- Marvel Comics¬†will have no gay characters in its mainstream books Only books labelled ‘Max’ or which indicate that they are for older people will contain any gay characters. I understand why they’re doing it, but it’s basically selling out one culture to bow to the Christian right
- Aaron Swartz writes about ‘Wikimedia at the Crossroads’ and announces that he’s going to run for a position on the board He’d get my vote – he’s evidenced a particular level of passion, enthusiasm, intelligence and commitment over the last few years.
- Aaron’s second essay on Wikipedia – “Who Writes Wikipedia” – is a bloody important read if you’re interested in social software If his contention is true – and it seems entirely plausible – then there are a lot of things we can learn from the existence of editors and the massively distributed content generation that’s going on with Wikipedia
- An interesting post on ‘Why You Tube works’ I actually pretty much buy this – I’ve never understood why advertisers (for example) so infrequently put their ads online for people to talk about and link to. You Tube has solved this, and I suspect is busily making a lot of advertiser’s lives a lot eas
- 3-2-1 Countdown Widget for Mac OS X Every Travian player’s dream come true – an easy way to set countdowns so you know when you can do the next bit of building in your village…
- Stowe Boyd discusses ‘Efficiency v Belonging’ in social tools There’s a bunch of research on why people participate in online communities, but very little on why they contribute to projects like Wikipedia (as far as I know). If anyone knows of some, could they tell me?
- Stanford University have a ‘Persuasive Technology Lab’ They call their field ‘captology’ and use it to mean how you can use computing technologies to influence and change behaviour, which sounds kind of creepy but they seem to be mainly using for good. Weird / interesting stuff…
- Wikipedia’s (slighty) artile on Captology Confession: My first reaction is to be horrified by the neologism. Apparently it derives from ‘Computers As Persuasive Technologies’ (CAPT-ology). If you went back to the Greek you’d discover that the word for persuasion is ‘Peitho’ and that there’s a Goddess associated with it. There’s even a discipline called ‘peithology’ that studies the nature of belief. You could do great compounds with that.
- Wikipedia’s article on Peitho, goddess of persuasion Funny goddess. Not enormously popular. Didn’t get out much. Occasionally confused with Aphrodite.
- Wikipedia’s entry on Mark Shuttleworth It seems slightly weird and stalkery to mention this, but I met a man who went into space at FOO and he had a weblog and he was really nice and quite good at werewolf and I promise I won’t mention it any more.
Category: Links
- Chris Messina talks about, “The yin-yang of FOO and Bar” Interesting comments from Robert Scoble surrounding the contention (which I agree with) that FOO and Bar are entirely compatible parts of the same ecosystem…
- Islam vs. Christianity – it comes to a head on The Daily Show Frankly it’s about time a primetime TV show tried to answer the question, “Which religion is correct?”
- Sprites sing a song called, “I Started A Blog Nobody Read” on Odeo It’s like it reached into my soul and sang me a song based upon the activities I do on the internet…
- Awesome pictures of an iPod Shuffle case mod using an old Nintendo controller Probably – definitely – the most fun thing I’ve seen so far this week.
- Mr Webb has relaunched his ‘dirk’ project on the interconnectedness of all things I remember this from the first time around when he launched it in 1996 and promoted it on Lance Arthur’s glassdog.net webnerd artistic community. This time I believe it’s built on Ruby on Rails. If you think about it, it’s sort of a proto-anti-tagging…
- “The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes” – a piece on design and style by Adam Greenfield from 2001 I read this at the time, but was sent it this morning by a friend and re-read it. I’d be interested to know what he thinks of the current state of the design industries – certainly it’s got a bit more function focused, at least on the web…
- Stargate SG-1 to end with (cough) tenth season Stargate is one of those desperate guilty secrets that it’s difficult to justify, particularly in the presence of Battlestar Galactica which frankly craps upon it from a very great height. I’m not sure I’ll miss it enormously…
- BarCampers spot the unusable bathrooms Ah Flickr, my true friend. You’re always on my side. Hug.
- Awesome Human Space Invaders on You Tube I have no concept of how long this must have taken. Thanks to Euan Semple for pointing it out.
- An interesting Flickr set of people hanging around on the set of Lost No spoilers as far as I can see, although there are sets I don’t recognise. Realistically they could be not parts of the set at all.
- Steve Irwin dies, South Park has the story Okay – I’ll accept that there’s an element of tastelessness to the link I just posted. Let’s be generous and call it a tribute, eh?
- Just over a week ago Techcrunch UK launched keeping track of the tremulous UK start-up scene I hear really good things about Techcrunch UK, but haven’t yet been keeping much track of it. Nice to see that I get a mention though.
- E4’s running a parody of The Sopranos credits sequence and it’s awesome and YouTube has it Probably won’t make much sense to people outside of the UK. Love the Wicker Man joke. Also Scunthorpe.
- The more I see of Schulze & Webb’s site, the more I think they’re using NLP to make us think of them as the design equivalent of an underground electronic music collective This looks so much like an album cover. Like something by AIR or Godley and Creme or something. I’d go to a concert by these guys. We need some kind of teenage magazine-style periodical full of fanboy pin-ups of design nerds with pin-ups and stuff. This would rock.
- sudo humour from xkcd We’re using this in the office now. “Get me a drink?”, “No”, “Sudo get me a drink?”, “Okay”… etc
- Ryan Carson explains, “Why I don‚Äôt use social software” I’d argue that he does, of course – and that he’ll use more in the future precisely because he has trouble maintaining all the relationships that he has now, he’ll need some form of software prosthetic to make that stuff easier.
- Philips announce production-ready clothing that can act as a simple light-emitting display medium God that was hard sentence to squeeze out. Anyway, it’s called Lumalive and looks surprisingly cool. First application I could think of – a pattern on the lapel that pulses when you have a phone call. Particularly good if you’re somewhere noisy and dark.
- Wikipedia talks about food irradiation or so-called ‘cold pasteurisation’ Advocates consider it a cheap and effective way to preserve food. Critics say that it’s a cheap way to kill bacteria in faecally-contaminated or badly-prepared food.
- Ev Williams on why pageviews are obselete There’s clearly a need for an abstracted measurement to help advertisers work out where they’re going to get the best return on their investment, but god only knows what it is…
- Venn diagram on Wikipedia Examine, if you will, the distinct differences between Euler and Venn diagrams and in the future use the terms appropriately in order to impress and confound your friends and seem cool in mathematical company…
- Midnight Inbox is a new GTD application currently in beta I haven’t had time for much of a play yet, but I’m really looking for something that can help me do this kind of stuff. It’s more about keeping on top of things than getting things done…
- One beautifully laser-etched Powerbook crafted at FOO camp Beautiful, gorgeous, interesting. Wish I’d thought of something cool like that.
- Kevin Anderson’s off to be Head of Blogging and Interaction at the Guardian Interesting and exciting. Well done old chap.
- Mr Hammond sent me this OK Go video featuring eight treadmills Bloody awesome. Bloody awesome. Gets better the more times you watch it. Very funny. Very cool. Treadmills.
- An awesome flash representation of the music that’s playing on US radio stations (in real time) Lovely bit of work this, built by the people who are doing a ‘rate the music you hear on the radio’ application that really reminds me of the Phonetags work we did at the BBC
- A rather frustrating article from The Independent about Ashley Highfield I think my opinions are relatively well-known, so I think I’ll keep my mouth shut on this particular one.
- The UK alert level has been lowered and hand-luggage can not be taken on planes again Only about half as much can be taken on board, liquids are still verboten and they’re asking people not to bring too much as it takes a long time to search – but generally that’s a pretty positive thing…
- TVTorrent.info seems to have been hacked, collapsed or shut-down… Another move by the copyright infringing people? I can’t find much coverage anywhere
- Male circumcision could halve the rate of HIV transmission in Africa, according to a new study I’m generally highly suspicious of the health benefits of circumcision, but this could change my mind.