11 February 2008 – 11:37 pm
Like Splinty, I am not inconsiderably annoyed at Private Eye. Oh yes.
In the recent ruckus between Newsnight and the Decent Right thinktank Policy Exchange, the Eye (or at least the enigmatic ‘Ratbiter’) has unaccountably chosen to side with the latter.
Newsnight alleged that Policy Exchange or its researchers had forged the receipts which showed you could [...]
22 September 2007 – 8:47 pm
The following comment didn’t appear on whatever post it was meant for, as WordPress’s spamcatcher automatically sent it to the bitbucket.
I like your blog and I feel we share sufficient common ground for a link to each others blogs to be mutually beneficial.If you agree to link then please contact me at ‘An Unrepentant Communist’
http://unrepentantcommunist.blogspot.com/
on [...]
6 September 2007 – 3:27 pm
I don’t know Tilda Swinton. At all.
There are, of course, many people I don’t know; the list could be extended more or less indefinitely, potentially forming the basis for a rather unchallenging game (“Yeah? Well, I don’t know Charles Kennedy, Jason Orange or Hufty from the Word…”) The point about Tilda Swinton in particular is [...]
After all those columns from 1999, here’s one from last month. (And then I’ll get back to proper blogging, probably.) They say you should write about what you know; what I knew, that particular weekend, was beer. ‘Dave Bitzer’ doesn’t represent anyone in particular. Years ago I invented a consultancy called Gargle Bitzer Helipad, and [...]
7 February 2007 – 1:20 pm
I think the thing that really irritates me about the Long Tail is just how basic the statistical techniques underlying it are. If you’ve got all that data, why on earth wouldn’t you do something more interesting and more informative with it? It’s really not hard. (In fact it’s so easy that I can’t help [...]
13 November 2006 – 2:34 pm
Now that Nick has read the last rites for Web 2.0, perhaps it’s safe to return to a question that’s never quite been resolved.
To wit: what is Web 2.0? (We’ve established that it’s not a snail.) Over at What I wrote, I’ve just put up a March 2003 article called “In Godzilla’s footprint“. In it, [...]
Ryan Carson:
I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either…
Read the whole thing. What’s particularly interesting is a [...]
My frustration with the bearpit that is Comment is Free was brought to a head by this bizarre post by David Hirsh. Once again, I’m going to reproduce my CiF comment here, because frankly I think more people will pay attention to it here than there.
First, a word about Hirsh’s argument. He opens thus:
Since before [...]
Nick writes, provocatively as ever, about the recent ‘community-oriented’ redesign of the netscape.com portal:
A few days ago, Netscape turned its traditional portal home page into a knockoff of the popular geek news site Digg. Like Digg, Netscape is now a “news aggregator” that allows users to vote on which stories they think are interesting or [...]
I hate to say this – I’ve always loathed VR boosters and been highly sceptical about the people they boost – but Jaron Lanier’s a bright bloke. His essay Digital Maoism doesn’t quite live up to the title, but it’s well worth reading (thanks, Thomas).
I don’t think he quite gets to the heart of the [...]
Nick Carr’s hyperbolically-titled The Death of Wikipedia has received a couple of endorsements and some fairly vigorous disagreement, unsurprisingly. I think it’s as much a question of tone as anything else. When Nick reads the line
certain pages with a history of vandalism and other problems may be semi-protected on a pre-emptive, continuous basis.
it clearly sets [...]
Scott Karp:
What if dollars have no place in the new economics of content?
…
In media 1.0, brands paid for the attention that media companies gathered by offering people news and entertainment (e.g. TV) in exchange for their attention. In media 2.0, people are more likely to give their attention in exchange for OTHER PEOPLE’S ATTENTION. This [...]
Et la piscine de la rue des Fillettes. Et le commissariat de police de la rue du Rendez-Vous. La clinique médico-chirurgicale et le bureau de placement gratuit du quai des Orfèvres. Les fleurs artificielles de la rue du Soleil. L’hôtel des Caves du Château, le bar de l’Océan et le café du Va et Vient. [...]
17 November 2005 – 2:55 pm
[Pardon the long silence - life called.]
Shelley:
I think Google Base is a fun experiment, and I’m willing to play a little. It will be interesting to see the directory, especially if the company provides web services that aren’t limited to so many queries a day. But I never forget that Google is in the business [...]
21 October 2005 – 9:41 am
OK, let’s talk about the Long Tail.
I’ve been promising a series of posts on the Long Tail myth for, um, quite a while. (What’s a month in blog time? A few of those.) The Long Tail posts begin here.
Here’s what we’re talking about, courtesy of our man Shirky:
We are all so used to bell curve [...]
A long time ago on a Web site far, far away, Clay Shirky wrote:
“We are all so used to bell curve distributions that power law distributions can seem odd.”
He then traced Pareto-like ‘power law’ curves operating in a number of domains where large numbers of people make unconstrained choices – most memorably, inbound link [...]
When it’s a long tail. Maybe.
David Weinberger writes:
In a conversation with Erica George at the Berkman she pointed out that the demographics of Live Journal don’t always represent one’s experience of Live Journal — the demographics say that teenage girls are the largest users, but if you’re a 25 year old, your social group there [...]
Via Nick, another Blairian fantasy:
The PM also this morning urged Labour supporters to turn out to vote on May 5, saying: “It only takes one in 10 of our voters to drift off to the Liberal Democrats and you end up with a Tory government.”
That is a figure hotly disputed by the Lib Dems, who [...]
