Facebook: the new, um, Flickr?

Last summer in London was the Summer of Crappy Weather, and also the Summer of Facebook. So inevitably this year the pub/bar/park conversations regularly dip into who’s still using Facebook and who’s not, and the usual argument about its merits ensues.
“It’s a place to put your photos” one friend said recently in Facebook’s defence. And [...]

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I have a new theme

It’s a pre-cooked one, but I switched the header for a pic I took of the Appleton rum factory outside Kingston. There were some amazing looking factories in Jamaica and I thought it (factories, not rum) was kind of appropriate to the subject matter…

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Today’s bookmarks

Things I’ve bookmarked in Ma.gnolia in the past 24 hours
Mechanical Turk: The Demographics
Apparently more than half of Mechanical Turkers have degrees, and the vast majority are still in first world countries. Fortunately for people who need to live off their work – and value their spare time – after 2.5 years it still seems to [...]

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Today’s bookmarks

Things I’ve bookmarked in Ma.gnolia in the past 24 hours
Yahoo Buzz is a Game Changer for Social Media; And Spells Trouble for Digg! – ReadWriteWeb
So far stories are limited to coming from an invited group of publishers.
Election Night at NYTimes.com – Open – Code – New York Times Blog
Great description of how they get their [...]

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Today’s bookmarks

Things I’ve bookmarked in Ma.gnolia in the past 24 hours
Calais – Overview

An interesting Reuters project.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Tags: mashups, semanticweb
Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype – ReadWriteWeb

Rather critical review of Twine ‘the most hyped semantic app of the season’ – but apparently it has greatly improved since this review was written.
Rating: [...]

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Reuters and Global Voices

When is Global Voices’ deal with Reuters going to be realised? I can’t see a peep about it on Reuters’ website, apart from the media release, and that was ages ago. And I’m very curious… Global Voices seems to be one of the few successful attempts at ‘citizen journalism’ (or whatever the cool kids [...]

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The Economist’s leader-writing software

One of my colleagues wrote this based on the story about Thomson Media developing software to write corporate earnings stories.
>It would be interesting if computers started writing op eds, like for the Economist. I >guess the program would look something like:
do (witty comment);
if (free trade policy) ;
then (supportive comment);
else (snarky comment);
repeat (witty opening comment);
/end

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The new Technorati

It gave me high hopes at first, but it’s mostly lame. Their attempt to present blog posts is ridiculous. ‘Economy‘ for example. How many of them are to do with economics, or the economy?
I think you’ll find none.
If they’re going to do this they should at least be realistic and stick with the following categories: [...]

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The internet – it’s not what I thought it was…

I have been such a big supporter of the idea of the internet, always rubbishing those stupid scare-mongering stories about it, explaining to people it was just like the phone network really, hoping it would be some kind of force for positive change. But now it feels like it is running off in so many [...]

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Splogs

I found a disturbing spam blog today. Disturbing because it’s either a) using a very very clever algorithm to create something with the look and feel of a genuine blog, or b) it’s some crazy splogger actually doing it  by hand.
Okay ,it’s probably a). But it really sucks -  I probably shouldn’t even link to [...]

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