- A court in the Pennsylvanian town of Dover has declared it unconstitutional to teach Intelligent Design in the town’s schools… I think my favourite comment about the whole thing comes from Pat Robertson who said that the move risked provoking the wratch of God – despite the ID prononent’s assertion that it wasn’t a religious theory…
- “One in 10 UK websites fail to work properly on the open source Firefox web browser, a study shows” And the Odeon website is explicitly named again! That must be years now after they were first taken to task for it. They’ve made some improvements it’s true, but how long will it take for them to realise that it needs root-and-branch rebuilding?
- Kevin Marks explodes Susan Cheever’s ludicrous take on the copying of digital artifacts… “It’s a strange experience to see your own property so appreciated. It’s disorienting and beguiling. You’ve been quoted. That’s how it feels when something of yours suddenly appears in cyberspace…”
- DIY Paper bookmarks This has been all around the web, but still – it’s a neat and simple idea. Printable corners that you can stick on books to keep your place or to annotate the content at that point. Annotation is everywhere.
- An awesome post by a Barbelite colleague on “Christmas Trees and the God of Yule” I bloody loved reading this – it’s all about Freyr, a Norse god of fertility, one of whose symbols was the Christmas tree – within which each Winter he would be reborn. This is way more fun and spiritually satisfying than Christianity!
- Wikipedia has an awesome article on Freyr full of enticingly obvious symbolism! “The most important Freyr myth relates Freyr’s falling in love with the giantess Ger√∞r. Eventually she becomes his wife but first Freyr has to give away his magical sword.”
- “How Google woos the best and brightest” One thing occurs to me is that such structures should either be well known, or kept very secret. All recruitment seems to be a gameable system. Ideally they should be well-known, so that everyone has equal access to the cheats…
- ‘Gay weddings’ first for Belfast “Two women, Shannon Sickles and Grainne Close, exchanged vows at Belfast City Hall, followed by a gay couple and another lesbian couple.” Lovely. And about time, frankly.
- A Flickr photoset of the notes taken during the inaugural ORG meeting, designed to try and capture the major issues that people felt about digital rights… Named, “Digital Rights in the UK: Your Rights, Your Issues”, this gets to the heart of many of the core issues that people are worried about w/r/t digital rights, although I’m sure there are more. Probably worth annotating for clarity?
Year: 2005
Links for 2005-12-21
- One Billion Internet Users (from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) “Some time in 2005, we quietly passed a dramatic milestone in Internet history: the one-billionth user went online. Because we have no central register of Internet users, we don’t know who that user was, or when he or she first logged on.”
- The guy from Suprnova explains why the site went offline a year ago… He tells the story quickly, but it sounds like quite a scary situation to find yourself in. Still, it also sounds like the story ended fairly well. I wonder what happens next…
- Roger Ebert describes his best 10 Movies of 2005, and mentions a whole lot of other films that nearly made the list or deserved a mention It’s a fascinating group of pictures. I can’t quite fathom why everyone in the US was so taken with Crash – it didn’t work so well for me, and I don’t think it did enormously well in the UK box office. Maybe it’s a cultural thing.
- Saturday Night Live’s “The Chronic of Narnia Rap” This one’s really spreading – I heard about it on a mailing list from a friend in the US about six hours before Cal sent me the URL. I’m guessing it’ll have eaten the internet by Thursday.
A quick note from jetlaggia…
It’s this direction that’s the killer – not being able to sleep until 4 or 5am and not feeling awake and fresh until the middle of the afternoon. I’ve been back in the UK for a couple of days, but I’m still living in that hallucinogenic twitchy overwarm zombie space, and I suspect I’ve got at least one more day of it to go. Thank god for Christmas. Posting will be irregular until the middle of next week, I suspect. Fragments of my incoming stimuli will continue to be captured on my Flickr photostream as normal.
Links for 2005-12-18
- John Spencer, who played The West Wing’s Leo McGarry, has died aged 58 God, what terrible news. I’m astonished that he was only 58 – he looked ten years older at least. It turns out that he was younger than my stepfather.
Links for 2005-12-16
- Wikipedia survives research test “The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows. The British journal Nature examined a range of scientific entries on both works of reference and found few differences in accuracy.”
Kong! Kong! Kong! Kong!
There’s a moment about a fifth of the way through King Kong (IMDB / Metacritic) when a young character who’s reading a copy of Heart of Darkness suddenly twigs that he’s not reading an adventure story. And then about thirty seconds later, you realise you’re not watching an adventure story either. And then the ground falls out from underneath your feet and the next time you breathe it’s about an hour later and you’re so hooked and consumed by the whole experience that you don’t want the film to ever end. I’ve never seen a movie that so comprehensively crapped on any and all opposition, that so savagely went for your throat and held you by it until you begged for mercy. God knows how it’ll stand up to repeated viewings – it’s not a short film and there are patches where you could find fault – but for the moment I can only say that there’s never been a blockbuster like this, it’s going to clean up everywhere and I’d put money on it putting years on Speilberg. Unbeatable. Amazing. Must see. Wow.
Links for 2005-12-14
- Alexa Web Search Platform “The Alexa Web Search Platform provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents — even create their own search engines — using Alexa’s search and publication tools.”
Links for 2005-12-13
- The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 I’m not buying the Web 2.0 = web app concept as such, but this is still a pretty solid list of good web apps out there and hence (at the very least) pretty much a place to find the gold standard to get inspired by…
- The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users I know pretty much all of this stuff, but del.icio.us can have a bit of a learning curve for new users. It’s generally worth it in the end though. Explore away!
- Punk photographer Andy Rosen has signed up for Flickr and is starting to post his private collection… Astonishing stuff – and apparently confirmed by various people around the place. Mass amateurisation goes both ways, as professionals start to take advantage of the more innovative tools of the little guys…
- Openomy – an online file-system with tags Haven’t had a play with this yet, but I’m intrigued by the idea of enhancing the very idea of online storage in various ways. Bears further investigation…
- Yahoo! offers Movable Type as part of its offering for small professional outfits “Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for small business users, taking advantage of its scale and efficiency, Anil Dash, vice president of professional products for San Francisco-based Six Apart, said in a phone interview.”
- Hotwiring Your Search Engine Repulsive SEOs wallow in their own crapulence over on Newsweek, happy to ignore the evidence that search engine position based on lies is always going to be under attack from search engines eager to reduce spam.
Update from San Francisco…
So I’m halfway through my first Yahoo-employed trip to San Francisco and I’ve been so bloody busy that I’ve not really had much of an opportunity to keep up with my e-mail or my community or with what’s been going on around the internet. What’s made the whole thing even more difficult to keep hold of has been my pernicious gut-rot, which kicked in on Wednesday evening (vomit everywhere) and has continued now for almost five days solidly. The initial grotesquery has been replaced with a perpetual sourness, recurrent belching and vicious and unexpected cramping. Other than Thursday, where I could barely get out of bed, I’ve tried not to let it stop me doing things, but it’s certainly put a tiring dampener on the whole experience.
Yesterday I was persuaded by Simon and Dinah to go for a drive over the Golden Gate to look at some Redwoods. I was initially reluctant, but with the exception of a few moments of minor inflating body horror, the whole experience was pretty special. The whole day has been carefully (and expensively) documented via MMS-to-Flickr (A day with Simon and Dinah), and here are some odd pictures below that should help capture the whole thing:
Workwise, the whole trip has been extremely illuminating – a hell of a lot has happened while I’ve been out here, including the official announcement of the acquisiton of del.icio.us by the mothership. It looks like a fair number of people are nervous about the whole thing, but I can’t help thinking that they’re going to be in good company near the Flickr and Upcoming crew out here in Mission College. I’m looking forward to getting the little London Tech Dev team that we’re setting up playing with the emerging Yahoo Social Software scene. We should be able to come up with some pretty neat stuff.
What else has been going on? I went to see Narnia with Cal and I’m sorry to say that I think that the critics for the most part got this one wrong – the first two thirds of the film, adapted inelegantly from the book, are pretty mediocre at best and pretty terrible at worst. The last third – barely referenced in the book – is substantially better if you’re prepared to see Lord of the Rings-style tropes slapped on the screen with little innovation or creativity. I found the whole thing disappointing, and was only pleasantly surprised by the actor who played Peter Pevensie who is the spitting image of my little brother (also called Peter). Very strange. My little brother in a movie. Anyway – hopefully King Kong or Brokeback Mountain (which I’m hoping to squeeze in before I leave) will be more entertaining.
Otherwise, to the few nerds in the city I haven’t hung out with yet – I’m around until Friday and it would be great to see you. I’m not going to make it to Syndicate unfortunately, but I’m free most evenings and really trying to plug in both to what Yahoo are up to and what’s going on more widely. And then on Friday I can fly back to London and collapse in an exhausted heap in a pile of dirty laundry and let everything sink in for the couple of days before Christmas!
Links for 2005-12-10
- Metacritic reviews The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – and likes it! I’ve fallen over with a revolting stomach bug overnight and feel like crap, but I’m still completely looking forward to the Narnia film and King Kong. Maybe I can persuade Cal to go too…
- Another film I’m looking forward to a lot – Brokeback Mountain 89 out of 100 for a gay cowboy movie. It’s difficult to see anything here that’s not worth investigating in greater depth…