BBC News reports that
Gordon Brown says he is “truly humbled” by the scale of the backing given to him by Labour MPs as their choice to succeed Tony Blair as prime minister.
Aw shucks. I prefer Simon Hoggart’s observation that “Gordon Brown does humility like he does ballet lessons”.
Hooray! WordPress.com is about to celebrate its millionth free blog. What’s the secret? Robert Scoble says
It’s audience per blog is much higher than Microsoft’s Live Spaces, for instance. The audience that hangs out on WordPress is a lot more engaged, too, and I believe that blogs on WordPress.com get more than their fair share of Google traffic. Matt told me that more than half of the traffic that comes to WordPress.com comes from Google — the HTML is automatically SEO’d (optimized for search engines).
So Foreign Policy magazine claims:
India is known for its vibrant public discourse on everything from politics to Bollywood. But in this nation of 42 million Internet users, those conversations aren’t happening online. Recent research suggests India has just 1.2 million bloggers. By comparison, China has around 30 million. One northern India-based blog-hosting company, Ibibo, has even resorted to offering cash prizes to entice people to blog regularly. Indians’ tendency to be bashful about blogging appears to stem in part from a problem of perception. “The perception [is] that blogging is for people possessing superior writing skills,” says Ibibo executive Rahul Razdan. In a country where nearly 40 percent of people are illiterate, that perception spells trouble. Before blogs can burgeon, Indians may need to learn their ABCs.
From today’s New York Times
WASHINGTON, May 18 — Casualties among private contractors in Iraq have soared to record levels this year, setting a pace that seems certain to turn 2007 into the bloodiest year yet for the civilians who work alongside the American military in the war zone, according to new government numbers…
Foreign Policy has published a sobering photo-essay on what happens to our digital junk after it’s been dumped on the developing world.
Thanks to Nick Carr for the pointer.
Sean French pointed me to this:
Like him, I’m baffled by how anyone could have such an encyclopedic knowledge of film. This is not the kind of stuff you find by Googling.
More… Quentin (like Sean, a movie buff) writes: ” I wonder if somebody had access to the close-caption text transcripts for a large movie library – you could search that…”
From Quentin’s blog. Seen in an Antipodean airport.
I often wish I could afford the $6,000 conference fee for the TED conferences.
Here’s why — a riveting talk by Ken Robinson on how School stifles creativity.
This morning’s Observer column…
PG Wodehouse wrote the best evocation I’ve ever read of what it’s like to be totally astonished. He describes the expression on the face of a chap who ‘while picking daisies on the down line, has just received the 4.15 in the small of the back’. Well, I saw that expression this week. It crossed the visage of a friend who is a grizzled veteran of the print business, a man who was once deputy editor of one of our more disgraceful national newspapers. No more cynical observer of human depravity can therefore be imagined. But he was, for an instant, genuinely taken aback…
Sitting next to Michael at dinner tonight we talked about Thomas Friedman, the celebrated NYT columnist. I argued that one of the reasons for F’s publishing successes (both The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat have been best-sellers) is that they contain just the right number of half-truths. (This is also the secret to successful business books btw.)
Then I came home and found this on Dave Winer’s Blog. It skewers Friedman very economically.
“I did a good job of stifling while listening to NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman”, Dave writes, “although at times I did gasp out loud at his arrogance and disregard for us, the audience…Friedman told an old story about how the Internet out of control would turn everyone into a public figure, like Friedman, who suffers from slander and exposure”.
Friedman told the story of an Indonesian woman who thought Al Gore is Jewish, something she heard on the Internet, which Friedman says is untrustworthy. But we remember when Friedman warned of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, who explained to us in his audience why we had to go to war. If I had time to ask a question, I might have asked him what regrets he has about the mistakes he’s made, the lies he told that caused more death than the lies the Indonesian woman who thought Gore is a Jew. The mistake we make is when we blindly trust any source, including the NY Times.
Spot on!