Archive for July, 2004

French author gets in trouble with employer for writing a handbook on how to survive the corporate world without doing any work.

Thursday, July 29th, 2004

Sample chapter headings:

The Morons Who Are Sitting Next To You
Business Culture, My Arse
Why You Can’t Lose By Resigning
Corporate Culture - Stupid People

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Lazy joke lands author in trouble

Michael Moore to Bill O’ Reilly: “I want you to live. I want you to live.”

Wednesday, July 28th, 2004

Posted in politics | Comments Off

Microsoft’s rival to Google news powered by Moreover

Tuesday, July 27th, 2004

Via Anil
MSN launches Newsbot, Microsoft’s answer to Google news.

If you look at the URLs as you mouse over them - its all powered by Moreover..

Bullshit statistics

Wednesday, July 21st, 2004

Two very different headlines in the UK press illustrate a truism in news - people always gravitate towards the sensational. Overall, crime has dramatically fallen.

BBC: Violent crime figures rise by 12%

Independent: New figures reveal that crime has fallen 39 per cent over the past nine years - the biggest sustained fall since the 19th century

Great mobile homes of Mississippi

Tuesday, July 20th, 2004

“Tornadoes cause ‘hundreds’ of dollars of damage to mobile homes every year and some trailer dwellers take measures against them. Others just let nature help them with their decorating.”

Great Mobile Homes of Mississippi - The Trailer Park

Reverse Air Rage

Tuesday, July 20th, 2004

Classic - reverse air rage on an Aeroflot flight as drunk cabin staff attack a passenger, giving him a black eye.

“… a medical examination after the flight showed the cabin attendants were heavily intoxicated.

Another passenger told a forum on the avia.ru civil aviation website that the stewards distributed in-flight meals only when the plane started its descent, and managed to spill large quantities of food on the floor. ”

BBC: ‘Reverse air-rage’ on Russian jet

Googlebomb

Tuesday, July 13th, 2004

Blogjam is trying to get Blur’s Damon Alburn to be the top entry for the word cunt (which if you are British or Irish or Australian, normally refers to a guy and can be used in general bar talk).

Cunt, or quoint used to be polite speak for Vagina (which sounds a hell of a lot more rude to me) and appears in Chaucer. The word ‘quaint’ is actually the same word via a different route.

Isn’t Damon quaint?

blogjam: cuntbomb

what is the most valuable weblog?

Thursday, July 8th, 2004

Well there are several possible measures (and one very interesting candidate):

offline recognition (i.e. PR exposure, number of mentions in news articles), traffic/reach, (Alexa rank), popularity amongst Bloggers (Technorati 100), hybrid measure of online popularity (Google Pagerank).

The interesting thing is that there is no clear winner amongst these measures and that although there are similar rankings for top weblogs accross the board, there is one clear winner for Pagerank. It beats the Gawker media sites and Boingboing and Scripting with a Pagerank of 9 - PVRblog

PVRblog also has the biggest gap between Pagerank and Alexa rank. These stats demonstrate something interesting - perhaps PVR blog shows the perfect scope for a vertical market weblog with maximum Google exposure for its traffic.

I’m not entirely sure what this means, the difference should either disappear over time as a Pagerank of 9 drives more traffic and thus boosts Alexa rank - or if the potential readership is saturated, perhaps it will soak all the potential searches for PVR related content and pick up a large share of ad revenue with very good impressions to clickthrough rates on Adsense advertising.

I suspect the latter, that PVRblog is the perfect fit for a niche content site if you want to have targeted ad revenue.

Real-time news

Wednesday, July 7th, 2004

“By the time Kerry announced the news in person at a Pittsburgh rally 45 minutes later, Democratic and Republican Web sites were ready with dueling videos, fact sheets and statements.
But they were all 12 hours behind the air-travel Web site USAviation.com, where on Monday night a visitor wrote that John Edwards decals were being fitted to Kerry’s campaign plane in a Pittsburgh hangar.”

CNN.com - Edwards news was on Internet first - Jul 6, 2004