Russell Beattie is amusingly underwhelmed by the latest slew of Web 2.0 upstarts - bothered by the enormous amount of copycats and possibly by the almost dronelike tone with which all these upstarts repeat the same mantra: social, rich media, events, blogs, feeds.
I think this particular kind of cranky is alwasy going to miss out on a lot of good stuff, but clearly there are many crappy ideas being thrown about just now.
While acid tongued new economy debunking is always good fun, in the end, the only memorable thing in the post is the mobility rant:

And finally, where is the goddamn mobility? This is what most depresses me most about these new sites. Not being able to use my mobile to sign up and use any new site or service that’s launched now is completely inexcusable. I don’t care what you’re doing, you’re wasting your time and the 20 seconds I spent even checking out your site. The future is so obviously in mobiles, why the hell are so many startups still screwing around on the desktop? Morons.

Even this I'm not so sure is right. Plenty of life left in the plain old web without mobile access.

Naturligvis er det den billigste lortekaffe der har navnet "Eksklusiv".
Naturligvis præsenteres dette fupnummer i en butik der hedder Fakta.

(tidligere note om denne lovmæssighed)

Iøvrigt så kan alle vel historien om Hr Charles Boycott - undtagen antikinesiske graffiti artister.

Af alle steder ser man denne politiske udmelding foran Jensens Bøfhus?

Her til morgen tog jeg mig endelig sammen og så første halvdel af Scorseses Dylan-dokumentar No Direction Home. Jeg båndede den da SVT sendte den for en uge siden (anden halvdel følger i aften).
Det et en glimrende udsendelse bygget sammen af interviews der er så forskelligartede i billedkvalitet (og tøjstil) at man har svært ved at overskue hvor mange kilder de er blandet sammen af. Hovedvægten i originalmaterialet fra de tidlige 60ere er fra Pennebakers Dylan film og en dokumentar fra Newport Folk Festival i 1963. Filmen er et sjovt supplement til de fremragende erindringer der udkom for et år siden.

Som i biografiens første kapitler er fokus på rødderne og folk-miljøet i New York i starten af 60erne og på Dylan som den underlige grænsesprængende traditionalist han er. Det er godt for historien at Dylan ikke selv holder kameraet, sådan som han gør i Chronicles. Man kan bedre se at der er og var en stærk selviscenesættelse i Dylan, mest tydeligt i det helt andet billede man får af Dylans Woody Guthrie fascination. I bogen virker det som reverens for en stor mester. I filmen bliver det tydeligt som noget helt andet, nemlig egentlig imitation. Dylan imiterer simpelthen Guthries optræden og sangstil og hans kontakt med Guthrie får et helt andet skær i lyset af at Dylan har forsøgt at løfte sig selv op gennem sin kontakt med Guthrie. Filmen giver det en ikke særlig ærbødig karakteristik som noget nær snylten. Når interviewpersonerne taler pænt om det siger de at "Bob was channeling Woody".
Der er en anden ting som man får med i bogen, men ikke ligeså tydeligt som her. I bogen siger Dylan at der var mange gode sangere, de prøvede på at lyde godt. De gjorde ikke noget for at så sangene til at lyde som de skulle. I filmen, og jeg forestiller mig det er det samme han snakker om, siger han at han altid har beundret sangere der virkede som om de vidste mere end den der lytter. Hans ambition var at blive sådan en sanger. Det er jo i og for sig en meget uærlig og udvendig ambition og den er med til at sætte Guthrie-fascinationen i det andet, imiterende, perspektiv.
Det der sætter Dylan fri som kunstner til sidst er at han imiterer dem allesammen. Han suger musikalske indtryk til sig med en foruroligende energi og i løbet af et til to år er han færdig med at efterligne de andre og igang med at være sig selv. En livsalders erfaringer gennemført på utrolig kort tid. Det er ikke så mærkeligt at hans samtidige synes han var magisk.
I filmens karakterisering er det et nybrud der løfter Dylan ud af en rolle som traditionalist. Han omdanner traditionsformerne til nye personlige individualiserede kunstneriske former som udtrykker ham selv og ikke traditionen.

Filmen fik mig til at tænke på hvorfor det er helt præcist at konservative stridskæmpere som Brian Mikkelsen og Claes Kastholm-Hansen ikke kan bruges til noget som helst.
Dylan, den store traditionsbærer, er kun fantastisk fordi han forkaster hele grundlaget for traditionen og omformer den i sit eget billede. Det samme kan man sige om alt jeg sætter pris på af kunst og kultur lige fra renæssancen til idag. Det er rigtigt om alle de store at de sprængte rammerne og udfordrede deres samtid, lige fra Leonardo Da Vinci til... folk jeg end ikke selv kan se er fantastiske idag. Kunst der kun handler om fortiden er meningsløs og æstetik kan vi som sagt tale om om hundrede år. Så kære konservative: Kendskab til historien og respekt for traditionen er noget andet og meget, meget større end jeres lamme bagstræberi. Jeres ministerielle godkendelser af de gamles bedrifter kan I simpelthen stikke skråt op. De kan ikke bruges. De har aldrig kunnet bruges. Vi skal videre.

Vi lever i nonsensens storhedstid. Den politiske verden er sprængfyldt af skandaler, komplotter, afsløringer og konspirationer. Biskopper vil pludselig have troen ind i naturvidenskaberne* og den meget omtalte, men ikke altid lige kloge, kanal klog - DR2 altså - ofrer endnu en aften på skodbogen Da Vinci Mysteriet.
Er der noget at sige til at flere og flere får svært ved at skelne mellem det hamløse og ligegyldige nonsens - Da Vinci Mysteriet - og det livsfarlige nonsens - anti-Darwinisme og religiøs vold?

[Update: DR2 bruger faktisk halvdelen af aftenen på at sige fra over for vrøvlet, men i demokratismens tidsalder lader man altid alligevel en kattelem stå åben for vrøvlet, det var jo uhøfligt ellers.]

* en skandale simpelthen. De kunne ligeså godt foreslå hekseprocesserne genstartet.

Uffe har ikke svært ved at score JP vs. Islam: I en kommentar i Berlingske Tidende siger han for det første det umiddelbart fornuftige at ytringsfrihed og tolerance ikke kan skilles ad. For det andet, og her skal diskussionen til gengæld nok komme i gang, synes han ikke Jylland-Posten formår at holde de to ting sammen i forbindelse med Islam-tegnings historierne. Der er vel næppe nogen der vil anklage Uffe for at være hverken kommunistisk blødsøden lejesvend eller i det hele taget bange for en skarp melding, så den kritik er lidt sværere at svare på. Den teknik Flemming Rose hidtil har anvendt i interviews i forsvaret minder om den gode gamle fra den kolde krig med at stille modspørgsmål til interviewerens eget borgersind (ligesom man ikke i gamle dage kunne kritisere Sydafrika uden at blive forholdt Sovjet, gulag og Sakharov)

Midt i januar udnævnte jeg Laue Traberg Smidts fiktive forargede muslimer til året nyhedshistorie. Det var ikke til at vide på det tidspunkt at det både var helt rigtigt og helt forkert.

Det blev forkert af et antal grunde, mest den at hele resten af året er fortsat med den ene demaskering efter den anden. Det man skal være i år i medierne er simpelthen useriøs, skinger og til sidst afsløret. Men på samme måde kan man, med en let omtolkning af hvad det betyder at være årets historie konstatere at det virkelig blev årets historie: At stille sig selv som talsmand for en idé man senere må opgive enten fordi man ikke har rimelig adgang til at være talsmand for den, eller også fordi man ikke kan stå imod kritikken af ideen hvis den ikke er særlig god har udviklet sig til årets tema. Forbrugsministeren havde rod i privatfinanserne. Socialministeren var asocial. Louise Frevert var i virkeligheden en pensioneret orlogskaptajn af hankøn. Jørgen Leth var først levemand, så en gammel gris og nu er han måske til sidst blevet forfulgt kunstner og ad den vej levemand igen.

Senest er Flemming Rose muligvis fakkelbærer i en nødvendig kamp for ytringsfriheden, eller også er han i virkeligheden bare en borgerlig provokatør - den seneste nyhed er stadig svær at score og binder smukt an til årets første nyhed om den uhåndgribelige indvandring: I januar havde Traberg Smidt hverken en sag eller nogen forargede muslimer at kæmpe for. I september har Flemming Rose egentlig ikke nogen sag, men til gengæld et helt verdenskomplot af forargede muslimer at kæmpe imod.

Sjældent har et år bragt så mange skinnyheder med sig med så virtualiserede angreb, forsvar og retræter som 2005. For første gang i nyere mediehistorie er det som om man faktisk kan køre historien baglæns eller forlæns uden at kende forskel.

DIY is hip, we live in the age of the amateur, the age of Makers - according to at least Tim O'Reilly. And some other people. A good example is Instructables a recent website for makers of all kinds of things. Instructables makes DIY a social object by allowing anyone to upload a step by step DIY recipe and then allowing everyone to comment on the recipes.
Nicely executed and already full of food recipes, wood working recipes and semi professional "how to do surprising thing X with simple household object Y" type instructions. Yes, there is also a LEGO Mindstorms 3D printer (that outputs chocolate).

Pis! Jeg har sagt GIF forkert i alle de år...

Og i relation til foregående post så stank Marc Hedlunds keynote på EuroOSCON ikke lige så meget som ihvertfald et par stykker af de andre gjorde (keynotes stinker altid; jeg ville ønske de ikke var der). Blandt andet sagde han ovenstående fornuftige ord.
Et ekko af Scott McNealy's gamle "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it".

Berlingske Tidende forsøger i dag at få en uhyggelig historie ud af at rekrutterende virksomheder har opdaget Google og tjekker ansøgeres navne i søgemaskinerne.
Det håber jeg da de gør. Det er der ikke noget uhyggeligt i.
For mange, og da især for mange der blogger, er en del af spøgen ved at være i søgemaskinerne da lige præcis at man kan ses. Ike ødvendigvis fordi man vil have et job, men bare fordi man gerne vil have nogen i tale med det man skriver eller gør. Naturligvis kan man have sagt eller gjort noget, der får en til at se uspiselig ud til en jobsamtale, men oprigtig talt, var man ikke blevet uvenner før eller siden alligevel? Jo mere ens arbejde minder om vidensarbejde, jo større rolle spiller social kompatibilitet og jo mere rimeligt virker det at tjekke folk ud på Google før man ansætter dem. Sjovt nok bliver det også mere sandsynligt at man faktisk finder dem.

Om den lamme "millionsiden.dk" der stjæler alt indhold fra The Million Dollar Homepage er der kun at citere fra originalens FAQ om imitation; det eneste millionsiden ikke har bøffet:

So I say good luck to the imitators! While in my opinion it's not very cool - I would prefer to come up with something original - in many ways the act of copying (perhaps more on a subconcious level than anything) is the basis of all creativity. But yeah, really bad rip-offs are seriously lame - I mean, if you're gonna copy the concept, at least come up with your own design and text!

(ja, der er mange, mange flere kopier - de fleste af dem anerkender i det mindste originalen med et link)

I'm back from Amsterdam and the debut of EuroOSCON. I've had fun and broodje haring (which is a "pickled herring hot dog" with raw onion and pickles).
There were good talks and not so good talks and a lot of nice and interesting people.
As a perl hacker it was fun to see all (well, a lot of) the perl hackers on the mailing lists in the flesh and there were plenty of good talks for my tastes anyway.
Overall the vibe was "sharing, simplicity, source" - all the projects were focused on moving on. Tons of projects were in a remake phase rather than a make phase so they were focused on getting it right the second (or third or forth or ...) time around.
Memorable performances in the "it's about the user" category were Ben Goodger's talk on the making of Firefox and Jeff Waugh's talk on Gnome

What impressed me the most was the intense commitment to the social side of software. It's why open source works of course, but it was also top of mind for everyone from perl 6 reimplementers to Linux desktop hackers. Or maybe I just went to those talks were this was top of mind. A conference is after all designed so that you miss 80% of the fun.
I might cover some of the talks on my infrequent hacking addendum (in particular I think I'll expand on the sadness that is perl 6) but here's at least some highlights: The best talk I saw was Autrjius Tang's talk on pugs. I liked that it actually works, that there's heart and courage, vision, friendliness, openness, a complete lack of perl (or any language) bigotry and if you add a nice presentation and the ambition to go on a 10 year hacking pilgrimage a la Paul Erdös I think we have a best of show winner. If I was a benevolent millionaire (I'm not) I would sponsor Autrijus' walkabout in a heartbeat.
The Maker Faire was fun, but as a previous Ars Electronica attendee I have to say I was distinctly underwhelmed by most of the hacks. Each year Ars E presents nothing but hacks thay are way, way superior. That's all fine and dandy this is supposed to be about grassrootsy get involved hack your own stuff like MAKEing, it's not supposed to be perfect - but the secret here of course is that so is Ars E to a large extent.
Couple of good things there though. A couple of projects had vision and heart (not just hacking) in mind. The nodel project is a collection of tools for building an open voluntary people/locations/events semantic web. Fernando Botelho was interested in building cheap computers for the blind from open source software. It's more af a call for action than an existing project but there's scope and heart there.
Other than that, the most admired demo was Beth Goza's tour through Second Life - an MMORPG that has two to three unique enabling features: There's a free basic account if you want to look around. You can script the environment yourself. The interactions are social and not hack&slay. It's simply not about killing people.
I quite liked a demo that wasn't really part of the faire but just an impromtu demo by Liz Turner of her ICONAUT a newsmeme analysis tool that slices and dices news keywords with isometric iconography. It's either informing and eye-opening or just eye-opening, but it's certainly that.

(more on Technorati: tag and just search)

I Norge er Terkel i knibe (med censuren altså). I Brande behøver man ikke være en tegnet figur, der er grov i munden, for at få problemer. Man skal bare tisse.

I øvrigt synes jeg det er værd at diskutere om Max Uwe Jensens tisprovokation ikke er ren æstetik og nul provokation, set i relation til det foregående indlæg.

Om tis som provokation - læs også Frank Hvam. Om Frank Hvam læs også Sinatras skarpsindige iagttagelse: Det er slet ikke Frank Hvam der er Klovn, han spiller ham bare. I virkeligheden er det Brian Mikkelsen der er Klovn. Om folk der er andre end man tror. Hvorfor tror Nybolig

at vi gerne vil købe hus af Peter Skaarup?

Om Peter Skaarup. Køb nogen andre plader, mand!

Titlen er et skarpt citat fra komponisten og fluxuskunstneren Henning Christiansen som svar i en diskussion om hvad kunst er for noget på spørgsmålet om æstetik ikke også spiller en rolle. Det blev refereret i en udgave af Dagens Gæst på P2 (desværre ikke arkiveret) af Christiansens søn, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen fra kunstgruppen Superflex.
Jeg kom til at tænke på det i forbindelse med en post jeg så på nettet om hvad man skal mene om hadeordet branding. Det er ikke "brandet Apple" der får os til at synes at en iPod er for fed. Det er oplevelsen, det egentlige, indholdet der er det fede. Brandet er det vi husker bagefter. På samme måde er æstetikken måske det vi husker bagefter kunsten, ikke det det egentlig handler om.
Den tror jeg er meget god. Æstetik er kunstens brand. Lad os tale om den om hundrede år. Respekt til den skarpsindige fluxuskunstner.

My server (the one serving this page) also handles my personal email. It runs no public mailing lists, it's not an open relay even if it once was so I was very surprised to learn that my server had been blacklisted by a spam database. The base in question was sorbs and the error of my ways was apparently "sending email to spamtrap adresses". Spamtraps like that are not accurate in any way shape or form. There's plenty of ways email from my server could legitimately end up in any email folder, starting with the obvious case of someone using the spamtrap address as the sender address for spam to my server. This kind of test will have tons of false positives.
Annoyed as I was that these people were groundlessly causing me problems I went looking for a way off the list only to learn that SORBS demand you pay a 50$ "fine" to get off the list. The SORBS anti-spam bigots are oblivious to the fact that their test is quite simply broken. Blackmail. It doesn't really matter thay you can pay the money to a self proclaimed charity (a legal defense fund for some anti-spammer) it's still blackmail. No wonder they need a legal defense fund; this ought to be illegal. It's a pity for the good cause (spam prevention) that jerks like this are tainting the concept of an anti-spam database. Contrast this with the polite service you get from ORDB.
Needless to say I'm not going to pay, so I can only recommend if you have any connection to any system using SORBS, that you stop doing that immediately.

Der er et system

Det hedder paranoia

Det virker for mig

Følg det nye "vi kan kun finde på det samme ordspil som de andre" news meme her.

Jeg sad netop og overvejede hvad der skulle til for at få mig i gang med de danske indlæg igen, nu hvor Jørgen Leth kanonen har skudt sit sidste krudt af. Løsningen fik jeg fra Handelshøjskolen by way of ugebrevet A4 og Henrik Føhns.
Føhns kan nemlig viderebringe oplysningen at Skærbæk i Sønderjylland er Danmarks mindst kreative by. Det er der jeg kommer fra.

Måske er det det der er forklaringen på min instinktive modvilje mod Richard Florida, og navnlig de der læser ham halvreligiøst. Jeg synes der er en udpræget grad af Er Vi Ikke Fantastiske! over hele det kreative medieshow, og det skyldes ren ugidelighed at jeg ikke kastede mit fjernsyn ud af vinduet da de radikale selvfede trådte op til DMA som spytslikkede, smokingklædte mediestjerner. Aldrig har så få været så langt fra at være oprigtigt kreative.

Men Skærbæk altså. Jeg har skrevet om byen før. Man kan godt bo der. Der sker ikke det helt vilde. Og ja, Føhns - det var nok meget godt at I ikke foranstaltede en pride-parade nede i Storegade. Omvendt er Danmark så gennemdemokratisk at selv Danmarks kedelige småbyer, og altså også den målbart kedeligste af dem allesammen, har sine stolte sønner (der er flere, men speedwaystjernen Tommy Knudsen, tegneserietegneren Franz Füchsel og mediesociologen Henrik Dahl(iøvrigt min storebror) comes to mind). Den har sin egen historie og også sin egen magi, selv om man skal lede lidt efter det sidste og selv om jeg må tilstå jeg også har svært ved at se den de få gange jeg har besøgt byen gennem de sidste 10-15 år. Udviklingen har ikke været god ved små byer som Skærbæk. Jernbanestationen er for længst nedlagt og er bare et trinbræt. Biografen er såvidt jeg ved også lukket. Mejeriet er lukket og slagteriet er ikke længere en lokal stolthed der laver Skærbæk Pølser som sælges i hele landet, sågar på Rådhuspladsen, men er nu bare en del af Danish Crown, et anonymt akkordslagteri i den danske sværindustri der kaldes landbruget.
Hvordan er det at vokse op i Danmarks mindst kreative by? Jeg fortryder intet. Jeg er glad for at være vokset op i en virkelig lille by; det giver livet på stenbroen en fremmedhed som det ærlig talt ville være for trist uden. Og så er jeg glad for at kunne nogen virkelig go'e sønderjydske børnevitser for slet ikke at tale om livsvigtige udtryk som "pisse hyl". Men det hænger meget på det helt tætte nærmiljø må jeg omvendt indrømme. Marsken er et fantastisk landskab, og der er dejligt på Rømø, og dog har jeg alligevel mange, mange gange med andre provinsboere, der er flyttet til København, siddet og diskuteret sandheden i de gyldne linier fra "Songs for Drella":

There's only one good thing about a small town
There's only one good use for a small town
There's only one good thing about a small town
You know that you want to get out

When you're growing up in a small town
You know you'll grow down in a small town
There's only one good use for a small town
You hate it and you know you'll have to leave

It seems Larry McVoy of BitMover is either a complete asshole or just your run of the mill socially inept paranoid hacker. He is actively reaching out to customers to have their employees stop working on competing open source to bitkeeper. These people aren't BitKeeper developers, they're end users. It's like if Microsoft tried preventing Word users from contributing source to Open Office. Simply, insane. Lesson learned: Avoid BitKeeper at all costs.

For those keeping track, Rollyo may be the first ever commercialization of currying as something cool. Currying is the process of taking a function

f(arg1, arg2, arg3, arg4)

f'(x) = f(x, arg2, arg3, arg4)

I think there's a decent chance that China will get to Mars first. They're huge. They're growing. They're hungry. They don't mind risks.
Going to Mars is going to cost bundles of money. It's also going to require tons of technology, but technological leapfrogging is already happening in China and once you have a 200 mio middle class providing hundreds of thousands of engineers every year you're definitely going places. Going to Mars is still largely a technological pipe dream. The project that will put together the space vehicle that will go to Mars first has still not been started. Leapfrogging means that as long as the other guys haven't actually started to build the damn thing you still have an excellent shot at catching up.

But first, you need to get organized, you need to..., need to... Get. Your. Notetaking. Skills. In. Place.
Need. To. Read. This. Book.
This is hardcore procrastination for the really serious procrastinator. A 131 page manual on notetaking. The chapter on buying the right pen and paper is 14 pages alone. It all goes like this:

PEN

You need a pen. Actually, you need three. And they need to have little four color clippies- Red, Green, Blue, and Black.

Theoretically, you can do this all with a black pen, but TRUST ME, you don't want it. Your ability to very rapidly switch colors will way more than make up for the nicer line that the G2 gel pens give you. Really.

You need one to carry with you, you need one for backup, placed in a trusted place, and you need one to be a backup to the backup. YES, you really need this. If you are wasting time looking for a pen that you lost, you are just wasting time. The pen will come back. In the mean time, you need to write, so you've got to fetch your backup. You have a backup to the backup. If you have ready access to a store, you need to buy another pen, should you not find your first pen by then.

These 4-color pens are expensive. Remember: Buy 3. Your pen is your life - don't lose it. But when you do, don't hesitate to start in with the backup.

One of the worst things about reliving the bubble is that a lot of bad bubble ideas are getting a rerun. Case in point: the 'meta'-search engine or supersearcher that goes out to ten places and runs a search. Latest entry: gada.be. It's like one of those pages any able programmer puts together for himself that links 10 convenient search resources in one. It gives you the information overload you're not interested in. It adds very litte - except ads. Saving grace is a scraped down appearance for mobile devices, but personally I'm underwhelmed.

Uheldig info-grafik fra FEMA, den amerikanske regerings beredskabsstyrelse.

The How 2.0 rating service now has a hiscore. The most Web 2.0 application so far? Del.icio.us. The least? Altavista.

You can still play. Coming soon: Suggestion box.

The guardian runs a story about the awarding of the next Nobel prize for literature. According to the story, there's heated debate over "controversial" writer Orhan Pamuk.
But the article is wrong. There is absolutely nothing controversial about Pamuk. The Armenian Genocide is only a controvery in Turkey. And it's disgraceful for Turkey to live in that kind of denial. And disgraceful for the Nobel prize committee and/or The Guardian to consider Pamuk controversial. The controversial bit is the lack of freedom of speech in Turkey.
Let's hope the EU leaders don't bow down and remove the requirement that Turkey acknowledge this genocide (and introduce actual freedom of speech in the process) if Turkey is ever to be considered for EU membership. The EU is in no need for a fiercely nationalist, citizen-oppressing bully among the member states.

The wikipedia entry on the genocide is a testament to how this sad kind of pressure works. In the age of storytelling, all stories are "disputed" - because obviously there's always some idiotic alternate interpretation of reality. But that doesn't mean the Nobel prize committee or The Guardian should pander to such views.

I hadn't seen the Google Feed Reader before today, it started cropping up in my referrer log. GMail-like, with what appears to be a too heavy interface for it's own good. It's quite slow at present and not immediatelty useful. But, like GMail, the choices made for how to browse feeds may make sense in the end.

(About not seeing it before: It's new.)

The fact that Wikipedia has unlimited space available for articles makes for excellent encyclopedia-browsing. Among the examples are the much talked about article on the heavy metal umlaut, the listing of fictional words used in "The Simpsons".
Todays find in this category is this article on fictional encyclopedia articles. Lengthy, interesting and fun.

While browsing away from this article I also discovered (which I hadn't taken notice of) that Wikipedia actually has an alphabetical index of articles, which makes that wonderful pastime of reading the article next to the one you need possible. It's just that Wikipedia doesn't include a link to the index from every page. I sense a bookmarklet coming on...

DRs nye stilige hjemmeside afslører at aftenens program i aften er det samme på DR1 og DR2. Bummer.
Og så henviser den iøvrigt til redesignleverandøren.

(Det er kun i Firefox det sker for mig. Det sker ikke for alle. Heller ikke i Firefox)

Har Jørgen Leth alligevel glaskæbe? Han lader til at være blevet lidt groggy af medietæskene og trække næsten sin bog tilbage. Den skal ikke forstås "for konkret" men sem et kunstnerisk værk.

So I'm testing Yahoo Search as a Google replacement. On each search page I get the above internal notice for Yahoo employees. What's up with that? The link is to some walled of intranet URL. Bothering the user with this kind of internal gunk seems utterly clueless to me. What am I supposed to do when I see bad search results?

The otherwise excellent Firefox plugin Slogger has a serious flaw in that logging a page that you got as the result of a POST request repeats the request. Thinking in RESTian terms, you're only supposed to consider results of GET requests static redoable and cacheable, not POST requests. If you're autologging something important you might get disappointing results after purchasing that book/deleting that DB records and so on and so on. This is a similar discussion as the one over Google Web Accelerator, but more serious, since this also involves POSTs and not just ill-considered GETs.

I'll update this post if someone posts a fix to the Slogger mailing list.

Google's account system is global, single sign-on. That sounds like a good idea but it's not. It means I can't be signed into GMail in my Firefox window without Google mangling my search results pages at the same time in another tab. What happens is that Google activates some kind of javascript onclick handlers so that I can't Ctrl-Click for tabbed browsing through search results anymore. Intensely annoying. Yahoo, thankfully, doesn't do this (I'm not logged in to Yahoo) so now I have to switch search engines.
Now I've posted about it here, and contacted Google Accounts about it. Let's see if anyone responds.

[UPDATE: I'm not perfectly sure that this isn't somehow also horrible breakage in Firefox, but still Yahoo doesn't give me this problem]

So, Just has a good observation about one more thing that's new in web 2.0:

Web 1.0 was 7 plus/minus 2 items, web 2.0 is 2 plus/minus 1 item.

I like it. It's like an attention economy analogue of the "It's your data" meme. It's your attention too, we shouldn't ask for too much of it.

Here's the classy.dk Web 2.0 quality matrix:

The news that weblogs are media properties to be bought for huge sums of money by incumbent media conglomerates is

• Really quite Web 1.0 even if blogs are the posterchildren for Web 2.0.
  
• Going to get a ton of "how can I make money off my blog"-types to start thinking about other things than Google AdWords.
  

[Update: I like this discussion. Is Web 2.0 really easy to summarize in two words: cash out]

Jørgen Leths medieprovokation fejrer fortsatte og store triumfer: Først spillede Ekstra Bladet villigt med, nu har Udenrigsministeriet meldt sig på banen fordi en honorær konsul ikke også kan indrømme at han har smuglet hash i sin ungdom, og såmænd også TV2 er på banen fordi hende den 17 årige nok var lidt for skrap kost når man bijobber som kommentator. Leth må være i den syvende himmel - hans selvbillede som en ægte provo og levemand er cementeret af en ivrig offentlighed, der løfter historien fra påstand til virkelighed.

Og i den fortsatte serie "politikere i knibe" har Louise Frevert fået midlertidig afløsning af Flemming Oppfeldt, der nu karakteriseres som børnelokker, altså en af de mange

mænd, der stod i porte og med slik forsøgte at få kontakt med børn. Eller de prøvede at lokke unge til at komme hjem til sig for at se et marsvin.

I'm unable to attend the Web 2.0 conference, but in spirit I'm there!. To prove the point I whipped up a quick, light, revolutionary, simple, user oriented Web 2.0 reality checker.
Web 2.0 is all about the user, sorry, the conversation partner, so the Web 2.0 companies need your input on how well they're doing on the whole Web 2.0 thing.
Go ahead. Rate'em.

Leave a comment if you have any suggestions.

(update: There's crazy refresh problems. Will fix It was just Slogger acting up. App works as before. Only annoyance: Ridiculous javascript requiring redirecting sites.)
(update II: New and improved look. Less annoying "we own the topframe" refreshes)

OK, now that we've established that surface matters and language matters is it ok to dissect game changer hopefuls like Ning?
It looks to me like a well done, well integrated advanced web panel for a well equipped PHP hosting solution. What that means is: You use the webbrowser to configure and manage your hosted application. You can rely on certain pluggable elements that will fit right into your data (e.g. user login) but other than that you're writing PHP agains a set of compatible elements accessing e.g. all the open social services out there.
A server with a full CPAN, a web interface to my CGI directory and something like Catalyst would seem to do almost the same trick. Or the equivalent based on Rails.

But of course execution is everything and ideas nothing in this particular case. Looking forward to testing this - even if i do have to learn php.

Over on Signal to Noise there's a discussion of the speed with which writeboard fixed the obvious blunder of not locking documents.
The obvious discussion gets started: Was this held back to have some good news to offer real fast, or is this really a rapid release cycle. Some think so, some dismiss that as rampant conspiracy theory. It's impossible to tell of course, but it's worthwhile to mention that Jason Fried suggested doing exactly that (holding back features) as a marketing strategy in his talk at Reboot. Of course he didn't suggest that you should tell people another story in public. Personally I'm not sure I like the suggestion either way.
Also: The whole "no public betas" discussion seems like religion over fact to me. In both schools (i.e. Google vs. 37Signals) products get releases with plenty of flaws and shortcomings. In both cases your best bet is to hope that they're working hard to improve the product. As far as I'm concerned I derive no comfort from having the beta sticker removed when I still have to expect bugs and feature changes/additions as a part of life with the product.

Kunne man måske bruge Søren Pinds 3 strikes and you're out idé på politikere der trækker deres udtalelser tilbage?

Til de mange Louise Frevert T-shirt kunder kan jeg kun sige at vi arbejder meget hårdt på sagen og forventer at kunne åbne Louise Frevert T-shirt butikken meget snart. Med lidt held idag.

Since we're talking about wikis (even ones that won't admit they are secretly wikis, you'd think they were afraid to be thrown out of the country if the secretly admitted to being open community software) I looked around to see if it was really true that there weren't any good hosted wiki services around.

There's plenty of hosting plans including wikis, but there's also Schtuff, which is free, simple, has history (with differencing in the same style as writeboard), access control, search, backups, and much more.
They could do with a fresher look and bigger fonts, but other than that it looks really nice. Bookmarked.

Other free options are here.

So, rapid response to questions is the new black. A few months ago it took DHH about a day and a half to respond to my backpack observations. Scoble is reporting mych faster response times (but of course he's Scoble). Abe Fettig took 5 hours to respond about Jotlive. I just got the fastest ever response to a question I've ever had though. It took all of 5 minutes for Sam Schillace to respond to my question about the current suckyness of Writely when used with tabbed browsing (answer: They're fixing it). I'm not discounting the possibility that the answer was a robo-answer, since I can only imagine they kinda got this question before, but still, that really is fast.

(Unfortunately I no longer have the email signed /Sergey in response to an early question I asked about Google back when it was in beta...)

Good post by Rick Segal on Writeboard and the response from geeks like myself. Language matters and "Yes. This is just a one page wiki with an edit history and a forced login to view/edit.", my description of Writeboard which works for me, does not work for everyone. So what's the invention in Writeboard? Certainly nothing in the functionality of the application which really is plain old wiki with absolutely nothing new. It's not even simplified in any way. Even Ward Cunninghams ur-wiki had all the features of writeboard, with the same stunning simplicity.
The language however is clean and maybe new. The product name and domain name, immediately descriptive and comprehensible, and the language used in the application, without cutesy tech words (wiki) that mom wouldn't know the meaning of. I'll buy an argument that this really matters. (The notion of a new product which has no novelty, except in language, is intriguing. Can user centered design really be boiled down to pure language?)
The new language does however have a bad sound of 'consumer' ringing through my years. My mom won't mind at all. She is a consumer when it comes to tech. For 2-way conversation types like myself it's kind of offputting though, so I'll take my wiki'ing elsewhere.

37Signals' Writeboard is trying to derive some buzz off the recent interest in collaborative web editing, e.g. JotSpot Live or Writely. But Writeboard is in fact nothing new, but simply a 37Signals branded version of ... the wiki!
Yes. This is just a one page wiki with an edit history and a forced login to view/edit. There's no fancy rich text editing, it's plain old wiki-formatting once again. There are no collaboration features except what was already the case with a plain old wiki (reload the page to see other people's recent edits). It has less features than almost any wiki package I can think of. There are plenty of hosted wikis (or just look here).

Free is always nice, but this must be seen as a pure marketing effort to drive attention and interest to the products of 37Signals. 37Signals is of course "the Apple of simple web applications", so I'm sure they can manage to get product reviews out of this (oh wait, they have)

OK, det er på en meget lille skala, men hvordan er Carsten Jensen dog havnet i Berlingerens Groft Sagt redaktion? Er han ved at lave en Claes Kastholm og omdanne sig til konservativ frontkæmper antændt af en helt ny retfærdig harme? Hvad gør den øvrige Groft Sagt redaktion når klummerne nu ikke længere kan handle om Carsten Jensen? Går de i strejke? Og hvem bliver den næste? Klaus Rifbjerg?

Ditlev Tamm, Henrik Gade Jensen og Tøger Seidenfaden må være lige rystede over denne disturbance in the force. I samme lørdagsberlinger hvor det lille chok blev annonceret mærkede man iøvrigt en anden korrektion i forcen: Hele magasinsektionen var et kald til ikke bare borgerlig, men faktisk konservativ, debat. Gad vide om Berlingerns tid som Anders Foghs loyale væbner er ved at være ovre.

Don't know the guy, but it seems he's always putting some social idea and/or gathering together. In real virtual worlds and now also in virtual virtual worlds.

I sådan ca halvandet år har jeg haft en lavintensitetshobby med at følge med de de mange oplevelser Area Man kommer ud for. Det går op og ned fra ham, han dør, myrder, stjæler, kæmper for friheden i Irak, forsvinder og bliver fundet igen andre steder i verden. Men en gang i mellem smiler lykken alligevel på ham. Som idag hvor han langt om længe kunne tage sin præmie hjem som indehaver af det største bæltespænde i Texas - og siden det nu er Texas, sikkert i hele verden. Jeg er stolt af ham.

Det var slet ikke Louise Frevert der havde skrevet alle de grimme ting om indvandrerne, det var hendes webmaster. Til trods for at Louise Frevert er blevet interviewet både til pressen (her Politiken) og af DR til radioen. I Politiken nærlæser Frevert sammen med journalisten de enkelte punkter i artiklen og står ved dem punkt for punkt. I P1 kunne man høre Frevert forklare at hun ikke mente hun havde gjort noget strafbart. Journalisten på DR spurgte ind til det, udfra den idé at rubrikken 'Artikler ingen tør trykke' turde antyde at Frevert godt vidste at hun var på kanten, men Freveret forklarede frejdigt at det bare betød at de faktisk havde været afvist af landets aviser.
Så her er altså en opgave til landets debatredaktører: Vil I være rare at finde de indsendte indlæg og fortælle os hvilket navn der dengang skrev dem under?

Jeg glæder mig til en George Bush-agtig vinkel med medicin i forbindelse med søsyge der kortvarigt forvirrede Frevert. Udtalelsen nedenfor er godt på vej, men ikke helt ude i hampen endnu:

»Jeg blev så konfus! Jeg ved jo, at jeg som folketingspolitiker må stå ved mine handlinger. Det gjorde jeg så. Og på det tidspunkt, da Politiken fanger mig i et tog, har jeg ikke nogen mulighed for at komme ind på hjemmesiden. Så i virkeligheden ved jeg hverken, hvad der er rigtigt eller forkert. Derfor påtager jeg mig et ansvar, selv om jeg ikke rigtig ved, hvad det er.

Så i virkeligheden ved jeg hverken, hvad der er rigtigt eller forkert. Derfor påtager jeg mig et ansvar, selv om jeg ikke rigtig ved, hvad det er.
Louise Frevert - Dansk Folkeparti

Paul Graham, a hacker, but these days maybe better described as a gentleman programmer, was an early bayesian spam filtering pioneer, and writes essays that are occasionally great about hacking, the business of hacking and ... other things.
I own the book, there's great stuff in it, but that doesn't mean that this parody isn't funny:

Google Maps is essentially a large Javascript application. Great hackers have an almost instinctual aversion to Javascript. Google is betting its future on something a tasteful programmer's radar rejects.

If was in the footnotes of the equally great Dabblers and Blowhards. You shouldn't read the title essay from Graham's book without reading this.