Year: 2000

Tom promotes blatant copyright theft: It occurs to me that a really good template for a weblog would be the Wired News Template (with a few adaptations of course). I’ve even got a name for it. You could call it UNDERwired.

I really love Metafilter. Almost an unholy amount, in fact. For those of you who aren’t webloggers yourself (I’d place a bet on around 5%), and are thus unfamiliar with the site, it’s a community weblog, where anyone who signs up can post links through to interesting sites and news stories around the web. The two most important differences between it and other similar community weblogs are that Metafilter: 1) Allows considerable discussion of every post made, and 2) Seems almost magically to attract some astonishingly intelligent, responsible and able members of the web community.

Two recent examples:

• Malasia’s attitude to sodomy and politics
  I posted this story yesterday that I found through AOL’s news site. It was a highly disturbing and bizarre piece which describes how the ex leader of the country has been sentenced to nine years in prison for sodomy. His brother has been sentenced to six years and four lashes with a rattan cane. And why? Because of apparent political differences with the current leader. I was astonished by the quality of the replies.

• Network Solutions has denied Amazon.com’s request for the renewal of their domain
  Less seriously, having posted the above, I noticed what appeared to be a Wired-style story about Amazon’s problems with Network Solutions. Only it’s so much funnier than that. [Read the full piece]

  “As you are no doubt aware, the .com top-level domain is intended for use by for-profit corporations. Many such corporations are registered with Network Solutions, and this policy is unchanged. However, it has come to our attention, as evidenced by recent SEC filings on behalf of Amazon.com, inc., that your company has yet to turn a profit….”

Things that are in today’s Evening Standard: A long article about Ivan Massow. Things that aren’t in today’s Evening Standard: A long article about weblogs featuring interviews with Katy and myself. I can, of course, only quote from the former:

“His crossing shows all the evidence of pique, not of principle, or of some such immature dramatic display as might please the Oxford Union. With his evident lack of ideological commitment the Conservatives would be wise to dismiss his defection with “Good riddance”, and the Labour Party to welcome him with as much relish as a stinking fish.”

Guy Ritchie, boss of a friend of mine, spouse of icon and creator of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and the upcoming Snatch (NB: snatch.com is not the film site!) is guest editing Time Out this week. There’s even a photo of him lurking by the back door of the Time Out building in London looking all pensive. I wish someone would have told me – I would have liked to have seen that in progress. I’m probably in the background pulling my hair out, to be honest…

When is all publicity not good publicity? Penguin Books have just released a book called katie.com [Full Article: Guardian]. The book describes the experiences of a girl who runs her own website and who came into contact and was finally assaulted by a paedophile she met in a chatroom. Unfortunately, katie.com isn’t the domain name of her site, but of a completely unrelated website. And now the second Katie is getting vast amounts of traffic, along with tons of e-mail talking about the issues surrounding paedophilia.

The latter Katie is extremely irritated, and asked them to change the name of the book. Penguin’s lawyers responded with a very firm no, stating that she had no case whatsoever.

So when is all publicity not good publicity?

1. When what should be your intellectual property (unless proven otherwise) is used without your approval or consent – ie. katie.com.
2. When the association between yourself and the book means that people think that you have been assaulted or raped by a paedophile.
3. When your traffic increases to such an extent that you must pay additional bandwidth charges (as seems likely in this case).
4. When your e-mail address is undermined by thousands of e-mails describing disturbing and upsetting events (not to place any blame onto those people who have written of course).
5. And when the distressed caused to you has been completely ignored by the company concerned.

It turns out that my mother was right. Neither she nor my brother liked Being John Malkovich at all. Not even a little bit. I could feel them next to me in the cinema squirming, desperate to get out. My mother thought it was inappropriate material for a 15 year old and that it was too long. My brother just thought it was boring.

Major flashback: Maggie Let It Go has finally got its arse in gear and scanned in the pictures from the epic collision of Mark, Katy, Vance and myself. The first thing Katy then did with them was write dodgy captions to them all, including the stylish “Ok, who farted?”. She’s so classy.

I am having substantial difficulty persuading my mother that she needs to go and see Being John Malkovich this evening. She seems convinced that she just won’t like it. The problem is, I go and see so many films, that I’ve pretty much seen all the new releases on in London at the moment. And there is no way on god’s earth that you’re getting me to go and see the Patriot again…

The weblogger’s new hair…

It’s surprisingly difficult to get a decent photo which adequately shows up what are essentially relatively subtle new hair effects, which may go some way to explain why it’s taken me so long to find something. This picture, in fact, actually doesn’t do it any justice at all, but it was the only one from my recent webcam tests that even vaguely looked right. Judge for yourself.

I also received a highly entertaining e-mail regarding this hair thing. It reads:

“Spotted: Strolling down Oxford Street on a muggy Sunday afternoon with family in tow, one weblogger with new hair.
“Verdict?: Looking good!”

I’m really letting it all out today – venting left, right and centre – weblogging like there’s no tomorrow. Which might indeed be the case if I fulfill my ambition and become an Evil Supercriminal.

When I was a kid, the whole ‘evil’ thing really didn’t appeal to me. I had my hair cut very responsibly, I couldn’t handle conflict very well and whenever I went to see a movie, I would come home and desperately try to build the hero’s special car or bike or helicopter or plane or spaceship (I saw fairly generic movies) out of the all purpose panacea to being a kid in a village of eighty people in Norfolk with only a phone box for company: Lego.

My imagination would take flight when I was up in my room playing – the room would look like a complete wreck when I had done with it, with mountainous valleys made out of duvets, hidden subterranean bases (Bond) down the back of the sofa, vast forces of heroic lego people on small hover bikes (Star Wars), Helicopters bristling with missle launchers (Blue Thunder), Delorean-alike time-travelling cars (Back to the Future 1, 2 & 3) etc etc etc. But in all of this it was only the heroes that really interested me. Never did I pay the slightest bit of attention to the bad guys.

Until puberty that is, when I became completely and overwhelmingly confused by everything. I’d still frantically read the books with the heroes in them, the comic book good guys were always important to me, the films where the bad guy got trounced were staples of my imaginative life. But I started to get a darker thrill from the presence of the evil supercriminals – people who didn’t have respect for society, people who weren’t interested in puppies and blonde girls and apple pie and fudge brownies, but instead would prefer to annihilate Frankfurt with a huge gun and an over-fluffed white cat.

It has remained this way throughout my adult life. I want to be a bad guy. I want to rule the world. I want to be the Sherriff of Nottingham, “You! 12.30. You! 12.45. You! 1.00 … bring a friend…”

And now I know how I can make this dream come true: So You’ve Decided To Be Evil? [via glassdog]