We all need things that are good to think with – interesting or fascinating questions that are worth exploring. Here are a few interesting questions people around the world have been asking this week…
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Year: 2003
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Clutter on your desktop…
Clutter is my favourite new OSX toy. It starts off as a tiny little window that links in with iTunes. While you’re listening to music, it pops online and grabs cover images from Amazon. Now that – in and of itself – is quite entertaining. But then it gets really good. You can drag the covers off onto your desktop and pile them up like there were CDs on your floor. And when you want to listen to an album, you just double click on the cover. iTunes then makes a bespoke playlist and starts playing it straight-away.
There’s a couple of really interesting aspects to this. Firstly, there’s this nostalgic yearning for groupings of music in album-like shapes. Many of us using toys like the iPod have got used to thinking about the future of music as being song-sized – componentised. It feels kind of weird to start playing with albums again. But then again, maybe the rampant componentisation that we’re currently experiencing is a push too far – a utopian idea of totally fluid information chunks that will prove to be illusory and against the best interests of human beings. It could be that the ‘album’ is about to enjoy a resurgence. I’ll tell you one thing for nothing – the predictable and consistent noise of an album is much easier to work to than the on-the-fly “Greatest Hits Of Your Life” approach…
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A Singular Lack of Integrity?
On the news now, a correspondent reported from the Azores where the pro-war-in-Iraq lobby have been meeting. She said something I found startling. Apparently at several points during the last few months it had looked like the UK/US position would get upwards of nine/ten votes in the Security Council. That was until France declared its intention to use its veto. At this point the other countries saw no advantage in voting to approve a war that couldn’t happen anyway – and which might cost them an election. Almost to a man, they changed to a no vote.
I’ve expressed repeatedly my anxieties with any upcoming war with Iraq – that while it’s clear to me that Saddam Hussein is an unpleasant man who should be removed, the route that I believe has to be taken is one of international collaboration. I do not believe that any country or group of countries should be able to act internationally (unless they have directly and individually been provoked) without at least the vaguest assent from the international community. My opinion has been that, should there be failings in the United Nations, then it is the job of the world to change the United Nations, not to disregard it.
But my whole position has relied on the integrity of the people concerned. If countries act in an honourable way, then I have respect for their opinions. And I’ve argued to defend the assumption that people are acting honourably. I have continually argued for France’s right to express its dissent from the opinion of the international community. And I’ve been hostile to the possibility that France or the United States should try and bargain with, threaten or buy the votes of any other country on the Security Council or across the world.
But where is this integrity, exactly? France has crossed the line a couple of times. The United States and the UK have demonstrated that they’re not averse to a little bullying as well. And now we hear that the votes of the rest of the Security Council depend only on what they think will play well with their electorates. Our world is run by monsters and hypocrites and if I could retire from it, I would.
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Has B3ta been spammed?
Apologies: I don’t know for how long it has been the case, but the game is now loading for me in a separate window – this could have been a change at their end or a browser bug at my end. Please disregard all that follows.
Every Friday, b3ta send out their newsletter – a newsletter that goes out to many thousands of people and is known world-wide. The newsletter contains links to fun things made by B3ta people as well as to cool things send in by members of the public…
Except this week it’s different. The b3ta newsletter contained a link to a game described as follows:
“>> Stroke the Kitty Game <<
“I’ve made a new game”, writes Jibbed, “I’ve
named it Kitty Stroke. The cat needs your help.
She’s in dire need of some serious stroking
action. Stroke that cat as if your life
depended on it.” TIP: The aim of the game is
to follow the cat with your cursor. Great.
http://www.magic-carpet.freeserve.co.uk/thb/kittystroke.html
When you click through to the page, however, the game isn’t there at all. It has been replaced with a button that claims to launch the game, but instead launches an affiliate link to Sky Digital. Also on the page is an advert for OneTel. Now, as far as I can make out, there are two explanations for this state of affairs. 1) The people at the other end changed the page “accidentally” or 2) The people at the other end decided to co-opt the mailing list and use it as a cheap and easy way of making some money.
Which leaves us with the question: Given that we don’t want our cool mailing lists and independent bits of cool and homegrown content usurped by unscrupulous idiots – how do we make sure that they make no revenue out of this? Presumably neither Sky nor OneTel wish to have their affiliate programmes abused in this kind of way…
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On the meltdown at the Guardian…
Mad outbursts in national newspapers are like the rays of sunshine glinting through the storm clouds of international news. It’s lovely to be able to sense the person who wrote the news, and get a sense of his or her vibrant perspective on the events they’re writing about. It adds interest to information that you might otherwise wish to totally disregard. Like for example information on Cricket! So let’s turn towards today’s cricket report on Guardian Unlimited. It starts reasonably enough:
“It’s really simple: India are already through, New Zealand have to win.”
But then it goes a little pear-shaped:
“Meanwhile, have you ever thought what sort of life is this and what the hell am I doing boarding a train for Moorgate at 6.30 In the morning and then standing around for ages waiting for a tube while staring at a sign telling you that if you wait for four minutes you can board a train to Uxbridge I’d rather wait four hours for a journey with the Grim Reaper quite frankly and then you get to work and then there’s this and I know the cricket’s good and all that but I’ve got out of the wrong side of bed this morning and in any case it’s not as if I’ll write a cracking match report and then get rewarded by being sent on a wonderful assignment around the world because I’ll be very surprised if any of my bosses will read any of this let’s be honest they won’t although on the other hand that’s probably just as well..”
And that’s before the weblog-style grumpy commentary kicks in! I mean – classy, fascinating comments emerge like, “Asger Kring works for a Copenhagen media company that publishes several newspapers. “Do you want me to inquire whether they are looking for an over-by-over commentary guy?” Yes. Yes. YES! YES! YES!!!! Not that I’m desperate or anything.” By the ninth over, people are writing in with their improvisational ‘hit the keyboard with your fists’ comments:
“I must have a different keyboard-banging technique from Leonard,” types John Kirby with his big fists. “I get ‘ytcdskljojnvds.lkzsedli;j un fesalmjni vfesa;lmija;mju fceiv faewj;omivrewaomiu; svfeomijuhlvesmu;oilgvrstmjloivtrseomiju,’ which looks rather like Finnish.”
God, my sides would be shaking hard as Shakin’ Stephens if it wasn’t (as Matt has pointed out to me) potentially a ‘wacky’ Red Nose Day thing. Wouldn’t that just drain all the life out of it? Like all the life out of it? I hate Red Nose Day. It’s so desperate and tiring and forced. And they think they’re being so cool and down with the kids. Grrr. Wankers.
Addendum: Worth reading the comments on this one – you might learn something. I certainly did.
1) Key Problems with Movable Type. If you’re a Movable Type user then you probably share a few key experiences with me. To start off with, you’ve probably mis-spelt it Moveable Type more than a few times. You’ve probably chortled to yourself as you realised your mistake. How foolish you’ve been. Ha! The other thing you’ve probably done at some point is scratch your head to the point of bleeding about this whole “Trackback” malarky. I know I have. I know because my outboard brain tells me so.
2) Solve the Trackback confusion by turning on ‘Autodiscovery’. One of the most confusing aspects of the whole Trackback debacle is this idea that a different URL is used to ping for trackback than the URL that you use to visit the post itself. This aspect of the relationship is essentially very simple, but it’s quite hard to explain and so remains essentially incomprehensible to many web-users. So it’s important wherever possible to not draw attention to this process – in fact to conceal its workings as much as possible. The best way to do that is by encouraging the use of autodiscovery. Autodiscovery works like this – when you post something that includes a link to a trackback-enabled weblog, your version of Movable Type goes and has a look at the trackback-enabled weblog’s page and tries to find the trackback URL associated with the thing you’re linking to. Then it pings it. Nice and easy. You don’t have to know the trackback URL (which means they don’t have to display the trackback URL anywhere as well). It also means that there’s no clunky manual pinging process. It’s all nice and neat and self-contained and (more importantly) easy to explain to punters. So why don’t you go anc check that autodiscovery is turned on right now…
3) Trackback manners. In fact, I think there’s probably only one set of circumstances where it’s not a good idea to use auto-discovery, and that’s the same set of circumstances when it’s not appropriate to use Trackback at all. As far as I’m concerned there are at least two of these. Firstly, there’s when you don’t accept trackback pings yourself. Frankly, if you’re not prepared to maintain your place in the embedded conversation, then you don’t deserve to participate at all. The other circumstance when you shouldn’t enable Trackback at all is when you’re maintaining a pure and commentary-less link-log – like the side-panels on kottke.org or anil dash. I think it’s important to try and remember what Trackback is for and what it’s not for – it’s not supposed to be simply a way for you to get a link to your site on highly-trafficked weblogs (although clearly that’s what some people use it for). It’s supposed to be a way of maintaining the links between posts in such a way that the thread of a conversation can be maintained. If you’re not contributing to the conversation in any way, then there’s no need for you to use Trackback. In fact every time you do so, you slightly diminish the utility of Trackback and the likelihood of people following the links therein…
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A wifi hypothetical…
So here’s a hypothetical situation for you. Let’s say that there’s a Starbucks in the high street. Let’s say that this Starbucks runs a wireless network in association with T-mobile. And let’s say that they charge for access to this wireless network. Now let’s say that above this Starbucks is a flat. And let’s say that in that flat is a geek. And let’s say that this geek is running his own Wifi node, that he leaves open to the general public and advertises on something like consume.net. So the average customer to Starbucks has two options – the pay-for service supplied by Starbucks or the free one run by the guy upstairs.
Now here’s the thing – how long do we think it would be before Starbucks tried to shut him down? Days? Hours? Minutes? And why do I get the feeling that they’d probably be successful in doing so? This seems to be a situation that’s likely to crop up in the next six to eight months or so (if it hasn’t done so already) so I’m interested – what would the legal implications be?
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Will Blogdex fix it for me?
Right. I’m on a mission. I’m wacked out on Dr Pepper and dog-related endorphins, I’ve just watched Mission Impossible on TV and I’ve got at least three posts I want to get written by eleven o’clock. Let’s be honest with each other for a moment – I’m not going to get any of them done if I fanny around ‘thinking’ about them or ‘trying to get the spelling right’. So let’s get on with it, shall we – starting with an appeal to the godhead of microcontent voting… “Please Mr Blogdex (if you haven’t done so already) could you fix it for these links to get absurdly popular?”
- Reinvigorate.net
I don’t know who the hell these people are, but they sure know how to make elegant and well-assembled real-time stat-checking web interfaces. Unlike places like thecounter.com or extreme stats, there’s no advertising, no monthly fee and your stats are all nice and password protected. More entertaining still is the fact that you can have a little Flash MX window open that shows you traffic to your site in real-time as it happens. It can’t possibly scale, of course, but it’s bloody nice now. Have a play while you still can… - Trash Addict
This post is merely another part of my semi-regular plugging of Trash Addict as one of the most generally and genuinely entertaining weblogs out there. The reason I keep getting surprised by its excellence is that it (like so many other weblogs I’d like to read regularly) doesn’t have an RSS feed. So I can’t read it via NetNewsWire. This makes my reading of it more sporadic – with the weird side effect that I’m always surprised how good it is. - SETI project reaches next stage
Any article that starts with the line, “After more than a million years of computation…” is going to be OK with me. In full-on web-geek Star-Trek loving, Farscape-missing dorky can’t-get-a-boyfriend mode, I find the SETI@home project endlessly fascinating and exciting. The idea that they’ve now got a reasonable assortment of potential signals from across the universe to investigate is ludicrously wonderful. Dear God, I hope that any aliens we find aren’t interested in quite smart, dextrous new beasts of burden. [More at Wired]
I wonder if it’s converting to Movable Type that means that I find it so hard to write. I wonder if it’s the fact that each entry gets its own full page to sit-upon that makes me nervous about short posts or fragments of life-commentary. I get this anxiety that I won’t be able to think of enough to say to warrant a full stark blank white page. And if I know I’ve got enough to say, then I get angsty because writing then becomes this significant job of work that really should take second-place to something more work-minded…
- Could the Universe be shaped like a doughnut?
A particularly good debate has arisen about the shape of the universe – does it infinitely extend in all directions or does it curve back upon itself? Cosmologists are always having these kinds of debates – just a few years back some nutters were trying to convince us that the world was spherical. - Wifi in Starbucks
T-mobile extends its plans to put wireless internet access in Starbucks branches, but makes the UK prices four times as expensive as the US ones. - Tom Steinberg comments on UpMyStreet Conversations
In the process he references an ongoing thread that criticises the site for reflecting the interests of its current users. In my opinion this represents a stunning misconception of the purpose of the site and ‘politics’ in general. - The increasingly brilliant politX posts about Section 28
Section 28 is the piece of legislation designed to stop teachers talking to students about gay people and what it means to be gay. Conservative backbenchers are fighting to keep it in place, despite the fact that gay teenagers are most at risk of attempted (and successful) suicides.
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Fresh and fertile Monday linkage…
You know, really, if you think about it, it’s totally ok just to steal links from Popdex, Blogdex and Daypop because you’re still only going to steal the good links and that helps everything self-filter even more effectively. Or something…
- Grant Morrison on ‘The Filth’ [via Darren]
Innoculating readers by injecting them with dirt. - The Tyranny of E-mail
Clear and intelligent instructions on ‘how to get things done’. - Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies
“N is for Neville who died of ennui.” - The New McCarthyism
We’ve heard the phrase “Anti-American” before…
More later in the day when I’ve had another stab at finishing my long piece on weblogs as conversation.