Nick Denton

Google to overtake Yahoo
A web market research company, WebSideStory, has found Google will soon overtake Yahoo to become the top search engine. An analysis of search referrals shows Google on 32%, just short of Yahoo's 36%. Google's share was negligible as recently as June 2000.

WebSideStory #

Jews for Allah, backed by nickdenton.org
Some people seem to think that a link is an endorsement. I did a post a while back about a bizarre organization called Jews for Allah. I'm now on their links page. So, hey, if there are any Jews for Allah who have clicked over here, I've got this to say to you: I think you're totally nuts. I can understand Jews for Atheism. I am one. Secular Jews have brought us the atom bomb and most other good things in life, after all. But Jews for Allah. I would rant on about Islam being a profoundly backward and prejudiced culture, whatever the text of the Koran, antithetical to Jewish notions of progress and tolerance. But I just can't take the concept seriously.

Sites who link to Jews for Allah #

Melting pot, not
Glenn Reynolds is hosting an interesting discussion about intermarriage in the US, the general tone of which seems to be one of celebration of the melting pot. Lots of stories about friends who've married out. I love the ethnic diversity of the US, but I've got to pour a bit of cold water on the notion that America is becoming a mixed-up nation of happy mocha-colored people. Believe it or not, stodgy old England will get there first. Inter-racial relationships between blacks and whites are two to six times more likely in the UK than in the US. For instance, 24% of Black Caribbean women in the UK have native white partners compared with about 9% in the US. Read the study below from University of Massachusetts. The authors do acknowledge that some of the difference is to do with residential segregation. Blacks in the US are much less likely to meet whites in their daily lives. That is little consolation. Asians and Jews may be melting, but most US blacks are still out of the pot.

· InstaPundit.Com

· Unions between blacks and whites compared [University of Massachusetts] #

Monday, April 29

Blog marketing
Meg Hourihan, alternately appalled by the attentions of the web marketers and resigned to their discovery of weblogs, observes the wariness. "When participating in an interactive blog, it is unwise to attempt to directly market a product." It sounds just like, "When approaching a western lowland gorilla, it is unwise to attempt direct communication with the alpha male." Cue National Geographic music, fade to black

· Meg Hourihan

· Blogging in the Web's Footsteps [eMarketer]

· The coming of the blogs [CNET] #

European condescension
Too accurate for comfort, a line from Patrick Nielsen Hayden's weblog: "We'd like to stay friends. But the European and British intelligentsia, by and large, is like a friend who's been allowed to be condescending for so long that he literally can't see it any more."

Electrolite #

Sunday, April 28

An Axonometric View
A gorgeous three-dimensional drawing of downtown Manhattan. Still with the trade towers. You can buy this and other excellent map-drawings from MapPoster.com.

Downtown Manhattan: An Axonometric (3D) View of The Big Apple [MapPoster.com] #

Clusters in the web
Weblogs rose out of the ashes of the Usenet flame wars, but the medium is experiencing its own conflict. This, from USS Clueless, is a pretty accurate characterization of the different blogging communities. "The A-list, in particular, often have a kind of contempt or disgust for the war bloggers. Not only do the war bloggers have the wrong politics (the A-list tends to extreme liberalism; if it was left to them, Nader would be President of the US now) but they also see war blogs as a perversion of the medium. It's just not what blogs should be for... The War bloggers tend to look at the A-list as being unrealistic, idealistic, and out of touch. The effect of all this is to cut way down on the amount of cross-cluster linking; why should I route my readers to THOSE sons-of-bitches? Let 'em find their own readers."

· Clusters in the web [USS Clueless] #

Saturday, April 27

Celeblogs
Bruce Sterling was co-author with William Gibson of steampunk classic, The Difference Engine. I didn't realize that he had a weblog.

· Schism Matrix #

Taking the "you" out of user
A clear and interesting article by Meg Hourihan on using personas in web application design. By personas, she means users defined by their age, experience, computer setup, priorities. The moral: build for a persona, a customer, rather than for your inner geek. This is the design version of all those books about selling through abnegation of the self.

· Boxes and Arrows #

Friday, April 26

The Voice of France
Belatedly, here's Olivier Travers. a rare French Americaphile, on the results of the French election. "The demonstration that this country is a wreck is less in the high vote for Le Pen, than in the petty and contemptuous reactions of our pseudo-elite."

· Web Voice #

Turn your laptop into a website
Some advice from Bill Seitz on sharing files across the web. "So, you want to access (read-only?) files on your hard-drive. And I guess you want to let others do so as well. Anyone who knows the URL? Are you already running a web server on that machine? If so, the only issue is the dynamic DNS problem, right? If so, then check out www.dyndns.com." #

The silent majority
Brink Lindsey brought my attention showing widespread support for free trade - in the developed and developing worlds. The problem is that support is nebulous, and the protectionists, though usually a tiny minority, have much more immediately at stake. That's why we need politicians who can mobilize the silent majority for open economies, and defy vested interests. Too bad Bush isn't one of them.

BrinkLindsey.com #

European anti-semitism
   What a crock. The op-ed and weblog presses are churning out idiotic generalizations about European anti-semitism. So many that I'm just going to give you the Daypop search for the subject, and not link to every single individual posting. So what is the charge sheet? The showing of Le Pen in France's presidential election; the attacks on French synagogues; sympathy for the Palestinian cause; and Europe's generally sordid history. Let's put each in context.

   Le Pen is a nasty old racist, but most of his antipathy is directed towards Arabs who live in France but don't buy into its culture, and his support comes from people who make the connection between ethnic minorities and crime. Le Pen is a reaction to political correctness. Think of him as a ranting warblogger, with a funny accent. And, in any case, we're talking about France, which is admittedly going through a national mental breakdown, rather than the whole of Europe.

   Second, the attacks on French synagogues were almost certainly committed by French Arabs. I buy the argument that violent anti-semitism is endemic in the Arab community; and that European governments have sometimes been too tolerant. But I don't see disgruntled Arab youths from the banlieu as any more representative of broader opinion than are white power nuts in Idaho.

   Third, European sympathy for the Palestinian cause. That has far less to do with anti-semitism than with left-wing sympathy for the underdog, for the oppressed, the colonized. Sure, the anti-Zionists indulge in rhetorical overkill when they yell that Zionism is racism, or make uncomfortable parallels between Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and the injustices that Jews have suffered. But, damn it, there *are* some uncomfortable parallels. Jews, of all people, should have some sympathy for a people without a state, unwelcome wherever they live. I think this has to be classed as a fair point, not evidence of hatred for Jews.

   As for Europe's sordid history, well, that is a matter of record. It's precisely the country that has the most blood on its hands that has rooted out anti-semitism most completely. Germany is a different country now; they have expunged their guilt with typical thoroughness. It sometimes goes over the top; younger Germans are so apologetic that I want to hug them and say: it's okay, it wasn't you. Viewing Europe through the prism of the holocaust is like founding a history of the US on the genocide of the Indians, and the slavery of the blacks.

   And the fact that European publications like the New Statesman or Prospect dare to write about the power of the Jewish community in the US? Well, I'm sorry, it's true, America's Jews are far more influential than their numbers would suggest. Thank heavens. Unless it means that the US indulges Israel in its ultimately self-destructive behavior. There, I said it; what's the big deal? And when did conservative US commentators become so politically correct that they can't even mention the issue?

   I grew up in Europe; my mother was Jewish; the majority of my friends are Jewish. And, at least in middle-class London, I never experienced even a hint of anti-semitism. There is definitely some prejudice in the white-trash neighborhoods, and among the nationalist intelligentsia in places like Poland and Hungary, but it's a helluva lot less potent than racial prejudice in the US.

   Yes, while we're at it, let's talk about the US. Britain had an ethnically Jewish prime minister in the 19th century, France in the 1980s. And what was the US still doing in 2000: wondering whether Joe Liebermann's Jewishness would be a liability to the Democrat ticket. Most US cities are incredibly segregated, compared with London or Paris. The inter-marriage statistics bear that out; but it's obvious just walking down the street.

   Say that Europe is wimpy, hypocritical, whiney. I'm with you there. But the notion that Europe is congenitally anti-semitic is out-of-date, and just plain wrong.

· Search for European anti-semitism [Daypop]

· Europe and 'Those People' [Charles Krauthammer, in Washington Post] #

Design and sell your own t-shirts
Okay, I'm really slow. I've just discovered CafePress.com, though many website owners out there have been using the service for yonks to rack up the gigantic profits they're now reporting. CafePress lets you design and sell T-shirts, and other tchotkes, online. Very slick.

CafePress.com #

Getting the dates right
Since we're all pretending to be Middle East experts now, here's a timeline of events in the Israeli-Arab conflict. This being from PBS, and non-judgemental, there are two columns, one for the Israeli perspective, and one for the Palestinian. Interesting nugget: the Yom Kippur War of 1973 is referred to by Arabs as the Ramadan War.

POV: Promises [PBS] #

Thursday, April 25

File sharing tips
Pete Rojas reckons this is the best resource and news site for file-sharing hobbyists. I'll tell you what I'm looking for: a service which provides URL access to a folder in my hard drive. Web storage is fine, but limited, and the costs for additional storage and bandwidth quickly mount. I could just give out my Kazaa username, but that would require others to also download the Kazaa software in order to access my files. Computers with defined IP addresses can obviously be shared. But most internet connections rely on dynamically generated IP addresses. What is needed is a service which redirects on the fly to the shared directory on my hard drive, wherever I am. Maybe it already exists, in which case, tell me about it.

Zeropaid.com #

Wednesday, April 24

Too damned cramped
There's been some discussion about the generosity of Israel's offer to Arafat in January 2001. Was it 97% of the occupied territories, as the Israelis claim? Or 95%? See Richard Falk's article in The Nation, which questioned whether the offer was as generous as the Israelis had claimed. Here's the final status map presented by Israel in January 2001. This was the most generous offer Israel made. It highlights the impossibility of drawing good borders between Israel and Palestine. The putative Palestinian state would be speared by two Israeli promontories, one east of Tel Aviv, and the other east of Jerusalem. But those two Israeli cities would still be vulnerable to rocket attacks and cross-border raids from the neighboring.zones.The land is just too damned cramped.

· Map [Foundation for Middle East Peace]

· Backgrounder [Economist]

· Ending the Death Dance [The Nation] #

The siege of Ramallah
Flash guide from the ever-impressive graphics department of Spain's El Pais.

Arafat in Ramallah #

Tuesday, April 23

The western wall
   Israel seems in a hopeless bind. Neither peace nor war hold out much prospect of ensuring the country's security. There's little point resuming negotiations with Arafat, or even of pursuing a formal peace with Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia. As Dennis Ross, Clinton's negotiator, has rather bitterly pointed out, Arafat didn't even try to negotiate seriously when presented with the 97% deal. Arafat knows that Palestinians can achieve their aims more effectively through violence, and he's right, because they have. There is a deeper issue. Most Arabs have not come to terms with the existence of the state of Israel, even within its 1967 boundaries, and a piece of paper isn't going to change that. What is the point of forcing Arafat to declare his love for the Jewish people, in English and in Arabic, if he and everyone else knows this is a meaningless ritual? After any comprehensive "peace" agreement, there is every indication that Palestinian and Islamic activists will continue to attack Israel. Let's remember that the inhabitants of the Jenin refugee camp want, not the independence of the West Bank, but their families' former homes and land in Israel proper.

   And war? Expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank? Continued occupation? Sure, expulsion would solve Israel's strategic dilemma, the proximity of Palestinians to the main Jewish population centers of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. Another Deir Yassin massacre, or ten, would do it. But I don't believe Israel has the stomach for ethnic cleansing. It would lose the support of moderate Jews internationally, and prompt more Jewish emigration from Israel. Nor is the status quo any more appealing. Jewish settlers living alongside embittered Palestinian refugees; you might as well put two fighting dogs in a cage. And while the conflict continues, a generation of Palestinians, and Arab television viewers, are being brought up to believe the Jews are baby killers. Which sometimes, they are bound to be. There is no security in occupying a sliver of land, surrounded by hate. "We hate you, the earth hates you, the air hates you," as one Palestinian leader said after the Israel military action.

   So, what to do, if war cannot be stomached, the status quo dangerous, and peace talks are pointless? Unilateral withdrawal, and separation, is the only solution. Israel needs to withdraw from most of the West Bank and Gaza, not to make nice with Arafat, the Arabs and western liberals, but because withdrawal is a matter of Israel's national security. As long as Jews and Arabs live side by side, they will kill eachother, and eachother's children. If you can't or won't expel (read massacre) the Palestinians, you have to uproot or abandon the settlements. Israel has to get its troops off the al-Jazeera evening news, or it will continue to be the focus for the murderous rage of the Arab world. Let them take it out on Russia or India, or eachother, for a while.

   What about the suicide bombers? More than 99 out of 100 terrorist attacks in Israel proper are conducted by Arabs from the occupied territories. Stop them crossing over. Rely on peacable Filipinos to work in construction and agriculture, the Gulf States do. Build a wall. Israel needs to withdraw itself, not just from the West Bank, but from the Middle East, that godforsaken place the Jews were unwise enough to choose for their homeland. Sure, separation would devastate the Palestinian economy, and the divide, which would have to thread through Jerusalem, would be the new Berlin wall, a symbol of, well, whatever it's convenient to blame on Israel. But the EU could polish its conscience by increasing aid to the Palestinian authority; viewers would get bored of the pictures of the wall after a month; and the suicide terrorism would fade. And, in Jerusalem, there's already one storied stretch of wall anyhow; an extension won't hurt. So here's the proposal.

· withdraw from most of the occupied territories

· annex land around Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem

· abandon settlements beyond the boundary

· forget about regional cooperation

· bar all migrant workers from Palestinian-controlled territory

· build barrier between Israeli and Palestinian territory

· maintains overflight rights

· air force bombs source of any cross-border rocket attacks

· wait two generations
#

Steve Bell, Britain's most scatological cartoonists, dumps on Le Pen
· A French movement [Steve Bell, in The Guardian] #

Thumbnails
This - Express Thumbnail Creator - is quite the best piece of shareware I have ever seen. Thoughtfully executed. The thumbnails can be of fixed height and width, allowing for a grid; there's great control over borders; and there are no ugly templates to be disassembled before the pictures can be published. For weblog authors, here's a tip. Create a gallery on your own PC, then drag and drop the entire contents to the top directory of your web site. Apart from the index file; you wouldn't want to overwrite your blog. Then cut and paste the central table of the gallery index file into a blog post. Make sure you have turned off the automatic line-break feature in Blogger. And, hey presto, a blog gallery. Even I can do it, so it must be easy.

· Express Thumbnail Creator

· California [Road trip gallery] #

Marika Marton

Monday, April 22

Lies, damned lies, and maps
This link is making the circuit, usually with the implication that the scale of the massacre in Jenin has been overdone. It's a map, supplied by the Israeli government, which shows only a small area of the West Bank refugee camp destroyed. That the scale of the destruction in Jenin has been exaggerated I don't doubt. However, before we use this map as proof, let's remember that the satellite photos of Manhattan after September 11th also show a city largely intact.

Aerial Photographs of Jenin [via InstaPundit] #

Natalie Portman v Queen Padme
Natalie Portman may be defending Israel in the Harvard Crimson, but the actress' on-screen persona in the new Star Wars was more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. According to Time, Queen Padme, played by Portman, pleads with the Galactic Senate for moderation and understanding. "If you offer the separatists violence, they can only show us violence in return! Many will lose their lives. All will lose their freedom."

· Dark Victory [Time]
· Natalie Portman strikes back [Washington Post] #

Web marketing 101, a Star Wars case study
Lucasfilm, trying to restore the cool of the Star Wars franchise, targets web opinion makers. 'Lucasfilm saved its best goodies, though, for the Web geeks, a stratum of �Star Wars� fandom that, in the past, it had communicated with only via cease-and-desist orders. Last September, about a dozen Webmasters received an invitation from Lucasfilm to spend two days at Skywalker Ranch. The occasion was ostensibly the �Menace� DVD release, but everyone knew the real agenda was damage control. In exchange for a tour of the grounds, a dress-up session in genuine �Star Wars� regalia and a 20-minute Q&A with The Man himself, the attendees were to go home and play Moses to their straying Israelites. �I guess they�re starting to come around to the idea that the Web is pretty powerful,� says Lou Tambone of Star Warz.com.'
The Empire Bounces Back [Newsweek] #

Sunday, April 21

A bad day for Europe's left
The establishment left in third place in elections in France (presidential) and Germany (regional). In France, Lionel Jospin of the Socialists scored a measly 15%, coming behind both Chirac and the loathsome Le Pen. In Germany, in one of the eastern German Lands, Schroeder's Social Democrats trailed the Christian Democrats and the former communists. However, this is probably less a rejection of the left than a rejection of politics as usual across Europe. French and German establishment politicians are just terrified of their voters. Given the historical record, you can't blame them. They're afraid of populism, because they don't know where it might lead. So they take refuge in the bland and bureaucratic. No wonder 7% of French voters plumped for the huntin' and fishin' candidate. Say what you want about American politics - and I intend to - but US politicians are wonderfully responsive to popular concerns.

· Shock success for French far right [BBC]

· Schroeder hit by election setback [BBC] #

The great material wealth of the Jewish community
A revealing quote from Stephen Steinlight, recently-retired director of national affairs at the American Jewish Committee. In an article for the Centre for Immigration Studies, quoted by Prospect Magazine, he makes the point that campaign finance reform is bad for Israel. Prospect takes a relatively dispassionate view of the power of the Jewish lobby, and ethnic lobbies in general; but this line is grist to any Arab conspiracy theories about the origin of Jewish power. "Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete...the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel... For perhaps another generation... the Jewish community is thus in a position to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas."

· The Israel lobby [Prospect Magazine] #

Friday, April 19

Just as I get there
So, as I finally make it to New York, the New York Observer tells me everybody there is heading for the easy life on the West Coast. Don't leave. Was it me? "And now that the big bonuses and stock options that drove a whole generation have subsided, the heat-seeking youth of Manhattan is rubbing its eyes and seeing for the first time a city full of hard-working, haggard and increasingly vicious peers. The struggle to succeed has been replaced by the struggle to survive."

· Go West, Young Babes [New York Observer] #

Superman

Dateline, London. Star of the new BBC promotional film is David Belle, an insane Frenchman who has taken extreme sport into the urban environment. The showstopper: a 23-foot leap between two buildings. No wires. No clever editing.
· BBC film's rooftop stunts are real [BBC] #

Thursday, April 18

The Arab-Israeli conflict, in Flash
A nicely executed interactive map from the Guardian, showing the ebb and flow of Israel's borders.
Guardian via Amit Asaravala #

Automatic weblog article generator
Another griping weblog author, Meg Hourihan, this time. "I think I'm going to write an application that auto-generates weblog press. It will be a wizard that will step "authors" through the article-writing process and generate stories for them automagically." Her wizard questions made me laugh.
Meg Hourihan #

Syndicated newsfeeds, a directory
Syndic8.com #

Using Google to cross-check data
"I have implemented a professor verification system that automatically searches the web for the combination of both the teacher name and the school domain for all newly added professors, using the Google web API."
John Swapceinski via Olivier Travers #

Peter Maass eats brain masala
PeterMaass.com #

U-bomb
Gordon Mohr of Bitzi writes in to correct my assumptions on suitcase nukes. "An atomic "suitcase nuke" is commonly estimated to be capable of anywhere from sub-kiloton to 10-kiloton blast power -- while being light enough to be carried by a single person. The blast-analysis tool to which you linked considered the effects of a 1-megaton hydrogen bomb, which could be anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than a "suitcase nuke" --and I believe would weigh 1,000 pounds or much more." So a 1-megaton attack would require a vehicle the size of a U-Haul. We've had A-bombs; welcome to the U-bomb. #

Tipping point: a real-world experiment
With Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point, and writer for the New Yorker. "Social Network Soir�e: Discussion, Champagne, Experiment. The event will take place on May 14, 2002 at 6:30pm in Eyebeam's space in Chelsea located at 540 West 21st Street, between 10th and 11th Aves. The discussion will address the social dynamics that drive fashion trends, enable salacious gossip, fuel Internet crazes and sustain corporate power structures."

· Eyebeam [via Cameron Marlow] #

Blog nation, divided
A little tension between the San Francisco web kids and the warbloggers. First, a summary, for the uninitiated. The San Francisco web kids are liberal, in so far as they have any political views; but, more importantly, they were there first, pioneers of the format, and the software for weblog publishing. The warbloggers are arrivistes, journalists, wannabe journalists or ranters, most of whom turned to weblogs after September 11th. For a long while, there was a curious arrangement between the two groups, in which each ignored the other's politics: the warbloggers grateful that someone had made web publishing so easy; the web kids pleased to see their creation spread.
And then James Wolcott writes a piece in Business 2.0 that pretty much ignores weblogs before the warbloggers; and the warbloggers get together to write a book, tentatively called Blog Nation. Jason Kottke, veteran web kid, seems to feel weblogs have been hijacked, which they have. The warbloggers respond, politely: write your own damned book. The revolution is eating its children. On balance, I think Jason has a point, and at least he's making it; most of the SF web people are scared of argument. Sure, a book needs to have a voice. But, get real, Blog Nation is not a monolithic work, it's a *compilation*. Compilations are meant to be diverse; at least in so far as that makes them interesting. So, warblogger buddies, just make nice with Kottke; apart from anything else, he's actually an excellent writer.

· "Contrary to what the article says implies, "warblogging" (two of my least favorite words, together at last!) is a recent invention and not representative of weblogs as a whole." [Jason Kottke]

· "Isn't there enough us vs them going around these days? How about letting everyone play...or at least make folks who may not be right-wing or pro-West feel welcome to contribute?" [Jason Kottke]

· "So don't try to impose some PC quota system on who's here or what's said. And don't presume you know what label to put on those of us who are here." [Jeff Jarvis]

· "Books have viewpoints; if you don't like them, you write your own." [Glenn Reynolds] #

Online today: latest Denton geekery for the Guardian
"Wi-Fi has grown out of the West Coast idealistic belief that free internet access is a basic human right, and the failure of corporate IT departments to properly secure their wireless networks. But Wi-Fi needs to move beyond its hippy and hobbyist phase."

· Second sight: A pipe-dream fires up [Nick Denton, in the Guardian] #

Wednesday, April 17

Nick Denton, 98% dead
A new interactive web game: how dead are you? Plug in the address of the nearest landmark, choose the megatonnage of the al-Qaeda ~~suitcase~~ U-Haul bomb, and see just how dead you'd be. I used to have a book which advised on blast and fallout patterns in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack on the UK. West Sussex always looked like a good bolthole. This is much more sophisticated. Okay, let's enter the data. Here's me, in Nolita. Epicenter, well, Wall Street, I guess. Oh dear, 98% dead.

· The American Experience [PBS] #

Tuesday, April 16

My weblog reading list for this weekend
· Talking Points Memo

· Q Daily News

· Letter from Gotham

· b-may

· Mighty Girl

· Other Web Sites [Slate] #

The story behind the story
The UK press is full of stories ahead of the annual budget. Considering the Labour government is about to announce big tax increases, the coverage is remarkably tame. Mainly because the tidbits are being carefully and selectively leaked by the government itself. Now, you wouldn't know this if you read the newspapers, or watched TV. But here's a weblog in the depths of the BBC news site, written by one of their regular correspondents. He would never think of dishing the dirt on his colleagues in mainstream media. But there is something about weblogs that invites frankness. For the tiny minority out there interested in British politics read this, rather than the heavily spun pseudo-exclusives on the newspaper front pages.
· Newslog [BBC] #

Linkbait
A perfectly fine piece in Business 2.0 by James Wolcott on blogging. He covers the usual bases: blogs can be bad, blogs can be good, the good ones are addictive. Interestingly, Business 2.0 is savvy enough to know that stories about weblogs go big on the web. The article was brought to my attention by Laura Goldberg of Trylon Communications, a PR firm. And Ned Desmond of Business 2.0 was well aware, last time I spoke with him, of the buzz around blogs, and the blog buzz about buzz around blogs. In other words, there's no surer way of attracting inbound links and getting into the Blogdex Top 40. Watch this one rise up the charts.

· James Wolcott [Business 2.0] #

The hidden hand
I've spent the weekend listening to French conspiracy theories. Isn't it an amazing coincidence, they ask, that just as some Middle East countries, threaten to curtail oil supplies, the US gets the regime it wants in Venezuela, the world's fourth largest oil producer. We can all make up conspiracy theories. Just ask: who benefits? And work back from there. Problem is that occasionally, very occasionally, the conspiracy theorists are onto something.
Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans Who Ousted Leader [New York Times] #

Among their sons
Is there anyone out there who still doubts that Islamic militants carried out the September 11th attacks? Oh, yes, forgot, only a few hundred million Arabs and Pakistanis. I know this is an old story, but I'm still coming across Pakistani taxi drivers who claim that Mossad did it. I make a habit of asking. I want to rub their noses in the truth, and al-Jazeera's latest video showing has finally provided the evidence. One of the September 11th hijackers, in a video testament recorded before the suicide attacks, says: "The message says: The time of humiliation and slavery is over. It is time to kill the Americans in their own backyard, among their sons and near their forces and intelligence." Or - don't tell me - this tape is a forgery too.
·

Transcript [BBC] #

Monday, April 15

Peter Maass in Pakistan
"I walked into a drugstore in Islamabad yesterday and noticed, in a proud stack by the cash register, a dozen cans of Slim-Fast."

PeterMaass.com #

Saturday, April 13

Testing blog posting through email
And, if you can see this, it works. Another reason to use Blogger Pro.
Blogger Pro

#

Never change SMTP address again
This is an assistant to Microsoft Outlook and other email programs. It gets around the need to specify a new SMTP server in order to send email from a new ISP account.
iDataExpress-Home #

Thursday, April 11

Develop your own applications using Google
· Google's suggestions of uses of their new web APIs:

· Auto-monitor the web for new information on a subject

· Glean market research insights and trends over time

· Invent a catchy online game

· Create a novel UI for searching

· Add Google's spell-checking to an application

Google Web APIs #

Peter Maass, blogging from the frontline
   One of the most powerful criticisms of weblogging: it's derivative. We rehash opinion pieces by newspaper columnists who are themselves far from the action. And there is some truth in the accusation. So it's refreshing to see a bona fide war correspondent, Peter Maass of the New York Times Magazine, embarking on a blog.
   Disclosure: Peter is a friend of mine from way back, I'm a huge fan of his writing, and I've been haranguing him to produce a weblog for months. Shame he didn't blog from Kandahar, when he was working on the NYT Magazine piece on Afghanistan's new warlords. But here he is, now, better late than never, live from Islamabad. He's been at it, trying out the medium for the last two weeks, but he's only now allowed me to spread the word. The irony: his latest post is a comment on a New York Times opinion piece, which he could have written as easily from the US as from Islamabad.
   Some weblog social trivia: PeterMaass.com is designed by Matt Haughey of Blogger and Metafilter fame; and he used to go out with Rebecca Mead of the New Yorker, who wrote You've Got Blog, one of the first and best articles about blogging in establishment media. It's all connected.
· PeterMaass.com #

Monday, April 8

The four-day week
My latest State of the Union column for Management Today is online. "My next company will be different. No more late nights. No more monomaniac workaholics. Less heat, more light. Call it the 80% company."

· State of the Union [Management Today] #

Sunday, April 7

The great trade robbery
Okay, this is more like it. I've always thought that western humanitarians do more harm than good. Oxfam too. Famine relief which destroyed local agriculture, and created a cycle of dependency. Capitalist credentials thus established, take a look at this latest Oxfam campaign on trade. The killer fact: goods from poor countries are taxed at four times the rate of goods from rich countries. Oxfam claims the West's abuse of global trade rules costs the developing world $100bn a year, about twice the amount of western aid. The West giveth, and the West taketh away, and more. True, Oxfam spoils its case with a sideswipe at western multinationals, and market pricing for commodities; but otherwise free-marketers will have very little to argue with. Poverty activists, and plutocrats, unite!

Here are Oxfam's charges against the West. The first two are spot-on. The latter three are probably there to keep the anti-globalizers happy.

· Stopping or penalising poor countries from exporting their goods into rich world markets. Goods from poor countries are taxed at four times the rate of goods from rich countries.

· Subsidising rich farmers by $1bn a day. Agricultural surpluses are dumped onto world markets, suppressing world prices and destroying local markets in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines.

· Influencing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank policies to force open poor countries' markets with little regard to the social consequences. These are policies the rich world has itself rejected.

· Being indifferent to erratic, falling commodity prices that condemn many poor economies to failure, while generating huge profits for big corporations.

· Allowing big corporations to ignore internationally-recognised workers' rights.

maketradefair.com #

Friday, April 5

The Technocol Xperience
You think weblogs are a refreshing break from establishment media in the US? Try Hungary, in darkest eastern Europe, a country with some of the worst establishment media in the world. Boring, jargon-ridden, corrupt, predictable, partisan. I could go on. But, joy oh joy, the Hungarian weblog has arrived. Only problem is they are written in conversational Hungarian, and textbook Hungarian is quite hard enough.

· The Technocol Xperience

· Plastik #

Thursday, April 4

Send email to cellphones
SMS - the cellphone text messaging service so widely used in Europe - is highly convenient. But I already have to check email, voicemail, and my instant messaging software. It's a pain to deal with yet another messaging medium, and I've been looking for a way to send SMS messages by email or IM, and get the replies to my computer. Genie lets me send SMS to UK phones from the web. And Windows Messenger lets me send messages to anyone who can be bothered to register their cellphone with the service. But I've just discovered that ICQ lets you send a message from email to any mobile phone, registered or not. Okay, not to any mobile phone, but to phones on many networks. Just send an email to +###########@icqsms.com. And my new Treo phone promises access to AOL instant messaging. Still piecemeal, but one day email, instant messenger and phone will be one.

ICQ

Genie #

Monday, April 1

Salad bowl and a tennis ball
I love New York taxis, except for the part where the driver tells me that Mossad was behind the September 11th attacks. That, and sudden braking, swerving and jerky driving that makes me bang my head against the plastic partitition. A friend of mine is a particularly smooth driver, and told me how he learned. The instructor gets into the car with a shallow salad bowl, into which he places a tennis ball. The goal of the pupil is to anticipate turns and changes in speed so that the ball never makes it over the edge. Next time I'm in a New York taxi, I'm going to whip out the salad bowl, the tennis ball. And if the driver fails the test, he can forget about a tip. #

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