Sample chapter headings: The Morons Who Are Sitting Next To You Business Culture, My Arse Why You Can’t Lose By Resigning Corporate Culture – Stupid People BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Lazy joke lands author in trouble
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Via Anil MSN launches Newsbot, Microsoft’s answer to Google news. If you look at the URLs as you mouse over them – its all powered by Moreover..
Two very different headlines in the UK press illustrate a truism in news – people always gravitate towards the sensational. Overall, crime has dramatically fallen. BBC: Violent crime figures rise by 12% Independent: New figures reveal that crime has fallen 39 per cent over the past nine years – the biggest sustained fall since the 19th century
“Tornadoes cause ‘hundreds’ of dollars of damage to mobile homes every year and some trailer dwellers take measures against them. Others just let nature help them with their decorating.” Great Mobile Homes of Mississippi – The Trailer Park
Classic – reverse air rage on an Aeroflot flight as drunk cabin staff attack a passenger, giving him a black eye. “… a medical examination after the flight showed the cabin attendants were heavily intoxicated. Another passenger told a forum on the avia.ru civil aviation website that the stewards distributed in-flight meals only when the plane started its descent, and managed to spill large quantities of food on the floor. “ BBC: ‘Reverse air-rage’ on Russian jet
Blogjam is trying to get Blur’s Damon Alburn to be the top entry for the word cunt (which if you are British or Irish or Australian, normally refers to a guy and can be used in general bar talk). Cunt, or quoint used to be polite speak for Vagina (which sounds a hell of a lot more rude to me) and appears in Chaucer. The word ‘quaint’ is actually the same word via a different route. Isn’t Damon quaint? blogjam: cuntbomb
Well there are several possible measures (and one very interesting candidate): offline recognition (i.e. PR exposure, number of mentions in news articles), traffic/reach, (Alexa rank), popularity amongst Bloggers (Technorati 100), hybrid measure of online popularity (Google Pagerank). The interesting thing is that there is no clear winner amongst these measures and that although there are similar rankings for top weblogs accross the board, there is one clear winner for Pagerank. It beats the Gawker media sites and Boingboing and Scripting with a Pagerank of 9 – PVRblog PVRblog also has the biggest gap between Pagerank and Alexa rank. These stats demonstrate something interesting – perhaps PVR blog shows the perfect scope for a vertical market weblog with maximum Google exposure for its traffic. I’m not entirely sure what this means, the difference should either disappear over time as a Pagerank of 9 drives more traffic and thus boosts Alexa rank…
“By the time Kerry announced the news in person at a Pittsburgh rally 45 minutes later, Democratic and Republican Web sites were ready with dueling videos, fact sheets and statements. But they were all 12 hours behind the air-travel Web site USAviation.com, where on Monday night a visitor wrote that John Edwards decals were being fitted to Kerry’s campaign plane in a Pittsburgh hangar.” CNN.com – Edwards news was on Internet first – Jul 6, 2004
Any Techno-epidemiologists out there who know what the trigger was that made Orkut so big in Brazil? Was there a ‘Typhoid Mary’ somewhere in Porto Alegre, a massively connected maven that managed to create a tipping point for an entire community to adopt it? Porto Alegre (6985 members) New York (1762 members) orkut – communities – list
Google has recently introduced banner ads for their adsense program, so perhaps all the talk about how text ads perform better is not true. You could argue that banner ads are a different thing, that they are richer media and thus brand advertising. But the difference is that Google’s image ads do not pay publishers on an impressions basis, but for clicks, just like current contextual text ads. Adwords works. People click on text ads which are relevant to a search because they are actively looking for something. But perhaps when ads are served alongside static content, the conversion rate is lower, and perhaps people are starting to ignore them now that the novelty has worn off. So maybe in your face image ads are back, for good reason. The problem for Google is that image ads are not only ‘in your face’, they are very much in the face…