It’s all shiny and new and designed just for you – Barty Trabaca has remodelled his online pied-a-terre in a contemporary apple green and powder blue combination with some experimental avante-garde typography and a stunningly apropros Mac OSX Aqua style inverted heart motif. Bravissima, Barty… Bravissima…
It may be hard to believe, but this morning at work I was asked to produce this picture of a freaky baby for a very important BBC event. Turns out they won’t need it after all. Which is a relief. But all that work – I couldn’t let it all be wasted…
He is a dandy highwayman? Or maybe he’s a New Romantic throw-back? Or maybe he’s a bit of gay homosexual? How do you spot a highwayman?
Speaking of Anusol (and Stalin), I was surprised to discover today that the Piles Advisory Bureau is sponsored by the zinc-filled butt cream. And more surprised still to see that the PAB is currently running a competition to win a Spa visit or a personal CD player… Go figure…
Observant plasticbag fans will probably have noticed the “How did they get here” box at the bottom of the page – a cunning piece of kit supplied by Stephen’s Web. Concept in a nutshell – publically available referrer log – how did people get to this dumb site anyway – that kind of thing…
Now the interesting part of this whole palaver comes when you have a couple of people both using the system. Let’s say – for example – that 0 fresh decided to use it. And let’s say – for some unknown reason – that person decided to come to plasticbag.org twice. Suddenly it’s on my referrers log. Which means it shows up in the little box at the bottom of the page. Which means that people click on it and go back through to him. Which makes his little box record a referral from me. Which means that the relationship between our two sites starts to become stronger and clearer. People note that plasticbag.org sent twenty-five people to 0 fresh and so come to the site expecting me to have said something. And of course I haven’t. But then people reading plasticbag.org see that five or six people have been referred from 0 fresh. So they go to see what all the fuss is about. This relationship is like a link in the mind that gets stronger the more that it is used – but it’s a link between Stalin and Anusol. Or any two random things that aren’t really connected at all.
So what am I saying? Is the tool useless? No! Is it particularly useful – well it could be, particularly when there actually were people using it to keep track of explicit references to each other. But in the meantime it could be exploited by anyone linking to any site – as long as they both use the system. Suddenly, there are links that last days without the slightest reason, without the slightest connection. At times like that you have to take control – and that’s what I’ve done. No one’s squeezing traffic out of me without me linking to them. But since I can’t stop them getting the traffic – I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and sanction it. Hence yet another bloody link to 0 fresh.
More Matt Jones than you could shake a stick at this morning. The most important article being over at the BBC’s dot.life section. I’ve heard that the eyebrows follow you wherever you go. Even to the loo. So be wary. I’ll say no more. Slightly less hi-tech and slightly less high-impact is the cartoon over at joyoftech.com which is annoyingly hard to permalink to.
Anyone interested in the kind of people who hang around on Barbelith should investigate Barbeblogs immediately… There’s a lot of good stuff out there…
Inspired by a recent viewing of Unbreakable and a really frustrating e-mail exchange in which intention and meaning passed like ships in the night comes a complaining rant from the pen of your author: “I thought this bright new future was supposed to be one where we were all super-heroes. I don’t want to be a side-kick. I’ve never wanted to be a side-kick – I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to prove I’m good enough to be a super-hero of my own! If the choice is side-kick or super-villian, I know which road I’d take… At least people take super-villains seriously…”
Stage One: Yesterday I rang up BTOpenworld – who are cross with me because I use the internet improperly. My plan? Get broadband ADSL. Then no one shouts at me any more. Plus I get to do big downloady things. Except there’s a hell of a lot of people telling me that it’s trickier than it looks… More information as I have it…
After I went to Los Angeles for the first time, Kerry – my West Coast correspondent – sent me a tape of songs to listen to. It was a really odd selection of tunes – but most of them I’m still listening to. One song has spread like wildfire – wherever I play it people want to know wht it is – people at work even hum it now whenever it comes on. The song is ‘Mambo Italiano’ by Rosemary Clooney, who died on Saturday aged 74.
