Jeff is right about Vlogs, in fact blogging will become the de facto standard for any type of online publishing - because its simple and easy.

Imagine for example, the effects of digital camera attachments to cellphones and ‘picture messaging’ - currently on free trial in the UK. Now imagine an SMS to blog gateway and a picture weblog posting pictures of celebrities snapped by passers by. Ubiquitous digital cameras and simple publishing will give way to a new type of Bloggerazzi - celebrities beware.

Aaaanyway, so I was sitting in a ludicrously trendy bar somewhere in the ‘Schmillage‘, feeling mildly inadequate, when it was pointed out that because there were two people with Mohicans, this was clearly the start of a global trend. My first instinct - bollocks, but now I am seeing them everywhere. Conclusion - I have either lost my mind or everyone else has.

This time the Mohican is different - it is not the six inch, superglued, punk rebel thing, but a sort of ironic, wear it with designer clothes, look - a post modern Mohican or Pomohawk.

The genealogy of this haircut is different too - clearly there has been a progression from 1. the mop-top messy haircut that it now mainstream to 2. the ‘Hoxton fin‘ where the mess is brushed into the middle currently claiming victims all over London, leading finally to 3. shaving the sides off and leaving nothing but the mess in the middle.

There are some people that rarely leave Manhattan except to go to the airport, it is as if its island status makes its inhabitants behave like they live in a medieval walled city.

A new breed of Manhattanites are even more particular, they rarely leave the districts that comprise the lower rise neighborhoods that are hemmed in between Midtown and Wall St., Greenwich Village, the East Village, Lower East Side, Tribeca, etc. Clearly it needs an all encompassing name, what about the Schmillage, suitably nonchalant?

Off to Gaby’s place on the Island of Mull, off the West coast of Scotland, for New Year, so will be in ‘blog silence’ for the next few days. However, am taking the avalanche of books I recieved for Christmas, so there will be plenty to rant about when I get back.

Expect FAST, the Norwegian company behind Alltheweb, to be acquired by Overture or possibly even Microsoft.

That will leave 3 players in online search, the rest won’t matter.

One liner: “##”

Summary: Simplistic, rectilinear shapes created from two groups of three towers at right angles to each other and linked by bridges. In addition to the new towers, there is a proposal for landscaped piers representing shadows form the original towers. Multiple memorials are constructed at ground level and in the new buildings.

Plus: The pier proposal is very simple and elegant. Being the same size as the original towers they would allow their scale to be grasped.

Minus:
The towers are simple without the elegant simplicity of the originals that made them so iconic. The ‘multiple memorials’ idea is pointless. The cantilevered gardens/balconies would be prohibitively expensive, would disappear from the working drawings and would therefore change the design altogether.

The designs for the WTC site are out, its taken a day to digest all the proposals.

The bad news: they are all either mediocre or unbuildable.

The good news: the architects themselves are not all mediocre and the eventual buildings will be nothing like the original competition entries. The favorite appears to be Foster. I have some knowledge of the way the Foster office operates, since I used to work there when I was an architect. If he wins he will change the design entirely, just as he did for the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank’s headquarters in Hong Kong, the skyscraper which made his name. I would guess that the competition entry was largely conceived by others in the office (possibly Ken Shuttleworth), but if it wins Foster will want to get more involved, as it is such a high profile scheme.

Who’s your daddy?

“Prince Charles’ private secretary, was forced to alert the police about an alleged plot to seize hair from Prince Harry for DNA testing, apparently to answer lingering questions about his paternity.

It has long been rumored that Princess Diana’s former lover, army officer James Hewitt - and not Prince Charles - is the father of Harry”

Help!

Is the following legal HTML or, more specifically XHTML?

<span class="foo">bar</span class="foo">

I want to write a ‘dumb’ metadata parser that can parse fragments of markup and doesn’t need to count in and out of nested div or span tags. Being able to explicitly label attributes in closing tags would help, to say the least.

David Galbraith’s weblog: Kissinger resigns as head of 9/11 commission due to a conflict of interests.

More like: ‘An interest in conflicts’.

Baroom Ching.