- Ricky Gervais and Matt Groening have a little love-in as Gervais completes his first full Simpsons episode… “The Simpsons creator Matt Groening said Ricky Gervais did such a good job writing an episode of the hit US comedy show that he wants him to do more.”
- Retrievr allows you to draw sketches in an MS Paint style and then find similar Flickr photos… It looks like they’ve gone and done some analysis on some of Flickr’s most interesting pictures to try and match them up. If you play with blocks of colour you get some really nice and occasionally startling results…
- Weinberger writes a really interesting and solid piece on why (and how) the Media gets Wikipedia wrong so often… “Jimmy has been all over the news telling people that Wikipedia is not yet as reliable as the Britannica, that students shouldn’t cite it, that you should take every article with a grain of salt.”
- Bodytag – a glorious selection of explorations in web programming, visualisation and play Mr Willison, co-worker extraordinaire, introduced me to this cornocopia of beautiful fragments of insight and play. Very very classy indeed. Yay the web!
- The Stokke Xplory series of prams and pushchairs elevate children so they can see what’s going on around them… They look beautiful, but they also look really unstable to me – almost dangerous. I’m intrigued by the height question too – is it useful for children to be elevated, or should they be getting familiar with the way the world looks at their height?
- Weirdest moderation technique ever – Second Life griefers are sent to ‘The Cornfield’ If you misbehave a fair amount you are sent to this weird environment with only a slow tractor, lots of corn and a depressing film playing in black and white on an old TV for company. The big question is whether or not curious people will act up in order to see the weird new territory…
- Technoranki – a weblog ranking and authority service I have no idea whether this is any good or not as a service, except that it seems to be being used by the BritBlogs people for their charts at the moment. Anyone got any experience or thougts about it?
- Allegedly psychic Flash game works out what number you were thinking of… Or at least so it seems for about the first three minutes you play with it. Have a couple of goes and then see if you can figure out how it’s done. There’s at least one ingenious twist in the whole thing…
- Blogger Web Comments for Firefox The most interesting thing about this is how the weblog is becoming the default platform for pretty much everything and individual expresses online. Why would you use a dedicated web annotation service when you can just integrate it into your site?
- My favourite new Social Software enterprise is the beautiful and well-developed extratasty.com! For sheer class, check out the submit a recipe page – all the ingredients come from a controlled vocabulary, are translated automatically into tags, and it even writes the recipe for you as you submit each component. Plus you can register on the submission page in just three fields (one of which is hidden until it knows you’re new). Very very nice indeed.
- What’s the deal with the self-referential sign…? A sign that warns you about itself? That sounds like Banksy to me, but it can’t be – surely? Speaking of which I saw another weird traffic cone orb in London yesterday. I wonder if it was him…
- Current favourite character in all drama: Titus Pullo Probably just toppling Doctor Jack from that Lost TV series. I believe the term is something like ‘silver fox’ or something. Dodgy tough-as-old-boots grey-headed soft-hearted violent impuslive grumpy bastards. Cough.
- The Patent Epidemic from Business Week One of the weirdest things I’ve had to get my head around over the last couple of months is the US patent culture. There’s no patents for software in Europe yet, so it’s been a total culture shock…
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12 replies on “Links for 2006-01-05”
Eek, the psychic game freaks me out – how do they do that? I noticed that every time I start a new game the symbol for each number is different, but that’s as far as my little brain can compute…
One hint: the number 9. I once stumbled upon the same game but with pictures of kittens. So everytime i played i got freeked out, but also went ‘Awwww!’
This old blog entry of mine will explain the maths behind the psychic game…
I wonder what plans Ricky Gervais has for advertising on the podcast? Is it exclusive to Guardian Unlimited because their hostng it (the ultimate in sponsorship)?
“The most interesting thing about this is how the weblog is becoming the default platform for pretty much everything and individual expresses online. Why would you use a dedicated web annotation service when you can just integrate it into your site?”
What nonsense? Have you never seen a message board?
Sigh. Yes, Aaron – I have seen a message board. In fact I’ve been running one for seven years, and co-developed moderation strategies for them. Also I’ve worked in online communities and social software for years.
To clarify my point, a couple of years ago there were dedicated web annotation services, and the blogger firefox things makes that kind of redundant because it capitalises on a larger existing community of people running their own sites already. And alongside all the systems that allow people to review products and comment on web pages, trackback and technorati-based products have meant that it’s now possible for people to write things on their own personal weblogs and have them integrated in other people’s sites, rather than signing up for those sites. Therefore, there seems to me to be a movement towards letting people express themselves by default on their own personal spaces and using the various technologies that have been developed to mine this space to drag it into other areas. Hence, my position expressed briefly in the above piece that maybe asking people to sign up for your site or service to post might no longer be the default way to get people to express themselves.
But all this be damned. Let’s talk instead briefly about the way you phrased your comment – dismissing the thing I mentioned as nonsense before insulting my intelligence and expertise – and doing so in such a way that it’s not even possible for me to send you an e-mail in response.
If you disagree with what I’m saying at any point, you are completely free to express your opinions and I’m totally up for engaging in a discussion about it. I may even change my position. But I don’t respond well to being talked to as if I’m an idiot by people who aren’t even prepared to stand by their opinions. When I talk to people or disagree with them, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt – arguing with the substance of the piece, presenting counter-examples, and working on the principle that the person concerned is not an idiot until proven otherwise. If you have any desire to post on this site again and have anyone hear what you say, then I suggest you operate on the assumption that you’re still talking to real people, and that – as usual – you’ll get a better and more thoughtful response from people if you treat them with the slightest bit of respect.
Thanks for the link to the Psychic game – the sense of achievement when you crack it is quite something!
based solely on my sites position on the BritBlog top 50, technoranki seems place a lot of emphasis on that days inlinks, with my position shifting massivly between days. I’d be intrested to find out what they are doing to judge postions. Perhaps a weekly top 50 British Blogs chart would be more useful? It seems to be that regularity of publishing must be taken into calculation, blogs should surely be rewarded for being up to date.
Apologies, I enjoy your blog and didn’t mean to offend. The comment was offhand and typed in a bit of a blur. It was very badly phrased.
Aah, thanks Roy.
regularity of publishing must be taken into calculation, blogs should surely be rewarded for being up to date.
“Rewarded”? When did rankings-as-measurement-of-activity turn into rankings-as-a-gold-star-for-the-cool-kids?
You’re right Phil – it has nothing to do with rewards! We’re still working on technoranki to try and make it more accurate, so all I can say at the moment is ‘watch this space’.