Back in the early days of the Web, every document had at the bottom, “Copyright 1997. Do not redistribute.” Now every document has at the bottom, “Copyright 2008. Click here to send to your friends.” –from an interview with Google’s chief economist, via flowingdata.org
“Because most of the targeted employees were male between the ages of 20 and 40 we decided that it would be best to become a very attractive 28 year old female. We found a fitting photograph by searching google images and used that photograph for our fake Facebook profile. We also populated the profile with [...]
The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two is sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a [...]
“You can spot the Americans in any airport. They like to undress.“
Via Libby; Bruce Schneier on data: In the information age, we all have a data shadow. We leave data everywhere we go. It’s not just our bank accounts and stock portfolios, or our itemized bills, listing every credit card purchase and telephone call we make. It’s automatic road-toll collection systems, supermarket affinity cards, ATMs and [...]
What obliterate means…
Closing some tabs… Stephen Fry writing on ‘social network’ sites back in January (also in the Guardian): …what an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we [...]
How it works: The Web Originally uploaded by danbri Or, “but what do all those links mean?” Based on the 1994 slides by TimBL which inspired the SWAD-Europe graphics and shirt. The twist here is just an emphasis that the giant global graph is a graph of idiosyncratic claims, and only sometimes do we all [...]
 QOTD: You, the reader of this document, are not a normal user. – Brad’s thoughts on the social graph.