one in a million
amnesty international, iansa and oxfam are hosting the million faces petition at controlarms.org.
238,346 have now joined the Million Faces.
95,143 are displayed online.
kind of a silly photo i uploaded but the project is kewl. no no, actually, my photo is here.
wordpress hosting search engine spamis wordpress.org hosting search engine spam?
waxy thinks so and explains his point in this rather upsetting article: wordpress website search engine spam.
and i have to say i agree… sad that.
apparently matt mullenweg, the wordpress übernacho, is quietly hosting a rather dubious service by a company called hot nacho on the wordpress.org website. this consists of 168′000 articles containing cloaked links to websites selling asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages.
the trick is to host these at the wordpress.org website to try and take advantage of the excellent google standings that wordpress.org has thanx to all the wordpress blogs linking to their blogsoftware’s home by default.
matt mullenweg explained that this pays for his expenses to develop the software.
but in my opinion this is very uncool, and should, at the very least, be made in an open and transparent fashion.
i know i would have certainly not chosen wordpress had i known this.
i will immediately remove all the links to wordpress from my blog, especially in my admin, and i deeply regret the various generous donations i have made to this project. and to all the people i recommended to install this blog software i say: i am deeply sorry.
don’t get me wrong, the wordpress blog software is still excellent. but if it is financed by a practice that destroys the web, which search engine spam is clearly doing, it quite spoils things for me.
hmmm. i always thought matt had something fishy…
should i switch to textpattern?
mp3giffile this under: kinda cool, kind of a bummer [for mac users at least]
download this image and drag it to winamp and some other mp3 player and it should play a sound.
very cool stuff, but unfortunately it does not work with any of my mp3 players here on my mac. i’ve tried iTunes, mp3rage and audion. so i’d love to hear if this actually works on a pc with winamp.
you can make your own here. [via 4rthur]
music’s future, online & digitalsince tuesday this week the US supreme court is ruling the mgm vs. grokster case [all the info @ copyfight or telepolis - in german], which will keep us holding our breath over the next few months. meanwhile others keep pointing out the inevitability of the cultural shifts facilitated through developments in digital media.
march 16th npr hosted a conversation between chris anderson, editor-in-chief, wired magazine, matthew perpetua, mp3 blogger; editor and curator, fluxblog.org and tim quirk, general manager, real network’s rhapsody, titled music’s future, online & digital. “iTunes offers even the most obscure songs. Podcasting can turn anyone into a DJ. And mash-ups allow do-it-yourself record producers to rewrite musical history. We explore the future of music.”
the revenge of sapir-whorf: alan wexelblat presents a nice sum up of the various studies that have shown that p2p is not hurting music industry. “[E]very study that has been done since Napster has shown that music sharing has no negative effects on music sales (CD or downloaded). In fact, some show a positive effect.”.
streamline.net are crapor: al4ie’s struggles against the windmills
Worst hosts ever. This is a blog entry detailing me trying to stop them from deleting our palmpixels account, them saying “sure we wont”, then turning around and doing it anyway. now they’re threatening legal action unless I take down my blog post about how crap they are!!!
the css sicknessor: it’s scary when CSS follows you into your dreams…
last night, apparently, when my lovely partner came to bed i briefly woke up to tell her, that i had found the solution to the CSS problem…
or so she claims.
she’d been up reading her book in the front room and when she came to bed i was asleep, but somehow made myself tell her this.
i can’t recall any of it.
needless to say.
she, however, did not get into it with me, she told me that she was too tired to talk about CSS now.
but what if.
what if i really had found the solution to the CSS problem… the solution to ALL CSS problems…
we’ll never know…
the other question is this one: was all this not in fact happening in her dreams?
transparent street signswe’ve all seen the transparent desktop meme by now - and maybe done a few (1 | 2 | 3) ourselves.
tano, a street artist from chicago, has been doing a similar thing all over his hometown, sticking photos onto no parking signs and then photographing the resulting transparencies. spectacular.
[via - and more photos - wooster]
more software & the gadget of the year
cyberduck is a very versatile, open source, freeware ftp client for mac osX. need i say more? i did not think so, download. oh, and it is written by one david v. kocher from switzerland. weee. TEH PRIDE. small step by small step this here computer is running on almost all open source software.
foxblocker scrambles the tv channel fox on your tv. on any tv actually… hmmm, there’s a thought. with the other gadgets we mentioned here earlier maybe 2005 will be the year of activist hardware, innit? apparently the guys who produce foxblocker have received death threats!?! speaking about over-identification with a media consortium. holy mackarel. either that or they are on murdochs payroll.
urbi et orbi - the unreported bird incident
edit: “i was at the Einstürzende Neubauten concert on sunday (first concert of the 25 years tour!). Blixa said he had seen the Pope on tv, and his urbi et orbi sounded like the noises the girl makes in “The Exorcist”. And of course, he gave us a sample of it. lol” [klav via IM]
apple strikes the wrong cord - yet againbenjamin cohen, a young british internet entrepreneur is determined to fight apple. the wanna-be “bad” corporation from cupertino is trying to claim the uri itunes.co.uk, which cohen has registered in november 2000. there have been negotiations to settle out of court, but the parties have not found an accord.
cohen says: “It’s a matter of principle now. I paid for it [the domain name] and if Apple had contacted me nicely without lawyers we would have sold it to them.”
[guardian]
posted by j. zup[ping]er @ 11:19:20 | 
