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- Get back to work, George Galloway! “As Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow, George Galloway MP earns an annual basic salary of ¬£61,708. Paid by you, the British taxpayer.”
- Channel 4’s two-part series, “Root of Evil” sees Richard Dawkins talk about his understanding of the dangers of religious thinking I’m watching the show and – as usual – I’m stunned by what I see as the credulity of religious people in defiance of all reason. But I’m also noticing that Dawkins is not a sympathetic character, his rationality manifesting quite aggressively…
- Newsdesigner talks about the work on the Observer redesign that launched on Sunday I missed it, which is the most unfortunate thing. Matt Webb says it’s a pretty solid piece of work. Looking forward to exploring it properly this coming weekend.
- The BBC ask what people should call Menzies Campbell’s supporters… Given that his name is shortened to ‘Ming’, then they’re suggesting Mingnons, Mongos and – the obvious but entertaining – Mingers…
- So I don’t understand how this underwear works or even which way you wear it, but it looks terribly exciting… It’s for snowboarding in, apparently, but it’s difficult to tell whether it’s padded, armoured or has dedicated hatches for personal releases. I can’t even tell if this is the front or the back…
- Alternative Monopoly rules put an entirely different perspective on the game! Monopoly hacks to make the games more interesting. I love the idea of joining together two boards to make a figure of eight…
- Social Facts – the course notes for Clay Shirky’s teaching around social software and group formation I’ve not had time to really interrogate this yet, but I really really need to and want to. God if only I had more time in my day to get my head around things…
- SkyScout – awesome device that identifies celestial objects that you use like a telescope I so want to get one of these, but it’s kind of pointless given that I live in London and can’t even see any stars most of the time. The sky is a perpetual red horror of light polution. I miss the countryside…
- Doc Searls writes a really interesting post about DRM, but it’s one that I need to respond to in detail Someone really needs to explain to the wider web about the rights situations inside most large organisations and how they really have legal obligations at the moment to support things like DRM. It’s not good, but it’s true…
- Why is Menzies pronounced Mingis? Interesting BBC article on the history of the Menzies / Mingis name and why it is pronounced the way it is. Good bit of history and linguistics stuff with a nice sideline in the impact of new technologies (ie. printing press)
- “Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson finds that putting his work online has invited a deluge of less than flattering correspondence” I think the one thing I like most about real world people moving onto the internet is how much they have to deal with the same crap as the rest of us – nutty people leaving abusive comments, flame wars and the like.
- Totally random BBC news article about rebuilding the Newsnight set in Second Life I completely missed this, and I can’t believe i missed it. It’s so gutting. I bet it was awesome. Does anyone have a clip?
- expialidocio.us is a flash interface for viewing your personal del.icio.us tagcloud for any given period of time It kind of choked on the sheer number of tags I have, but still pretty cool. What I really want to see is a Flickr-style top 50 tags but animated over time, so I can see new words appearing and disappearing in response to news stories and my interests…
- The Scotsman reports that the US Government are exploring an area of physics that could result in practical faster than light travel… There’s remarkably little about this news story on Google News or elsewhere, and I have to say that I’m not sure I trust The Scotsman as a source for science stories. But still, it’s a fascinating story…
- Adam Greenfield ships Everyware, now available on Amazon pre-order… I get a thanks on his post on the subject, which I’m not sure I deserve, but hey. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of this – albeit with that dread that it’ll be great (in which case I’ll be jealous) or that it’ll be terrible (in which case I’ll feel terrible)…
- Best news in ages: Jon Stewart is to present this year’s Oscars. He rocks. It’s just a shame it’s always on in the middle of the bloody night in the UK. I always doze off at the wrong moments, ten minutes from the Best Picture gong…
- The Guardian reports on the attempts to work out the feline evolutionary family tree… Cats appear to be everywhere – from the top of mountains to the toughest and hottest deserts on the planet. The first domestication? 12,000 years ago. The first identifiable breeds? Only a few hundred years…
- Podzinger makes podcasts searchable by performing speech recognition upon them… Media analysis is only one of the three ways you can accrete metadata around a media object. Also worth considering – production metadata and post-release public annotation…
- Barbelith discuss “Brokeback Mountain” And they do so with a characteristically entertaining title, “The Cowboy who went up a mountain and came down a gay man”. Charming…
- Behind the magic curtain – how Steve Jobs prepares for the Apple keynotes… Mike Evangelist reveals how the keynotes work. What’s really interesting for me here is how much of this stuff is organised around demanding top-down management. God knows what it’s like to work with Jobs…
- 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…
- Mr Morgan cut all his hair off! This is almost certainly of limited interest to those of you who don’t know early UK weblogger and notable grumpy bugger Mo Morgan. But for those who do know him, woyzer!
