Ben Trott, is clever and reasonable - and his piece on ping servers is a welcome antidote to idiots like me banging on about ping servers.

I also think that for the larger publishers/providers, making an easily accessible update stream, as Sixapart are doing, is the right way forward. But this doesn't work for the multitude of individual sites.

Secondly, Ben says:

"Google and other search engines seem to do pretty well in keeping their indexes current, even though they don't receive any pings. And they're indexing billions of web sites, while there are only tens of millions of weblogs."

Google don't allow search by date, except for news. With news search, they don't spider and index in the same way they do for ordinary websites, they harvest thousands of sites, not millions and they have to scrape headlines.

Why should news or weblog search be architecturally different from ordinary web search?

Reliable ping servers and decent specs would mean they wouldn't have to be, and we would be able to search the whole web for the most recent information.
link »

tags: [rssping]

posted via Wists: permamark

Time magazine asks the question which is surely on some people's minds. Has Katrina got anything to do with global warming?

The reality is probably not.

But given that:

1. global warming is a reality;
2. that its early effects will not be sudden catastrophic failure of the environment but freak storms;
3. and that people clearly won't give a shit until its too late;

- the responsible thing to do is to pretend that the Katrina storm has everything to do with global warming.
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tags: [global] [warming]

posted via Wists: permamark

It is often taken as a given that the web is benign - that it allows the truth to emerge from an army of fact checkers.

But what if, there was an inherent tendency for it to spread infectious and dangerous ideas. From conspiracy theory discussion groups to the spread of Islamic extremist ideas via the web, there is evidence that this may be the case.

Remember the mysterious 'Piano Man' - found on a seashore, unable to speak, no identity, autistic genius who communicated only through his virtuoso piano skills?

It was a story that reverberated around the blogosphere, in particular - could the power of the web unravel the mystery?

Well, it seems that the truth is he could speak, was not autistic, could only play one note on the piano, and his identity has been revealed.

The real explanation followed Occam's razor, being the most simple and statistically likely while the blogosphere version followed the telephone game (Chinese whisper in the UK) theory of memes - that the explanation which is most likely to be passed on (reblogged or linked to) will dominate, like a game of telephone where each person whispers in multiple ears.

In fact the process of reblogging will mutate the story such that the most successful variant survives.

This has two important effects:

1. It means that weblog driven news which is many to many instead of broadcast news which is one to many will have the biggest divergence between Occam's razor and the telephone theory of memes i.e. weblog news will tend to b e inaccurate for stories where there is a strong element of seductive mystery rather than boring facts.

2. Because web reputation is based purely on link reputation successful memes and meme drivers increasingly dominate search results. An example of this that I have come across is searches for 'entropy, life' flood results with creationist attempts to challenge evolution, which look superficially plausible but are provably wrong. To read genuine research you have to do the same search on Google Scholar, where pagerank which biases towards the blind, meme driven, reputation is replaced by the better reputation system of peer review from chosen peers.

One would like to think of this as a meritocracy of ideas - and it is. But it is currently a meritocracy of memes rather than the truth.
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tags: [religion]

posted via Wists: permamark

There is definitely a tendency for certain people to despise wealth and consumption itself rather than its effects.

There is no word for this that I know of, schadenfreude is close but not quite right- lets say armenfreude (poorhappy).

The armenfreude are the people that like it when everyone can't drive fast cars and buy fancy goods, not really because it will damage the environment and squander resources, but because they possess that dour puritan streak that runs through Anglo-Saxon culture secretly wanting to pee on people's parades.

This is the kick-off for Steven Levitt's attack on Peter Maas' piece on peak oil - that one should be skeptical of doomsayers - indeed.

But then Levitt's single explanation of why peak oil is not a problem is that everything will be OK because markets are self correcting.

I am no economist, but this looks like horseshit to me, it sounds less like a ‘Fisking’ than a ‘Hitching’, i.e. doing the Christopher Hitchens thing of being deliberately contrarian without really believing what you write.

1. The oil market is one where demand has been shown to be remarkably resilient to price, until the point where it hurts the overall economy.

2. Every US recession has been prefaced by rising oil prices.

3. From the Roman Empire to the Danish in Greenland, the biggest threat to civilization has consistently been problems with resources.

4. The US government has said that it cannot sign the Kyoto Treaty because it would 'wreck the economy' - the effects of the Kyoto Treaty would be the turning down of the dial on the air conditioner and the spendthrift use of the car that Levitt talks about.

5. We are at war because of access to oil, people are dying.

6. There are countless examples of economic systems that don't correct through market forces, anything taken to breaking point won't, such as the Irish potato famine.

My real issue is that there appears to be evidence that two things are potentially a real problem of global importance worth investing in protection against even if the risk is teeny tiny - and it isn't.

These issues are Global Warming and the lack of an imminent solution to Oil Dependancy.

But we don't need to succumb to armenfreude to tackle them, in fact technological progress may be more important now than ever.

We need some air-bags for our fast car economy and its effects, even if, as we hope, they will never be used, they will be worth it.
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tags: [peakoil]

posted via Wists: permamark

Jeff Jarvis reports on the fact that Google are selling: 14,159,265 shares (the value of pi being 3.14159265…)

There's a pun there somewhere - pi in the sky?

After Om Malik's excellent piece on Google buying dark fiber, I wonder if their pie in the sky plan really is to fill it with ad supported free wireless.

This would really make sense, pulling the rug from under Microsoft's feet by making the battle for the home page at a lower level than the desktop - Internet access itself.
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tags: [news]

posted via Wists: permamark

The Olympics is obsessed with its identity and making money out of its brand. Except that its identity is entirely schizophrenic it can’t decide whether it is capitalist or socialist, and as such bears the hallmarks of party member vs citizens syndrome.

Wannabe diplomat IOC members fly around the world drinking and eating indigenous food samplers and trampolining on 5 star hotel beds, to test them for Olympic springiness standards.

Competitors sweat it out on the track and field and 2 star Olympic village barracks, to fight for a single gold coin to dangle round their neck.

Words banned by the Olympics for brand infringement:

Olympic motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius/Faster, Higher, Stronger, games, medals, gold, silver, bronze, 2012, sponsor, summer

Words that could be posted by Bloggers to mess up search engine results:

Shittius, Citius, Altius, Fortius, Faster, Higher, Stronger, more drugs, games, tired, old fashioned, medals, gold, embezzlement, silver, bronze, 2012, Olympics, sucks, waste of money, world cup is better, sponsor, summer,

Everybody now: "it's coming home, its coming home, synchronized swimming's coming home".
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tags: [news]

posted via Wists: permamark