- Identity Cards? If you’re not a fan, there’s a Pledgebank thing you can sign up for. I’m getting more and more fascinated by Pledgebank, but I’m mostly fascinated by why no Americans seem to be using it. This could be huge. Is the UK focus too parochial?
- BBC opens TV listings for ‘remix’ “Developers and designers are being encouraged to come up with innovative ways of using TV and radio schedules by taking part in a BBC competition.”
- An old post from last year on a Google audio search Did anything happen with this? Does anyone know if there was any movement here. I’d be really interested to know what’s going on…
- AIM Fight – pit two AIM names against one another and see which is in the most buddy lists across the world… Got this one from Anil Dash (‘anildash’). If you want to pit yourself against me, my IM name is plasticbagUK
- Google look for an office in Victoria I wonder what proportion of the staff will be developers making new products and what proportion will be to do with localisation and sales
- Andrew Orlowski, Sloppy Journalist or Bold Faced Liar? One of a series of articles that have emerged since Scoble and Orlowski broke into open warfare. My opinions of Orlowski’s journalism are a matter of public record…
- “Bloggers and journalists responsible for shades of gray between them” “Orlowski doesn’t take the sort of chances that Winer is referring to. He has, for as long as I’ve been familiar with his writing, taken liberties instead liberties becoming of a buffoon.”
- False breasts betray exam cheats “A Russian youth wearing a drag outfit which gave him improbably large breasts has been caught trying to sit an entrance exam for a female friend.”
- Danny O’Brien: The right to digital freedom “While these conflicts are tremendously important, they are more than 3,000 miles away. Battles for Britain’s digital future are taking place more locally – yet we barely hear the fights here.”
- A body-modification project that builds eyeglasses that pass through the nose It’s pretty stunning, although I keep wondering about magnets. Does that sound banally stupid? Magnets.
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4 replies on “Links for 2005-08-01”
It’s entirely too easy to confuse “why I don’t” and “why I and my countrymen don’t,” but my feeling is that Pledgebank isn’t a particularly American sort of thing. “I’ll do this, but only if I know that everyone else will do it too” isn’t exactly a part of our national self-image. We may be a bunch of sheep quite often, but coming right out and saying “I’ll do this as part of a crowd, but not on my own” doesn’t fit our independent, self-reliant image.
re Google and music and the other search engines too. MP3s have relatively rich ID tags that are at a known place in the file. It doesn’t feel particularly hard (for Google) to spot the .mp3 extension and use HTTP get range to collect and index the metadata. I’ve seen people criticise this saying that it would hit the bandwidth of the provider, but collecting just the ID tag mitigates this.
So why hasn’t it happened yet?
This probably applies to other media as well. Like the JPG EXIF standard.
I think Pledgebank is fantastic, but it’s not being used by US users for a couple of reasons. First, the support methods for Pledgebank include SMS to a specific number – both not so big in the US, and (I’m assuming) using a number specific to the UK.
Unlike Phil, I don’t think collective, community action is against American principles – the way it’s portrayed here, though, sometimes implies sheep action.
I think it just takes a few people to start using it, and it spreads. It’s still very young, you know, and it hasn’t had much press outside Britain.
Google UK’s current job openings look very Sales-heavy:
http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/jobs/index.html