Category: Random

It’s not going to be up long, so you should probably go and look at it soon – Queen Mother rises from the dead!

Today I am muchly loving the cheek of the awesome Firda and her highly entertaining and completely head-destroying Blogger-parody. And if that bores you, then there’s always discovering how Google uses pigeons to rate a page’s relevance.

When you start work at the BBC you are given a temporary pass. They take a really unpleasant photo of you with the world’s cheapest digital camera and edit it so that it makes you look like you’re gurning, then they laugh and show it to their friends before printing it onto your pass. I’ve seen them do this. It’s true. The best thing about the pass is that if you’re very special you get given a little clip to put it onto your belt which includes this little mechanism so that you can pull out the pass on a little retractable cable and then let it go and it wizzes back to your waist. I have had much fun with this already. But the best thing about it is that there actually seems to be a culture involved in the wearing of it. I have been reliably informed that only dorks clip it to the front of their trousers. The hip place to put it is on the right-hand hip…

iBooks are beautiful, but some people miss the various colours that you could make them and pine for something a little more extreme than the pearly white that is currently in vogue. And then again, some people aren’t content just to pine…

Rumour abounds on the net that Mark from Riothero.com has grown a beard. If you have evidence of this, e-mail immediately.

AOL buys Blogs: “You can’t really put figures on this,” one executive told The Register, “but we think we have 78 per cent of the libertarian news blogs, 91 per cent of the ClueTrain Manifesto fan sites, and 59 per cent of all blogging female arts graduates, many of whom are Virgos,” he said. “And the possibilities for vertical integration are endless,” he enthused. “No cat will ever go ill again in America again in obscurity.”

After a weekend in Norfolk I’ve been attempting to get some greater sense of personal and cultural history by researching the history of the village of ‘Belaugh’ where I grew up. This is what I’ve found so far… You’ll have to forgive the quality of my writing. I’m a little fried at the moment…

One of the most interesting conversations on the net is happening over at Powazek.com literally as we speak. Derek’s a well respected community-builder and designer with a long-standing committment to the interhighweb – and he’s started a rebuttal of the current mantra, “The Web’s Got Boring” which seems to be circulating around New Media circles at the moment. You want a rebuttal? Then spot the bloke at B3ta’s Female or Shemale! The web rules. Still.

I got some great spam today – it was for naked girlie videos and pictures. It said that it had pictures of young naive girls that had somehow become captured by the evil porn business. It occurred to me that this was both the most highly self-referential porn I’d ever heard of, and also explains why people don’t really do anything about those who are being exploited by the porn industry and who really wouldn’t want to do it otherwise. It’s because the people who watch the porn don’t really want to believe that these people are doing it for a career. They want to believe that they started naive and were drawn in and corrupted by the horros of an evil industry. I think it must make it seem more sexy.

We take a brief break from stories of Tom’s weekend in Norfolk to suggest that you go and check that Yahoo haven’t signed you up for an infinity of spam missives. They had me, and I don’t recall agreeing to it…