This is just a note to say that those of you who are frustrated about not being able to get through to Blogger.com should try posting through Newsblogger, as it appears to work OK.
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Newsflash from Pyra "It's probably
Newsflash from Pyra
“It’s probably become obvious to the careful observer that all is not well in the Land of Pyra. Rather than wait for the public speculation and debate, I’m going to say what exactly is going on (from my perspective — not speaking for anyone else on the team or as an official Pyra/Blogger representative). We found out last Friday that the one most people on the team were hoping for was not going to happen. This took the wind out of the already limp sails people were surviving on, and it was largely decided we couldn’t keep this up.”
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And the best weblog maintained
And the best weblog maintained by an Old World Poof goes to: me… I can get some work out of this, right? Congratulations to Zannah as well as all the other people who participated. In the words of an Oscar winner, “they like you, they really like you!”. But remember, as the Golden Globes are but a prelude to the Oscars, the real battle is still to come. Remember at all costs: plasticbag.org for most banal content!
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Suicide by milk…?
I got home from work last night at about seven with press copies of Buffy and Angel to watch, some tomato soup, ten lucky-dip lottery tickets and the prospect of two episodes of Sex in the City. Enjoyment of same depended, however, on the presence of my flatmate Mella to keep me company. At nine she still, resolutely hadn’t turned up, so Meg and I popped down the boozer for a girly vodka and tonic, game of pool (she beat me) and many many fags (note to Americans – wash out your mind). After which, and having returned to the flat, I watched the most depressing ten minutes of Sex in the City ever, contemplated drowning myself in milk as a way to pass the time, played the Pixies and Veruca Salt really loudly, finally watched TV with flatmate between midnight and two am, and find myself (this morning) un-rested and over-bloody-come with hate towards the builders hitting things outside my window.
A really cheeky comment from the people behind Salon:
New Site Hopes to Stay Unspiked
“O’Donnell said Salon can afford to ignore the British market for now. “We just didn’t see the revenue or user base,” he said. “There’s no business for content in Europe. England’s not that big to begin with. I just canceled a meeting there. Why waste the time?”
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Scroll to the bottom…
Oh now, that’s just really nice. (Scroll to the bottom).
Imagine, if you will, a healthy body. Now introduce two types of foreign elements – lets say bacteria and viruses. I’m now going to bastardise their life-cycles horribly. Bear with me.
Viruses need to spread to other bodies before either the immune response of the body finds and kills them, or before they kill the body and are trapped within it – but whatever their evolutionary strategy, they cause damage to the organism concerned. Bacteria on the other hand are more varied beasts. Some bacteria are horribly damaging and can kill creatures, while others have formed symbiotic relationships with their hosts, and can fulfill such functions as aiding digestion. The latter form of bacteria may have an evolutionary advantage over the former, as will the organism that they inhabit.
Now imagine that we are not talking about organisms and their genomes, but instead ideas – memes. Let’s pretend that the body is a huge and highly fertile environment for memes – the internet. And now let’s consider analogies between e-commerce ventures (dot.coms) and the two bastardised life-cycles I have described previously.
The internet was essentially an environment free from commercial ventures until six or seven years ago, but when the memes were introduced, they flourished immediately. The question for many people was what would these memes do to their host? Would they act in a viral fashion – spreading themselves and gradually damaging it, or destroying it (leaving no room for other memes and leaving an interesting discussion about whether the memes would survive a leap into a still other form of quasi-organism), or would they become the grist that aided the internet’s development – gave it an advantage to flourish and develop.
Interestingly enough, for the last couple of years, no one really discussed the possibility that they might simply lose the evolutionary struggle under pressure from hundreds of thousands of millions of other memes born directly from the internet itself:
The Museum of E-Failure
“We call this digital compast heap “The E-Failure Museum” – a multi-megabyte collection of screen capture files documenting the home pages of 120 commercial Web sites that didn’t make it.”
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A selection of firm and attractive links…
This is a weblog: Sometimes I forget completely that this is a weblog. In order compensate for this, here are some ‘links’. Interesting meme possibilities: Weblog playlists? Napster to charge for membership as of June. Yet another reason to be depressed about SXSW: Fray Café. I’ve been saying for months that e-books will catch on for reference works (although I still maintain that travel books and city guides are going to be the first really successful market).
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A conspiratorial approach to SXSW…
So my epic scheme for getting to SXSW originally went as follows: 1) Buy something off Jeff Bezos’s wishlist, 2) mention my craving to go to SXSW and 3) let nature takes its course. Except of course that I immediately realised that that was horribly, horribly corrupt and that I was a bad person. At which point I actually looked at his wishlist, realised that the man is obsessed with some of the weirdest shit on the planet, decided that I should buy him something anyway and then have a cool story to tell people down the pub. Which is what I’ve done. Jeff should be receiving (any day now) the Trivial Pursuit Star Wars Trilogy Edition.
[Speaking of wishlists (and being horribly corrupt), if you really wanted to, you could buy me something off mine. Think of all the stories you would be able to tell your grandchildren and how much they’d love you for it…]
This morning’s job involved updating timeout.com‘s page of Moscow links. All in all a pretty thankless task, as the state of the art in Russian media-websites seems to be somewhere pre-school. This is surely not a reflection of the country, but much more a reflection of the lack of money in Russian media companies.
One site that did stand out with Pravda‘s English-language website, which gives an astonishing insight into the mind-set of the people who used to live behind the Iron Curtain. Amongst stunning headlines appear a few absolute corkers, complete with astonishing introductory paragraphs:
NATO SITE ON INTERNET: A TISSUE OF LIES FROM BEGINNING TO END NATO PROVIDES DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE FOR ITS OWN INDICTMENT
“The NATO site on the Internet is at best a shame and a disgrace and at worst the confirmation that the rest of the world is unfortunately forced to come to terms with: the benevolent air of the perpetrators of the new world order is buried beneath sham, lies, irresponsibility, racism, jingoism and basically, the worst elements of post-fascist western decadence in the last half century.”
AIDS CASES GROW IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
“Young people all over Europe seem to have the mistaken idea that by avoiding the issue of protected or unprotected sexual relations by adopting oral sexual practices is safe, but they could not be more wrong.”
My plan to do a version of The Onion based upon a stereotypical 50’s Russian Propogandist take on the news now seems rather unnecessary…