If anyone would like to have the domain live8blog.com to put to good use for live 8, email me and I'll give it to whoever has the best plan.
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tags: [live8]
Am putting together a list of events in my life as a series of visual bookmarks - and also to get a better understanding on what features one might need to be able to do this properly.
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tags: [dgblog]
Looking at the picture on the left, its clear that even mega stars still have to dress like lawyers when in court, even if they aren't the defendant.
Bono is sporting a sharkskin-like rock star suit and for someone who has not been seen without sunglasses since 1982 he tones down the effect, with a pair that actually cover a minority of his face and are somewhat translucent.
An outfit that conveys the idea to the judge: 'you know all the leather and stuff is just a costume, I normally relax in a 2-piece, I'm really one of you. I may be a rebel, but I respect the law'.
Conveys to everyone else: 'I'm not a square, you know, look at my suit, its shiny, I look a bit like Robert Palmer, I'll wear what I want, like when I modified my school uniform and my Mum grounded me.'
What's strange about courts is that although people tolerate the theatrical on stage (I'm sure that when Bono appeals to the world at Live8, for example, he'll be wearing trademark compound-eye specs, wife beater and one-bollock leather trousers) the same people, when judge or jury, want the makeup removed.
And all this is because Bono is in court to get back a pair of black pants, earrings, sweatshirt and stetson hat that he says were stolen from him.
Perhaps Bono only has two outfits and someone stole the rock star one leaving him with the suit
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tags: [postmodern]
One of the problems that I have with the current Supreme Court ruling over file sharing is the assumption that this stuff can be legislated absolutely.
As media is reduced to an atomic state of bits, it starts to show quantum-like uncertainty, is it a thing like an LP or a transmission like a song on the radio, a particle or a wave?
Hidden within the Supreme Court ruling is the other side of the coin:
Just as people have created software that allows people to share things they don't own, with copy protected digital media nobody owns anything. Everything you buy is actually rented.
Why is it legal to develop software which necessarily prevents ownership of something you buy?
At the moment I buy albums in flea markets for 10c a song, read books that I bought in the UK in the US and can read all the books I want by checking them out of the library.
I cannot buy second hand MP3s, watch DVDs I bought in the UK (without hardware that will surely be banned at some point) or check out unlimited electronic books from the library.
The bottom line to all this: stuff should just be a whole lot cheaper and the problem would surely go away.
The role of the media industry has always been to promote and distribute media - when the network replaces these what is that role?
Notes on RIAA and MPAA Press Conference: Corante
Partygaming, a site where the majority of its revenues could potentially be found illegal, and whose affiliates are known to many bloggers as comment spammers went public in the UK - for $9 billion.
Does nobody in the UK remember 1999?
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tags: [gambling]
A democratically elected un-democratic leader.
Oh no.
Iran's saving grace could be the fact that with the youngest average of any country, at some point, things might change.
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tags: [politics]
... OK not quite, but this news below does seem like a parody from the Onion:
"As previously reported, Microsoft is also proposing extensions to the RSS specification that will add support for ordered lists. That would enable, for example, e-commerce sites to more easily publish things such as a constantly updated feed of best-selling products."
Do they mean extensions to the RSS spec, or an RSS module? Since what is being described can be done with a module, it would be crazy to change the spec.
And if all Microsoft is doing is writing an RSS module, then Jeez, their PR machine needs to understand that this is not a big deal.
You can already publish things such as a constantly updated feed of best selling products in RSS, the problem is not with the standard but the aggregators - no aggregator will display metadata from RSS modules on-the-fly.
This ad for a V8 engined Volvo which does less than 20 miles per gallon featured alongside a Reuters story with the headline "Oil touches $60, U.S. demand steams ahead - in V8 Volvos perhaps.
Volvo's moronic advertising goes one step further, the strapline is 'it's the best V8 for the planet', a bit like a low tar cigarette describing itself as the best for your lungs.
At Moreover, someone once sent in a screenshot of a tourist website for Northern Ireland with a robot fed news headline saying 'Iron bar gang beats up overseas visitors'.
Thinking of collecting examples of this kind of advertising juxtaposition which occurs on the web because content and ads are matched without human approval.
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tags: [environment]
The guy pictured was outside my door this morning with a bizarre looking Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson) contraption.
Apparently the machine is designed for 'sewer fishing'. According to its owner "these covers lead to drains that go way down, there's stuff from the 17th century down there". Eeeew.
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tags: [weird]
If oil hits $3 a gallon, people will demand that the government focus on domestic problems and the economy.
It will be a sublime irony if Bush's popularity slumps because of oil prices and not because of the Iraq war, since the Iraq war was an attempt to keep cheap oil flowing if the Saudi supply was in danger.
But because other reasons were used to galvanize supprt for the Iraq war the government is now in a curious position of having to continue to fudge the WMD issue and not reap the benefits of the emerging reality.
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tags: [peakoil]
Ed Sim writes: "One of the ways we like to invest is by talking with the buyers in the market, the CIOs and CSOs, and understanding what their pain points are, what solutions they are evaluating, and how open they are to working with early stage companies."
I'd like to see an enterprise knowledge network where CIO's spelled out their problems to invited software providers. A forum where high level problems are thrown out there as individual problems rather than lengthy RFPs.
The obvious problems of confidentiality are mitigated if there is no immediate agenda and the posts are initially anonymous. I.e. both sides are invite only and problems are posted anonymously. The identity of the poster is revealed to people offering suggestions/solutions if the poster wants them to follow up.
Too much of the enterprise arena is still hamstrung by a lack of transparency and reliance on anachronistic ways of communication for the enterprise software market to be an efficient marketplace.
I'd like to see an enterprise lazyweb, if you like.
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tags: [enterprise] [blogroll]
posted via Wists: permamark
Adam Michela is cooking up a new project which will take some of the UI developments from Ajax, the goodness of Rails, 43things style serendipitous networking and weblog style publishing to create a new way to look at travel. Knowing Adam, it will surely rock.
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tags: [tools]
permamark in: Wists
"As MPs vote on whether to go ahead with a Bill that could outlaw religious jokes, we celebrate comedy's finest at their blasphemous best"
I always think that a society's toleration of jokes about anything, is a fine sign of its level of being benign.
My favorite is the Emo Philips one:
"I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said: 'Stop. Don't do it.'
'Why shouldn't I?' he asked. 'Well, there's so much to live for!' 'Like what?' 'Are you religious?'
He said: 'Yes.' I said. 'Me too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?' 'Christian.' 'Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?' 'Protestant.' 'Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?' 'Baptist.' 'Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?' 'Baptist Church of God.' 'Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you reformed Baptist Church of God?' 'Reformed Baptist Church of God.' 'Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?' He said: 'Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915.'
I said: "Die, heretic scum," and pushed him off."
My favorite thing about the new Technorati is that it now differentiates between links to a blog from an actual post and persistent links from a Blogroll or sidebar. Would be interesting to see the top 100 blogs ranked separately by number of posts and number of sidebar links.
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permamark in: Wists
Of 1000 children aged between 13 and 16, not a single one could name a living scientist. Some answers offered up included Madonna and Chemical Ali.
Guardian Unlimited | Life | Only dead scientists are known to teens
The Register reports that it will ship in the UK this fall. I'm not particularly a gadget freak, or an early adopter, but damn I want a WiFi cellphone combo, since although the US is very good for most services, its cellphone services suck. Will the Universal work in the US?
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permamark in: Wists
Reading through accounts of Christian protests of Harry Potter came upon this classic:
"Maine: A group of Christians in Lewiston, ME, the Jesus Party had planned to hold a book burning in a local park on 2001-NOV-15. However, they were denied a fire permit by the Fire Department. So they held a "book cutting" instead. "
The Harry Potter books: Charming stories or demonic plot?
In response to China and Iran's censorship of bloggers, have done a quick logo for Bloggers Without Borders to post on weblogs.
It has no anti-aliasing, using only black lines and a transparent background, so should place on most sites without dithering problems.
The font is Kottke's Silkscreen, which seemed appropriate.
The icon shows an arrow bursting out of a box, to symbolize free speech using an image which is often used to indicate opening a link in a new window.
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tags: [blogs] [censorship]
permamark in: Wists
[Update: as Sean points out, I am a moron. The whole Bloggers without borders thing has been done - and I didn't even Google it before pontificating.]
"Umbria Communications of Boulder has developed a Web crawler that monitors hundreds of thousands of blogs, turning the information from them, via natural language algorithms, into marketing data that is potentially much more reliable than traditional tools such as focus groups."
The results:
Most mentioned non alcoholic beverage: Starbucks coffee
Most mentioned fast food: McDonalds
Most mentioned female celebs: Britney Spears, Paris hilton etc.
Well there's a surprise.
Blog software tracks consumer preferences
This is funny on so many levels.
A Google Adsense rep calls me today to pitch some form of customized Adsense for Wists. He then sends me an email saying:
"Here's an example of how Flickr.com is using AdSense: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/manhattan/ (you may need to hit refresh to see the ads load)"
1. Flickr was bought buy Yahoo and now has Yahoo ads.
2. Who in their right mind refreshes a page just so they can see ads.
3. Why pitch something with an example where it is broken.
Caveat: I hope this doesn't get anyone in trouble - its obviously a harmless error.
[update: seems like they are in the middle of the switch, so depending on the number of times you refresh the page (not exactly normal behavior), you get either: no ads, Google ads or Yahoo ads. No less stupid, however]
So Google is the biggest media company in the world as of today.
But I've been in San Francisco for a week now and haven't had one free drink, or had to speak to a single 'bizdev' guy in a button-down Oxford. Things just ain't like what they used to be.
Google now most valuable media company | CNET News.com
I've been reading an unhealthy amount about entropy lately, and one of the best explanations of something that was confusing me is in Roger Penrose's new book, which doesn't shy away from the math. One normally associates a high entropy thermodynamic state with randomly distributed matter within a system. The opposite is true for large bodies where gravitational forces mean that the highest entropy state is where matter aggregates e.g. in a black hole. Except that the ultimate aggregation of matter, the big bang, must have had an extremely low entropy state, so I am still confused.
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tags: [entropy]
permamark in: Wists
TagCloud launches. Looks pretty cool - creates tagclouds from an RSS reading list. One more component of 2.0
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permamark in: Wists
"Private bloggers or websites must register the complete identity of the person responsible for the site, and the ministry - which has set a June 30 deadline for compliance - said 74% of all sites had already registered."
A nice reminder that despite China's economic growth, it is not free.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | China orders bloggers to register with government
Reuters: Indian government reverses a crippling fine imposed by a Hindu temple, on a family whose baby pee-ed while its mother was praying.
The first of the gambling IPOs, PartyGaming (which are in the UK because it is illegal in the US) is about to go out for $9 billion (5 bn GBP).
As I wrote before, I noticed that a large percentage of comment spam was coming from affiliates of these companies with pending IPOs.
I suspect that, like porn, conversion rates for gambling affiliates are such that they can't afford to advertise on Google and therefore resort to things like comment spam to scam Google.
In other words, because CPA affiliate programs like the poker sites' don't appeal to sites with any readership (a medium traffic site can go for Adsense CPC advertising and a big brand site will opt for CPM revenues with guaranteed income based on readership) their affiliates tend to be low end sites. Low end sites would normally have to buy traffic, but if the cost of buying it through a normal channel such as becoming an advertiser on Google is higher than the CPA revenue, then sites will often use illegal means to boost traffic for free - e.g. spamming.
TripAdviser very successfully arbitraged this difference by putting non contextual fixed links on sites with abnormally high Pagerank to traffic ratios, getting high up in Google search results and making money off CPA programs for travel which pay very highly. They could buy these links cheaply on scientific sites, where the blog-like culture of linking abnormally boosted Pagerank, but whose normal traffic and demographic readership meant that they were happy to be offered decent cash for links (which did not even need to be contextual like Google ads, since they were designed for robots to click on, not people).
The difference is that what Trip Advisor did was legal and temporarily exploited real opportunity for arbitrage. There are poker site affiliates who are operating illegally, and there may be no arbitrage opportunity for a significant percentage to be viable otherwise.
So the question remains:
If the sites which are about to IPO don't know that they have affiliates that are illegally spamming people, how much of their revenue would disappear if one takes those illegal affiliates out of the equation and how much would that affect the IPO price?
I am amazed that no journalist has picked this up.
(Most gambling sites offer CPA (Cost Per Action) affiliate programs - i.e. you only get paid if someone signs up and pays, on the advertiser’s site. This is compared to CPM (Cost Per impression (Mille - thousand impressions) and CPC, (Cost Per Click). Advertisers like CPA because they only have to pay if someone buys something - so they always make a profit. Publishers like CPM because they know their readership and therefore the publisher makes guaranteed money) CPC offers a middle ground for advertisers to buy ads accross a network of smaller publishers who may not have known readership or brand appeal). Because of the nature of these models CPA is not used for brand advertising but for products and e-commerce. Amazon affiliate programs are CPA, for example. The difference is that the kind of goods that are sold on Amazon often have brand advertising as well. Almost all porn and gambling advertising is pure CPA.)
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Poker firm comes up trumps in £5bn flotation
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