Two questions for the world at large

1) Why does wbloggar keep giving me an HTTP error when it’s posting with no problems?
2) Why have six of the archive pages had their entry numbers mangled so that Google thinks that they’re five entries adrift from where they really are?

Em@iler in profit

With 298,000 of the things sold, surely there must be a fair chance of knowing someone who owns one. But I can honestly say that I’ve never seen an em@iler (their dorky spelling, not mine) anywhere but underneath a layer of dust in a Dixons window.

Maybe all the ZX Spectrum games addicts prefer to keep quiet about it…

(More) why social networking services got it wrong

Another interesting article outlining why the YASNS haven’t got it right yet. White sans-serif font on a dark grey background makes it hard to read, but worth the effort.

Bush speaks

Just shows what you can do with some imagination and a copy of iLife. Hilarious.

Social ambiguity

Oh, we’re getting geeky this morning. This post sums up one of the major problems that I’ve got with Orkut and Friendster and LinkedIn and all the rest of the social networking services/sites - they’re all too damn granular.

I can’t reduce my social relationships to a series of binary “I know this person” / “I don’t know this person”. It’s actually more complex than that - “I Knew This Person Once But Now I’ve Lost Touch So I’d Be Embarrassed To Contact Them Asking A Favour” through to “I’m Sleeping With This Person So I’d Actually Be Able To Blackmail Them”. The last one’s an exaggeration, by the way.

A couple of things that did make me wonder - if FOAF is XML-based, and XML is designed to handle this kind of extendable ambiguity, what’s to stop me defining my own definition of relationships? And if I did that, what would stop FOAF becoming tag soup as everyone did that?

Regulator Gets It Shocker

Courtesy of BoingBoing, a summary of a speech given by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Which quite frankly amazed me - could it be that a regulator actually gets it? If this is a genuine statement of principles, it’s 180 degrees in the opposite direction to the way that Big Content would want to take the internet - in which case I suddenly feel a little bit more optimistic about the world…

Science fiction inventions, listed by date

Now we can know exactly how many of these can be blamed on Arthur C Clarke.

Currently drinking…

…a bottle of 2003 Merlot from Origin. 2 for £8 in Threshers. Rather good.

Grey Album

I don’t actually like DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album - it reminds me less of a remix and more of two randomly chosen CDs playing simultaneously, and some of the reviews have tended towards the emperor’s-new-clothes school of fatuous fawning.

But it’s got up EMI’s nose, and that’s good enough for me. Here’s where you can download it - get it before the cease-and-desist nastygrams start flooding in…

How to blog corporately

Says Robert Scoble