- Blog
-
Anti brand campaigners need context
UPDATE. Just read this post, in October 2022, and I’m kind of shocked. I so profoundly disagree with this post that it’s quite difficult to acknowledge that I even wrote it, twenty years ago. What a mug. Anti-sweatshop campaigners have launched a campaign for a Christmas boycott of The Gap’s stores worldwide. Gap is encouraging…
-
Liberal email
Is this how you take the pulse of liberal America? From technoculture I learn that the NY Times publishes a daily list of the ‘most emailed’ articles from its online edition.
-
NHS Obscure
Is this Britain’s worst web site? No. That would be an exaggeration. NHS Direct Online could be Britain’s least useful web site, though. Trying to find out what the normal temperature range for a two year-old is, I search for a lot of different terms with no luck. Searching for ‘temperature child’ brings me 461…
-
Previewing books
The thing with book reviews is you’re supposed to wait until you’ve finished reading the book before you review it but anyway – the latest big book to land here is Peter Spufford’s Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe – a big, beautiful survey of economics, trade, infrastructure, manufacture and custom in the…
-
A blogging injury
I’ve got some kind of RSI – pressure on a nerve in my neck makes my left arm numb (I’ve pretty much ruled out a stroke). My neck hurts and I can’t pick anything up. I’ve sort of fixed my stupid working posture and now I’m just waiting for it to get better. In the…
-
Freedom of the road
This German charity is teaching Afghan women to drive. What a breathtakingly practical way of helping a downtrodden group get going after decades of oppression. According to The Economist they have taught 100 women the theory so far but the practical element is more difficult because they only have one car. Sounds like a great…
-
Are you a Baconian or a Cartesian?
Freeman Dyson quotes Bacon in his NYRB review of a book about the importance of amateur astronomers: All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed on the facts of nature, and so receiving their images as they are. For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern…
-
Notes on Work Foundation conference
Diligent attendees at last week’s Work Foundation Social Software conference (part of a larger research project) have published their notes. Very useful. Thank you!
-
Distressed information architect
Matt Jones is the subject of a long and quite serious interview about information architecture for news at Online Journalism Review. This is all very interesting but the best thing is that they’ve used one of my accidentally distressed photos taken at XCom 2002 to illustrate the piece! I hope this has now become Matt’s…
-
Problems with Azeem’s BPL idea
Azeem’s BPL idea will encounter many obstacles on its way to the mainstream: 1. How far downstream does the BPL go? If you require content and app developers to embed the BPL in all derivitive product (as the pure GPL requires), there is no limit. This will alienate businesses who don’t want their work to…