Year: 2002

I haven’t started a fucking meme in ages. It’s time for embarrasing online web confessions. Today I will confess to being the man who first created the alt.fan.noah-wyle newsgroup. I rule.

As we wander around the internet, and grab and download files to play with, our computers fill with the assorted detritus of a thousand tiny urges. While cleaning my computer I found a folder called ‘unfiled’ which contained images that I thought I might use two, three and even four years ago. Just odds and ends. Things that were funny, interesting or beautiful.

I’d love to put them all online for you to see, but perhaps they’ll make more sense as a collage – a scrapbook – a kind of stream-of-consciousness insight into bits of my head over the last couple of years…

There’s a much-linked article at the New York Times at the moment about the future of music-delivery and media – and it basically argues what I’ve been arguing for quite a while – that it’s the Value-Added aspects of music that will be interesting and people will pay for. I’ve suggested that video, lyrics etc. attached to audio files might be the most obvious, but the article suggests some areas I hadn’t thought of – all 20-tracks of a single song could be sold, or bespoke, non-replicatable, productions based upon the acoustics of your room…

Jason has linked to a very handy web presentation on simplicity which I can thoroughly recommend all web creatives to investigate.

Six Months That Changed A Year: “Julie Burchill: How I liberated Kandahar with the news that Tony Parsons is a bastard.” Terror Marches Backwards: “October 19th: Blair announces support for the US intention to bomb during Ramadan but confirms that out of respect for Islam, all food parcels dropped during this period will be empty.”

My first Exquisite Corpse has been posted. My slice is the third one. I was terrified when I sent it in that it would be embarrassingly bad, but it’s come together quite well. I feel quite self-satisfied, suddenly…

Daypop’s new Wishlist tracker is a genius idea, but also – presumably – quite a profitable one! It’s a shame that it seems restricted to Amazon.com customers, rather than the UK audience – but then again that does leave a space for someone in the UK to make some money… Additional features could include recently purchased items – and perhaps a way of grouping wishlists by types of products. Plus it would also be a nice touch to feature a cheap random product that you could buy off one of the wishlists in question. It seems unfair that Daypop should reap all the benefits of our greed!

How can it be true that the word atheist can be considered too offensive for a car number place? How can anyone justify that? The retrograde push in liberalism, science and popular politics in America is really beginning to alarm me.

Every day I get more and more aware that when I go to bed there are never any English webloggers left on AIM. In fact there are seldom any East Coast Americans left either. They’re either out for the night or fast asleep. I’m left with the San Franciscans and the Los Angelenes…

My favourite suggestion of the day so far comes via brainsluice (again) and is based around me using this banner and my Barbelith Paypal donations scheme to fund not only my own colonic irrigation – but perhaps also the rest of my life… I’m as yet unconvinced by the idea of the sponsored defudging – but I’m open to persuasion. No jokes, please.