Gasp in stunned awe at the “wonderful world of weblogging”! See the strange solitary creatures scuttling around in their underpants in rooms full of empty coke cans and pizza boxes. Beware their strange and colourful stenches!
Categories
Year: 2003
Categories
Awesome applications of Science!
Ladies and gentlemen, today I present to you six – count them – six “awesome applications of science and technology” from wooden mirrors to ships made of ice…
Categories
Power-cuts in the States…
Thanks to Cameron from Blogdex for pointing this out – as America is hit by a massive powercut you can track New York power consumption in real-time on the New York energy market. I suppose it would be a dumb question to ask if there’s anyone online in New York or in the power-cut areas across the eastern seaboard, but if there is here’s something you can do: Blackout.textamerica.com is a site that’s collating images from the ground sent in by MMS. All you have to do is send in images via e-mail from your phone to blackout.814@tamw.com. That’s assuming – of course – that your mobile phone network is working – which is highly suspect, I believe…
Categories
The Chamber Pot…
To start off with – I should apologise to the various people who come here for stuff about social software. I’ve been thinking in very different directions with the new job and I’m only just starting to get to a space where I can start reconciling them. Having said that – I’m not really sure that my slightly tangential approach to my writing over the last few weeks has really changed the character of my site that much – certainly not enough to make the main search requests that reach my site How do I masturbate, shit and You’re a Fag. Sigh. I’m the internet’s chamber pot. Makes a chance from Paradoxes of Liberalism, I suppose…
Every single time I get asked by someone for my opinion on the whole “weblogs as journalism” thing, I give pretty much the same response. First things first – there are differences. That should be pretty obvious. One clear difference is that working for an established organisation or brand gives you access to the newsgathering machinery. By that I mean from the low-grade, cost-dependent things like being able to afford to get Reuters newsfeeds all the way up to the stuff that’s all about being ‘in the club’ – ie. everything from being invited to movie review screenings before the film is released through to being able to be present in the press room of the White House. These latter things work on the principle that it’s not possible to let all the world in to ask all the questions they might like, so there are representatives from the newspapers who ask those questions for them. Fair enough – to an extent that kind of thing is unlikely to be heavily democratised, and quite rightly so.
The other difference between weblogs and established mainstream journalism is in terms of the brand – and more importantly the mechanisms that are supposed to lie behind that brand. The trusted brand is supposed to reflect an organisation that makes sure its journalism conforms to good standards of fact-checking, that it is guaranteed to be professional, that it asks the questions that its readers want answered and that if it is not there is a space and a process whereby redress that can be made. This is what I normally argue when asked – that although there is a lot of overlap between mainstream journalism and weblogs (particularly around opinion pieces, editorials, reviews and … less fortunately … regurgitated press releases), there are some things that – for the most part – are done better by the professionals. Webloggery – as yet – cannot even think of competing with the professional newsgatherers.
Well that’s what I normally say anyway – despite the fact that absolutely anyone who’s ever been featured in a news story (or ever seen a news story about anything they actually know about) knows full well that journalists routinely seem to get quite important and easy-to-check facts wrong. Here’s today’s example in a piece about (what else) weblogging by Bill Thompson from the BBC: “All over for blogs?”. And the typically offending line?
“The earliest bloggers have been at it for two years now – how many days can someone keep on posting to their LiveJournal site, or visiting Blogger to add more details about their cat’s mysterious illness? ” [my emphasis]
Decent journalists, according to my training, when they put a date or a figure in their work are either supposed to check that figure and mark it as checked, or their sub-editors are supposed to check it for them, grudgingly and with a certain amount of irrtation. I don’t know where the gap in professionalism was that allowed this ‘two year’ figure to go to print, but I do know that it started with the person who wrote the damn article and should have checked in the first place.
The earliest webloggers have been going for two years, then? That should make me positively primordial, since I’ve been posting regularly since November 1999. Meg Meish in the UK was also posting around then, I believe. Cal Henderson and Matt Webb were both definitely posting regularly over three years ago. There were loads of other people across the UK and the US who started posting around or shortly after that time. And we’re all children compared to the long-haul people…
And what’s this? If you do a basic Google search for History of Weblogs you get seven articles about the origins of weblogs on the first page? And what do they say? That, “In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of ‘other sites like his’ as he found them in his travels around the web.” [Rebecca Blood] So that’s five years for certain – five and a half for certain if we include kottke.org (one of the most linked-to and visited weblogs on the internet). If we look further back, then Dave Winer started Scripting News in April 1997, a few months before the term ‘weblog’ was invented by John Barger of Robot Wisdom. So now we’re nicely over the six year mark – and with what? Thirty seconds worth of research?
So where does that leave us with weblogs vs. journalism? Well I still stand by my word – for the most part proper news gathering is better done by paid professionals with the budgets, access and accountability. There’s still space for professionalism. And as soon as I find that professionalism evidencing itself in the opinion section of the BBC News Technology supplement, I’ll let you know…
Categories
MP3 of FiveLive Thing..
Let’s bear in mind (1) that I was quite nervous (2) that I didn’t really get a chance to get into my stride and that (3) I think it’s quite embarrassing. Are you bearing that in mind? Ok. Then if you’re ready, here’s that 5live Blogging piece as an MP3 (7 Mb). Featured contestants include James VoxPolitics, Alastair S. Duck and yours truly…
Categories
On the bloody weather…
The English talk about nothing but the weather. We do this to avoid talking about ritual goat sodomy, which would otherwise be the first thing on our minds, I think. This is my honest belief. It would decimate my world-view if it was demonstrated to be untrue. At the moment there’s more weather to talk about than normal. A couple of days ago we got within a degree (centigrade) of the hottest temperature ever recorded in the UK. It is – bluntly – stinkingly uncomfortably depressingly miserably oppressively hot.
Now – before you even start – everyone who lives in places that actually get much hotter than this (say in Africa example or – maybe – on the Sun) is bound to find the whole idea of it being really hot in the UK kind of funny. “Ha ha,” they’re almost certainly thinking as they pump out another two or three pints of blood-heavy sweat, “These English people will complain about even the smallest of heat-waves. Once when I was strapped in an oven in the Sahara for ten weeks with cayenne pepper inserted into my rectum, I complained less than this weakling English pigdog.”
Well screw you buster! First things first – compare and contrast the BBC’s current European weather map with the one for North America. We’re stomping all over your weather. I think London’s currently beaten only by Texas and certain particularly gay areas around Miami. Next – bear in mind that English homes are – at best – designed to keep the rain off and the heat in. They are not designed to be cool and refreshing idylls amid the melting pavements. No – British homes are apparently designed for a country with a climate so temperate that any weather that strays from a ten degree range between ‘moist and chilly’ and ‘moist and fresh’ is considered almost insanely avante garde. Thirdly, as a people – we’re just not bloody used to it!
I can feel this post just kind of petering out as I run out of body salts (should I lick my own arm, would that help?) and my brain shuts down forever. No doubt I’ll return for another stab at completing it in one of my many many nightly trips back to the computer that I take when I get bored of lying in my own sweat. Writhing in discomfort isn’t as fun as it sounds. My only other option would be to cave my own head in with a spade in a vain attempt to get some crapping sleep already…
Categories
The Quest for Fonts…
First thing I have to say is that Identifont is an extremely cool and really useful font-finding utility. The next thing to say is that despite the fact it’s extremely cool, it didn’t help me find the two fonts that I’ve been scrabbling around to find for the last week. So this is where you guys come in. I figure maybe you can help me (since my life-long love, Mr. Internet, has completely let me down).
So here we have the first font as it decorates the front cover of the July issue of The Face. Now the weird thing with this font is that I have spent weeks fiddling around with a logo with the word ‘dirty’ in it. Literally weeks. After about twenty passes over the logo, desperately trying to get it looking roughly accurate, I suddenly stumble upon this issue of The Face. Sitting there in my sitting room. The two ‘dirty’s look identical. I’m the most derivative designer alive. Nonetheless, now I want to find the damn font. It’s all through the issue.. Can you help?
Now the other font I’m looking for is – coincidentally – also in the same issue of The Face, although it’s not where I saw it originally. It’s a highly stylised psuedo-cursive that looks a bit like Neon. The best place to see it is on page 153 in the ‘tracks’ section. It’s the font that they use for the name of the reviewer at the end of each review. I’ve seen it all over the place recently, but I can’t seem to find out much about it online. Please help!
Categories
Plasticbag.org's Top Posts…
Categories
A question about password length…
Right. So here’s a dumb question about password length. There are a great many sites where you have to register to use the service. Most of these sites require you to provide a user-name and a unique password. In order for your account to be secure, it’s in your interest to have a password that’s hard to guess. So the first thing that most sites suggest is that your password should be a certain number of characters long. The reason for this is that people will try to use passwords that are as simple as possible to remember and short-passwords are going to be easier to remember than long ones. So if you were doing a brute-force attack trying every combination of letters and people (on average) were using more passwords that were four characters long than seven or eight characters long, then you’d be able to break some passwords pretty quickly just by starting with the smallest words. So people stick on a minimum length of passwords. Which is interesting. So my first question here is: if you set a minimum password length of (say) six characters, how many people use exactly six, seven or eight character passwords? Doesn’t that make it easier for people to state ‘a large number of passwords will be of this length, so let’s target our efforts there’? Even if the maths involved is much nastier? I bet – for example – that loads of people have passwords that are combinations of two three or four letter words… What’s the maths like around this stuff?