My browsers (both Camino and Safari) are now totally drunk on information. They’re so full of tabs and bookmark-bar stored links that they’re sluggish and clumsy and unresponsive. So in an attempt to help them back to a semblence of normality, I’m going to stick two metaphorical fingers down their collective throats and help them vomit up their linky goodness all over the blogosphere in the form of a massive blast of microcontent votage:
- Ben’s Brain on Blog
One of the best experiences of ETCon for me was actually getting to know Mr Hammersley a bit. I had tremendously good fun arsing around with him in arch-English accents in the middle of the Westin hotel while Webb looked on indulgently. While we were out there he told us about these places you could go and pay $1000 for a full body scan. And now he’s gone and done it for the Guardian. I’m looking forward to reading about that… - Awesome USBV spywatch
It’s probably the least comfortable piece of tech ever made (apart from some chastity belts that Webb kept talking about in San Francisco – but you can’t put MP3s on them). Probably best to wait until tech like this is bluetooth-enabled. That would actually be pretty useful; - Meatball on Feature Karma
I like the concept of “Feature Karma”, which basically says that every time you add a feature you should simplify another one or even remove it. That way you keep a site or a software project clean and simple and user-intuitive. It’s more use as a buzz-word or a piece of short-hand, though – since you’d have to find the optimum level of simplicity / utility first, otherwise you’d never have any functionality at all… - Defining Spam
Wired’s coverage of the efforts to legislate against spam e-mail has been uniformly intelligent, apposite and good-natured. The most frustrating part of the debate is the obvious self-serving of some of the people concerned. Here’s a bit of the article: Wientzen argued that marketers should be able to contact consumers “at least once” by e-mail to ascertain whether the individual might be interested in receiving marketing messages. “How do you send solicited e-mails if there is no way to initially solicit interest?” he asked. The crowd responded with boos. How profoundly stupid can you be? You can’t encourage people to respond to those e-mails to help out the legitimate marketers if – in the process – it would get horribly abused by a thousand times as many illegitimate ones!