Wow - Michael Ignatieff, who is a genuinely intelligent person, unlike the vast majority of politicians, is going to run for the Canadian premiership.
I've seen him stark bollock naked, because we used the same gym in London - I guess I may have seen the Emperor with no clothes.
TheStar.com - No more Mr. Nice Guy
A good round up of all the shopping blogs is in today's Baltimore Sun:
"Crib Candy: Overflowing with eye-catching items for the home, this site features tons of adventurous products for adventurous people."
Perhaps blogs to do with shopping needs a word?
Blog Shops - Blops?
Got time and money to spend? Click here - baltimoresun.com
T-mobile suck
Here's an idea - if everyone added the tag: badrank ragerank and a company name to weblog posts about sucky customer service, you could aggregate complaints in one place and also Google bomb them.
Update: ragerank is a better tag name.
I just spent 20 minutes on the phone to T-mobile to try and get a refund on the fees they charged me to reinstall their service because of an error at their end. Unfortunately it was impossible to talk to a human being that wasn't reading from a script and then the line cut out - because its a T-mobile one and therefore sucks. Ha!
I figured that its easier to give them some bad Google juice instead.
BADRANK RAGERANK T-MOBILE
Anyway, did I mention that T-Mobile suck and just fined me for their own incompetence.
'Crude or profane language
Little and his dad both use "Oh snap!" as a euphemism. Dad interjects "Jeez." Name-calling includes "loser.'... and Little's dad keeps calling him a daft wee feathered c*nt - I don't think so.
In England, the more senior you are the less likely you are to ever get expicitly fired - you are leaving to spend more time with your family, taking early retirement, or chose to blow your own brains out with a revolver. Whatever arrangement results in the least fuss - because the English establishment abhores a fuss.
Being handed a loaded gun to kill yourself with is more than courtesy.
What the Brits really abhore, is comeback, damages - and ultimately, of course, money loss. Courtesy evolves within a culture because it is advantageous for both the donor and recipient and resignation or suicide imply that a decision was voluntary and so there is no comeback.
In the US, where establishment and money are more closely linked, by virtue of being a newer country, things are more straightforward. If you don't have money or you don't have a track record of litigation, then you get fired. If you do, then you get resigned.
There are people that I have worked with, who were fired, for very good reason, who would sue if anyone told the truth and were to say that - like here. So everyone keeps their mouth shut as a ticking bomb is passed on to another unsuspecting company without detection.
Silicon Valley is full of second tier, mediocre executives who are paid enough to afford a good lawyer to bury their track record through threat of litigation but who aren't quite senior enough to have to be exposed to public shareholder or media scrutiny. Here there is an obvious advantage for both prior employer and employee to be 'economical with the truth'.
This medocrity flows from one organization to another, its path lubricated by recruiters who like the idea of people moving from company to company. It eventually becomes the dark matter of corporations and the thing that contributes to the inexplicable inneficiencies of certain firms.
Of course Judith Miller was not this kind of dark matter, but it is weird how, even when everyone knows that she was fired, there is still an advantage in it being couched in euphamism.
New York Post Online Edition: gossip
"No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future."
"Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have."
I believe - that atheists like Jillette tend to be nicer people because they don't have to pretend to be nicer.
Oooh - I treated myself to the DVD of Scorcese's Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, having missed it on the telly.
Bob Dylan was the first person I ever saw in concert, I was 14 and someone gave me two tickets for free as I lined up outside Earls Court with my pocket money. Dylan was my current age then, and already had more than a lifetime's worth of achievement behind him.
It strikes me that Dylan's generation, my parents', were the children of people who had been through one of the most bestial periods in human history. Those who had experienced war, my grandparents' generation, were ready for change and it manifested itself through their children who were brought up differently. These people created the cultural renaissance that was the latter half of the 50's and early 60's.
Is a shame that not everyone believes that war is the absolute last resort. I owe it to my grandparents' generation to never forget, and to tell those who do to go fuck themselves in the same way that my parents' did.
Anyway, suffice to say that No Direction Home is truly great, genius portraying genius.
Jarvis, pretending not to be a techy but really getting it on Google base: Google Base v. microformats.
"What we need instead is a means of letting you tag and structure your data so it can be found reliably by any search engine no matter where it is on the internet."
Right on - that is the semantic web, which so far is a good idea hampered by daft ideas on RDF, which I once bought into. Base might be the stimulus for that, precisely because putting things in base is currently a one way trip and it highlights this fact.
Base is interesting because it comes at a point where the Google backlash has just begun. To demand that people use open standards is fine - Google do, they allow bulk import of RSS and Atom.
To demand that they dump out their database schema is unrealistic - almost nobody on the Internet does this.
Ah, you say - but people output RSS - yes but they only do that because currently RSS, despite the hype, is used to syndicate headlines not metadata.
Where are all the standard RSS modules and extensions for events and classifieds and genealogy and biographic data? Well they all exist but 99.99% of RSS is merely syndicated headline links with full text if you don't make money from your content.
Perhaps Base will kick people into gear.
BTW - another thing that Jeff has trumpeted but nobody seems to have picked up, is the total lack of tracking of true reader page impressions vs aggregator caching for RSS - I really need that, so am tinkering with something that may or may not work. If any of the RSS ad providers have a system that 100% accurately does that, please email me.
American Rhetoric: McCarthy-Welch Exchange During the Army-McCarthy Hearings
Some people don't seem to like Google Base - I like it a lot and I'm sure that its a product that will gradually evolve into something truly revolutionary.
So far nobody has been able to touch Ebay, but one gets the impression that since they are an effective monopoly Ebay have become very conservative with their product, not wanting to risk innovation which could mess things up.
This leaves others who innovate with an opportunity, and Google will innovate here.
The people that pay Ebay - the sellers, would switch if they could, but Ebay has the buyers. Only someone like Google could offer a rival marketplace of buyers.
As an aside - since the single item Google Base upload allows you to define your own metadata via custom name-value pairs, does that mean that with bulk uploading Google will intelligently parse RSS modules in their own namespaces?
If this is the case then RSS has taken one mighty leap forward.
"While social commerce is a fairly new concept in online shopping, it is quickly gaining momentum, as more online vendors realize that there are few more powerful sales forces than a personal recommendation, picking up where comparison shopping engines leave off...Wists.com and Kaboodle.com are two of the early social commerce programs. "
Yahoo Unleashes a User-Plugged Shoposphere
Sony's latest cockup with DRM in CD's shows that they haven't a clue - or rather that the media bods in Sony don't have a clue.
More than ever, Sony needs to split its hardware and media divisions before one drags the other down.
Such a spectacular failure in DRM attached to physical media sets a huge precedent - Sony will have to change tactic. Their real fight now is with Apple since Apple's DRM is flowing onto iPods without people really noticing while their own attempt got caught by being stupidly aggressive.
Anyone who has visited a used CD store recently and looked at the prices, can see that the very CDs that the music industry fought so hard to push, with inferior artwork to vinyl, are its worst enemy - they have created the sneakernet Napster. The price of used CD's is dropping as they change from a product of desire (the inferior artwork is not enough to collect) to one of convenience - serial numberless disk storage media.
One of the things that may happen is that Sony pretend to repent and donate money into the cash strapped EFF to force Apple to open up their own DRM or place warning notices on iTunes downloads that the songs will only ever play on Apple products.
This would be Sony's true Trojan horse as their ultimate interests would be orthogonal to consumers.
What is happening to all media is that the distribution has changed and that we don't need the distribution companies. From MySpace to my iPod there is no role for them, just like there is no real role for Blacksmiths when people have cars.
Not needing an umbrella, due to the clement weather, she furled the small, weildy flag with both hands, full of ruth at one so vincible, pervious to her own pain. Although he had been maculate, with peccable taste, he was gainly and couth and his love for her was truly requited...
Dorothy: "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
The Kansas state motto is 'ad astra per aspera' - to the stars through adversity.
Sometime Kansan, Charles Lindbergh, was the first person to fly Accross the Atlantic. A Kansan, Steve Hawley, was on board the first flight of the space shuttle, Discovery, and that same Kansan was in charge of deploying the Hubble Telescope.
Somewhere in a Kansas school is a litlle girl or boy who could have taken us further towards the stars if it hadn't just been made deliberately more difficult.
And all because a few arrogant grown ups banged their heads and are off to see the Wizard.
I'd love to write a satire of the Kansas School Board based on the Wizard of Oz.
Ad Astra Per Veritas.
According to the principal of unintelligent design, the Kansas school board has technically opened the door to schools teaching satanism on a par with science.
CNN.com - Kansas school board redefines science - Nov 8, 2005
Michael Parekh explains wists much better than I ever could in his post: microchunking commerce the web 2.0 way.
Speaking of which, having eaten my own dogfood by doing cribcandy I now know what I need to fix on wists to make it a lot better.
I'm working hard to try and get a decent wists release out and some more cribcandy like sites are in the pipeline.