Jul 19 2005
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RSS ads ten times less effective?

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Very useful lowdown from Fred Wilson on poor performance of RSS ads. This is to be expected. Ads are about persuasion, and they need to be seductive, which is why the average TV ad costs more per minute to make than a feature film. In the context of search, text ads work because people are looking for things to be spelled out simply. They rely solely on a seductive slogan. On a destination site, the picture becomes more blurred – but the fact of the matter is that the sites with the most traffic do not generate the most revenue from CPC based text ads, like Adsense – it comes from CPM based banner or rich media ads or brand sponsorship. Adsense ads can be made to perform better by placing them in different positions on the page, but the performance will rarely be as good as rich media ads…

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Jul 18 2005
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Two thirds of blog readers don’t know what a blog is.

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BuzzMetrics/Mouthpiece has a fantastic statistic – further analysis of a survey of awareness of the term ‘blog’ showed that two thirds of blog readers had never heard of the word blog or did not know what a blog was. This is great news, it spells ubiquity. Memes need a buzzword to catch on, but by now blogs are more than online diaries. The weblog publishing model, with built in syndication, tracking, real-time search, permanent, item based archiving and linking and easy to use publishing tools is the way everything will eventually be published on the web. With magazines and professional websites being blog driven, blog refers to the way something is published not what. There is no more need to know what a blog is than know what an internal combustion engine is if you drive a car. This is a paradigm shift as important as the browser. Web 1.0…

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Jul 15 2005
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How to debate creationists, without being boring, part 2: defending the ‘you are so scientific and unspiritual’ manoeuvre.

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If someone asks you to debate Evolution over Intelligent Design, scientifically – don’t. If you lose on technical grounds, then you probably shouldn’t be out unsupervised, and if you win you will get some variant of this: “You are too scientific and rational, one day you’ll understand the true nature of the importance of being spiritual”. The counter argument to this, makes a much better opening move: Believer: “If evolution is true and birds are descended from dinosaurs, can you tell me why there was a maintenance of hepatic-piston diaphragmatic lung ventilation in theropods throughout the Mesozoic?” Atheist: “No”. Atheist: “Why do the insides of evangelical churches look like Donald Trump’s bathroom?” Believer: “Its what happens in a religious building that matters, not the architecture, think of all the music”. Atheist: “What, like the Osmonds, all the stuff Cat Stephens did when he converted to Islam or Uncle Harry’s Bar…

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Jul 14 2005
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Are Levis back?

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Ten years ago, I started a design company and our biggest client was Levis. Levis were trendy and they fed the trend by sposoring DJs and independent record labels and bands. We got the gig for Levis, in fact, because my business partner knew the manager of Massive Attack and Levis were involved in promoting Massive Attack’s climb to fame. Five years Later, when I moved to the US, Levis was in the process of a big fall from grace – and the business guys blamed it on late outsourcing and bad design. Last month, I noticed that a few trendy people were wearing Levis in NY, in an almost ironic anti-fashion way. A bit like the daft Trucker Hat fad. When New York bounced back from its 70’s ‘Taxi Driver’ nadir, Giuliani was given credit for its revival, people proposed all sorts of theories, such as a trickle up…

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Jul 14 2005
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Oil to List as a Stock in UK

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Traditionally if you wanted to invest in oil, you would have to invest indirectly in oil related companies, or have gallons of crude decorating your front yard. In the UK a stock is about to be released which will be directly linked to oil prices. If oil drops below $50 again, I’ll be buying it.link » tags: [peakoil] posted via Wists: permamark

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Jul 14 2005
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Should SETI be looking for analog or digital signals?

Posted by | half baked ideas | No Comments

Andrew Orlowski writes: “A new study conducted at Cornell University suggests that we think in analog, not digital. It’s a bold claim which, if true, threatens to make thirty years of linguistics and neuroscience metaphors look very silly indeed.” The fact that our cats can calculate the required muscle flex and velocity to leap onto a table with food, but don’t understand the meaning of ‘no’ and can’t do simple arithmetic has always puzzled me. However it makes sense that any system based upon learned statistical reaction to sensory input would create sophisticated responses without understanding them. In this instance ability to extract logical rules would be based upon a enormous amount of analog input that produced binary certainty as an emergent phenomenon. The Reverse Turing test or ‘captcha’, usually contains a noise filled image of a password with warped fonts is used to filter humans from computers, to stop…

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Jul 13 2005
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Film with Bill Murray is not Crap

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All films with Bill Murray in are very funny. Having religiously watched Jacques Cousteau's deep sea adventures with aahttreeehjus accent as a kid, The Life Aquatic is very funny, and it hits you even more the next day – like a bad curry.link » tags: [fav=movie] posted via Wists: permamark

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Jul 13 2005
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TV Documentaries are Crap

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PBS’ Guns Germs and Steel documentary took an hour and several tons of jet fuel to explain, well nothing. The documentary merely stated, but neither explained nor tested the hypothesis. A great shame, because the book is still a hypothesis worthy of testing. I saw Jared Diamond talk about a year ago, and he had plenty of new evidence to add. P Z Myers says it best: “The information density is appallingly low, and what we got in an hour was the equivalent of reading a handful” of pages from the book.”

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Jul 13 2005
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Mainstream News is Crap Too

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I received a boat-load (very small boat) of email about me moaning about political blogs. So just to redress the balance, the mainstream media is crap too. Bah Humbug. As an example, I always had a feeling that Wall Street Journal opinion pieces were written by cub hacks, or even cub scouts, rather than the editor. Its an otherwise excellent newspaper, ruined by painting by numbers editorial. As Josh Marshall points out, today’s is a particularly side-splitting classic of obsequious, foppish garbage, worthy of the court of Louis XVI: “Wall Street Journal headline: “‘Karl Rove, Whistleblower.’” Translation: Rove told the truth, shower him with medals, everyone else has no integrity and is wrong. Marshall: “… can you blame them? Most of the kids there want White House jobs or other GOP-based promotions.” Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

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Jul 12 2005
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The Role of Camera Phones for London Bombing Pictures

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When 911 happened, most people hadn’t heard of bloggers or Wikipedia, there was no Feedster or Technorati, Google News did not exist*, there was no Flickr and people did not have camera phones. These products and services are not a result of 911, but this was the event that created one facet of what is now an unshakable trend, real-time, ubiquitous, truly democratic media. The second phase of the web, where people could publish as easily as they could browse, was being born. The thing that people used to laugh at when we pitched it originally while at Moreover, actually happened. After the attacks last week in London, I thought that this would be the point where image sharing reached mainstream awareness for news gathering. Camera phones with ability to post via the web are more widespread than in the US and photo sharing has reached an inflection point. In…

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Jul 12 2005
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Rapid Eye Movement – how humans are effecting evolution

Posted by | darwinism | No Comments

New Scientist Premium- Evolution: Blink and you’ll miss it – Features “commercial fishermen use large-meshed nets to spare smaller fish… working on the principle that by reducing their haul this way, they can keep fish populations vigorous and healthy. But they could be making a terrible mistake. It is becoming increasingly clear that such well-meaning strategies may actually have the opposite effect to what the fishermen intend.”

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