Just in case anyone had not already heard, the new Star Wars film (Episode II) is to be called ‘Attack of the Clones’ – possibly the worst title of all time, after (maybe) ‘The Phantom Menace’. Will this film suck as heavily as the last one did? Only time will tell…
I’m quite fascinated by the way that Netscape is developing it’s cross-network infrastructure. It doesn’t really make total sense to me, although there’s some interesting stuff going on. The top navigation at Entertainment Weekly is now entirely Netscape branded – which means it’s probably part of the AOL Time Warner monstrosity that is eating our planet. But all the navigation seems to go back to Netscape Central rather than to encouraging people around the rest of the Time Warner Sites (Mad Magazine for example) – which I find slightly strange.
Could this be the next form of advertising? Inbuilt navigation? Could TimeOut.com get revenue by placing a full block of someone else’s navigation on the top of its front page?
I’m in love with the look of Webmonkey at the moment. I know the redesign happened a while back, but it works so well and really looks like a site rather than a magazine or a bit of print design. Plus it’s not afraid to play a little. I wonder if there’s a way to automate that staggered blocks of taster-text so that I could do something like that with Greymatter.
It is 2.45pm and here is the news from the BBC:
“On the 56th anniversary of the day that a war was won by the wholesale slaughter of a whole city full of people: Hiroshima remembers A-bomb.
“Is this the future of public internet access? Complete with brass covers and four modem points, an English Park Bench goes online.”
“And on the day that Tom’s American guest stays up until 7am watching episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, his countryman Ben Affleck enters rehab for problems with drink.”
More news in our evening bulletin…
Today on Barbelith: Philosophy of Fan Fiction – “In other words, fanfiction as concept and practice can be central to one of the most important political / cultural / aesthetic problems of our time: is it possible to create anything new? Deva inquires.”
Another month, another set of overuse charges for barbelith.com. Thankfully, these have been the lowest such charges for a while, possibly due to my burn and purge attitude to heavier web graphics recently. Still, even a supplement of $16 is a pain in the arse when you can’t pay the basic $30.
How many people do you think would secretly love to run this 404 error? I would. I’d love it. Favourite line? “If you would like Windows to screw everything up, click Screw everything up.” [via NotSoSoft]
A quick hello to everyone redirected from machete 2.2. Hope you like the place.
Kudos to riothero and vodb.com for the use of the Barbelith syndication script. Now all I need is to put up some more bloody articles. [I want a kitten]
Blogdex functionality is gradually ramping up, slowly making it a useful piece of online kit – even though it’s still not done anything that hasn’t been done before (and it doesn’t seem to render quite perfectly on Macs).
Let’s block through some of them one-by-one: 1) Updates – a simple page that tells you what they are planning to add to the site addresses (adequately?) one of my main concerns about the site – namely that it doesn’t promote sites, in fact quite the opposite – it gives people a way to find interesting links without actually reading them. Their response: “blogdex is not intended as a destination to bypass bloggers, rather a place to organize and distill all of the information they generate”.
2) The main page now includes a list of all the people who originally found the link that has been popular enough for blogdex to track it. A couple of questions arise for me here. The first one is how blogdex distorts the popularity of these links by merely saying ‘these links are popular’ and the second is whether or not people can promote their own sites simply by trying to get onto one of those lists. That is – if I link to the current top link on blogdex without giving a damn about the content, then will I show up in the list of linkers, and will I receive traffic from that list? If so – this could lead to a gradual homogenisation of weblog content and a huge disparity between the ‘top-ten linked-to’ things and ‘the rest’.
3) The Top Links of All Time is a strange little page. It tracks the top several hundred links that have been collated by blogdex over all the time the site has been running. But which links are incorporporated into this system is a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, as far as I know, Blogger itself hasn’t been in the top ten of the site since it launched – and yet it is number one on this list with over 2/3rds of all the weblogs tracked containing a link to it. Is the main list excluding text-links that stay the same across a weblogs life. For example, I have a link to Davo on the right of this page all the time, but it’s not part of the ‘blog’ itself – is this not included in the main list perhaps? And is it included on the ‘top links’ page?
I’m unclear about what exactly is being tracked. I would really like to know what is being tracked – I’d love to know whether (for example) cross links between weblogs are actually excluded from this ranking. If Jason said something stunningly apropros, or detailed a genius scheme for revitalising the web industry – I’d want links to it to be tracked. Otherwise, aren’t we treating weblogs as a place which doesn’t produce content, but just links to it? Where’s the valuation of the commentary?
Nonetheless, this Top Links of All Time page makes fascinating reading. You can find plasticbag.org lurking on the second page at number 33 – only five places behind plastic.com and only six behind the godlike Zeldman. Implausible, but pleasant.