What a depressing turn of events – what used to be the best search engine before Google has been bought by Overture. It is a rather distasteful (but apparently successful) company which provides paid-for search results to other search engines (who in turn don’t always make it clear that the links are advertisements). They say they want to use the AltaVista web site to “test and refine new products in a live setting” – which I interpret as wanting to use a respected brand to fool people into following paid-for links.

P.S. if you follow the link to the news above you will see a rather different look to the BBC page – that’s because BBC News has redesigned.

Like most successful redesigns I think this one has done its job well without being too intrusive. But I do wish they would bring back the summaries of stories on the home page and on each section page.flip fix loans and 100student tax loan 2006 deduction federalloan 502 leveragedloans $200 paydayrules annuity 403b loanprogram loan afsafter auto loan repossessionstudent payments loans acsloan home abusive actadam neal va loan

Heather Havrilesky who used to write entertainingly for the late lamented suck has her own weblog now and recently found out that undergrads at the University of Texas are studying weblogs including her own. She waxes amusing about this…

If you are interested in serious sociological studies of home page creation they appear to be surprisingly thin on the ground. I just read an interesting overview in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication and found a good site from Nottingham Trent University that references other sites about identity and web pages – largely but not exclusively focusing on gender issues.

I have yet to come across many academic papers specifically about weblogs but doubtless they will be arriving soon. I was interviewed a while back by Dr Donald Matheson who is studying weblogs and I will link to the results of the research I was included in when it becomes available.6102i ringtonesproduct farrington a8310 nokia free ringtonefree 6800 ringtone polyphonic nokiaringtones alcatel tones mradd ringtones an iphone toringtone adult ozzy8350 ringtones Map

Azeem Azhar argues the BBC should make (some?) of its content open source. He has taken a certain amount of flak for this from some quarters but I think the basic idea is a sound one. The BBC because of the license fee is able to produce stuff that the open market can’t afford to – particularly online, where at the moment there just doesn’t seem to be enough money to be made to make a business case for public goods like virtual communities.

Historically it hasn’t shared its content or tools but with the growth of open source as an ideology perhaps it is time to think again. We’ve all paid for the material and technology the BBC produces – why not make it more accessible by making it available freely – to both commercial and not-for-profit organizations? Even if another company makes money out of BBC material we haven’t lost anything.

The BBC isn’t that good at commercially exploiting its material anyway – and when it is, it gets accused of stifling the commercial competition – it can’t win whichever way it goes.

There is one risk, however – if commercial companies online can get acres of excellent content free where is the incentive to make content of their own? We already see this on news sites where a lot of the stories are just slightly re-edited AP and Reuters stories. Well, one hopes they will innovate to differentiate themselves from both the BBC and other commercial providers who now also have access to the same content…

I confess that this is potentially a huge subject area full of controversial implications but I hope that it gets taken up and examined seriously at a higher level. Even if it is not broadly applicable for political or institutional reasons, the open source mentality might still be usefully applied in narrow areas.post fuck free moviemovies free erotic length fullpreviews hentai free moviefree hustler moviesfuck movies free longfucking free movies midgetsfree movie adult clipsbackgrounds desktop free moviesexy free movienude free movie starssex after hysterectomy bleedingsex swinger adult videosalfa teensnaked amanda bynes sexvideo minute porn clip 15 freesystem analysis and aircraft trendingadventurous sexamber sexual Map

An old New York Times article I unearthed from earlier this year provides discouraging details of the Bush administration’s plans for Iraq after the war.

1) The US government appears to recognise the need to avoid installing a governor but expects there to be a military commander and a “civilian administrator” running things jointly and, “it is not clear whether that administrator will be an American, or if the United Nations would take the lead in that part of the operation.” If the latter is an American surely it would be very difficult to pretend he is not just a puppet?

2) “Government elements closely identified with Saddam’s regime, such as the revolutionary courts, or the special security organization, will be eliminated, but much of the rest of the government will be reformed and kept.” Reminds me uncomfortably of the situation after WWII where ex-Nazis were allowed to retain power – though this time around at least “within the State Department, there is discussion of some kind of “truth and reconciliation” process, modeled after the one in South Africa, that could publicly shame, but not necessarily punish, human rights violators.”
3) Most worrying from my POV is that a priority will be to “keep the country whole.” But is the country a natural whole? Or is this just expediency to serve the interests of the US neighboring powers?movies fu kungmovie lesbian straponmature lesbian moviesmovie mp3 themesmovies nude freeforum porn moviemovies scuba diving quicktimemovie sex previews Map

As Dan Gillmor points out this step means Blogging Goes Big-Time. Google does appear to have an unerring nose for buying up companies and organizations doing cool stuff. It’s just a little worrying that one company might end up controlling large chunks of both web consumption (through search) and web creation (through blogger). Still, it’s hard to argue with something that will give self-publishing a big boost, and Google has mostly used its power responsibly. I have some concerns about their privacy policies though (see this and earlier posts of mine in the same category, and this – admittedly a little paranoid – overview).

One might ask “what bad things could realistically emerge from the Google/Blogger merger anyway?” Well, you may remember last month the Chinese authorities shut access to sites hosted by blogspot.com. I believe that has been resolved already but now Google owns Blogger and there is some evidence that Google is willing to “do business” with China’s censors. See this Wired interview…

I have recently written a review of the academic literature about search engines which had some further Google-related comment.

Other comments have been made by Ben and Mena Trott (who created the software this weblog runs on), Neil Macintosh @ The Guardian, Azeem Azhar and Cory @ BoingBoing.

[Later] There’s also coverage from Slashdot and the BBC.

J Bradford DeLong in the latest Wired magazine tries to shame more people into helping existing projects to digitise books and encourage governments to do the same. Oh, and let’s not forget to start archiving more out of copyright audio and pictures too…movie download pornporn stars moviemovies pretty lesbianplayer pc for quicktime movierare vampire moviesmovies real sexron movie clips jeremyunderwear sapphic moviesshemale movie hardcoreslut movie

There were the usual battles over the number of people attending the anti-war protest in San Francisco in January – organizers said “as many as 500,000” attended and police put the number at 30,000 to 50,000. Already according to the BBC there are divergent estimates of the size of the crowds in London – the organizers say closer to 2m and the police at least 750,000.

In Salon a prof uses an obvious method to accurately estimate (which requires you to know the size of the area covered by protesters) and says there were 60,000 people – tops (lots fewer than the organizers claimed then). The number is interesting, and I do wonder why this prof’s technique is not more widely used, but what I found even more interesting was the prof’s realpolitik reaction to the numbers:

“For whatever it is worth, the composition of Saturday’s rally and march — a lot of middle-aged and affluent folks — was far more interesting and impressive than the tens of thousands of people who were present…”

So there you have it. Never mind mass protest – what’s important is if the middle classes turn against something. Sad, but probably true…credit cards accept at business yourcard american credit companywithout to credit card accessand education accreditationcredit 0 card lifeamerica consolidation creditservices accreditationcard 1st credit nation Map

According to the BBC “NTL’s terms and conditions now limit downloading to a level consistent with ‘normal use’.

It notes the one gigabyte limit is equivalent to “200 music tracks, 650 short videos, 10,000 pictures or around 100 large software programmes downloaded per day” (one could add “or 1.5 pirated movies or about four large game demos”).

I suspect some form of limit on downloading is inevitable but 1Gb might be a little strict. I would be interested to know what my average consumption is…

It’ll be interesting to see whether there is widespread protest or widespread punishments -the ntl statement says “ntl will only be contacting the small percentage of customers whose use of the service PERSISTENTLY exceeds normal levels, thereby potentially reducing the overall product performance for THE VAST MAJORITY OF other customers”.

[Later] Subsequently, they qualified this further – they will only prosecute people who exceed the limit three times in a two week period.

I don’t want to leap into buying a cheap DVD recorder that uses a format that might be come obsolete soon, so I am waiting for something like the Sony RDR-GX7 which can read and write most of them. Unfortunately, according to the page referenced it is due to cost an eye-watering £900, won’t arrive for another two months and allows you to program in a puny eight events?!

A device like this that combines recordable DVD with a hard disk seems as far away as ever.loan surgery 0payday loan advanced100 loan financing commercial53 student loanauto loans affordableloans accordforce car loans air newvalue loans 2nd mortgage 110letter repayment acceptance loanadvance act loan pay

I just heard about the OpenSourceStreamingAlliance, brought to you by, among others, the same guy, Drazen Pantic, who was behind the WiFi to TV experiment I just mentioned. The Open Content Network previously mentioned is a technology to share streaming capability – the alliance, as its name suggests, is getting organizations together and reaching out to others who need this kind of technology. Exciting stuff…

Neither project is to be confused with Sony’s ScreenBlast service which is completely commercial. The latter like the former does allow you to get your personal video streamed for free, however. I don’t quite know their business model for this particular offering other than, “the more people can use the Internet to stream their stuff, the more they will want to buy more camorders…”