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November 30, 2004

A chance to cause offence

Lycos are encouraging people to DDoS websites they don't like. — presumably this is somehow supposed to stop people trying to sell me Rolex watches, or something. I'm sure I appreciate the effort to stop spam and all, but really, DDoSing people (including innocent networks unfortunate enough to be transferring the intervening traffic) isn't the way forward. Not to mention the effects if innocent sites are targetted, or spammy sites are hosted on the same boxes/networks as non-spammy ones.

According to the BBC News article, Lycos want to give us users "the chance to be a bit more offensive" — frankly, they can fuck right off. And I hope that's offensive enough for them.

Posted by James at 03:52 | Comments (1)
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November 18, 2004

Mindless link propagation

Posted by James at 17:18 | Comments (1)
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November 14, 2004

A relation from elements of one set to (unique) elements of another

I've not really said anything about the US election result: at the time I didn't want to think about it, and since then everything I might want to say has probably been said. So while sorry everybody is probably worth a link, and that IQ thing (even if it did turn out to be a fake), I've not really wanted to join in with the whole mapping craze and so on.

I did like this one though.

Posted by James at 15:19 | Comments (0)
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So this podcasting lark

(No, don't worry, I'm not going to subject you to my voice, especially given the current state of my throat.)

I still don't understand it, just as I didn't when it was merely called audioblogging. Robert Scoble obviously gets it, even though he only manages to listen to an hour or two of podcasts a day, compared to the almost 1000 regular blogs he reads. Dave Winer obviously gets it, and will no doubt be claiming to have invented if before too long1.

But despite the long list of blogging luminaries who think podcasting is the best thing since the invention of the potato waffle, I really can't understand the appeal. Sure, I guess it's quicker to produce, because most people can speak faster than they can type; it's a hell of a lot slower to consume, though, because the reader can almost certainly read quicker than you can speak. And since, even on an insignificant, little-read blog like this one, readers outnumber writers dozens to one, I can't see how this tradeoff makes any sense at all.

Is it that people who audioblog don't realise how slow speaking is compared to reading? Is it that people who listen to audioblogs think what's being said is so important, it's worth the extra time to take in? Or is it just that audiobloggers have even bigger egos than regular bloggers?

Answers on a postcard, comment, or trackback...

1 oops, too late

Posted by James at 00:40 | Comments (3)
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November 01, 2004

Hate

This was going to be a long, carefully thought out blog entry, covering a range of issues. Then firefox arbitrarily decided to exit, taking all my content with it. I hate software

(And yes, I know, I should write my blog entries in something other than a text box on a webpage. I got as far as installing gnome-blog...)

Posted by James at 02:36 | Comments (2)
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