Or Political Uncorrectness. In amongst stories about graffiti artists turned fashion designers and Porn Stars mkving into clothes modelling Adrants have a story about a new T-shirt company whose designs will probably shock anyone with an politically-correct streak. Read the Adrants story first – then go to the site.
The US Supreme Court vote unaminously against Grokster and Streamcast with a ruling that means P2P software developers can be held liable for users actions. Via The Register, CNN, BBC and loads of other places.
As I left NYC this morning, the city had got barricades all down 5th Avenue in preparation for all the viewers for today’s Gay Pride parade (lots of pictures of the event over on Fickr). Yesterday, there was a smaller event, a lesbian march which appeared to be a far more serious affair. Except for one women, who’d dressed in red dominatrix gear and was tied up to a post on a small trolley on tiny castors/wheels. Good idea – execpt for the potholes; she kept getting stuck and having to be dragged over the lumps, before unceremoniously tumbling to the floor. I’m sure it wasn;t the first nor the last time – she’ll have some bruise to show for it!
Some preliminary results for the MIT survey have been posted here – or they wil be once the demand issue is sorted out. See what happens when things let loose…
MIT are runnning a survey of bloggers and blogging and are looking for a large sample. If you have a spare 15 mins, here’s the link:
What Microsoft could do with RSS support…
The Register has a good piece about getting things done by just getting things done. By ‘Doctor John’, it details working in IT support for foreign language teachers in Inner Mongolia. An well written account of working sonewhere where rules can be broken, if they exist at all,
Last week LA Times stopped an experiment that had only been running for a few days – a wiki driven online editorial page which was meant to give its readers a voice and allow the paper to have some real community driven content. But the site quickly got vandalised and the paper pulled it down before the community could correct itself, leaving this message up:
Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material.
Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.
In many places, the LA Times attempts have been greeted with open arms as the ‘right’ thing to do in opening up its pages to reader contributions but a little surprised that a wiki was chosen. Wikis are notorious for the freedom they have, the freedom that can lead to random vandalism which can only be kept in check by the development of a community that self polices. The Observer, a newspaper that runs its own blog for reader contributions was not all surprised at the outcome.
But could it have worked? Ross Mayfield has published an open letter to the paper that covers some of the steps that may have ensured the continued existence of the wiki. Could these stpes have prevented the vandalism – no, you are always going to have people who enjoy doing such things and whose sense of netiquette is so stunted that they do not care about the consequences. But they could allow the community to do something and manage such vandalism if the LA Times opens their virtual doors again.
Update: Rafael Behr, who authored the Observer blog piece referred to above has a longer piece in the online paper
In my effort to be a tourist I decided I would go up the Empire State Building. Having heard nightmare stories about the queues, I decided I would be there nice and early, so I got to the doors at 8.05 (I’m only one block away from it) to find around 100 people already in front of me. But the queue mobed quickly to the first barrier, the security check. Bags went though the xray machine, but all other things were meant to go in a box before you went through the metal detector. Before you got to the screening, one person was going up and down the line telling people nopt to take jackets off or anything like that, just put the bag through. So they didn’t..and went through the detector with keys,phones etc in pockets and were then yelled at by a women who did nothing but yell. One guy in front of me tried to take off his jacket to put through the machine as he obviously had lots of things in the multitude of pockets; he got told to put it back on, then got repeatedly sent back and forth through the detector until he found every single thing that was setting it off. At no point did the guard stop and tlak to him, see what he had or run over him with one of the personal detectors, just kept yelling. I;ve siad it before – what is it with the guards here, did they all go to the same school of discourtesy?
After security, everything went very smoothly and I got to the top with no more waiting. The view was superb and i took lots of photos. Somehow the numbers were controlled so that there was always ‘just enough’ people up there, I could always find somewhere to stand and stare. I hired one of the audio tour sets they have – I guess if I had looked hard enough I could have foind the whole thing as a podcast for free.
For the rest of the day I visited Times Square, had brunch in Bryant Square and took a 3 hour open-topped bus tour around the lower half of Manhattan. So now I’m dehydrated and slight burnt, as it is very hot here – time to rest, top up the liquid and think if I want to do anything else this visit.
Sitting here in a friend’s apartment smack bang in the centre of Manhattan I find 6 open wireless networks,all for the taking. Beats anywhere I’ve been in London.
Via Niall Kennedy (and lot’s of other places but he’s the one I read first), Microsoft announce RSS support in Longhorn. Not exactly a secret, following Dave Winer’s post the other day, plus Scoble’s hints at the London Geek Dinner. Go watch the video.
Love this. Google Maps UK now has satellite imagery. So here’s where I live; I’d do one of where I grew up, but it is not of a high enough resoltion for the Midlands area.
I’m definitely in the wrong timezone. The day started with a 7.30am work call. I’m not too bad on doing late calls with the US when I’m in the UK but early calls with the UK is just difficult. I;ve then spent 4 hours with an agency in an assessment, to see if they are going to be doing one of our websites. Finally got a chance to relax and prepare for my all-on day of sightseeing tomorrow!
With the death of the Philipine’s Cardinal Jaime Sin, there has been some interesting comments about his name. The best one I’ve seen is here, but I’m goig to paraphrase it anyway…
A certain Irish cleric had obviously had a crisis of faith earlier in his vocation and had had an affair which resulted in a son. When this came out in the press (as these things tend to do) he resigned his post. He then travelled abroad to the Phillipines to seek forgiveness from the Cardinal, with these immortal words: “Forgive me Sin, for I have fathered”.
Hey Richard, I arrived. I’m sure IM or mobile would have been a lot more efficient that this though!!!
I had lunch today at the Oxo Tower, with the team from work, as a farewell lunch for a colleague who is heading for the US. Took a chance to take a series of views from the balcony then used the software that came with the camera for the first time to stitch the images together. A pretty clever process, it managed to get all the joins correct with minimal manual intervention. Here’s a small version, there’s a slightly larger version here.
The food here was pretty good, I think well deserved of its reputation. However service was rather lacking. They got a couple of the meals wrong (which was quickly rectified) but in general it was very slow. Even though there were 10 of us, I would have thought they could have served the meal in less than the 2.5 hours it took – and even then the desert and the bill had to be chased. On a good point, the boxes they gave us for the deserts that were ‘taken away’ (for the people who had to leave for meetings) were very nice. On a bad point, it was annoying how they kept trying to top up the wine glasses all the time; it makes it impossible to track the volume drunk, which is not good when you do have to go back to work.
Following the farce that was the US Formula 1 at the weekend, where 7 teams withdrew after the warm-up lap over an argument about safety, tires and chicanes, various US *fans* have decided to take legal action against the Formula 1 organisation for the lack of a race. It’s only 2 days after the race – come on, US law firms, you’re slipping! I would have expected it a lot sooner 😉
The BBC Breakfast show is running a feature that is encouraging people to send photos of this morning’s summer solstice sunrise. I saw some of the photos on TV this morning; there’s a couple more on the website a tthe moment. So where are the rest? Apparently they’ll be up later today – I’m wondering what takes the time (see, I’m used to Flickr, moblogging and instant gratification!). The sunrise looked like it was pretty special this morning, so there should be some good pictures.
Here I was yesterday asking if it was possible to get a fingerprint control put on the TV remote control, and today I find a study reported in the papers that the remote is responsible for more that 1.5 million arguments a day. I read it in the Metro this morning and after a (ver brief) search, here’s an online verson. (sorry, I know it’s the Sun)