“Lawmakers, consumer advocates and Internet industry officials gathered for the latest in a string of discussions on harmonizing international laws to cut back on spam, which now accounts for nearly half of all global e-mail. Spam has become a hot-button issue for politicians and business officials, who worry that unless it’s criminalized, spamming could become…
“It is the kind of thing that most Japanese young women wouldn’t think twice about doing…. They might spot a new hairstyle or a new dress in a glossy fashion magazine and they want to know what their friends think – so they take a quick snap with their mobile phone camera and send everybody…
“I’m closing OpenContent because I think Creative Commons is doing a better job of providing licensing options which will stand up in court. As I close OpenContent, I join Creative Commons as Director of Educational Licenses. Now I can focus in on facilitating the kind of sharing most interesting to me – that which supports…
“The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can’t be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers. | Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media,…
“While visiting my local health food store, I noticed how many non-food products are labeled “All-Natural.” Toothpaste. Dog biscuits. Deodorants. Some of them, like those Carrot-Honey-Ginger soaps, sound good enough to eat. Is it a soap, I found myself asking, or a salad? Recently, I decided to find out….|Grandma’s Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Soap. Oatmeal adds a…
“The Virtual Broomcloset is proud to announce the release of Jeff Stewart’s Space Quest 0: Replicated, an all-new AGI fan game set prior to the events of the Sarien Encounter! In the tradition of The Lost Chapter, Space Quest: Replicated offers fans an untold tale of Roger Wilco as our hero finds himself posted aboard…
“The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems.” Jakob Nielsen —Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (Alertbox) I’m guessing Nielsen has…
“We?re quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that’s how we treat e-mail now. But imagine…
—100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know (Houghton Mifflin) The list stretches a bit to supply words for every letter of the alphabet. Confession: Last fall, I learned I had the meaning of enervate backwards. There are a few others on that list that are in my reading vocabulary, but which I’d have a hard…
“My new friends seem to expect the life of a young woman living in Manhattan to mirror that of Carrie Bradshaw, the alluring protagonist of the popular TV programme Sex and the City. I’m expected to follow in the stiletto heels of that (in)famous TV drama’s befurred, cosmo-swilling crew. Alas, I am inevitably a disappointment…
“Paul Hillard, spider specialist at the Natural History Museum in London, said researchers first discovered the effects of psychotropic drugs on spiders during experiments at the end of 1960s.” —Spider Experiments with Drugs (Miss Black Widow) This is just weird. Similar:Educated, uplifted, boosted, and fed. Block party celebrating August Wilson continues thro…Culture5 of the Fiercest One-Liners…
“The fun, simple and safer way to turn ordinary hotdogs into exciting to cook and super fun to eat… OCTODOGS!” —Frankfurter ConverterOctodog) You know it’s a slo-o-o-w weekend when this site reaches #21 on Blogdex, with only 4 links. Note the weasel word “safer”. Safer than what? Similar:Time article with clickbaity headline: Web users annoyed…
“A weblog, also known as a *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the reader sees the most recent post first. The style is typically personal and informal. Freely available tools on the World Wide Web make it easy for anybody to publish their own…
“We need to take a minute to consider how anomalous a genre weepies really are. Most movies—especially American movies—are essentially dramatic, as opposed to lyrical (concerned with mood or the inner self) or conceptual (concerned with ideas). The weepie’s the exception. It creates an interesting aesthetic problem for the people making it: How do you…
“Grant writing is all about power. We write grants because they bring us prestige, programs, equipment, travel, and time. Grants free us to do the kind of research, teaching, and service that we enjoy most. So why is such an essential skill so difficult and so mysterious for so many academics?” Kenneth T. Henson —Debunking…
Hurrah for the National Do Not Call Registry website. But wait… “A person who wants to be included on the list will receive an e-mail from the government, then must send back an e-mail reply as confirmation. But a problem’s arisen, as at least one major processor of e-mail — Yahoo — is blocking the…
“Rowling’s ability to stop the Potter pretenders is largely a function of the new regime of international copyright. Until recently, countries varied considerably in how they protected literary works, especially works from abroad. The United States, for instance, has a long history of providing less protection than the Europeans. Benjamin Franklin was a kind of…
“Google Inc., want to know how to compete with Microsoft? Endear yourself to us all. Listen to the likes of us the little people of the Internet. Make the toolbar cross-platform and you will endear yourself to all of us. Change the ‘BlogThis!’ to enable us to blog to whatever blog tools we use. When…
“Mr Sahhaf’s daily press briefings in Baghdad during the war, at which his statements were increasingly at odds with reality, made him a figure of fun in the West.|He was dubbed ‘Saddam’s optimist’ and ‘Comical Ali’ by media commentators, before disappearing as American forces entered central Baghdad.” —‘Comical Ali’ Resurfaces (BBC) Sahhaf is, perhaps unsurprisingly, working…
NASA Planetary CollageAFP/NASA) No image of Pluto? I’m outraged! Disney’s copyright protection schemes have gone too far! Update: I found this image on the AP newswire feed. There was no link or credit, but Rosemary Frezza writes: http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-000454.html This is the closest thing I could find on a NASA site so far. I wonder who…