Everybody's favourite TV geek crush, David Tennant of Dr Who fame, has joined up with Oxfam to offer an online climate challenge. You must guide David to answer questions about climate change, and pick the correct option out of three or four answers.

Watch David Tennant screw his face up as he tries to figure out how many wind turbines China builds every day. You make the celeb answer by clicking one of the three or four answers, you get a mark for what time you chose it in, and then the celebrity says your answer. Other stars involved include: Ashley Lensen, Mackenzie Crook and Miranda Richardson.

Games include: Boiling Point; Trains, Planes and Bananas; and Pollution Solution.

There's a button to sign an Oxfam petition on climate change and an option to share the game on your Facebook account. Oxfam have also hooked the climate challenge up with Nokia phones, so it's available as an Ovi app.

It's a moreish way of getting people to swallow some hard facts on Climate Change.

http://www.theclimatechallenge.org/

Related: Weird Website of the Week: Dalston Oxfam Shop

We're very sorry to report that Barack Obama has never used Twitter. No, I didn't expect that he personally composed *all* of the Barack Obama account Twitter updates, but some - surely!

In my heart of hearts I always suspected that some of those campaign tweets were from the Blackberry of the great man himself.

And when he followed me back all those months ago it was always possible that it had been Barack himself who had happened to log in that evening and check the new followers section.

But no, Barack has not been on Twitter. His Twitter account is all the work of minions. At a Q&A session with Chinese students in Shanghai, a student asked him : "Do you know about the great firewall and should we be able to use Twitter?" His reply: "I have never used Twitter but I'm an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access." (via Breaking News Online)

He does have a large country to run, so I suppose he's busy, but this must be a disappointment to at least some of his 2.6 million followers...

So if you're reading this Mr President uh, um... Twitter is good, you should try it. Can I have an autograph?

ReadWriteWeb took the opportunity to make a wider point about change and global politics:
"Got that? The President went to China, was asked about Twitter and it was streamed live on his Facebook page. How the world has changed."

I still want Barack Obama's autograph. That's all.

Plenty more about Twitter from us tomorrow when we're covering the 140 character conference #140conf.

Related: Why Pointless Babble is the Point of Twitter

Lady Gaga's raunchy cyberpop hit Poker Face got nerded on youtube by a sweet adorable geek called Molly. Molly covers the song in a really nice way, but makes the track sound a bit like a Sesame Street jingle.

This has been described by the internet as nerding. As in -making something nerdlike. Where Gaga is kinda sexy and vampish, Molly replaces these with the revered geek qualities of being sweet and good at using technology. The musical equivalent of putting Beyonce in square glasses and an "I heart Linux" t-shirt. And that is why we love it.

It's actually a good cover, amazingly she does the vocals and all the separate instruments herself - brought together in a pretty impressive sound mix. Molly Lewis is an impressive musican in her own right, this is her blog. Here is her Poker Face cover:
[Yes, it was for Halloween, but I think it's good all year round]

A quick How-To nerd a synthpop track guide:
1. Wear cute clothes that don't fit you 'cause they're too big and you got them in a charity shop
2. Treat your sunglasses like they are oversized reading glasses
3. Have a stylophone
4. Have a sweet warbling voice
5. Mix it up something amazing showing that you pwn computer mixing programmes
6. Stick it up on Youtube with little self-deprecating notes

Geekcore.

[via Insta]

A new website wants to help you create your "lifepath" online.

Inspired by the film "It's A Wonderful Life", and by the founder's grandmother, the site Odbody lets you record what has happened to you. In a similar way to Twitter, Odbody gets you to create a personal timeline - but it suggests you focus on the events in your life that were of historical significance rather than everyday trivia.

In their mission statement, site creator Natasha writes:

Can this poor man ever escape? All he wanted to do was make commercially successful music in the late 80s and early 90s.

Other retired rock and roll stars get an easy ride, some royalties money, a holiday home and a few tours. But for Rick Astley, British singer who had a hit in 1987 with Never Gonna Give You Up, the story is so different.

There he was... just keeping his head down and avoiding social media when a torrent of RickRoll memes pushed him to the forefront of the memeverse.

Lovely blog post from social media guru Chris Brogan on how to be a human online or "at a distance" as he puts it.

Aimed at corporates trying to be friendly on social media, there are also some useful tips for the average geek wishing to communicate their personal charm a bit better... get friends, dates, free software, that sort of thing.

A kooky new ad campaign for Russell Athletic lets you stick your head in an 80s movie. Sort of. It's an 80-izer video-maker that lets you choose between four different but deeply 80s scenarios: a breakdance, football trials, a muscle beach and a jazzercise class and upload a photo of your face. Russell Athletic is really working its all-American roots with this little viral vid and claiming the 80s - a decade that set its aesthetic - as its own.

A British start-up have launched a Spotify of music videos on similar principles to the successful music-streaming site.

Muzu.tv have signed licenses with the big labels - including Universal and Polydor - and then let you watch official music videos for free online. They pay for it with advertising, banner ads and wraparounds on the screen and every five songs there's 15 second video advert inserted in. Ad revenue is shared 50/50 with the artist and label.

Youtube used to be the site where you once wasted hours watching Girls Aloud music video after music video - but since Youtube removed masses of license-infringing content from its archive, and Spotify launched, people have been listening to music on places like Spotify and watching music videos elsewhere.

Meet Stinky Teddy, a gossip fuelled real-time search engine. As Read Write Web says, Stinky Teddy "reinvents meta-search for the real-time web".

Okay so what's with the silly name?
It sounds a like a joke student project, but was actually developed by one David Hardtke formerly a physicist at the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Lab. His search engine was named after his daughter's "trusted (and abused) stuffed bear."

This little online fashion site Viva Swag came to our attention recently. I'm not an expert in fashion - leave that to lovely Andrea over on Shiny Style, but what I do like about Viva Swag are the shopping assistant avatars: now that's a nice touch.

Of course there's a fine line between cute helpful avatar and annoying little web widget, but I think they're just treading on the right side.

It's adding a dash of the Simms into the online shopping experience:

"We overlay the shopping functionality of the site with an amusing world of make believe characters, blogs, and social networking." as they say - "Our "celebrity" spokespeople roam Viva Swag's shopping pages, offering up droll remarks and fun facts."

They do have a cute little gadget shop as well, with its own section avatar, a quiet but serious looking Latino boy called Ric Bolero. He says little cheesy things, but he is handsome. Yes, yes I fancy an avatar.

Viva Swag

Who are you really? It's a recurrent question, but where people used to take six month trips to India to reflect on their lives, you can now use a web service that helps you understand yourself. Start-up Youtego - currently premiering in Beta - wants to help you self-visualise.

Like a therapeutic Facebook aimed at self-recognition rather than self-publicity, Youtego helps you visualise your live, skills and interests.

Basically you upload information about yourself: your name, age, interests, experience and skills and it creates a life story for you. Each time you add a 'tego' for yourself - say 'Reading' in the I love section it asks you to choose an icon to visualise it. Youtego automatically offers you a selection from photo sharing sites Flickr or Picasa. Or you can upload your own. You end with a string of pictures of things that relate to you.

The past year has seen an outbreak and panic about the dreaded Swine Flu.

If you're like us and you haven't yet had the pesky pig illness then you might be a little bit concerned about how it will spread over the winter.

Google's also cottoned onto this and its now expansion of Google Flu Trends to 16 additional countries, including much of Europe. It's also made the site available in 37 languages.

The site works by tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries, and using these to estimate the level of flu, in near real-time.

While some traditional flu surveillance systems may take days or weeks to collect and release data, Google search queries can be counted immediately. Google claims that its Flu Trends provides an "additional surveillance tool that may help public health officials and the public make more informed decisions about preparing for the flu season."

It also says it's seen a good correspondence between its estimates and official flu activity data.

However, it's not just swine flu, this little tool covers every flu like illness going so it's definitely worth a quick peek.

This seems to be the week in which everyone bands together to be rude about internet consultants. A couple of vids doing the rounds on Twitter show meetings between a business manager and social media consultant and then, in another version,with a cloud consultant. It's a similar set-up on each occasion: the business manager is green and clueless, the net guru is an arrogant cowboy.

NSFW generally, gems from the social media guru include "I bore of your analogue attitude" and "I have an internet blog and everything, in layman's terms that means I'm super fucking awesome."

The man behind it the Social Media Guru film, markhamnolan says the character in his videos seems to have struck a note with watchers:

"A lot of people claim that they know this guy. There is no actual guy, he's an amalgam of a hundred different half-assed guru-wannabes Ive encountered online and in real life. For every one good guy, there seems to be ten cowboys."

Both videos use the Xtranormal video blogging technology we mentioned a few weeks ago.

Ever been stuck searching for a film to watch and just gone for the one that gets advertised on the bus only to find out that it's crap?

Well, meet Jinni - a so-called 'taste engine' for films, which offers a novel and more intuitive way to search for movies. It has just been profiled by Techcrunch.

From the site itself it doesn't look startling different from a run-of-the-mill search engine.

However, its 25,000 strong database isn't just categorised by title, director and genre... you can search for a mood, or a plot characteristic like "dark humour" or "unlikely couples".

Children's TV show Sesame Street have a nice line in spoofs - from Mad Men to err, the iPod advert.

Maybe they're trying to teach kids to be advertising-savvy, or maybe they just liked the colours and bouncy music. Anyway this is Big Bird with a "D" a music device that resembles the Apple product in more ways than one.

Making a blog post got just a whole lot more fun since someone invented a way for animated avatars to speak the words you write.

Previously, creating a small two person cartoon would require considerable animating skill and knowledge of design programmes I don't even know the names of.

But with a preloaded template on website Xtranormal you just need to type a few words in a text box to make a short little two person dialogue. You then choose from a limited range of facial expressions, music and sound effects to make the film a little more complex and it wraps it up into a short piece for you. You have to register, but everything else is free. The next two paragraphs are narrated by computer animations, I call the characters Jim and Sadie. They happen to be in a bowling alley. I cheated on camera angles by letting the programme do them automatically.

Check out our little Xtranormal creation after the jump