Another month, another set of overuse charges for barbelith.com. Thankfully, these have been the lowest such charges for a while, possibly due to my burn and purge attitude to heavier web graphics recently. Still, even a supplement of $16 is a pain in the arse when you can’t pay the basic $30.
How many people do you think would secretly love to run this 404 error? I would. I’d love it. Favourite line? “If you would like Windows to screw everything up, click Screw everything up.” [via NotSoSoft]
A quick hello to everyone redirected from machete 2.2. Hope you like the place.
Kudos to riothero and vodb.com for the use of the Barbelith syndication script. Now all I need is to put up some more bloody articles. [I want a kitten]
Blogdex functionality is gradually ramping up, slowly making it a useful piece of online kit – even though it’s still not done anything that hasn’t been done before (and it doesn’t seem to render quite perfectly on Macs).
Let’s block through some of them one-by-one: 1) Updates – a simple page that tells you what they are planning to add to the site addresses (adequately?) one of my main concerns about the site – namely that it doesn’t promote sites, in fact quite the opposite – it gives people a way to find interesting links without actually reading them. Their response: “blogdex is not intended as a destination to bypass bloggers, rather a place to organize and distill all of the information they generate”.
2) The main page now includes a list of all the people who originally found the link that has been popular enough for blogdex to track it. A couple of questions arise for me here. The first one is how blogdex distorts the popularity of these links by merely saying ‘these links are popular’ and the second is whether or not people can promote their own sites simply by trying to get onto one of those lists. That is – if I link to the current top link on blogdex without giving a damn about the content, then will I show up in the list of linkers, and will I receive traffic from that list? If so – this could lead to a gradual homogenisation of weblog content and a huge disparity between the ‘top-ten linked-to’ things and ‘the rest’.
3) The Top Links of All Time is a strange little page. It tracks the top several hundred links that have been collated by blogdex over all the time the site has been running. But which links are incorporporated into this system is a bit of a mystery to me. I mean, as far as I know, Blogger itself hasn’t been in the top ten of the site since it launched – and yet it is number one on this list with over 2/3rds of all the weblogs tracked containing a link to it. Is the main list excluding text-links that stay the same across a weblogs life. For example, I have a link to Davo on the right of this page all the time, but it’s not part of the ‘blog’ itself – is this not included in the main list perhaps? And is it included on the ‘top links’ page?
I’m unclear about what exactly is being tracked. I would really like to know what is being tracked – I’d love to know whether (for example) cross links between weblogs are actually excluded from this ranking. If Jason said something stunningly apropros, or detailed a genius scheme for revitalising the web industry – I’d want links to it to be tracked. Otherwise, aren’t we treating weblogs as a place which doesn’t produce content, but just links to it? Where’s the valuation of the commentary?
Nonetheless, this Top Links of All Time page makes fascinating reading. You can find plasticbag.org lurking on the second page at number 33 – only five places behind plastic.com and only six behind the godlike Zeldman. Implausible, but pleasant.
Change the style of your Blogger archive names with this handy piece of Javascript. Much as I think this is a useful and effective piece of code, I have to say that it seems like a hack to me – something that should be integrated into Blogger itself rather than an add-on. If Greymatter can do it, why not Blogger? [via Evhead]
The BBC News site has had some design changes since I last went there a few days ago – or at least I think it has. As far as I can tell, the search box has been moved to the top of the page – which is a substantial improvement and should be replicated across the BBC as a whole. I’m less convinced by the addition of a top hierarchy hovering above the BBC News logo – which seems to be contain related sites that really should be more heavily integrated within the left hand navigation. Their placement seems random and counter-intuitive.
The Watch / Listen box on the right of the page looks like it has undergone a colour-change and a few refinements – but nothing substantial enough to change the functionality of the pages. But the integration of the ‘Around the World Now’ section does seem to be a radical change to me, and one that I’m not entirely convinced by. It does illustrate ‘depth-of-content’, but it seems to me that someone specifically interested in African News will almost certainly be able to navigate down to that section, while the ‘headline-only’ policy doesn’t seem particularly easy to scan nor does it seem particularly inviting. It’s only benefit (and it may be a substantial one) is to get the regional news more coverage on the front page. Why do I suspect that the ‘[continent] in full” links will get clicked on more than the stories themselves?
You know who I’d like to work with? Richard Metzger at disinformation, that’s who. I mean – let’s be realistic. Disinformation shares many interests with Barbelith, including the immortal Grant Morrison. I’ve also talked to him via e-mail a few times in the past. Plus he says nice things about the Bomb and I’m experienced in putting together and maintaining editorially run web-sites. What the fuck am I doing in London at all. Why hasn’t he summoned me across the Atlantic to work at his side?
Entertaining Ralph: So Mr McGinnis, True Art from the Barbelith Underground and owner-operator of Lacking… is in town at the moment, and he’s staying with me for a few days. He only arrived on Thursday morning, so we haven’t had time to do that much yet, but we did some of the bars in town and wandered around some shops, and last night we wandered into Popstarz. Davo came too. It would have been a really good evening if I didn’t experience a RMS (Rapid Mood Swing) shortly after running into a guy I knew from Bristol who’s approaching the end of his doctorate. I suddenly felt really inadequate and pointless. A few more drinks and a Pringles picnic by the side of the road at three in the morning sorted that out though…
Hey look guys – I went and reviewed BBC Online – Films – Review – Planet of the Apes.