Category: On The Web

While I am taking a short break somewhere a little warmer, keep an eye on the Flickr sidebar in case I manage to work out foreign phone networks and picture messaging! In the meantime:

• e-consultancy’s internet decade seems like a bit of a back-slapping exercise. Certainly, many of the people listed changed something, but I would have preferred to see recognition for people who had the vision (and still do) rather than a list of MDs. Still, at least they admit, “the final list is really only some of those who have done so much”.
• You may not have seen it at your newsagent, but The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America has concluded that “differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation”. Why do people continue to look for differences between gay and straight people? Isn’t it obvious? Gay men fancy other men. What does it matter if there’s a difference in vowel production (who knew there was such a thing anyway?). [via plasticbag]
• The ‘world’s best radio station‘ that you’ve never heard (according to a report in The Independent): more and more people I know are tuning in here in Central London. I suppose I ought to try it at some point.
• And while you might not be too bothered about ex-PM John Major’s answer to the question, “Do you think ‘I’m gay and Tory’ is a contradiction?” (Answer: No. Many people who are gay vote Conservative, and over our long history, many who are gay have risen to prominence within the party) [source] you may be interested in some of the other things he has to say about Tony Blair, those ‘bastard’ cabinet colleagues and rail privatisation.
• According to News.Com, John Doerr reportedly said that, despite speculation, Google would not enter the Web browser market. I wonder.
• Bad news for my friends who work in mobile phone marketing: text messages are apparently twice as likely to irritate recipients as cold calls, according to research by Cable & Wireless reported at Revolution.
• Did you know that a “fixation is a very short pause of the eye? A normal viewing of an ad, say, would include multiple fixations and “saccades,” which are the paths between fixations. No, nor did I, but it’s reported at Poynteronline (everything you need to be a better journalist)in their coverage of the Eyetrack III study, which seems, in the main, to state a lot of obvious things – although it does back much of it up with some fascinating observations and heatmaps.
• Also at Poynteronline (still everything you need to be a better journalist), but this time via MarketingVox (no amusing strapline to be found), “a German newspaper started printing blog excerpts as a regular feature”. Apparently, the Frankfurt-based paper launched a page with excerpts from weblogs without permission, and the blogosphere’s wrath ensued, forcing the paper to apologise. Was this good or bad? A faint whiff of hypocrisy to me.

And, no doubt the world will have moved on by the time I am back. A few interesting things are my Bloglines Blogroll.

Really, I am not sure Steph and Alek should be allowed to post images of so many cute things. It doesn’t help when you’re catching up on their site over lunch; it makes me want to watch music television all day just to see if it shows up.

—
Originally posted at musak.org | Wayback – original | Wayback

Matt Haughey has a superb picture of San Francisco on Ten Years Of My Life (entry for 1 September 2004), which – for some reason – is making me yearn to go back there. I once visited on a rainy week in 2000. It was a business trip, and my first time in the US, so there were so many other things going on that I didn’t really appreciate it as much as I would have liked to. I do remember the view from the top of the Marriott, but it’s certainly not as good as Matt’s view from the plane.

I spent the holiday weekend in Copenhagen, and I will write something about it eventually!

In the meantime, I feel I have to post about my favourite headline of the day, which is on Digital Spy: Ulrika dyes her hair. Certainly more news than I needed.

Is it right to have celebrities on a panel of jurors in a courtroom when a man is charged with murder? Oprah Winfrey thought she was too opinionated to serve on the jury, but the lawyers said it was fine for her to serve. I wonder if anybody has looked at the psychological impact on the other jurors. Oprah is not just a jobbing actor you might have seen in the background on EastEnders. She’s a global star with a massive following, highly regarded in her field, and her opinions are reported worldwide. Surely, this means that people will listen to her. Does that make others on the jury more easily swayed? I am sure most of them would say ‘no’. I would say that her presence wouldn’t affect me – but I don’t think I’d be telling the truth.

The story goes that cool URLs don’t change. Valid in theory and very hard in practice – somebody always has a better idea two years down the line. That’s why it’s very encouraging to read Tom’s article on the reasoning behind URL’s on the new BBC Radio Three site. I’m hoping they do something similar for the other radio brands for it would be very useful and is a great example to other web designers/developers and producers. I guess many people are not afforded the luxury of the time Tom and company spent thinking about this so his post should be committed to memory. Now if only rest of us could learn …

Over the past two weeks, I have had cause to contact two online companies that happily take my credit card details for services (and I happily pay them as I want to use the paid-for features). You may recall I’ve mentioned contacting Yahoo. I also have had cause to contact Sonic Selector. So far, both companies are rating 0/10 for their customer service when it comes to billing enquiries. At this moment, it is at the point I would cancel both of the services and find alternative providers – especially as I just got an invite for a Gmail account! Such a shame that companies behave like this. Just a reminder that sometimes a real-world store you can walk into is better.

UPDATE: Interestingly – and totally unknown to me until I posed this – the ‘On This Day‘ link is also about poor customer service.

Things that caught my eye today:

• Are your SMS text messages being intercepted? Spy Blog seems to think that they may be. A terrorism expert quoted on the site says, “Having this kind of surveillance is the price we have to pay in a modern society to protect us from terrorists”. While I agree with that in principle, I do think we have a right to be told that this is happening. Wonder what they make of my late-night drunken texts home?
• If you thought teleportation was just in the realms of science fiction, then think again. I had always assumed it was just something inventive storytellers made up. Well, BBC News reports that there have been some advances in teleportation. We might be a long way from Scottie beaming us up, but it’s fascinating, don’t you think?
• Do you have a cool idea for the future of the web browser? If your idea might require some machine learning to implement, then Blake Ross wants to hear from you.
• I made a conscious decision this year not to start watching the current series of Big Brother – it can suck the life out of you. Naturally, this is the year I wish I’d been paying attention. If you missed it, there’s been a punch-up and the police were called. Tonight’s eviction is cancelled. According to The Scotsman, a BB spokesman said, “We want to let the housemates continue to work through their differences rather than be faced with an eviction”
• And if you haven’t seen this year’s Ascot hat collection, you should, for they look frightfully dull compared to some years.

You know all the cool kids are signing up for Gmail accounts through nice invites from people. I didn’t get one, and I even know somebody who works at Google. Still, nice to see trusty Yahoo! greet me this morning when I logged into my Yahoo mail account:

Virtually unlimited storage

A whopping 2GB means you should never have to worry about managing storage again! Keep thousands of messages, photos, and documents – think of it as your online archive.

The new Yahoo interface is cleaner, and I am about to start experimenting with using it as an online archive for something (although I haven’t yet decided what). The only problem I ever have with Yahoo is actually getting an answer to a query, which, in theory, should be OK for free services, but I do pay them for some services and still can’t get an answer. 

Not that I really needed another excuse to show this picture again, but hell, it’s Friday, so who cares? AdAge is reporting that ‘the hunk’, Jason Lewis, is claiming Absolut used the fake ad as a genuine one:

The actor who posed as the “Absolut Hunk” in a fictitious ad that appeared in an episode of Sex and the City is suing the Absolut Spirits Co., alleging it promoted the make-believe ad from the HBO series as an actual advertisement without his permission [source]

Previously: Silent For A Week.

The Scotsman is tonight reporting:

The former lead singer with boy band Brother Beyond was charged with trying to pick up a street prostitute in London’s seedy King’s Cross red light district. But friends of the former model claimed the accusation was ‘ludicrous’ because he is gay. Moore is to appear at Highbury Corner magistrates’ court in north London tomorrow, charged under the Sex Offences Act. [source]

And more on this story from Google.

UPDATE: 6 JUNE 2004: Moore pleaded guilty to soliciting a prostitute at Highbury Corner magistrates’ court.

If you don’t try and keep up with boifromtroy, you end up with so much to read you keep putting it off. It’s an amazing amount of material. Anyway, in case you – like me – have missed out on this season’s fashion tip (hot from New York City), you should click across right now and learn that polo shirts are back. Honest. When I was at university in the early nineties, there was a hall warden in the residences who must have worn a polo shirt every day of the four years I was there (I do not believe it was the same one). His collars were always up and, unlike most people’s collars, they never went limp. I don’t know who did his laundry (maybe he did), but it was incredible. Now the fact I can’t remember his name is starting to trouble me.

A number of sites are pointing to Tim Berners-Lee’s discussion on new top-level domains. I found it a fascinating insight into some of the concepts which were put in place in the early days of the internet. What I also see as interesting is that the tree-like structure of the domain system evolved from good technical reasons and was – back then – less about maintaining the concept of a trademark or brand. It’s a shame that it’s moved away from that, really.

There are a lot of reports around at the moment about the levels of spam.BBC News is saying that junk mail now accounts for nearly 70% of e-mails worldwide. If this is true, then I am doing rather better than most people. You may recall that my ISP is Demon, which introduced spam filtering earlier this year. This has had a fantastic impact on the levels of spam I receive. Curnow.org is hosted with DreamHost, which uses razor spam filtering server-side, and then I use Mozilla’s junk mail filter at my end of the chain. If one message a day gets through, then I am surprised indeed. I’m so used to this level of filtering that I hardly ever look at the spam folder. I just looked at it, and while there are lots of pre-filtered messages, none of them was the mails I should have had. All in all, this is working very well indeed.