iDon’t — a lovely (and subtly effective) site which attacks iPod conformity. With those white earphone cables becoming ubiquitous, the iPod is losing its cool image. It’s becoming the aural equivalent of Marks & Spencer knickers: what your parents wore — and what you wouldn’t be seen dead in! The site is sponsored by SanDisk, makers of an inexpensive MP3 player.
Open source news
Perceptive column by Jeff Jarvis. Excerpt:
A week ago, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger made quite a stir when he announced that some articles destined for the newspaper would now go to the web first. This may not seem like a big deal, except to the journalists whose circadian rhythm of meetings, deadlines and drinks will now suffer chronic jetlag. And you might say that this is being done already as major newspapers put updates online. But in giving the web priority over the paper, the Guardian is handing its crown jewels, its polished final product, to the future. And that is changing the nature of that product.
When the paper puts an edited story online hours before the old evening deadline, it means that readers may then react, asking more questions, offering more facts. And that means the reporter can augment that story for print. Thus the simple act of exposing a story to daylight before the dark of print can improve the journalism in it. After publication, this continues as readers offer more help and the story is updated online, in its text or in the discussion around it. This needn’t become an endless edition. But it is the end of news on the stone tablet. News becomes plastic. And news opens up…
Gordon Brown: my secret passion
Hi,
One of the loveliest things about being born Middle English is you grow up with a profound love of its non-rugged countryside. Middle England is renowned for its breathtaking flat bits and, like many a hardy Middle Englander, I’ve made it something of an ambition to walk across all 284 of its flat bits before I’m 60. Sometimes, there are gentle hills and the views from the top are slightly more breathtaking. They make the three-minute climb worth it.
I also have a profound love of all Middle English sports, apart from croquet. Cricket is a great obsession of mine. I love the thrill of watching the bat-wielder hit the puck and try to get it into the hands of one of the men standing away at the other end of the field. No wonder there’s an enormous cheer when he does get it into the hands of the faraway man, because that sort of accuracy deserves enormous recognition.
Middle English pastimes are also enormous fun and are something I look forward to after a day in the office or a gruelling trip abroad to my Kirkcaldy constituency.
I love pork scratchings and on Friday nights, look out, because I hit the cider.
Saturday mornings are reserved for jam-making, so I was pleased to hear last week that Waitrose is going to sell misshapen fruit at knock-down prices for all jam-makers. This is the sort of enterprise that makes Middle England the powerhouse of industrial nations.
After all, it was a Middle Englander who invented the hovercraft. Anyway, next Saturday morning, rest assured, you’ll find me outside Waitrose’s door, with my apron on, and a wicker basket, simply panting with excitement. Just let me at those bulbous apricots. Mmmm, jam. I simply can’t express too much how I love it and I hope that’s coming across.
Then, after jam-making in the mornings, Saturday afternoons are left free for morris dancing. Sarah always teases me about how nuts I am about morris dancing. I pour my heart and soul into it, but it’s something I like to do on my own. After a tedious meeting in the City about money or some such, I hop straight on to a train into the Middle English countryside with a bag of bells and a stick. Then I go to a secluded clearing or dell in the woods and morris dance to my heart’s content. Then Sarah picks me up and we both go off for a late-night pub lunch. She keeps this magic spot secret, which is why there are no visual records in existence of me ever doing it. I’m extremely grateful to her for that. She keeps me very very un-dour.
Gordon
Taking on copyright abusers
This morning’s Observer column…
This year, Bloomsday was marked in somewhat different ways. In Dublin, the festivities were cancelled because of the state funeral of Charlie Haughey, the former Taoiseach. Such restraint was entirely out of character with the spirit of Bloomsday, for Haughey was as colourful a rogue as any encountered by Leopold Bloom on his perambulations on the day in 1904 on which the novel is set. The correct thing to do would have been to infiltrate the obsequies, thereby highlighting the absurdity of a political establishment seeking to pretend that Haughey had been somehow a statesman of note.
The failure of Joycean nerve in Dublin was, however, offset by a laudable display of spunk in California, where Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University filed a legal suit against James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, in a US district court, accusing the administrator of the writer’s estate of ‘copyright misuse’.
Given that the entire publishing world has been legally intimidated by Stephen Joyce for decades, this is a landmark action. And the case will be followed with interest in every jurisdiction in which works on James Joyce are published….
WorldCat
Wow! Something I should have known about — Worldcat.
WorldCat is the world’s largest bibliographic database, the merged catalogs of thousands of OCLC member libraries. Built and maintained collectively by librarians, WorldCat itself is not an OCLC service that is purchased, but rather provides the foundation for many OCLC services and the benefits they provide.
I’ve just used it to look up a rare book and it told me which libraries in my part of the world have a copy.
China now blocks main Google site
I missed this BBC NEWS report (dated June 7), and only picked it up when reading Owen’s Blog…
Chinese authorities have blocked most domestic users from the main Google.com search engine, a media watchdog said.
Internet users in major Chinese cities faced difficulties accessing Google’s international site in the past week, Reporters Without Borders said.
But Google.cn, the controversial Chinese language version launched in January, has not been affected.
The site blocks politically sensitive material to comply with government censorship rules.
“It was only to be expected that Google.com would be gradually sidelined after the censored version was launched in January,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.
“Google has just definitively joined the club of Western companies that comply with online censorship in China,” the organisation said…
It was only a matter of time, of course. But it makes the Google boys look even more naive than I had thought.
Abandon hope…
…all ye who enter here.
House of the rising son
Cory Doctorow is leaving London for a year. He’s off to LA to write a book. Walking through Cambridge yesterday I passed a lovely 17th century house in Northampton Street and thought it would make a perfect residence for the great campaigner when he returns.
US ill-prepared for Net disruption?
From WSJ.com…
The U.S. is poorly prepared for a major disruption of the Internet, according to a study that an influential group of chief executives will publish today.
The Business Roundtable, composed of the CEOs of 160 large U.S. companies, said neither the government nor the private sector has a coordinated plan to respond to an attack, natural disaster or other disruption of the Internet. While individual government agencies and companies have their own emergency plans in place, little coordination exists between the groups, according to the study.
“It’s a matter of more clearly defining who has responsibility,” said Edward Rust Jr., CEO of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., who leads the Roundtable’s Internet-security effort.
Other companies with leaders active in the effort include FedEx Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Dow Chemical Co., Hewlett-Packard Co., CA Inc., Alcoa Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Pfizer Inc.The study points out that a massive Web disruption could potentially paralyze banks, transportation systems, health-care providers and voice calling over the Internet.
The chief problem: There are so many public and private institutions that handle security-related tasks that their responsibilities often overlap, creating inefficiencies that can bog down an emergency response, according to the study.
Security officials at some banks and other companies have established groups to swap data about Internet threats. Companies that make the technology behind the Internet itself have an informal group of their own to discuss security issues. Meanwhile, a government body called the National Cyber Response Coordination Group is meant to manage a response to Internet emergencies.Yet those groups’ roles are often unclear, and no system is in place to coordinate their efforts, the study says. It cited “serious problems stemming from the lack of consolidation, including the fact that these organizations are not accountable for their actions.”
Surprise, surprise: planet is hotting up
WASHINGTON, DC, June 22, 2006 (ENS) – The Earth is hotter today than it has been in four centuries and likely warmer than it has been in the past 1,000 years, according to a review of surface temperature research released Thursday by the U.S. National Academies of Science.
The 155 page report provides additional evidence that “human activities are responsible for much of the warming,” the authors said.
The study, written by a panel of 12 climate experts, assesses the state of scientific efforts to reconstruct surface temperature records for the Earth over approximately the last 2,000 years.
Widespread reliable instrument records of global temperatures are available only for the last 150 years, leaving scientists to estimate past climatic conditions by analyzing proxy evidence from sources such as tree rings, corals, ocean and lake sediments, cave deposits, ice cores, boreholes, and glaciers.
Committee chair Gerald North said the panel’s review of instrument and proxy data affords “a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries.”