Yahoo My Web

Hmmm... I just received an invitation from a good friend to participate in sharing links via Yahoo's myWeb. I couldn't log in to it, which was odd. I did some research on it and found that Yahoo are touting it as a social search system leveraging social networks to find relevant pages. (They'll have to fix it first.)

It actually sounds like people simply sharing bookmarks. I'm not knocking that; sharing bookmarks is incredibly valuable and a lot of blogging does exactly that. People sharing links via blogs have been very useful to me, but to call this a social search or to ever be tempted to limit a search to pages suggested by others strikes me as dangerous. Trying to turn a system of shared bookmarks into a popular search engine risks producing an ourouborous reminiscent of current big media.

One of the best things about the web is that which "experts" so decried when it first exploded into public consciousness. They worried that when everybody could self-publish nobody would be able to find the "real" information. Of course they were actually worried that "experts" would no longer have a privileged place in society. But what happened was a great surprise to almost everybody. We all suddenly had access to vastly more useful info than ever before and found that almost everyone is an expert on something. The few pre-web experts remained important in their fields, but we found that there were millions more experts than anybody previously thought.

Yahoo's myWeb sounds like a way of whittling the web down to the "manageable" size of the pool of pre-web experts. But of course this clearly can't be done. There are truly many millions of experts in everything out there on everything from overlockers to trypanosomes to Abba lyrics to MNG construction to cast iron toy cars of the '50s to reflectivity of smog aerosols to fungi found in Sunshine Coast, QLD forests.

shared bookmarks

Here is a useful shared bookmarks system:
http://del.icio.us/

Hurricane Ivan

Interesting thing I read in New Scientist letters pages last night:

...hurricane Ivan "veered from its original New Orleans-bound course last year"... it struck Cuba, with at least as much devastating force as Katrina struck Louisiana.

But this went largely unreported in our media, possibly because the much-maligned government of Cuba had taken the trouble to prepare for this predictable event, rather than relying on luck and charity. Nearly 2 million people were evacuated from the path of the storm in a systematic and orderly fashion, and not one Cuban was killed. It's not exactly rocket science.

Interesting. As in England, I don't recall this being reported here in Australia.
It worries me that we are becoming ever more of a US state.

Veronica Mars

I have been watching a brilliant TV show called Veronica Mars. I have been amazed by its superb writing and acting and generally high quality of production.

Because I don't really get TV reception here I rely upon a few friends to give me shows recorded to CD or DVD. This show definitely goes onto my list of series to buy when I have the money for the commercial DVD set.

The name might make you think it is science fiction. It isn't. It is a teen drama, but not like any other that I've seen. The coolest thing is that violence is almost totally absent from this show. The heroine (Veronica Mars, herself) solves suspenseful problems with the use of a good brain and quick wit.

I heartily recommend it.

totally, totally cool!

The backlash against the recording industry begins in earnest. I already know a lot of people who refuse to buy CDs made by the big corporations, but that, by itself can never be enough. Perhaps the recording industry execs need to be hit legally and hit heavily to make them stop hurting people. I have given up hoping that these paranoid coke-fried fools will realise that file sharing could be turned to their advantage and that file sharers are their best customers.

RIAA victim fights back.
Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of "outrage", and deceptive business practices.