Pixagogo – great site with classic Jazz LP covers. Autumn Leaves on Somethin' Else (shown) is that track that made me fall in love with Jazz. See it on Wists in [jazz] [art]
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My former professor, Peter Cook's building in Graz, with an outer skin which is a media facade that can be changed electronically. See it on Wists in [architecture]
Half way through Kingdom of Heaven our hero is given a choice: Marry the good king’s, beautiful, nice daughter, who he is in love with and she is in love with him, and become king of Jerusalem, rule it wisely and keep the peace. In exchange, the corrupt guy who is going out with said daughter, who is trying to provoke war and murders people periodically and who wants to murder our hero, will be arrested and executed. Sounded like a no-brainer to me. However, our hero, does not want to sell his soul, to have his enemy arrested on a trumped up charge. At this point I switched off and enjoyed the cinematography. The good king dies, the corrupt guy marries the beautiful princess and provokes a war where thousands of people die and he is captured. The hero takes over and manages to kill enough of the enemy…
The BBC have a very moving picture of an old, old man crying at a VE day remembrance service in Europe. WWII is refered to as a ‘just war’ to allude to the idea that a declaration of war can be on morally solid ground. But even if that were the case, justification is not the same as success. If 40 million deaths and many more injuries, homes lost and lives ruined and half of an entire race wiped out in genocide is not an unprecedented disaster then what the hell is? The allied victory in the Second World War was entirely Pyrrhic. For me, remembrance is second hand, of the lessons I learned from my grandparents’ generation who lived through WWI and WWII. Remembrance of a 16 year old boy with shell shock, shot for desertion to the allied refusal to bomb the railroad to Auschwitz. Because of the…
Dave Winer on ads in RSS “The feeds themselves are ads for the stories they link to, which are revenue-generators. Anything that keeps people from clicking, that confuses them, takes them off course, is going to drop the click-through rate.” here here. There are only three possibilities for ads in RSS: 1. where the feed is an aggregated feed or search result from many sources, then the ad is similar to what the search engines do (but this is a volume game – the individual ad revenue is less than at the destination site). 2. where MOST of the RSS ad revenue is given back to the publisher – so that the publisher can decide whether the ad revenue outweights the potential revenue from the added traffic. 3. Where the RSS feed is full content – although to be honest most people can make more revenue off fancy advertising at…
I disabled comments a while back because of the spam issues from gambling and porn sites, but noticed that 10% of my traffic was to inbound links to some poker site comments that I hadn’t deleted. The inbound linking is to game Google into indirectly boosting pagerank for the eventual destination using clustered keyword terms, a more sophisticated variant of placing outbound links in comments. The traffic came from what appear to be affiliates of a CPA affiliate program site, 888.com, which in turn linked to poker sites that were owned by the same company as 888.com, operating out of the UK’s Gibraltar. These companies are owned by Cassava Enterprises, who, one might imagine, are a small, shady company, operating offshore. However, it turns out that Cassava Enterprises are in the process of going public in the UK for an estimated $1.5 billion, underwritten by Credit Suisse First Boston. See…
What is acceptable on TV: a.) A nipple – not actually visible, but it’s shape visible through clothing. b.) Two people re-enacting creating life in a loving manner – fictionally. c.) Minor swearwords. d.) Encouraging violence and hatred. Racism, homophobia, misrepresentation and extortion. Answer d.) And for this madness, Max Blumenthal encourages people to complain to the FCC about a specifically odious example. At the moment 90% of FCC complaints come from one organization on the lunatic fringe. If Max can encourage enough bloggers to write to the FCC, at the very least it will help redress the balance. It may even help the FCC re-address how they deal with the fact that their complaints currently come from a minority group and therefore their guidelines do not reflect the ‘true moral majority’, the mainstream of America which is largely benign and moderate. Here is where you file complaints. Complaints can…
I haven’t seen details of Google’s ‘newsrank’ patents, but am pretty sure that Moreover’s ‘source rank’ which does pretty much the same thing, by the sound of it, and which has been made public to clients since 2001, would constitute prior art. BetaNews | Google Plans to Rank News By Quality: “Patents recently filed by search giant Google reveal that it plans to soon rank news stories by the quality and credibility of the source, rather than just by date or relevance as it currently does in its searches.”
We’ve added a Wists javacript wizard which allows you to publish and of your Wists linkrolls on your site, matching the look and feel, rather like Flickr’s badges or the headline feeds we used to syndicate at Moreover. You can choose to show Thumbnails and text links, just thumbnails or just text. To fore up the wizard within Wists, click on ‘publish on your site’, next to the XML icon.
Josh Rubin points to the preliminary designs for Manhattan’s highline, which were unveiled at Monday’s opening at MOMA. Manhattan’s highline project aims to take a 1.5 mile strip of disused overhead railway and turn it into a linear park. It’s a terrible idea. Linear parks were all the rage when I was an architect, because they could use spaces that were generally wastelands, like old railway lines and, more importantly, because the long sweeping shallow curves made it easy to do presentations that looked great and truly modern. The problem is that linear parks don