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Oct 08 2004
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Mixin up the medicine – Lessig’s brilliant powerpoint mashups

Posted by | media | No Comments

Arguably the first music video ever, and possibly the first Powerpoint presentation, in “Don’t Look Back,” Bob Dylan holds up cue cards with words from the song Subterranean Homesick Blues on them and flips them, while staring at the camera, as the song plays: ‘Johnny’s in the basement Mixin’ up the medicine…’ Slideshow presentations went downhill from then on: Times Roman font, meaningless bullet points, a blue blend background, droning presenters wearing company polo shirts and pleated khaki pants. Powerpoint is an art crime. Because of this, I rarely pay much attention to conference presentations. However, one of the best things I saw at at Web 2.0 was how Larry Lessig has perfected his trademark slideshow. Like in Subterranean Homesick Blues, the slides flow along nicely with the lyrics. A lawyer defending the right for people to create digital collages produces a presentation that is an art form in itself,…

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Oct 07 2004
0

RSS is not a space

Posted by | rss | No Comments

I’ve heard three people refer to the ‘RSS space’ at Web 2.0. This is dangerous hype. RSS is not a space, its a description of a way to transport links with clean titles. Advertising in RSS feeds will probably be worth $100 – $150 million within the next 18 months, and RSS readers will eventually be baked into all browsers as a fancy bookmarking feature – and that’s it. If people wanted to get excited about a piece of geekery that weblogs have helped drive then ping servers would be a better thing to look at. If you become the king of all ping servers then you have something that is a real threat to the core business of search engines. When quantitative information such as price appears in RSS product feeds, then ping servers are hugely valuable and search engines based on crawling are fundamentally broken.

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Oct 06 2004
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The world’s best toothpick

Posted by | design | No Comments

When I arrived in the US from bad teeth land one of the first things I asked my dentist for was a set of American teeth. Unfortunately I was told there was nothing that could be done. However at dinner with friends last night I was introduced to ‘Rota Points’, the best toothpick in the world. The bits in between my teeth are gone now, even if I’m still on page 27 of the Great Book of British Smiles. Intradental Cleaner

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Oct 05 2004
0

Gawker additions

Posted by | media | No Comments

Gawker launches 3 new blogs: Screenhead a funny-stuff compilation. Jalopnik a cool-cars blog. Kotaku a video games blog. My car is crapped out and I have to avoid video games, because I will play them till my eyes bleed, but I’ll be a regular reader of Screenhead.

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Sep 27 2004
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Origins relaunch

Posted by | online genealogy | No Comments

The Origins Network: British Origins, Irish Origins, Scots Origins and Origins Search, has relaunched, changing from pay-per-view to subscription. Origins is the definitive site for UK and Irish genealogy. Disclaimer – I was a co-founder.

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Aug 24 2004
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Olympic medals table by number of gold medals per population

Posted by | trivia | No Comments

If you take the current Olympic medals table (ranked by number of golds) and re-order the top 20 gold medal winners to those listed by number of people per gold medal, according to population figures, the rankings are somewhat different. By this measure, the leader, Australia, is 7 times more athletic than the US and 30 times more than China. Greece is doing well with its home advantage at number 2. Rank: 1. Australia 2. Greece 3. Romania 4. Sweden 5. Hungary 6. Belarus 7. Netherlands 8. Ukraine 9. France 10. Italy 11. South Korea 12. Japan 13. Great Britain 14. Germany 15. United States 16. Russia 17. Canada 18. Poland 19.Turkey 20. China

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Aug 18 2004
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Please spread this meme

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Let me repitch one simple thing that I believe would make the web more useful – ubiquitous use of one-line-bios. It’s something I have been banging on about for years, and is now built into Typepad but hasn’t taken off. So here’s the pitch (someone who is better at spreading memes, help me out if you feel like it): Back in the days, lots of people were looking at online syndication, news syndication in particular, and they set up large groups to look at it (NewsML ICE etc.). – and RSS, which actually has nothing to do with syndication, blew them all away (as Jason Kottke has pointed out, RSS is basically a hypertext link and headline that points to something – there is no movement of content and hence no syndication) . All you really need to create the same functionality as traditional syndication on the web is a…

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Aug 13 2004
0

Chatango mini

Posted by | technology | No Comments

Chatango have just launched Chatango mini, a fully embeddable IM client that sits directly in the browser and has configurable size and look and feel. Click on ‘get your own Chatango’ in my version in the right hand side bar.

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Aug 12 2004
0

The Olympics have jumped the shark.

Posted by | politics | No Comments

During the cold war, the stand off between the US and USSR channeled energy into substitutes for warfare that were actually interesting and benign. Superpowers flexed their muscles figuratively in the space race and literally at the Olympics. But there is something tawdry about the Olympics these days, it feels anachronistic without having the benefit of being camp, in the way that, say, the Eurovision Song Contest is. The Olympics are a colossal, committee driven, waste of money, vast sums being spent on facilities that flatter politicians

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Aug 08 2004
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Why we should all root for a successful Google IPO.

Posted by | search engines | No Comments

Google’s attempt at an auction could break a piece of the cronyism that has plagued corporate America and has caused huge failures from the demise of Enron to the collapse of the technology bubble. Middle men creaming large fees for little value-add and dolling them out to friends is not a good thing regardless of whether you are a free market evangelist or not. This is why I am so surprised that people like Dan Gillmor are choosing to attack Google’s offering. Google’s offer price is an attempt to derive price from real demand, not what generates profits for middle men. This benefits small investors in the long term. Why aren’t Google’s PR team on the offensive over this! “If Google’s offering works…then this IPO would legitimize an alternative to the traditional IPO that will diminish the power of Wall Street investment banks. Other companies, companies with lower profiles than…

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