Intravenous tea, Radio 4 and doctors calling themselves Mister again, when becoming surgeons, are the lifeblood of a particularly understated and delicate cultural facet that, along with aggressive guitar music and appropriate use of swearwords like cunt, are the things that I miss about the UK. Even when I worked in an office designing rock concert sets for bands like the Rolling Stones, all we actually listened to all day was the calming sound of BBC Radio 4. My favorite show was Loose Ends, presented by Ned Sherrin. He died Sunday. Bugger. Ned Sherrin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

OObject the latest Wists site launches today. Oobject is a gadget blog, but with a difference. Instead of posts, there are ‘charts’ constantly updated image galleries with the best items in each category, voted on by users. As usual, the focus is or quirky, unusual or well designed lists of things. OObject is a bit like Billboard charts for gadgets. OObject is a major leap forward in terms of the way our sites work as it completely couples the wists publishing system into a customized version of WordPress, and uses the new editorial back-end of wists for management.

According to the Global House Prices blog: “At the peak of the Japanese real estate bubble, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth more than the entire state of California”. Looking at the graph of US and Japanese Real estate prices is sobering, the US one is like a ski slope and the Japanese one, a mountain. But none of this seems to make sense to us Brits. Housing in America still seems cheap, by UK standards, even in New York. Consider that the average house price across the whole of the UK, not just the expensive bits, is over $400,000. The fact that I could barely afford to buy back the building that I bought in my 20s, despite having earned much more than most, since, means that something is fundamentally out of whack in the UK and by an order of magnitude that is much larger than in…

Wists users continue to rise, and monthly uniques are around the 350K mark, but our Alexa is dropping and deliberately so. The reason is that we have decided to ruthlessly cull spam users, which account for a large number on many social shopping sites and social networks. Social network spam doesn’t tend to be that visible since the items on front pages and showcased category links (top items etc.) of many social websites are hand picked by editors or users. But do a search for high value Adsense terms within many user generated sites and you will see that the automated publishing tools have blasted them, creating useless ballast that companies are reluctant to get rid of since it generates organic search engine traffic, and makes the numbers look good. Since the type of spam we get is SEO spam and a greater percentage of these people use Alexa toolbars…