As newsgathering continues to evolve, new ways of keeping track of current events are developing. Dave Winer joins Phil and Scott to discuss how Twitter and other social networking tools are changing the way that people read and react to the news. He talks about how he followed prior major news stories and why he now has started using social networking tools as a better way.

He then discusses his work with Twitter stats and reviews what can be learned from how Twitter works. He also reviews the possible future of these tools and assesses some of the ways that information is compiled and distributed and what might be different as time goes on.

Re Barger's list playing a central role in the origins of blogging, not sure I accept that the most important thing was a list of blogs, or even a network of them. People who think the task of blogging is to pull people together miss, imho, the important thing about blogging -- that it separates people and gives each individual a place to express themselves, not subject to veto. In that way it is different from a mail list. Blogs emphasize the individual over the group.

The argument continues to this day. People who say Twitter is a conversational medium would agree with those who say Barger was the founder. I see Twitter as a publishing environment, a place to push links, a notification system. Oddly, I think Barger with his linkblog approach (which was the same as the early Scripting News or the News Page of the 24 Hours project) would agree.

By Rudolf Ammann
Presented at Hypertext 2009
30 June 2009, Torino, Italy

Working from the online archival record, this paper aims to reconstruct the emergence at Jorn Barger’s initiative of the weblog community from a predecessor known as the NewsPage Network.

www.robotwisdom.com "For readers, the Internet is an embarrassment of riches, with thousands of pages of new text t sift through daily. Thank goodness, then, for "weblogs," sites that scour the Web for interesting prose and data. What elevates Robot Wisdom above other weblogs is the catholicity of its creator, Jorn Barger, who has a healthy appetite for everything from literature to science. The result is a world defined by Barger's curiosity, in which an article about a grand plan to film all nineteen Beckett plays sits comfortably alongside a report on post-Chernbyl cleanup efforts."

"Keywords Adamstown, Pennsylvania; All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com); Architects, Architecture; Architectural salvage; Barger, Jorn; Civil Liberties, Civil Rights; Communications ABSTRACT: WEB SIGHTINGS reviews of NYC Surveillance Camera Project (www.mediaeater.com/cameras); Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus (www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus); Inside.com ( www.inside.com); The On-Line Books Page (digital.library.upenn.edu/books); Ed Donaldson Hardware Restorations (www.eddonaldson.com); All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com); Rotten Tomatoes (www.rottentomatoes.com); Robot Wisdom (www.robotwisdom.com)."

But the richest people and the hundreds of thousands somewhat less rich, could not invest the money themselves. They needed intermediaries, the financial sector. Overwhelmed with such an amount of funds, and short of good opportunities to invest the capital, as well as enticed by large fees attending each transaction, the financial sector became more and more reckless, basically throwing money at anyone who would take it. Eventually, as we know, the bubble exploded.

"some economists don't think we should fix this. Some welcome high unemployment, thinking it’s the best way to get workers out of declining industries and into growth industries. They consider a period of high unemployment a way of convincing people who were previously employed "pounding nails in Nevada" to go do something else -- part of the respiration of the capitalist organism, as Josef Schumpeter said. They tend to like the fact that financial asset prices are now low, and condemn attempts to raise them as efforts to keep the feckless financiers who bought them during the boom from suffering their just punishment. Followers of this line of argument -- I call them the Marx-Mellon-Hayek-Hoover axis --tend to say things like: “What's to fix?”"

"One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days."

"At its heart is a formal Mathematica representation. Its inference engine is basically a large number of individually hand-engineered scripts for tapping into data which he and his team have spent the last several years gathering and "curating". For example, he has assembled tables of historical financial information about countries' GDP's and about companies' stock prices. In a small number of cases, he also connects via API to third party information, but mostly for realtime data such as a current stock price or current temperature. Rather than connecting to and relying on the current or future Semantic Web, Alpha computes its answers primarily from his own curated data to the extent possible; he sees Alpha as the home for almost all the information it needs, and will use to answer users' queries. "

"Wikipedia is offering an interesting feature: compile articles into books, and get it printed by "PediaPress." Alternatively you can get the book as a downloadable PDF or OpenDocument. Rad! I can imagine some pretty awesome/hilarious collections; what book would you make?"

"The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV. They lied because they could not truthfully defend their positions. But Russert's famed "gotcha" research couldn't catch them. Much has been said this eulogizing week about Russert's hard-working ways assembling the material in advance of the show. Old metal. When someone told a new lie on Meet the Press, such as when Dick Cheney flat-out denied he had ever said that intelligence confirmed the Al Qaeda/Iraq link, Meet the Press had no procedure for producing the contrary evidence. This would hardly have been difficult, given Google, an earpiece and a producer to do instant research. As it happened, NBC had the rebuttal to Cheney's lies in its own archives, but it remained for The Daily Show to do the research."

"20% of Nature readers -- mostly scientists -- say they up their mental performance with drugs such as Ritalin, Provigil, and Inderal."

"it would take more than 400 OLPC laptops to cover the same area and they would all have to be spaced out perfectly. We also have the possibility of using 500mW radios and 16 dBi antennas for even longer range in rural areas. When we consider the fact that a single failure in one of the mesh nodes due to battery drainage, moving out of range, software hang will cause the entire mesh scheme to break, there simply is no way to get around the centralized architecture."

"The government has forfeited its monopsonistic (i.e. sole employer) buying power over government-funded jobs killing people and breaking things, so the taxpayers are having to shell out much higher pay, either to Blackwater mercenaries or in six figure re-enlistment bonuses to U.S. military servicemen to keep them from going over to Blackwater. From the taxpayers' point of view, it's a ridiculous situation. This is not a unique case restricted to the military. Much of the demand for privatization of traditionally governmental jobs comes from government employees themselves who want a competitive job market for their skills. For example, the folks who run state lotteries have been working for years to get the state lottery business privatized so they can transfer from a civil service job to a "private"-sector job ... running a state-licensed monopoly. It's the best of both worlds!"

"a crack team of whipsmart librarians. Armed with some guidelines and an organizational zeal, they’re able to maintain consistent tagging rules on our daily output. They and their predecessors have been doing this for our material all the way back to 1851. While we are not able to share all of that metadata with the general public, metadata is available for all our electronic Web content from 2001 onwards. To see an example of this in action, view the source of a story like New Coast Guard Task in Arctic’s Warming Seas, and you will find the following metadata tags inside (but not all of them used):"

"Reichek’s samplers include embroidered reproductions of a Web page, Seurat’s portrait of his mother sewing, an Attic frieze, quotations in needlework from Freud and Colette, Charlotte Brontë’s favorite collar patterns with a paragraph from “Shirley,” and an extract from Darwin’s journals. Her needlework literally gives depth to the texts and images that she translates. “Unlike a pen or a brush,” she said, “a stitch pierces the surface that it covers and belies its flatness, becoming part of the supporting structure.”"

" Mormons for Equality and Social Justice (MESJ), for example, is made up of Latter-day Saints who are "anxiously engaged" in "furthering the cause of Zion by working for the gospel values of peace, equality, justice and wise stewardship of the Earth in a spirit of Christlike charity and concern." "

" “We think our paper is the first to bring external semantic context to the problem of object recognition,” said computer science professor Serge Belongie from UC San Diego. The researchers show that the Google Labs tool called Google Sets can be used to provide external contextual information to automated object identifiers. The paper will be presented on Thursday 18 October 2007 at ICCV 2007 – the 11th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision in Rio de Janeiro, Belongie. Google Sets generates lists of related items or objects from just a few examples. If you type in John, Paul and George, it will return the words Ringo, Beatles and John Lennon. If you type “neon” and “argon” it will gi"

"Not really design patterns, but UI design elements to steal."

"He alleges that the war in Iraq was botched for a reason: it will be easier for us to steal their oil if they do not have a functioning government. Some excerpts: Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. There is more, of course, but you get the idea. "

"My home server costs me a minimum of $13 every four weeks just to leave powered on and idling, or $170 per year. That doesn't count the roughly $700 I sunk into the disks and the other $700 I likely spent on the motherboard, CPU, case, RAM, and so on. Remember, these are absolute minimums, since the CPU does consume more power when it's actually doing work. "

"# Grid Layout Javascript enables web-developers to stick to a Grid Layout quickly and simply # Web20generator web 2.0 template generator # Roundedcornr rounded corners very usefull and stylish # Web 2.0 Badges a set of free and very cool transparent web badges # Ajaxload.info, Loadinfo and Webscriptlab: loading gif generators for AJAX applications # Background Image Maker A background image maker that lets you choose the type, margin, linecolor, background color, size and transparency # Button Maker A quick and easy tool that automatically creates an 80x15 or 88x31 button by your specifications # Mycoolbutton a simple web 2.0 button maker # Button Maker :: Adam Kalsey Create 80x15 stickers for your blog with any text or color you desire # Buttonator online buttons generator # Brilliant Button Maker by LucaZappa.com A web application to create customizable 80x15 brilliant buttons # PHP/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful PHP tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic data # ACME Label Maker Make a label # Create A Graph Create Graphs and Charts # iGal Online Image GALlery generator # Web 2.0 Logo Generator, Web 2.0 Stylr, logocreator, Web2.0 Logo Creator, Cool Text (Logo Generator) and Web 2.0 logo creatr: web 2.0 logo generators # Online SiGGy Maker Online Signature Maker # phpThumb() The PHP thumbnail creator # PixelButton PixelButton is an Antipixel online generator, easy and fast to use. # Portrait Avatar Maker # Portrait Illustration Maker Let's make an original icon # RSS Button Generator 150 Fonts, 144 Colors - 80x15 Pixel Button Maker # Sparklines You can star"

"Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Ontario sought to artificially re-create religious feelings by electrically stimulating that large subdivision of the brain. So Persinger created the “God helmet,” which generates weak electromagnetic fields and focuses them on particular regions of the brain’s surface."

"Quick Overview OS: Linux 7 - Windows 2 Web server: Apache 7 - IIS 2 - Lighttpd 2 Scripting: PHP 4 - Perl 4 - ASP.NET 2 - Python 1 - Java 1 Database: MySQL 7 - SQL Server 1 (possibly 2) Five of the sites use Memcached, a memory caching system originally developed by LiveJournal that has become a popular way to ease the load on for example databases. Note that not all information at the High Scalability website is complete (but it’s still a great resource)."

"There's simply no reason that this Congress and our government should protect the drug companies, but not protect workers, that they should protect Hollywood films, and not protect the environment. That's an overwhelming sentiment in this freshman class, in both parties, in both houses. And it's an overwhelming sentiment now in the majority in both houses overall."

"On the January 8 broadcast of National Public Radio's Morning Edition,...Cokie Roberts asserted that if Democrats pursue "fair trade" policies instead of "free trade" policies, they will be "essentially on the wrong side of history with globalization." Roberts made the assertion in response to host Steve Inskeep's request that she comment on his interview with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Brown had addressed precisely the question of "history," saying that "mainstream Democrats" have "evolved" from the early 1990s, when President Clinton pushed for congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Brown said: "[T]here has been an evolution among almost all Democrats that these trade agreements simply need to be constructed in a different way for fair trade, not for free trade." Roberts did not address the specific elements Brown laid out as part of a "fair trade" policy: ensuring compliance with environmental and labor standards. Rather, she simply responded to Inskeep's characterization of Brown's position as "cracking down on free trade." Roberts warned that opposition to free trade would be a "long-term loser" for Democrats and that Democrats "have to be very careful here, and there's a lot of division among Democrats on this issue." From the January 8 broadcast of NPR's Morning Edition: INSKEEP: Is there a danger of this being any kind of distraction for Democrats because you still do have what we could call the Bill Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, which, for example, pushed for the NAFTA free trade agreement? BROWN: That was 15 years ago. The so-called Bill Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has evolved into the mainstream Democrats, which we are, that say that we need trade agreements with environmental and labor standards. There has been an evolution since China in the late '90s, there has been an evolution among almost all Democrats that these trade agreements simply need to be constructed in a different way for fair trade, not for free trade. [...] INSKEEP: We interviewed Senator Brown to begin our series on what Democrats stand for as they take over Congress, and NPR news analyst Cokie Roberts has been listening in. Cokie, is the notion of cracking down on free trade a winning issue for Democrats? ROBERTS: It is in some states and in some districts, but it's a long-term loser. It puts them essentially on the wrong side of history with globalization. And even though labor unions often lose in trade agreements, consumers gain. And so the Democrats have to be very careful here, and there's a lot of division among Democrats on this issue. INSKEEP: OK, Cokie, thanks very much. We'll continue watching that issue and others. —R.M. "

"I just heard Cokie Roberts, National Public Radio's political analyst, tell listeners that the Democrats would suffer if they oppose President Bush's trade agenda, because they would be "on the wrong side of history." It would be great to be able to know the future course of history, but I question whether Ms. Roberts really has such knowledge. Has she looked into the out years of the 21st century and determined that the copyright and patent protection will become ever more stringent? Will the heirs of the Clinton-Bush trade agenda have our homes, offices, and public places thoroughly wired so that anyone using an unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted can be immediately apprehended and prosecuted? Will they have bathtub labs carefully policed so that anyone attempting to manufacture lifesaving drugs that are subject to patent protection will be harshly prosecuted for interferring with Pfizer and Merck's profits? That may be what the future holds, but I would like to think that it is still contested, not predetermined, as Ms. Roberts claims. Of course, those opposing this future would have a better chance if they didn't have to pay taxes so that "experts" like Ms. Roberts could tell the public that they have no chance. --Dean Baker Posted by Dean Baker on January 8, 2007 6:19 AM | Permalink "

"The best way, therefore, to seek an answer to the question will be to bear in mind that if the Two Source Theory is correct, one will expect to see not only Luke but also Matthew showing signs of fatigue in double tradition material. Those who believe in the existence of Q will have to look for their own examples of editorial fatigue in Matthew's versions of double tradition material. I have looked for examples and cannot find any. On the Q theory it does strain plausibility that Luke should often show fatigue in double tradition material and that Matthew should never do so, especially [58] given Matthew's clearly observable tendency to become fatigued in his editing of Mark. "

" * “Click to continue”: 8.53% * “Continue to article”: 3.3% * “Read more”: (-)1.8% The lesson is clear. Not only should you use actionable anchor text if you really want someone to click, but you should also tell people to take the exact action you want them to perform in order to get the best response. Click here to read the original Marketing Sherpa article in its entirety, and have a good Monday. :-) Enjoy this post? Vote for it at Digg. Thanks!"

""Microformats support is one of the most relevant features coming to Firefox 3.""

" * 2ndlife * 3d * 60s * abstract * africa * ai * algorithms * ambiguous * anime * anomalies * antonioni * apes * apps * archeology * art * astronomy * beatles * beck * beer * bestlists * biography * bjork * blogs * blogsci * bonobos * books * brazil * bubble * burningman * business * caffeine * cartoons * cats * celebs * chess * china * chomsky * cliches * coincidence * colbert * color * comix * conjectures * consoles * dance * davidlynch * design * designexperiment * dilbert * dontmiss * drugs * earbuds * ecology * economics * education * ethics * faves * fcc * flash * food * friv * frugal * games * generator * genetics * ggn * ggw * google * googlegroups * googlenews * gossip * gwarming * hasbara * health * hoaxtop * hope * housing * housingbubble * humor * interface * iraq * islam * israel * japan * jonimitchell * jornbarger * judaism * katemoss * kids * language * linkset * lists * lit * lo-tech * local * make * maps * mars * mashup * math * media * memewatch * money * movies * mp3s * music * neocons * neologisms * news * nostalgia * npr * obl * oil * overheard * pgut * pix * poems * politics * power * radio * recycling * reference * religion * robots * semanticweb * sex * simulations * space * strange * stupidity * suggestions * surrealism * tech * theresaduncan * toys * triphop * uncannyvalley * venezuela * videos * visualisation * wbu * weather * web20 * wikipedia * willwright * women "

How jpg compression works

"What makes someone start her own library? One of the multiple barriers put in place by major research libraries is that they don't enable ordinary people to make use of extraordinary materials. So the idea of making a library was fed by my experience that college and university libraries' closed stacks inhibit browsing and the process of random discovery. I always felt like I had my best ideas or developed my best projects when I was wandering and looking for certain things, but then finding things I didn't expect. How did this "process of random discovery" inform how you structured your library? Even at public libraries, the subjects I was interested in were scattered. They were either not present at all or organized in a way that made no intuitive sense to me. Neither Dewey Decimal nor Library of Congress as an organization method made any intuitive sense to me. It's like organizing your record collection or book collection at home. I've always used organization as a way to create juxtapositions and cluster little sets of coherency in my own book collection in a way that pleases me."

"Ever read a book that was a few hundred pages longer than it needed to be? Yeah, so have we. Fortunately, there are authors out there that would rather have a concise and effective book than a lengthy and diluted tome, and that's where we come in. Welcome to the lazylibrary, where you can find books on any topic without having to worry about high page counts. If it's over 200 pages, you won't even see it. Read all about anything, in less time, for (usually) less money. "

"Certainly, there should be a vision of what you intend to replace the bad old system with--European-style social democracy, Latin American-style socialism, or how about just American capitalism with some regulation thrown in? Global capitalism will survive the current credit crisis; already, the government has rushed in to soothe the feverish markets. But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis. Who would have thought that foreclosures in Stockton and Cleveland would roil the markets of London and Shanghai? The poor have risen up and spoken; only it sounds less like a shout of protest than a low, strangled, cry of pain. "

"born 1953 springfield ohio 1953-1966 yellow springs ohio, island of avant-garde culture in sea of cornfields nyc magazine and newspaper subscriptions: new yorker, sunday times book review and arts section later: village voice, new york magazine also: the reporter, saturday review, i.f. stone's weekly, science newsletter krokodil (russian language humor magazine) saw jfk during 1960 campaign stop in dayton arguable bacon number of 3 having played a squirrel elf to fred gwynne's 'bottom' in 1961 midsummers night dream stanford-binet iq in 1962 was 185 hypersensitive androgynous quiet compulsive reader lazy eye annual unrequited crushes literally unable to express anger before age 20 1st computer was minivac 601 c1964 baseball fan (reds) beatles fan heathkit hobbyist, av club fastest iceskater in class moved to bemus point ny 1966-1970 anti-vietnam accelerated math/science graduated valedictorian a year early considered physical sciences unchallenging targeted psychology instead jamestown (ny) community college antioch college new college (sarasota fl) university of buffalo read the texts and skipped the tests rejected experimental paradigm instead fusing computer simulation with literary standards of description real progress hinging on spiritual self-knowledge via krishnamurti especially 1974 a turningpoint pynchon nabokov robert stone walker percy g spencer brown compiling a database on index cards of 'literary indications' brief insightful literary descriptions of human behavior database gradually took cyclic shape heaven-fall-hell- rise-by-conformity rise-by-experiment morphing into an ungainly poem called 'brainfeathers' that turned out to closely parallel finnegans wake 1978 was another turningpoint cybernetic psychology = robot wisdom scientific theories of snowflake formation and atp mechanics omni magazine's 'world hardest iq test' qualifying for the four-sigma society and attending their convention in san francisco anti-math story-notation language and epiphany of 'missile command' arcade game as programmable platform for anti-math self-taught apple2 machine language worked on arcade conversions for apple, c64 and atari (now in chicago area) burned out as coder did telephone sales and customer service at pc network and elek-tek relished the chicago dance/theater scene performing member of excite dance collective nonperforming member of jellyeye drum theatre unrequited romance inspired 'solace' cybernetic/analytic anthology of quotes about romantic love (also some original jazz songs) hired as research programmer at roger schank's ai lab at northwestern university scored 780 math 790 verbal 800 analytic on GREs phd program dangled as carrot fractal-thicket indexing discovered and suppressed (arguable erdos number of 7 for tech report co-authored with schank) fwake-l mailing list about finnegans wake led to deep research into joyce manuscripts usenet enthusiast 1990-2003 (google groups shows 9430 posts) consulted for chris crawford 1997 on erasmatron story-engine requiring macintosh upgrade leading to belated discovery of www and 17 december 1997 coinage of word 'weblog' (a smallish one among hundreds of ongoing neologisms) online profile by julian dibbell twisted facts and quotes to fit a lazy thesis gigantic brouhaha about criticising israel in 2000 led to shift from mostly-blogging to mostly-joyce-studies rethinking ulysses and the ellmann biography later mostly-richly-linked-timelines-experiments covered 'codecon 2005' for the register wired magazine published a libelous fiction by paul boutin currently extending graph theory to accommodate human psychological complexity via 'worldtree' graphs and exploring 'discourse patterns' "

"including names like John Dominic Crossan, Richard Bauckham, Philip Esler, Adela Yarbro Collins, Kathleen Corley and Marcus Borg. Alongside these there were some independent scholars like Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. It has been interesting to watch as it has become clear that several of the listed fellows in fact have no association with the project at all. I asked Richard Bauckham, for example, and he confirmed that he had nothing to do with the project and could not imagine how he was added. I would like to add that I also asked Justin Meggitt about his involvement and he confirmed that he had been asked to be a fellow."

"Simple reel for earbud cables"

"Make a speaker from a plastic cup"

" * take an index card and cut it in half * draw a line from the center to one of the corners, as illustrated below"

"The word “kayak” came into the European languages in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, probably brought from Greenland by Dutch or Danish whalers. Some version of this word is now used in most European languages for any boat built on the model of Inuit (Eskimo) skin boats. Long before that, however, boat names cognate with “kayak” had already been found in most of the Turkish languages, being first attested by Kashgari in a book written for the caliph in Baghdad during the eleventh century AD (precluding the idea that Turks learned the word from the West.) Related words are also found in some of the Mongol and Tungus languages of Central Asia and Siberia, as well as in Hungarian, Russian, and several of the other Finno-Ugric or Slavic languages of Eastern Europe. (The distributions make it almost certain that the word was originally Turkish, and was borrowed by the other languages). Through Turkish, in the 1500’s the “caique” finally appeared in Italian as the name of a boat found on the Adriatic, and the name spread from there to the other European languages, finally reaching Sweden in the 1700’s. There the boat names “caique” and “kayak” met – albeit as the names of boats of entirely different kinds. The fact that the Turks and the Inuit both had boat names pronounced something like “kayak” seems at first to be a pure coincidence of the type that cranks love and linguists dread. However, a good case can be made that the Inuit and the Turkish words were etymologically related, and that the word probably originated in Turkish. "

"Graphic designer Olivier Patte lives at the top of hilly Montmartre, and his station is often empty when he goes looking for a bike. "Everyone goes down and no one wants to ride the bike up the hill," said Patte, 30. "The bikes are all at the bottom." The city has trucks to move the bicycles from one station to another, but officials say they need time to learn the traffic patterns. Another problem, Patte said, is taxi drivers. "The taxis really don't like us," he said. "They stick close to us so we can't turn right or left. We are in their bus lanes and they don't like it." There are, of course, the universal hazards for cyclists: erratic drivers and sudden stops. Car doors opened without warning. Wind and rain. Police who insist on enforcing the law. (No riding on sidewalks, no going the wrong way on one-way streets, alors.) No bike accidents were reported in the first week and, in fact, very few bicycle accidents are reported in Paris each year. In 2005, for example, bicycles accounted for only 5% of all traffic accidents, compared with 50% for motorbikes. Three people were killed in bike accidents that year, the latest for which there are figures. The bikes come without helmets, which are not required in Paris. And not wanted, it seems. Not a single rider of the scores observed Friday was wearing a helmet or appeared to want one. "What about a helmet?" businessman Xavier Barroux was asked as he fiddled with a bicycle lock in a business suit the color of creme brulee. "Ah, yes, it's a good question," he answered. "And?" "And I want to make it simple. I don't want to carry one." Le Figaro newspaper has been a bit snippy about the enterprise, which is new to Paris but ongoing in cities such as Barcelona, Spain; Geneva; Stockholm; and Vienna. In an editorial, the paper said it would take more than bicycles to solve Paris' traffic and pollution problems, and criticized the city for focusing on bulky three-speed bicycles. "Paris is not Amsterdam," the newspaper said, noting that the French capital is not flat and that perhaps its chic population won't be too happy cycling to business meetings. "An electric bike, which would prevent arriving at an appointment all sweaty, may have more future as an alternative," Le Figaro said. But city officials are bullish on the bikes. They say that Velib — short for velo libre, "free bike" — a public-private partnership, will have more than 20,000 bicycles on the streets by the end of the year and triple the number of parking stations. Renters can send away for an annual pass or buy daily, weekly and annual passes from machines at the stations. More than 17,000 annual passes already have been sold. The machines, which work with credit or debit cards, look much like ATMs but are a bit more complicated. It took new riders awhile to get the hang of things: They must swipe their card over the bike lock to take a bike and swipe it again when returning the bike. Renters must give a credit card or check deposit of 150 euros, which is collected only if the bike is not returned. Cyclists are responsible for any stolen bikes, though if they report the theft to police the price goes down from 150 euros to 35. So far, none of the bicycles has been stolen, according to a City Hall spokeswoman. Bike riders find that amazing — and one of the benefits of renting. "My son has had three bikes stolen this year," tour guide Marie Angel Denmory, 50, said as she rolled up her pant leg for a cross-river trek. "Mine was stolen a long time ago. It's much better to rent." "

" Robot Wisdom auxiliary Longer posts by Jorn Barger to supplement the Robot Wisdom link blog. 19 July 2007 Links On The MF-ing Page: a hypertext abc as we observe the 10th anniversary of 'blogging' and debate the precise definition of that term i'll go on record as claiming not only that rwwl was the 1st proper weblog but that it's still the only proper weblog an early product of the only proper hypertext lab on the web because properly designed experiments (here, experiments with links) need to minimise independent variables (here, like columns and styles) and pare down each design prototype to its barest essentials how best to * craft linkable pages * craft links to these pages [more] * arrange links on a page * embed links in prose * accommodate prose to embedded links it seems wholly bizarre to me ten years on that web trendsetters have barely begun these experiments obsessing instead on standards stylesheets and hypothetical semantic 'structures' some abcs: * one chapter per page * escape-links at the start of each page for lost visitors * related links at the end of each page for happy campers * similar links gouped, with major differences emphasized * linktext that minimizes disruption while reading (eg isolated in 'text buttons' at the end of a sentence) * linktext that tries to manage readers' expectations (eg text buttons that specify the filetype, the site, or special warnings) * page metatdata in the headers (not embedded) * pages that thoroughly massage all raw search results on some given topic * timelines or best-first as better organising principles than alphabetical . Labels: blogs, interface posted by Jorn at 8:07 AM << Home About Me My Photo Name: Jorn Barger View my complete profile Previous Posts * Jesus B * Robot Jenny lyrics * Tagportal: worldtree * Tag says it all * July 2007 links * Bremer bales * 50 Joycean conjectures annotated * A key to "Ravelstein" * The canonical Wallace Stevens * Action hypertext and the beehive paradigm Powered by Blogger "

"[Robot Wisdom home page] HyperTerrorist's Secret Lab for Hypertext Readability Theory Jorn Barger July 1999 (updated Sept 1999) This section of my website is a terrible mess. Boiled down to a sentence, my theory of Web design is "Be as considerate as possible, recognizing that everybody's browser is set differently." If you just want tips on designing your own website, start with my (good and bad) design awards, and this added-value theory, then this older checklist (dating from back when I used the text-only browser 'lynx'), and this longer compilation of ideas. (There's also an even older version of this overview.) There's also very old critiques of three sites: the Yale style manual, a Joyce site, and an AI site. Some model pages that embody hypertext theories: my one-layer Joyce-portal, the site map/tour, a series of author pages (eg Iris Murdoch) that try to integrate all the existing Web resources for each author, a dull page that uses a #-toc at the top to draw people in, my weblog that tries to make it as convenient as possible to keep up with Web news (and the net.literate portal pages where the best of these are sorted and archived), and most recently an ambitious attempt to make Finnegans Wake comprehensible via discreet hypertext theory. From a more theoretical perspective, hypertext research is in a shockingly confused state. Jakob Nielsen offers lots of excellent advice, but mixes in absurd prejudices as well, in particular claiming that many short pages are better than a single long one, a view that a simple poll dramatically disproves. Almost all the web design zines use a maximally obnoxious multipage format. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, has become a wretched drag on its evolution, advocating a boondoggle called XML. My alternative is browsers that do more parsing, especially respecting normal etext conventions. Javascript bookmarklets can do some kinds of parsing, too. For general rightheadedness about design and the Net, I admire Philip Greenspun, Lou Rosenfeld, and Alan Cooper. I have two theoretical/technical pieces on integrating hypertext theory with cognitive science: a 2k intro, and a later 9k approach. My recent theoretical posts to alt.hypertext and comp.human-factors. This timeline of hypertext has been very well received. Web-design pages: main : academia : info-design : adding value : resource-pages : lessons-learned : best-worst : plugging leaks Special topics: surfing-skills : url-hacking : open content : semantics : pagelength : linktext : startpages : bookmarklets : weblogging : colors : autobiographical pages : thumbnail-graphics : web-video : timeline of hypertext Anti-XML/W3C/etc: structure-myth : page-parsing : firstcut-parser : html-history : semantic web Design prototypes: topical portal : dense-content faq : annotated lit : random-access lit-summary : poetry sampler : gossipy history : author-resources : hyperlinked-timeline : horizontal-timeslice : web-dossier Website-resource pages: RobotWisdom.com : Altavista.com : 1911encyclopedia.com : Google.com : IMDb.com : Perseus.org : Salon.com : Yahoo.com Older stuff: design-lab : design-checklist : HyperTerrorist : design-theory : design cog-sci Search this site Search full Web Before you leave this site: Be sure you've checked out Jorn's weblog which offers daily updates on the best of the Web-- news etc, plus new pages on this site. See also the overview of the hundreds of pages of original content offered here, and the offer for a printed version of the site. Hosting provided by instinct.org. Content may be copied under Open Web Content License. "

"The publisher: Bloomsbury £13.71m – Its annual turnover in 1997, the year Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published. £109.1m – Its annual turnover eight years later, boosted by publication of the eagerly awaited sixth book. 74% - The drop in Bloomsbury's profits in 2006, when it didn't have a new Potter to publish. 50% - The drop in the company's share price since summer 2005, as investors have adjusted to life after Potter. £10m – Estimated cost of the worldwide security operation ahead of the publication of Deathly Hallows. The books 325m – The number of Harry Potter books sold worldwide (excluding pre-orders for Deathly Hallows). 1.8m – Amazon's pre-orders for Deathly Hallows, an all-time record. £27,000 – The price raised by a signed first edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, sold at auction by JK Rowling's father. £17.99 – The recommended retail price for Deathly Hallows. £5 – The cheapest price it will be available for in the UK. The films $140m – The first five day's US box office takings for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. $3.5bn – Warner Brothers' combined takings from the first four movies. The stars £17m – Daniel Radcliffe's fortune, as calculated by the Sunday Times Rich List 2007. £5m – Estimated earnings of co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, each."