- Planting trees in cooler climates may actually speed up climate change The more you hearif you believe it of coursethe more it seems that this really is one of those situations where the world either has to operate together or where there have to be some seriously good incentives for poorer countries to do things for t
- I may have just found the absolute best / worst present for a five year old ever made It’s a great big artificial arm made of soft toy material with huge claws that they can wear over their real arm. My cousin’s going to love me, and her parents are going to totally hate me…
Category: Random
- Are you cleverer when you’re hungry? Given that most schools in the UK are currently focusing on making sure children have had a good breakfast in order to improve behaviour and concentration, it’s an interesting and impactful argument to make…
- Wendy Grossman writes about the recent advert posted by 4500 musicians protesting about Gowers rejection of copyright term extension on recordings Turns out some of the people who protested werewelldead. Makes you wonder who decided to protest on their behalf. Maybe the people who actually own the recordings? Bit dodgy.
- My lovely colleague Simon Willison has gone and finally relaunched his weblog in Django I know weblog redesign posts are a bit 1999 but still, it’s really clear and well organised with a range of innovative little UI and archiving touches. Worth a look.
- Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist goes to meet business types and weirds them out because he’s not interested in profit maximisation I think I love Jim Buckmaster. Craigslist may not represent a replicable model, but it’s nice to have a counter example to the kind of advertising strip-mining that eviscerates sites and services because it can only think of eyeballs not communities…
- Sam Sethi reports on being fired my Mike Arrington on Twitter Funny chap, Sam. Not one predisposed towards calming things down (in my highly limited experience of him). Not really got a clue what this whole Le Web debacle is about. Too busy. Sorry.
- Webb’s keynoting at ETech. That’s going to be fun. Lovely topic and one which he’s going to knock out of the {insert sporting metaphor}.
- I don’t think I’ve ever been more troubled than by watching the various Philips Bodygroom adverts I suspect the only way I could be more troubled is if I tried to use the appliance in question. Eek.
- I’ve been playing a bit with Widsets today. It doesn’t work seamlessly, but it’s pretty interesting… I really think this is a better model than that of a mobile browser. The browser is useful too, but this dashboard style approach seems more suited to the available interfaces…
- Use the Wii-Mote as a lightsabre, by the creator of MacSabre earlier in the year You don’t even have to have a Wii to use it, and can instead hook it up to your Mac. No Wii? No Matter…
- I met that chap from ‘Random Acts Of Reality’ the other night at the Webby do And charming he was too. Funny evening, but definitely notable for the people present, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years and a good proportion of whom were totally awesome fun.
- Victor Keegan writes quite glowingly about ORG and MySociety He points out that he hasn’t seen groups quite like these in any other country of the world. I think, after some initial reserve about their first projects, it would be difficult for me to find fault in the work that MySociety have done recently. Bravo.
- Oxbridgelife – a profoundly troubling and actually quite insulting website designed to find jobs for people from Oxford and Cambridge Note that it’s really got nothing to do with whether the people who went there were any good, just that they happened to go to a couple of universities. A solid embodiment of old boy networks…
- Pixelotto is a well-publicised (in the UK) attempt to replicate the success of the Million Dollar Homepage, but this time with a new gimmick It’s actually trying to collect $2 million dollars, and the differentiator is that one person who clicks on the ads will be awarded $1 million dollars or 50% of the prize fund, with the rest going to the organisers. Smart, if slightly creepy, model…
- Alexa stats match Sitemeter stats for relatively well-trafficed sites I’m pretty surewell I know, actuallythat Alexa rankings don’t coincide so effectively the further you go down the rankings. When you get to me the two are almost entirely unrelated…
- Some straight couples are deciding not to get married until it’s a universal right that gay people can exercise too It’s a lovely sentiment, and the people concerned really have all my respect for making this choice. I think it’s more of an indication of personal morality than a political campaigning move though. None the worse for that of course…
- Octogenarians sing ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay A weirdly moving bit of television and music that has a certain cheese factor that’s cut quite nicely by the sense that the people who sing know exactly what they’re singing about – more than anyone a third of their age possibly could…
- Beautiful graphic design in the Gloucester Road Underground station by Chiho Aoshima I’ve seen the adverts for this all around the tube, but I didn’t realise it would be displayed like this. I totally want to go and see this now. It looks sort of beautiful…
- Identify the countries of the world in a big Flash World Map Game! I got 36. I can’t tell if that’s good or not. I suspect it’s not the greatest.
- Techcrunch reviews mixd – Yahoo’s new group texting service I think the group texting facilitiescomplete with web-based archives for text and photoswill rapidly prove to have more useful possibilities than the initial event-organising premise suggests…
- GoogleBlog bids Adieu to Google Answers I find the two different approaches taken by the two companies to the idea of Questions and Answers profoundly interesting. I don’t think anyone’s quite nailed the full dynamics yet, and look forward to seeing how the field progresses….
- The BBC’s Alan Yentob now has an (shudderingly creepy) avatar in Second Life which is flying around for an upcoming BBC TV show I recently spent a bunch of cash in Second Life to try and get an avatar that I actually felt cool, and ended up producing some weird neanderthal looking gay porn-star style figure that sort of embarrasses me to use…
- Checked in at Hicks Design again recently, and reminded myself how classy his work is again Much to explore. Consumately classy.
- The BBC reports on attempts to reconstruct an ancient device thought to measure the movements of the stars I don’t know to what extent the reconstructions referred to in the article are trusted by Classicists or Archaeologists. I should really explore this more. It’s sort of fascinating…
- Loving the eboy Web 2.0 brand-filled pixelposter right about now I want one of these. More particularly I want to make a site that makes it onto things like this. I liked that Odeo and Blogger were surrounded by bikini-wearing hula-hoopers too. Funny.
- I have to say I’m really quite impressed by the new Yahoo TV site It’s clean, open, practical. It has a page for every episode of most programmes and things that users can do around them. Generally pretty solid bit of work.
- Second Life Economic Statistics Fantastically interesting insight-generating whatsits into the amount of people, land and money in Second Life and what they’re all doing…
- Signal vs. Noise on building less and underdoing to win in competitive markets Not sure that I totally buy this, but certainly it’s interesting that Nintendo didn’t take the high expensive compete on raw power route to victory, but instead looked towards making profitable and innovate stuff…
- World of Warcraft’s Top List contain information on everything from most popular auctioned items to creature most likely to kill you Not as interesting as the stats for Second Life, unless you’re totally enmeshed in the ecology of WoW which I’m delighted to report, I feel like I’ve finally escaped from…