Author: Tom Coates

Must read article of the day has Jon Ronson following around the housemates in last year’s Big Brother. Best line: “You’ve got to remember,” he replied, “that all but three of the housemates are as thick as pig-shit.”

No fair. I want to go to this: Webzine » Independent Online Publishing. My life sucks ass.

Today on Barbelith: Atlantean Disneytyping – “How Disneytyping’s representations of gender, race, and class narrow the range of possible self-expression for everyone.”

I have the best AIM buddy icon in the world at the moment. I nicked it off Mark. You’ll have to IM me in order to see it.

Less true now than it was when I made this logo:

So – anyone interested in buying me one of these? I’m fancying a small or medium size of ‘guru’ or ‘netslave’. Small probably best frankly…

Ah well – didn’t get the position that I interviewed for last week. Not enough ‘project management and British history’ experience. The latter I agree with, frankly. The former I’m less sure about.

So, big news of the last week for me was that Jason Kottke loves Radiohead but doesn’t like Buffy. I’m still reeling from that little piece of information. That’s why he won’t be at all interested in comprehensive and entirely plausible spoilers about the next season of Buffy – omigod omigod omigod omigod.

I’ve stumbled upon some fascinating stuff about the original barbelites via a mention in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum: “Barbelite texts like “On the Origin of the World” and “Hypostasis of the Archons” presented the “Tree of Knowledge” in a positive light as a mechanism for human liberation via free inquiry, curiousity and questioning.” [more].

I really love this kind of stuff. Stuff like Yahoo!’s Buzz section, stuff that let’s you know what is going on around the internet – what people are interested in, what people are searching for. Today’s exciting addition to the team is the Google Press Center’s Zeitgeist page. If you know of any more sites like this, please let me know. I find them fascinating.

Most interesting news of the day on said site? Abercrombie and Fitch is one of the most rapidly declining search terms of recent weeks. I wonder why… And more people search Google in German than any other language except English. That’s more than Spanish, French, Chinese or Japanese…