On Web Culture

Quick! Post! Yes, and then, sleep! Sleep too! Sleep is good.

Source: Dooce

Source: Flickr

Source: YouTube

Top 5 albums of all time?
Hmmm. This could either be really easy or really hard. Well, in my opinion and in no particular order…
Radiohead - OK Computer (I’m going to limit myself to one from these guys)
U2 - The Joshua Tree (All That You Can’t Leave Behind was also very very good)
The Mars Volta - De-loused In The Comatorium
The Beatles - Revolver (Hard choice due to The White Album, Sgt Pepper’s…, Rubber Soul)
Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin IV is good too)

If you could be in any band/group, who would it be and why?
Rage Against The Machine during the early & mid-90’s - angry, political and brilliant

What would be your ultimate concert line up?
Mate, what a question. The only caveat I’ll put on this one is that the artist or band has to playing still and reunions don’t count (i.e. Led Zeppelin, Rage Against The Machine):
Radiohead, Dave Dobbyn, Massive Attack, SJD, Lemon Jelly, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, The Mars Volta, The Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay, The Foo Fighters, Bjork, Metallica, The Phoenix Foundation, Muse, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Queens Of The Stone Age, Sigur Ros, The Killers, The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Roots Manuva, Blur, Beck, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, U2.

First CD/tape you ever bought?
Mmm, I’m not going to admit what my first cassette was. But I know I did buy a Now That’s What I Call Music compilation with ‘Spice Girls - Viva Forever’ on it. Oh the horror.

Song that most reminds you most of your childhood?
That song by Cliff Richards that goes ‘We’re all going on a summer holiday. No more working for a week or two…’

All time favourite movie?
The Shawshank Redemption

Book you’d be most likely to recommend?
Ooh, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.

Do you have any pets?
Nein…

Best Christmas present you ever got?
Um, well there is the digital alarm clock that my Aunty gave me that just keeps going and going and going on one battery. And a very sensible jacket that I’ve had for years and recently wore all over the South Island.

Who are you tagging to complete this as well?
Monsieur Bartleby, DB, Pete Corin, Meg.

I’ve spent the last couple of days mucking around with Twitter. I can’t gauge how many people are using in New Zealand yet but I’m keen to get everyone on it.

In a nutshell:
Twitter lets you broadcast “what I am doing” by updating your online profile. Those “following” your profile can choose how to receive your updates i.e. email, text messaging, instant message, RSS.

To understand this, your friends can be “following” your profile and if you’re going out for drinks you can update your profile with that information, your friends get updated and those keen can join you for drinks.

The cool thing about this is that it is free. You also don’t need to update your profile for everyone, it is possible to send twitter messages or “twits” for short directly to individual users following you. If you understand that correctly, it is possible to send text messages for free…as long as they are on Twitter.

If you use an Instant Messaging client, i.e. Google Talk, it’s possible to update your Twitter profile directly from your client which makes that process easy and accessible.

The most interesting functionality I’ve discovered so far is if someones profile I am following is updated, I get that twit on my Google Talk. But if I sign out of Google Talk I get the twit on my cellphone. Which makes sense & is functionality I would want if it weren’t available.

Sign up to Twitter. If you live in Auckland, follow my profile!

Runs for about 53 minutes and appears to have most of the songs off the downloadable version of their new album In Rainbows, plus at least one of the new tracks only available on the physical version of the album.

Source: YouTube

Anil Dash:

Google’s announcement of Knol shows that they understand some of their key business drivers very well; With as much as 5% of the search result links for popular terms going to Wikipedia pages, a solution to capturing some of that traffic in an environment that Google can control and display ads on makes good business sense. The idea of sharing the earnings from that content with authors is also good business sense. But as with Google Pages (Page Creator), Blogger, Google Notebook, JotSpot, Google Docs/Writely and other tools, Google has not proven that it understands content creation and publishing as well as it understands its core businesses of search and advertising, or even its ancillary tools for communication and collaboration.

Worse, Knol shares with Google Book Search the problem of being both indexed by Google and hosted by Google. This presents inherent conflicts in the ranking of content, as well as disincentives for content creators to control the environment in which their content is published. This necessarily disadvantages competing search engines, but more importantly eliminates the ability for content creators to innovate in the area of content presentation or enhancement. Anything that is written in Knol cannot be presented any better than the best thing in Knol.

Danah Boyd:

…given that page rank algorithms are proprietary, I can’t wait to see what happens when Knol articles are “magically” higher in rank than the About and Wikipedia equivalents.

I just want to acknowledge that the Spice Girls reforming and playing to sold out shows goes well beyond beating a dead horse. This is kind of like hybrid cars: look, here’s something that is a bad thing dressed up to feel good in new marketing! New marketing! Oh man, now that makes it suddenly all better.

That the Spice Girls are playing a sold out 17 night run of shows at the O2 Arena in London speaks to the indoctrination of many young girls during the Spice Girls first run as living Barbie Dolls regurgitating manufactured production-line pop on demand. It was crap then and it is crap now. They are not important, useful or nostalgic. May they harvest the masses for their gullible dollars one last time and cease to exist.

Seeing the Spice Girls in their push-up bras singing about “girl power” is far from empowerment and much more about selling out all over again a generation of women to their right to liberation.

Source: Imeem.com

Source: Rolling Stone

LINKS
Photos from the Reunion Show and More [rollingstone.com]
Led Zeppelin Finds Its Old Power [nytimes.com]

BONUS
500 foot art installation at Tate Modern in London, NZ woman injures herself “I just didn’t see it” [nytimes.com]