Category: Random

An article via Blogger [“Media Web Logs For Fun and No Profit”] asks why more journalists are not maintaining weblogs. I would disagree – I would say that there is more of us out there than you know. I’d put a qualifier on that though – which is that online journalists seem to do it much more than offline ones, and online journalists often get rather submerged into different roles or better paying corporate jobs. I could name four Uk webloggers alone off the top of my head who all work in publishing and/or have been published in national / international magazines – myself included.

Mac users take note. The few of you that have yet to download the Mac version of Napster should do so immediately, as it is an intelligently designed, revolutionary piece of software. Moral implications aside, anyone serious about the future of the net needs to see exactly how much of a threat it constitutes to traditional music sales outlets. Personal opinion: they should be kakking themselves.

More useful information on the software can be found at the Macster weblog.

The Guardian’s Books Unlimited site presents: Five minutes with Naomi Klein. No Logo is up for the Guardian First Book Award 2000. [via linkmachinego]

I’m getting about three people a day finding plasticbag.org by typing “Ivan Massow” into Google. As far as I can tell they are clearly serious about finding sites with his name on. I say this because I’m squirrelled away on the fifth page of Google. Should the person looking be Mr Massow himself, drop me an e-mail – I have a couple of questions about mutual friends / acquaintances.

My beloved underground have a new project: “Help me hunt down and ritually slaughter this evil, egotistic, doddering old bitch”. I love them.

Hey – apparently barbelith got mentioned in Disinformation‘s regular broadcast e-mail. Here is the piece in full:

“Disinfo is the only site I know that will publish the weird juxtapositions like we have today: an adolescent tryst gone wrong,
and a profile of a brutal dictator who has evaded justice. I wish I could convince you that such editorial policies were really magical applications of Dr. Stephen Edred Flowers’ “Polarian Method”, but really, they occur because of chaos. If you’ve read James Gleick’s tome, maybe you should check out “The Invisibles” comic series by
Grant Morrison. And if you already know what I’m talking about, why not drop by and say hiya to our friends at Barbelith (http://www.barbelith.com/), surely one of the Internet’s coolest meeting places.

Consider me uber-chuffed. Note to self: try to make the upcoming barbelith webzine as unlike disinformation as it is possible to be without defeating purpose of self.

Via Jason I have stumbled upon the user pages for Jeff Bezos on Amazon.com. Bizarrely, these pages include his personal wishlist as well as a whole stack of reviews of (amongst other things) the binoculars he likes. And while you are there perhaps you would feel like buying the cheery multi-millionaire a Zircon 50793 Studsensor Pro 4.0 or a Star Trek electronic key chain (three types requested).

It makes you wonder whether there are other web celebrities or dare I say it … real celebrities out there with wishlists. I’d love to send Robert Downey Jnr a present. E-mail me if you can find other famous wishlists. It really is astonishing the kind of insight you can get into someone from what they ask for. Which reminds me, I must send a thank-you note to Lance Arthur.

I have finally gotten around to registering plasticbag.org on Yahoo! I’ve always felt a bit strange about putting my weblog on a directory – but I suppose after over a year of writing it, I should probably accept that it’s going to stay around a while. Moreover, for some unknown reason, it’s the most popular site I’ve ever done. I must be doing something right. Next stop (I suppose) is to get some meta tags sorted out.

An interesting place to get the inside information on what is going on with Macs is at Apple’s own PR section. Unsurprisingly, this little section isn’t particularly well flagged on their site’s main navigation.

Everyone in my office has a mobile phone. In the UK at the moment, it’s not really particularly surprising – almost everyone I know in London has one – from librarians to film execs, from journalists to lawyers. But is this ubiquity about to have a cost? In a feature called Deadly Decoys, it appears that some phones are not just cooking our brains with stray radiation. Some phones are instead actually guns. Could this be the first time in which professional criminals can blend in most effectively in the media industry? [via metafilter]