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Jan 31 2006
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A religious hatred law which will encourage just that – a good candidate for the legal equivalent of the Darwin awards

Posted by | religion | No Comments

The UK is trying to enact a very stupid and logically farcical law, which guarantees to increase religious hatred by outlawing it. The problem is that religion is not without its own hatred. Religion is also not based upon the same logic as the secular law, being based upon belief rather than reason, so good people ignore the passages in religious texts that include incitement to hatred. The law would prevent this loose interpretation. Under the proposed law almost any practitioner of any of the word’s major religions could be charged with religious hatred, either for threatening infidels with the ultimate torture, an eternity of hellfire, or for explicit threats within respective texts. Laws within a tolerant society are based upon logically consistent arguments, such as the existing UK laws against race hatred, which protect groups such as Sikhs and Jews not because of their ideology or belief, but because…

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Jan 23 2006
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Outline style blogging

Posted by | rss | No Comments

Over the last six months I have kept meaning to switch to outline style blogging. For all the hoo ha about OPML as a standard for reading lists – you might reasonably ask why not use RSS – after all RSS is often used for playlists so what could the difference be? The difference is really fairly subtle, but also very important, and the real answer has nothing to do with syndication, but the process of writing and what people who evangelize outliners have been trying to persuade people for years. The comments on Anil Dash: Outlining a Blog are a really clear illustration of the problem. Later generation blogging tools were designed with the influence of RSS which in turn was influenced by news headline syndication. This meant that every post had a headline and with only one default template for post styles post templates tended to look like…

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Jan 18 2006
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Trader Joes opening in NYC

Posted by | diary | No Comments

First store in Manhattan to open in Union Square in 3 months – all hail Trader Joe’s. Considering that we hired a car and spent 4 hours going to Trader Joe’s and back again, only last weekend, I am, as they say – stoked. Even better news is that they are opening a separate wine store next door to get round the stupid New York license laws which are a throwback to prohibition. Trader Joe’s to Open in New York – New York Times

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Jan 18 2006
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Is Web Accessibility on the wrong track? Part 1.

Posted by | software design | No Comments

In the UK in the late 80’s British Telecom carried out one of the single biggest acts of design vandalism when they systematically removed the famous red telephone boxes designed by Gilbert Scott et al. The justification for this was that they were not accessible to people in wheelchairs. This argument was impossible for people to counter and yet hid the truth – there were other ways of making phone boxes accessible that would not have required a complete change. People argue, quite rightly, for web accessibility, but what are the results? If you pass some of the top web sites’ front pages to the W3C validator: Yahoo – does not validate Ebay – does not validate Amazon – does not validate Google – does not validate. These have all been around for a while, however. What about the newer breed of online services? Flickr – does not validate Digg…

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Jan 18 2006
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Unimpress Release – Warren Buffett buys Business Wire

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Tom Foremski reports on the irony of America’s most famous investor buying Business Wire, a company that flourished under web 1.0 but is entirely obsolete in web 2.0. Online press releases will be part of an open infrastructure rather than a walled garden service. Which means no long term room for Business Wire, period. 5 other companies that Buffett could buy to match his most recent acquisition: Xerox Siebel Kodak Sun Silicon Graphics Buffett acquires business wire

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Jan 17 2006
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Teach atheism to children

Posted by | religion | No Comments

We wait till people reach maturity before we allow them to choose their political affinity and vote based upon it. As Dawkins points out, labelling a small child a neo-marxist is absurd. So why don’t we let people choose their own religion when they grow up? Religion is traditionally passed from adults to children. The second part of Dawkin’s documentary on religion was shown in the UK last night – thankfully torrent files are already available. This tackled the dirty little secret of all religion – that it requires people in a vulnerable state of mind to infect. Of course the best place to find vulnerable minds, as a matter of course, among the healthy is in schools. The program suggested, perfectly reasonably, that religious teaching in schools is a form of child abuse. In the UK: “The number of faith schools is increasing. More than half the Government’s proposed…

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Jan 12 2006
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Google’s Gmail adds Map This links to addresses mentioned within emails.

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

I just noticed that Google add automatic Map Links when something that looks like an address appears within a message in Gmail. This kind of on-the-fly detection of metadata to create searches could be used for auto-dialing phone numbers or adding appointments to a calendar – but I guess we’ll have to wait for a Google Calendar product for that. “Gmail makes it easy for you to keep track of your packages, and map out directions to your destinations; when you open a message that lists an address or package tracking number, Gmail shows you handy links to maps and directions, or your package’s delivery status.”

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Jan 12 2006
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Alito and the Intelligent Design theory of government

Posted by | politics | No Comments

I watched some of the Alito hearings in awe. Alito is very impressive, a great speaker, coherent and logical – but he is damaged goods since his reason and logic has boundaries. The evidence – the refusal to acknowledge that the constitution is a ‘living document’. This is the latest meme to attack the very foundation of American Democracy by people who cannot accept the Constitution unless it is ‘Intelligently Designed’ and not Evolutionary. Since the constitution clearly does change – there are amendments, the argument against it as a living document is not creationist – i.e. it does not pretend that the amendments are fiction, that would be crazy. Instead, like Intelligent Design it tries to create a mechanism whereby things do change but they change because of an original, divinely inspired and complete design – the original Constitution. This is the exact opposite of what the founding fathers…

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Jan 11 2006
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Adwords, Adsense now Adballoons – Google is stealth testing Yellow Pages killer, ad network for maps

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

Although unannounced publicly, Google appears to be testing its Yellow Pages killer, maps based advertising. If you do a search for Hotels in New York on Google Local, you get something that you don’t get for a search for ‘hotels in San Francisco’ – ads. Right there as little blue map balloons rather the red, algorithmic, local search results. Not only are the ads local, but they are contextual i.e. hotel searches bring up sponsored results for local hotels. In some ways this is a relatively obvious move, however its big news considering that: 1. The Yellow Pages advertising market is bigger than the entire existing online search advertising market. 2. Offline Yellow Pages directories will clearly be replaced, over time, by online products, and it looks like maps are how this plays out. 3. Ad products are where Google makes the money that justifies its gargantuan Market Cap. so…

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Jan 09 2006
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why is weblog search so hard?

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

Buried within the comments of Jermey Zawadny’s post about Feedster is this comment: “I don’t recall Feedster ever being all that useful. But I also don’t find Technorati particularly useful. Why can’t someone just create a simple search engine for feeds/blogs?” The truth is that it is very difficult to build a search engine with real-time updates, since search engines are optimized for retrieval and usually use batch indexing. In addition, the majority of weblogs are spam, further compounding the problem. Blog search, which may once have seemed niche, will eventually be a standard part of search engines. At the moment, nobody, including Google, have a weblog search product that works. If they did it would be very useful. The real reason this is important is that it has nothing to do with weblogs, long term. There are only two things that matter in search – freshness and relevancy. At…

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Jan 09 2006
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Fantasy things to say to a VC

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Let the Good Times Roll by Guy Kawasaki: The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs Heh, great post. Having never had a proper job since i left architecture, I used to fantasize about doing job interviews since I could really tell the truth if I wasn’t looking for a job. Now that its possible to bootstrap a modest web service, I fantasize about really telling the truth to VC’s. Top 5 fantasy replies to questions in a presentation to a VC: Q. How big is your market? A. $0 [The current market size is $0 because I haven’t been doing any paid work because I have been building this product for a marketplace of 1 – me. I built it because I really want this and believe in it.] Q. What is your burn rate 6 months from now to fund growth? A. No real growth will be apparent 6 months…

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