Well, no, not really. What was actually stolen was roughly the equivalent of £3,000. But then that number doesn’t make for quite such an eye-grabbing headline, does it? I thought the BBC was above this kind of thing! Also, the opening paragraph: Space trading game Eve Online has suffered a virtual version of the credit crunch. It hasn’t, has it? It’s been a victim of theft, plain and simple. It’s not the credit crunch, it’s not a mirror of the real world in that sense. Simply, someone abused the trust that was placed in them for financial gain… This is borderline tabloid reporting from the BBC. Sigh.
Crowdsourcing from angry cinemagoers, someone has created a map of IMAX-branded screens with a simple key as to whether they are “proper” IMAX screens or merely the watered-down versions. Submit your local LIEMAX! I’ve emailed him with the London ones I’ve been to, because it’s happening on this side of the Pond too.
The Times newspaper has set up a cool little blog to keep track of its experiments in new ways of presenting news data and statistics. It’s a good example of how media is adapting to new technologies and how these technologies can do much better in spreading information than the printed word ever could. Worth keeping an eye on, if only for the graph showing how much banana consumption has gone up in the last 30 years!
I’ve been on Twitter for ages now, and I’m a big fan of it. I started off following other Tumblrs, but have gradually expanded my list of Followees to people who just seem cool and say interesting things.
I’m not too big a fan of the celebrities that are seemingly using it as a broadcast medium, but I’ll admit to following Mike Skinner (of The Streets) and Andy Murray. I’m impressed that people like Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross have fallen in love with it, and use it to communicate with fans directly. Hell, even Demi Moore is a fully-fledged Twitterer.
There was an interesting point made on something I read earlier this week about Twitter’s business model, or lack of: the article questioned how it could be that Stephen Fry is able to directly interact with over 100,000 fans without him or the fans paying for the service. Twitter is shouldering all of the costs for this interaction, with not much benefit other than Fry occasionally paying lipservice to the site in interviews.
What I’ve fairly recently started using Twitter for is news and information. I love following people, and hearing about their days and their thoughts, but Twitter can be really useful for finding out things.
I follow BreakingNewsOn for instant headlines, my local train operator for any delays in getting to/from work, and an RSS aggregator for my football team, Arsenal. I like the little headlines that pop throughout the day, even if I don’t click on all of them. It’s just convenient to see them all in one place, rather than having to go hunt through various sites for these snippets of news.
So, if you don’t Twitter, you should be…
I told the girlfriend about Rule 34 last night. We were watching some crappy tv programme about viral videos, and that one with the reaction to 2 Girls 1 Cup came on.
I explained what 2G1C was, and mentioned Rule 34, which says that whatever you can think of, no matter how strange or out there, on the internet there is porn of it.
It’s kind of an in-joke that started at 4chan, along with pretty much every other meme, but holds true in most cases.
My favourite example of just how weird porn can get is CakeFarts.com. It’s exactly as it describes: semi-naked girls farting on cakes. That’s it. So odd that you can’t help but laugh at it.
I sometimes forget just how immersed in internet culture I am. I could mention Rule 34 to every single real life friend, and I doubt that more than two would have any clue what I was on about. And I love that fact. I’m quite happy existing in both the real world and the internet subculture, each pretty much separate from the other.
Note: it’s really not offensive, nor is it pornographic. Yet another step towards censorship of the internet, unfortunately. This is the page in question, with lengthy discussion of the subject on Wikipedia itself and plenty of press coverage too. Interestingly, there’s one hell of Streisand Effect because of this ban. Compare today’s pageview statistics to those of a month ago. 172 times the average daily traffic (thus far)? Well done, web censorship guys! There are loads of comments, notably at the Guardian’s and the BBC’s blogs. It’s a little odd for this kind of image to become the rallying point for opponents of internet censorship, but so be it. What worries me is that the image (and whole Wikipedia article about the album) has been censored to around 95% of the UK internet users without any information as to why. If you try to access the Virgin Killer article on Wikipedia from the UK, most people will be given a standard “this page cannot be found” error page. It does not say that the page has been censored, nor any reasons why. It’s censorship without explanation. It’s been pointed out already that there are eleventy billion ways round this blacklist (go to de.wiki, for example), and people will always find a way. I feel a bit sad for paraphrasing V For Vendetta here, but ideas live on. And who are the IWF, who put this image/page on their blacklist and cut access to it for so many users? Their website states that they are “an independent self-regulatory body” which created the blacklist in question and managed to get most of the British ISPs to sign up to it. “Self-regulatory” is an instant alarm sign for me. I don’t trust anything which doesn’t have some kind of independent oversight, especially when it comes to censorship. See also: Film age certification. Can a body really be transparent when it regulates itself? For me, this screams of a publicity stunt. As the many articles point out, the same image is on Amazon, eBay, Google, and many others. Why weren’t they targetted as well? It’s been a while since kiddie porn was in the news… Yes, I’m probably ranting here, but this is one of those topics that I’m really interested in. Censorship as a whole, and web censorship specifically.
