the Geldof / Gore axis of ego. And that is without taking account of the guitar-wielding windbags that they place on their foreheads that are cleverly disguised as stages.

Of course, the biggest problem with holding massive concerts is that they actually use up shedloads of energy. After all, they involve the use of massive fucking speakers and sophisticated lighting systems — real energy guzzlers. And then there is the small matter of the transport involved to get everyone there.

Gore claims that the concerts will be carbon neutral, but this is a bit hollow. After all, they could plant the trees anyway, without holding a concert. That would probably do much more good. But then we wouldn’t be able to have a giant party then, would we? Diddums.

My biggest problem with this concert proposal though is the fact that it is designed to “raise awareness” of the climate change issue. But has Gore not seen the news recently? Every fucker on the planet already knows about climate change. You could not possibly raise awareness of climate change! It is already the most talked-about issue on the planet!

In other words, this concert will achieve absolutely zip. If anything, it will have a generally negative effect — just like Live 8. Well done Mr Gore! Do the world a favour and stick to what you’re good at — losing presidential elections.

Gary Andrews is similarly unimpressed.

According to MSN, this is one of the 30 best blogs in the UK, one of just five in a category called “Music, Films and Stuff”. Weirdos. Apparently, “The good doctor’s recent deconstruction of a Top 1,000 classic albums list is an essential read.” Hmm. I don’t even remember writing that. Erm, I mean, yeah, it was definitely a great post. (Via.)

So I can now use MSN sorry, Windows Live Messenger to have a chitty-chat with Yahoo! Messenger users. But I have to add them all first. Why can’t I just associate my MSN account with a Yahoo! ID? Can somebody tell me, is there a reason for this, or are they — MSN, Yahoo!, the lot — all just being arses again?

Just as it was beginning to look like we would only need to use MSN Messenger and Google Talk to be able to talk to just about anyone (nobody uses ICQ any more, right?), MySpace have decided to create their own IM client.

And just because it’s MySpace, it will be huge. Let’s face it, if there’s anybody in a position to completely demolish the MSN / AIM hegemony in IM-land it is MySpace. I guess we can look forward to random emo-posers, strange men who always seem to have their tops off, and really awful bands all randomly adding people just to say, “A/S/L?”

Of course, Tom is your first friend when you open MySpaceIM. You can say any shit you want, but he’ll always respond, “Woo!”

I’ve taken the piss out of Google Talk a few times on this blog. Well, with the buzz about the new Google Chat idea that integrates IM into Gmail (which is being phased in), I felt like testing out the chat history, which saves your Google Talk conversations in your Gmail account (the one feature that I can use at the moment).

So I had a wee conversation with my brother just to see what the chat history was like. It’s pretty basic, almost exactly the same as the chat window in Google Talk. But that’s all you need. And because for some reason MSN Messenger’s chat history won’t work for me at the moment (serves me right for using beta versions of both MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer I guess), it’s +1 for Google Talk.

And as my test conversation went on I ended up being very impressed with Google Talk. To be fair, I had only ever used it a couple of times, and that was on the day that Google Talk launched. Which is a bit ago now.

Anyway, the upshot of it is that Google Talk simply does the job. It’s a swish, clean and basic interface, that gets across all the information you need in a novel way. I was surprised that they still haven’t got emoticons there yet — I suggested that Google just wanted to be retro about it, and my brother said that he liked Google Talk’s approach to emoticons anyway!

The appeal of Google Talk, I’ve decided, is that it sheds all of the bloat that comes with all the other major IM clients. MSN Messenger is just about the only IM client I use, simply because it’s what all my friends use. But it is filled with stupid features like nudges and winks and goodness knows what else. I really could do without all that. Google Talk goes right back to basics, and gives you what you need: instant messaging, with VOIP on the side.

My brother expressed his disappointment that Google Talk had not become a kind of Jabber-style application that would let you communicate with users of MSN, Yahoo! and AIM. Google Talk hasn’t revolutionised IM in the same way that Gmail revolutionised email — but it’s not Google’s fault that there isn’t a standard, er, standard for IM. This reminds me, though — what happened to MSN and Yahoo! merging their IM systems. I haven’t heard anything about that in ages. I take it this is still happening?

And VOIP! I had never tried this before. It suddenly occurred to me that I could use the microphone that came with my iRiver. My brother informed me that pink sockets mean microphone sockets. Yes.

This in turn spurred me on to finally download Skype. I’ll be honest with you hear: it’s pretty shit when you haven’t got any contacts. And can you believe that ‘doctorvee’ was taken! What a bastard! I have had to invent a variation: doc-vee. Ew.

So the desire to test a pretty basic chat history feature in Gmail when I was bored led to a mini revolution in the way I use IM. Until tomorrow when I revert back to MSN because all my friends are on it. Because that’s the other problem with IM. No matter how good an IM client is, it is difficult to switch over simply because you have to use the one that all your friends are using, otherwise you’ll have nobody to talk to. Which means using MSN. Gah!