I really missed Napster. But then I found Limewire. My file-sharing needs are fulfilled once more. Remember children – as it said on the front of my iPod when I pulled it from the box… “Don’t steal music…”
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Addendum to post about weblogs obsessing on the trivia of people’s lives. I should clarify that I wasn’t so much talking about the tendency to write about the trivia of one’s life, but about the public perception of the weblogging phenomenon. Since I started it seems to have evolved from being viewed as a kind of web filter or industry comment organ through to being a kind of dynamic diarist medium where quality of writing was paramount to finally being viewed as a populist organ for the dissemination of trivia. I have no problem with weblogs of any of these types – and in fact they all have existed in one for or another for years before Blogger emerged. What I’m slightly surprised by is how the dominant perception of them has changed from journalism to personal writing to trivia. The ‘potential’ of the form seems to have become less interesting to people…
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KPMG update…
KPMG update: Just gave a few quotes to a friend at the Big Issue about KPMG – it should be out on Monday if you’re interested. In the meantime, Chris was interviewed in the Observer last weekend – here’s a salient quote: “In other words, anyone seeking to place a link to it on their site requires prior approval from KPMG. It would be inappropriate for a family newspaper to summarise Raettig’s response to this preposterous assertion. The salient point is the staggering contempt for the web implicit in KPMG’s stance. It makes one wonder who would buy e-business consulting advice from a firm that takes such a line? “
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On being blown away by Matt Webb…
I was out drinking with webloggers last night and Matt and I were busy comparing toys, and he showed me the article that he pubished on upsideclown today. And I was blown away.
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Damn Davo forever…
Damn him. Damn him for being less crap than me. Damn him for redesigning Brainsluice brilliantly in the amount of time it takes me to move a piece of text three pixels to the left, sweat, have a panic attack and lie down. Related question: Is Davo a Hobbit? He does come from Noozle-land, after all…
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A proposal for a really divisive website…
Suggestion for a really divisive website: So you go to Blogdex and you travel to the all-time links section. Pulling out the information from that page dynamically, you tag up all the weblogs in the top two-hundred listings. And then you automatically divide this into chunks. The top twenty are labelled “A-list”, the next forty are labelled “B-list”, the next sixty are labelled “C-list”. The final eight are labelled “D-list”. No one else is mentioned… Hilarity ensues…
I found this one via Blogdex, which is always a shameful confession for me: Geoff Nunberg talks about the weblogging phenomenon (Real Audio). In this little radio segment, he compares weblogging, with all it’s diarist minutiae to Diary of a Nobody – which started me thinking. Exactly when did the weblogging format cease to be seen as a medium designed for insight and critical judgement and start being viewed as a place where people obsess about the trivia of their lives? I don’t think it had occurred to me before that this form of weblog was now the most prevalant – almost to the exclusion of other types. I don’t know how I feel about this…
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Introducing the Megway…
Jason finally reveals what Danza/WHAT is, and all I can say is I’ve got to get me one. They look neat! [And yes, I was in on the joke, I’m afraid].
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My first impressions of my iPod…
I just got an iPod. I’ve been thinking about it for ages, and the angst of my financial situation has always consumed me. But a momentary glimmer of financial light appeared, and rather than invest in my future I decided that the time had come for frivolity once more. And this glimmer coincided with the fortuitous arrival of said tech item at my local Micro Anvika.
So I’m busy making a pact with Matt that he’ll be there when I do the evil deed, and Rob overhears my evil scheme and decides he wants in. And rightly so, because it’s going to be an epic trip…
So we hop on a bus after a crafty fag and emerge bouncing and over-caffeinated at Tottenham Court Road. The iPods are almost throwing themselves off the shelves and into people’s grubby little mitts. I get the second to last one. They only came in that morning… Matt’s waiting outside, because he didn’t realise that we couldn’t wait for him. Rob accidentally buys himself a Sony Clié. And then we went and ate pies in a pub and it was really nice.
Then miraculously (and only two hours after we left) we’re back in the office, and I discover that the iMac I work on doesn’t have a firewire port, so I’m left frustrated for still more hours. I fiddle around for a while longer at work and run home to play.
Ten minutes later I’m hideously disappointed. And then half an hour after that, I’m bouncing with excitement once again. Then Kate comes home and we watch Bridget Jones’ Diary on video, which she got through the post at work today. Last time we watched it, it was a rough cut – and there’s this great bit in the middle of the fight where the screen goes all black and it says “FACE POV / DARCY” or something similar and it kind of spoilt the flow. This time, however, I have to confess I really enjoyed it. Although I now find myself consigned to the mass population of this country who want to bone Colin Firth. But I digress…
It’s almost midnight and I have to sleep and this entire post is over-excited arse, but who the hell cares, right? Woo. My iPod is full to bursting with dodgy MP3s of crappy songs from the eighties and I’m kind of tired and I’m going to bed, exhausted and happy and who needs a goddam boyfriend anyway?!
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On my first post on Usenet…
Google Groups has now fully archived the last twenty years worth of Usenet posts – which means that you can now experience several historical events as they were experienced by people of the time. Or alternatively, you can do what I did, and try and find your first post on Usenet – which seems to be May 1995 for me…