- BBC News now appears to have a section called ‘Also in the News’ for ‘surprising stories from around the world’ These stories include people who drive into underground stations and people meeting leopards. And people say editorial standards are slipping…
Category: Random
- The rumour is that last.fm has been bought by CBS for $280 Million I find myself surprisingly depressed by this revelation, although it does sort of rather explain some of the conversations I had with them a while back about what it’s like inside large organisations and how acquirees fare…
- Apple have finally launched the DRM-free higher quality version of songs on iTunes – it’s called iTunes Plus Obviously it’s EMI only at the moment, but it’s sufficiently interesting for me to go and see if there’s anything I’ve bought over the last few years that I could upgrade.
- Weird idea of the moment: Sell the movie rights to The Sims… I suppose when you think about it, there’s a bunch you could do with this if you treat it as a sort of meta-fiction about the world outside the game and its inter-relationships with the characters within it. Still. Odd.
- A gay pub in Australia has won a court-case that would allow it to ban heterosexuals “The tribunal’s president said groups of straight women found homosexual men entertaining but that such attention was dehumanising.” I have much experience of being treated like this by unpleasant and arrogant women looking for a pet.
- John Battelle has posted his “Data Bill of Rights” and I’m finding it pretty fascinating… I’m not totally sure it’s all workable, but there’s a lot here of significant value. I’m spending a bunch of time trying to work out how to operate honourably in the technology ecosystem and how to encourage honourable business practice. This helps.
- Time Magazine’s extract from Al Gore’s book on defending reason is pretty decent… Really interesting in terms of how politics has gone and how evaluation and reason is massively under attack from rhetoric and the visual image. Quite approve. Like Al Gore.
- Awesome web cartoon about the current wifi = death absurdities… “Good night, stay safe, and live in constant, irrational, fear.”
- I’ve currently got these four pictures entered in the Flickr/Tate “How We Are Now” pool / competition… The photos are displayed in the Tate Britain on screens and then the very best will be published in the Observer or whatever. Good fun. Not sure these are my best photos. Any thoughts out there?
- Techcrunch reports on the Facebook platform. This is a very very good idea indeed. I also agree with the description of the move as an anti-MySpace move. It’s weird this stuff. Now of course there will be a whole bunch of imitators. But I wonder how many of them could have got any movement inside their organisations before this…
- The Pansy Project finds places where homophobic violence or abuse has occurred and plants a pansy on the site… I can’t helping thinking that schools would be bursting with pansies, all over the place. There wouldn’t be room enough to sit down.
- Meg Pickard on the natural heirarchy of seats on the tube… I don’t agree with some of what she says – the idea of being trapped by the end door with the window open in a train would appall me. Hard to escape. Otherwise though, desperately and depressingly insightful.
- The Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards is about celebrating the best in European weblogs… It’s a pretty good way to see what people are writing about and to discover some new sites, and if you want to vote for me in the ‘Past his best’ category, that would be fine too…
- Charlie Brooker on lying just for the hell of it… You see, I sort of get this, but I’m afraid I’m a bit old fashioned. I don’t think that smiling to people you’re not so keen on counts as lying, and I think people who play tricks on other people are sort of self-inflated arseholes, really. Sorry. No fun,
- Grindhouse has been chopped in half for UK release. Kurt Russell’s not thrilled, and neither am I… Nice to know me and Russelly have something in common. You know what would be ace? NFT doing the original film as it was supposed to be shown. Or maybe showing both at the same time at some exclusive large venues?
- The rumour a month or so ago was that Amazon were about to launch an MP3 only music-selling un-DRM’d service Anyone heard any more about this? Also when the crap are iTunes going to start their DRM free service. Why does everyone insist on keeping me waiting for cool things. Very aggravating.
- Derek Powazek on “The Real Story of JPG Magazine” Derek provides his side of the story about how he left the company that he co-founded, and the reasons behind it.
- Heather gives her perspective on the whole JPG experience… It makes me sad that such a lovely idea got soured, however it came about. Very depressing. I only wish I’d been able to write about this earlier. Got distracted. Sorry.
- Where in London would I be able to see a bearskin-wearing wearing footguard of the Household Cavalry? I asked Metafilter (although I also said foodguard which is a bit dumb) cos I’m trying to get some good pictures. Can anyone out there help? Also they’re not the Household Cavalry. I feel stupid.
- How to meet other hackers! I wrote this post over on the Hack Day blog listing some of the ways that people are self-organising around Hack Day. Really fun bunch of stuff. If you know of anything else let me know. Otherwise #hackday on freenode might be a good place to hang…
- I’m sort of fascinated by ‘I Want Sandy’, the personal e-mail based life organising service from Rael Dornfest… It’s not live yet. I think I’m interested in it because my mum’s name is Sandy and she’s totally over-organised. Therefore it has a nice feel to it. That’s a dumb reason, isn’t it.
- Meg Pickard has spotted a rather aggravating security hole in Twitter’s service… Messages that are supposed to be private are being exposed through the API Various people are irritated by this, particularly as apparently some of the messages are being indexed. I’m sure it’ll be sorted out soon. But still, irritating. [Addendum: This is more of a security hole in Twittervision’s use of the API rather than Twitter itself. See here for more details]
- The Open Rights Group is looking for more board members… Ideally people with a little spare time who are passionate and clueful about issues like copyright term extension, data retention policies, DRM and the like…
- Stonewall reports on a new survey on the UK’s attitudes to homosexuality… Their concern – whether the shrill voices that argue against homosexuality are representative of the wider population. Their conclusions, pretty much totally no. Awesome. Sometimes the British really cheer me up.
- “Scientists reject Panorama’s claims on Wi-Fi radiation risks” from the Guardian is a pretty interesting read… Also good are statements from scientists indicating that it was “grossly unscientific” and “a scare story”. I complained to Panorama via the BBC complaint line yesterday.
- Can I just say that this story on ‘Yahoo censoring a Flickr user and then redressing its mistake’ is absolutely ludicrously over the top… I mean, genuinely, the managers of any and all online communities delete stuff all the time. They have to. Sure it was a mistake in this case, but the only reason anyone knows about it is because Flickr are so transparent and open…
- Panorama’s programme on wifi appears to be scandalously scaremongerish… If fifty percent of studies can find no evidence for a correlation at all, and radiation is one six-hundredth of reasonable than safety limits, then realistically it’s not much of a threat is it.
- “An investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme suggests the risks posed by wi-fi computer networks may be greater than previously thought, but scientists say the health fears are unproven.” Love the use of ‘unproven’ here. It’s being used to suggest that the bulk of scientists are still keenly investigating, rather than in the rather less worrying ‘we have found no consistently observable correlations’ sense…
- I’m very excited about the Moleskine San Francisco guide/notebook that I picked up in Foyles the other day… And I’m looking forward to my next chance to use it, which will probably be around FOO Camp in about a month.