The Blog
07 Sep 2005 Oi! You lot at the W3C! Who was it who had the bright idea of using the same character to escape character entities as the delimiter between variables in URLs?
I'd like you to meet the guy at Microsoft who thought it would be clever to turn the forward slash in Unix paths to backward slashes in Windows. TR 35 : They are the TR35--Technology Review's selection of the top technology innovators under age 35 (as of October 1, 2005).
Damn Ageists! Where's the "top technology innovators over age 35" And why are they all American? [ 07-Sep-05 8:37am ] 06 Sep 2005 Please excuse the blog spam. This is a last call for this conference. There's a lot of people here who should be interested in using Blogs and Blog like technologies in business.
Our Social World Conference Friday 9th September 2005 The Moller Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, UK - just 45 mins from London Theme: Getting businesses into blogging and wikis! Enabling conversations with your customers and users by learning about web logs and related applications. Who should attend: All involved in business from CEO's to receptionists, VC's and entrepreneurs. Blogs can destroy or build a company's reputation: Kryptonite Locks in the USA lost a $15m class action suit on issue's first raised by a blogger. There's a stellar cast of speakers including yours truly. Anything you can do to promote this to business people (rather than geek bloggers) will be much appreciated. [from: JB Ecademy] Skype prank
Hilarious. Post a provocative skype profile. Then match up incoming chats with each other. They both think their talking to "sexy girl" but actually they;'re talking to each other. Finally, archive the results. Boing Boing: Barbara Bush: things going 'Very Well' for poor NOLA evacuees
Somebody else making the connection between the current USA and pre-revolutionary France. It's not "let them eat cake" it's "Let them evacuate themselves" 05 Sep 2005 A very strange post appeared in my home brew RSS aggregator today.
Topic Exchange: Channel 'wifi' [ 5-Sep-05 4:23pm ] [View Website] Hmmm. I may have to click through on this just to see where the letters w i f i appear. There again, maybe not. A comment from me on The Doc Searls Weblog in response to his War on Error: The poor : I wonder if it's time to go back and think again about the best way to deal with the poor in a modern civilized, western country. The comments I've seen so far have been polarised within the current frames of reference with no attempt to think outside the box.
The news on Katrina from outside the USA || kuro5hin.org
I've tried to keep away from this because my reaction has been seriously confused. But the responses on this post tipped me over the edge. "The animals that are committing these crimes are not the same Americans who believe in our nation's high moral stature. Rather, they are the product of a politically correct curriculum which preaches the moral bankruptcy of this country; at least, when it isn't preaching that morality is non-existent. What we're seeing on the news, then, is simply the embodiment of liberal values, and the natural tendency of people live up (or down) to the expectations of their communities." "First - grab a clue stick. The US is a federal system. Bush doesn't have the authority to order evacuations of cities or to move troops into them. The reason the evacuation was delayed was because the Mayor of New Orleans didn't want to declare one." "New Orleans' poverty level is not all that different than elsewhere in the US - 30ish% vs 27%." So. the problem is too much socialism in the USA. Thanks, McCarthy. The country as a whole can't do anything until the local government request it. Well thanks again, you founding fathers. But it's that last one that really freaks me out. There's a joky metaphor there that's particular apt. The only reason the successful classes have their heads above the shit is that they're standing on the shoulders of a 30% underclass buried in it. Can a society really call itself civilised or preach "high moral stature" when it depends on 30% of it's population being below the poverty level? Apart from being eerily like any number of science fiction novels (Metrophage, Escape from New York, Distraction) this feels to me like the beginnings of the French Revolution. Any time the mob loses access to the basic necessities of life like water and food, the mob will revolt. Human beings want to survive and in desperation they will do almost anything to do it. Add easy access to guns, mix in the sudden cessation of the drug supply and leave basic resources unguarded and a swift fall into anarchy is hardly surprising. And the central power's reaction is entirely predictable, send in the cavalry to restore order and try and keep a lid on it. Has Katrina ripped away the facade and exposed the rotten core? Just as the spiraling cost of bread exposed the rotten core at the heart of the French Kingdom? 03 Sep 2005 I thnk we'll look back on July, August and September 2005 as a discontinuity as we shift to a Post-American, Post-industrial world economy. Too many apparently separate things piling up on top of each other.
Dan talks about US gas (petrol) prices rising as a market correction. But it may also see the end of the 8 litre V10 SUV. And it's the SUV that has been propping up the US car industry. Are they prepared with a fleet of economical small cars ready to sell to a willing public? I rather think not. 02 Sep 2005 01 Sep 2005 forum.skype.com :: View topic - What is new in Skype for Windows 1.4 API
Especially new URI schemes [from: del.icio.us] O'Reilly Radar > Geobloggers and the Y! Identity API
Hello... Flickr and hence Yahoo! have an authenticaion API? [from: del.icio.us] 30 Aug 2005 Reinventing Radio: On Phonetags... (plasticbag.org)
Tom Coates explains phonetags. visionary stuff [from: del.icio.us] Burningbird ยป Threshold
my comment:- "Google AdSense Sucks for Bloggers" Go on, shout it from the rooftops. Sure, if you set up a group of blogs with very narrow focus and then tailor the content to high paying AdSense keywords, you can make some money. But for all of the rest of us who blog about what *we* find interesting, Google is absolutely hopeless at providing interesting ads that people might actually want to click on. What's worst is when you get deluged with ads for blog hosting services. Hello? All my readers (all 5 of them!) already have a blog. Why would they want to sign up for another? And you've pointed out a key problem where the Ads from Google are ideologically unsound from the POV of the blog author. Hence the talk last year about publisher driven advertising. Me, I want Last.FM style radio buttons on each Ad that only I can see. "Love it, Ban it". Sure, Google lets me ban ads, but it's hard work, IE only and a PITA. It should be simple. And there's metadata in them thar radio button pushes. There's space here for a new Ad placement service targeting blog publishers. Open Listings anyone? 29 Aug 2005 From a comment on SuW's blog.
One of the problems with this stuff is explaining it to uninterested people in terms they can understand so it's not just us who are freaked out about it. This is a problem I have with Lessig's approach of talking about remixing. It's just too subtle compared with "pirate". We need the sound bite because the opposition are sound bite masters. Nothing to do with data retention, but I've been explaining the EFF fight in terms of VCR time shifting and skipping past the adverts. This is something that *everyone* sees as a basic right because everyone has done it even if their VCR still blinks 12:00. Now explain that their next VCR works just like their current one except that one day it refuses to record Lost or 24 or ER. Or when they do record it, it refuses to skip the ads. Or the quality is really bad until they spend another 1000 quid on a new plasma screen. Or the CD they buy won't work in the car. Or the music they thought they bought is dead because they upgraded to a new laptop or the supplier went out of business. And on and on. In terms of data retention, we need to fight with real world examples that people can relate to. Otherwise you get the sort of response that says "I wouldn't mind having an ID card, I've already got 4 in my wallet, what's one more? The government already knows everything about me, what's the problem? If it's going to stop bombings on the subway/immigrants taking my job/ID theft/benefit scroungers/teenage drunkenness/hoody hooligans/Chavs I'm all for it". 27 Aug 2005 Recording Industry vs The People
A blog covering somebody who's fighting back against the RIAA "Demanding money with menaces". Excellent. 26 Aug 2005 What do you call someone who believes in the literal truth of the old testament of the St James Bible? Did Jesus the Christ believe in the literal truth of the old testament of the St James Bible. I'm not that hot on theology but I rather think not.
So perhaps we should stop calling people who do, "Christian". They're giving the religion a bad name. 
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