Clusty the Clustering Engine looks like a fun clustered search. It does pretty well with me.
Archive for September, 2004
Cool Tools has a good review / list of review sites.
Charles Arthur relays the suggestion that youshouldn’t pay late charges on bank accounts or credit cards. Hmm. I’ve not had one of these for a while, but as he says, it is an unreasonable amount of money over time.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - The New Series is available for downloadable listening.
Headshift reflect on what networked web services might look like.
NASA World Wind looks like a nice way of looking at the earth from above.
iMPOWER have got the headhunters in to try to replace me. They’ve called three of my clients already…
Looks like the Spaniards (well a Spaniard) has picked up the Local egov site.
Choice in public services is an Audit Commission report that suggests that people would like some element of choice in public services, but aren’t willing to pay for it. Plus ca change.
Of course the music industry is up the creek because of piracy? I think not: the Independentreports the reality
But figures from the US show that Apple Computer, the dominant legal download business in Europe and the US, retains just 4 cents from each 99-cent (55p) track sale while “mechanical copyright” holders - generally the record labels, who own copyright in the song’s recording - take 62 cents or more. Music publishers take the rest - about 8 cents.
With the sites, the copyright owners have doubled their share of royalties, even though the marginal cost of manufacturing has fallen to almost zero.
How much goes to the artist?
Brown University’s 4th annual global e-government study is an odd hodge podge of data. Why should having audio and video clips on a website mean you get a good score for e-government?
Less is more for government websites argues that the push to “get it all online” is weakening the case for e-government. There is some truth in this, but it does overlook the fact that the “putting services online” programme is coupled with a massive transformational change programme in all the English Local Authorities I have worked with. Do any of the authorities really think they can get joined up 100% service delivery online? I don’t think so. Are they working the ones that make sense first? In most cases yes.
Boris Johnson is blogging. We can all go home now.
eProvisia checks your mail by hand for Spam. Very low-tech!
Death of the book ? says no, the book isn’t dead, but surely this is the beginning of the emergence of eBooks as a new medium. Not one that replaces paper books, but one that improves, fills in and fleshes out the printed word?
Ben makes the valid point in I’m not paying for that… that were the BBC’s license fee to be removed, the net result would be additional cost to consumers thanks to the advertising required to pay for the programmes. And you can bet we’d be paying more than a tenner a month.
Responsive Interfaces and Effective People links the task management process from Getting Things Done with a neater way of running application interfaces. Nice idea, and good to see ideas from two completely different areas coming together. Another interesting point is that the meta-effort of keeping the GTD system going can be larger than the effort to do the work you’re trying to manage.
The File Sharing Report asks whether file sharing (p2p) is a silent complaint about the business model of the software, movie and music industries. There’s some sense in that thought. It fits pretty well with my use of the technology (to save me ripping whole albums to my iRiver, to see if its worth seeing a movie at the pictures, to test whether software is right or not).
Saving Energy Without Derision is a free PDF about its subject. The idea is to do simple things (I found myself turning off all the unused lights in the house as usual and thought how much difference it would make if all my neighbours did the same) and understand their effect. [NB the PDF link is gone, there's a Google cache of the file viewable in HTML or you can download it from me here]
Salvo! has an amazing number of things for sale, including (currently) the whole of the Baltic Exchange. Just astonishing what you can get on the net.
