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Jun 20 2006
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Any company which relies on ‘user generated content’ knows neither the cost nor value of anything

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Jon Udell picks ‘User Generated Content’ as his least favorite buzzword. User suggests: adict. Generated suggests: made automatically with no feeling. Content, as Jon points out, suggests: the offal that fills a sausage. What could be a more contemptuous view of a creation and its author? This second wave of the Internet is distinguished principally by the fact that more people (ahem, users) are contributing. Caring about these people and what they contribute, will provide genuinely useful services and any business model based upon the perceived cost benefit of cheap, user generated content, shows an inability to differentiate between poetry and the contents of a telephone book. A celebrated Irish content generator defined a cynic as ‘someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’ A proponent of ‘building a platform to leverage cheap user generated content’ does not even know the market price, knowing merely the…

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May 30 2006
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Nobody knows what’s happening in Iraq.

Posted by | politics | No Comments

“Is Iraq in civil war?…I have no more idea what is going on in Iraq from here in Baghdad, than from back in London” Sobering, must see, Channel 4 documentary about what’s really going on in Iraq. One of the conclusions is that much of the only reporting outside the green zone is coming from bloggers:

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May 25 2006
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The Michael Arrington Effect

Posted by | technology | No Comments

There may or may not be much to moan about ‘Web 2.0’, but one person, Michael Arrington has clearly become its nexus, through TechCrunch. With that fact is something that restores my faith in the inherent meritocracy of the web, because the mystery, special sauce that makes TechCrunch successful is that its just plain good.

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May 24 2006
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The seven deadly sins of Web 2.0

Posted by | design | No Comments

A list of recent web design trends that are about to jump the shark: 1. Obsession with rounded corners everywhere. 2. Pastel colors. 3. Linear blends. 4. Fonts bigger than 15 pixels. 5. Avoiding tables, when they are the best solution. 6. Stretchable text columns that are too wide to read comfortably. 7. Ajax use that makes things difficult to link to. These things are so commonplace now that sites designed this way seem like the web design equivalent of a fashion victim. When the bubble bursts there will be big pastel shade mess.

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May 18 2006
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Apple's 5th Ave Store

Posted by | Uncategorized | No Comments

An empty, glass enclosed entrance with a spiral stair to an underground room – coincidentally, the architecure of Apple's new store is schematically identical to the Louvre, the main setting of the Da Vinci Code which also opens tomorrow.link » tags: [architecture] via Wists: link

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May 15 2006
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The Memetics of the Da Vinci Code

Posted by | religion | No Comments

‘The Da Vinci Code’: Is it worthy? “Experts can’t figure out how Dan Brown’s so-so writing has produced such a blockbuster.” The success of the Da Vinci Code has nothing to do with the writing, but the fact that it is a mutation of a very successful and ancient meme. There is another book that is inexplicably successful, depite being an incoherent mishmash of styles, often not that well written and full of plot inconsistencies and contradictions – the Bible. Of all the possible stories that resonate with the human mind, the Bible does so very successfully, giving the appearance of its success being testament to its truth, something that is obviously very helpful for a book based on teleological argument. To suggest that the Bible is the truth because it is so successful, however, is the result of looking the wrong way down the funnel of time. The fact…

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May 12 2006
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JSON and RSS

Posted by | rss | No Comments

John Resig has a very nice RSS to JSON converter. We’ve been working on a JSON output to Solr (Lucene) for Wists’ search and I’m now convinced that JSON is the way forward for RSS and webservices in general. John Resig – RSS to JSON Convertor

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May 10 2006
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How architects build brands

Posted by | architecture | No Comments

Architects are good at building brands without people noticing that thats what they are doing, but mostly bad at capitalizing on them by doing mass produced items, such as furniture collections or hardware elements. The Slate article below covers a very interesting topic but the conclusions are completely wrong. “neither Foster nor Piano has a house style; their designs vary considerably from project to project” If anyone has a house style, it is Foster. When I was there someone nearly got fired for not specifying the wrong door handles on a building – they weren’t Elementer. The main reason that Foster or Piano buildings vary in style is that they didnt design them all – if you are a big architecture practice its just not possible for the founder to design everything. That not deception, just a function of scale. What keeps the integrity of design is precisely the house…

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May 10 2006
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Why is DNA base 4?

Posted by | half baked ideas | No Comments

There are a number of ideas why DNA is base 4, but it seems obvious that the principal reason is that it provides a very elegant redundancy mechanism built into the process of replication. By being in base 4 DNA provides its own backup, which is very important in an environment which thrives on mutation in the long term but also needs to regulate mutation in the short term. Given that the process of replication can be used as a method for performing calculations, I wonder if it could be abstracted in a non-parallel computing scenario such as a digital computer. I hate having to deal with backups and bug fixes. Quaternary system dna – PDF file

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