This great Flash clock was sent as part of a joke about the invention of an Irish digital clock. Great use of Flash regardless of the quality of the joke.

As if to prove that the internet is actually making the world smaller (with the American election helping out by creating a common topic of conversation), one of my online scrabble opponents (who, by the way, is routinely slaughtering me with seven-word scores) forwarded me the following email from his brother, a rather inspiring reflection on Kerry’s glorious defeat:

“Yeah I’m bummed. Four more years of the pseudo-Christian Taliban, I fear for my country and I fear for my family. But I can tell you, I’m also elated. When I started working on this election my main and only goal was to keep my dear and beloved state of Wisconsin out of the neo-con grip of the Bush administration. We had a thousand volunteers in Superior and Northern Wisconsin with the same thought in mind. These beloved people gave their hearts and souls to this very cause. Signs went up everywhere, no phone was left uncalled and no door unknocked. My time canvassing for Kerry was some of the hardest and most fulfilling work I had ever attempted. I talked to the affluent and I talked with the poor. The young and the old. The people struggling in quiet desperation just to put food on their table; working three jobs so their kids would have shoes and their house would be heated. A ninety year old gentleman in a trailer court who had just lost his wife of 63 years but still had voted his absentee ballot because in all of his many years he had never seen this country in such crisis.

“This was all inspiring and I’ ll never forget it. Seeing my daughters get involved, to sense that this was their future being squandered and to watch them campaign for peace and justice brings tears to an old man’s eyes. I’ve never been prouder.

“And the good news is their work was rewarded. Superior and Douglas County had the biggest most unexpected turnout in history. They had to photocopy ballots because they ran out. People stood in line for hours to cast their ballot; and the end result was that the home of fighting Bob Lafollet, Gaylord nelson and Bill Proxmie stayed in the Dem. column. Kerry won by 10,000 votes in Northern Wisconsin and that was his margin of victory. We kept Frank Boyle and Gary Sherman in the Assembly. Two of the most progressive and brilliant representatives that this state has ever seen. And who can forget Russ Feingold; the most courageous man in the Senate.

“It was a good fight and we did good.

“Northern Wisconsin was not fooled by the politics of hate and fear. We were motivated by a vision of peace and hope. God I love it here. Rick.”

Meanwhile, for another silver lining, check out this response to the Bush defeat by underfunded scientists in California, although if you read further into the article, you’ll see it could actually harm science for decades to come, as government may withdraw funding generally as they leave states to raise their own funds. Also worth reading to see how those states concerned about environmental policy are making their own policies.

When someone sent me an innuendo-ridden script from 80s children’s TV programme Rainbow, I thought it was one of those urban myths that are so easily propagated on the web. But, days later, from a different source, I received a link to the actual video of that programme (sample quote: Bungle: “Rod and Roger can get their instruments out and Jane has got two lovely Maracas.”).

So unless someone’s done some particularly amazing lip-synching, or they made this but never broadcast it, I find my sceptical self corrected.

How the actors kept their faces straight, I don’t know.

According to the Globe and Mail:

“A group of Canadian and U.S. scientists reported Tuesday that computer simulations show that a large-scale use of wind farms to generate electrical power could create a significant temperature change over Earth’s land masses.

“While the precise tradeoff between the climate changes from wind farms versus that from carbon-based power systems is still a matter of contention, the fact that wind power isn’t climate neutral leaps out of the simulations.”

And no, I don’t routinely read the Globe and Mail. It was linked to by the excellent Slashdot.

Now that blogs have finally convinced me of their usefulness, I’m trying to put together a brief history, as well as a list of blogs that have made the mainstream news. Current links unearthed are as follows:

• Rebecca Blood’s ‘Weblogs: a history and perspective’ (she’s also written a book on the subject)
• Dave Winer’s history of weblogs
• The results from my Google search have yet to be thoroughly rummaged, but I’ll update this posting as and when.

Famous blogs include:

• The Baghdad Blog: Salam Pax’s diary of his experiences during the bombing of Baghdad became world famous, and have now been published as a book. Also worth checking out is Christopher Allbritton’s coverage at Back to Iraq: he set himself up as the war’s first independent correspondent, and, with contributions from readers, managed to successfully report from the country without the restrictions that conventional journalists operated under – restrictions such as those of CNN, who asked their correspondent Kevin Sites to suspend his (independently written) blog.
  
• Also published as a book was Breakup Babe, albeit somewhat less journalistically relevant.
  
• Mariah Carey famously went into emotional meltdown live on her blog.
• Queen of the Sky: Semi-fictional account of a US air hostess’s life. She was sacked as a result of the blog – not the only one to suffer such repercussions, as this Wired article attests.
  
• The blogs that exposed CBS: well, there were a few. This one – not actually a blog, but a message board post – supposedly started it all. This article gives an overview of what happened, but strangely, no links. For those you need to look at this article on the always useful Cyberjournalist.net.
• Cyberjournalist.net also gives the detail behind blogs that led to the resignation of the senate GOP leader. Yes, it passed me by too.

If you can think of any more (is anyone out there?) let me know.

Changing the way we view news? A new method of news surfing for the information age? 10×10 is one of the best ideas I’ve seen in ages: 100 images from the latest news stories, presented in a grid format and updated on a click. Rollover each image to see a word highlighted to the right (apparently worked out from a linguistic analysis of news text).

Contrary to first impressions, it is the words that are the most important for the hour, and the images only support those. You can also click on ‘history’ at the bottom to see snapshots from previous times – although this only goes back to the beginning of November.

The guy who created the site is also behind Wordcount – “an interactive presentation of the 88,000 most frequently used English words, arranged as one very long sentence.” In fact, just go to his site and spend your afternoon browsing through his previous projects. You’ve nothing really important to do, have you?

Thanks to a conversation with a colleague who’s been doing this longer than I have, I’ve now added a Creative Commons licence to my blog. This is one of those fascinating developments that digitalisation has produced in the intellectual property area, ideal for those who think information should be free, but are still afraid of being shafted by some upstart in Cheshire.

Me, I’m not so precious about what I produce. This may be to do with the fact that once upon a time I would be producing thousands of words of copy every week, but it seems to me that the value lies not in what I’ve put on paper once upon a time, but with what’s in my head and RSI-raddled fingers, so I will continue to refrain from putting copyright symbols on the bottoms of pages.

UPDATE (Nov 11 2004): Creative Commons have now branched out into patents and scientific publishing, in case you were interested.

The American election provided some great examples of online journalism. MSNBC produced an interactive map showing which areas had the biggest problems with voting (which was wiped just as I was drafting this – images to come) complete with the previous election’s results in those areas. Interestingly, the areas with most (recorded) problems tended to vote Democrat. Their Citizen Journalist pages also recorded voter reactions to the day and there was a blog recording the whole process in real-time.

Cursor.org recorded the whole thing beautifully, including the fact that:

“International election monitors in Florida told the International Herald Tribune that they “had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system.” Plus: ‘Foreign monitors barred from some US polling stations.'”

The collective groan around the world at Bush’s reelection was recorded best on the BBC site, while The Daily Mirror’s hilarious front page (“How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?”) was backed up with such subtle journalism as God help America.

The third and final (and easily the best) part of The Power of Nightmares documentary was broadcast last night on BBC2. Fascinating stuff about how the terrorist threat has been exaggerated by politicians, this was put together in a collage style that will, in future years, be stored in some multimedia encyclopedia under the entry ‘Information Overload’. My brain is now seared with images of a 30-foot genie materialising out of smoke on a beach, ‘mad eyes’ and a slo-mo shot of a swooping owl.

Anyway, aside from the style, there were some very useful facts for those debates I’ve been having recently with people via online scrabble. These include

• ‘dirty bombs’ being ineffective and unlikely to kill anyone (Iraq and US tested them years ago but found them to be useless), and
  
• despite hundreds of arrests in the UK and US, not one person has been convicted of plotting a terrorist act in connection with Islam.

Kuro5hin has a nice page about it, which has some discussion and links to more at Crooked Timber and a summary of the main points at iconoplex. Isn’t the web just lovely.