written by Martin on Apr 30, 2004
Tom Coates has rather ironically decided that the world needs a new scale upon which to measure how quickly an individual hears about big memes (‘meme’ definition: An idea that replicates through a society as it is propagated through person-to-person interaction, both direct and indirect. Memetics is a field of study that focuses on memes’ role in the evolution of a culture), which he is calling RHINE:
“Essentially, the longer it takes you to hear about rilly cool things on the interweb, the further downstream [of the river Rhine] you are considered to be – with all the commensurate anxieties about who has peed in your drinking water that involves. The novel factor in the scale is that your relative position can be identified with key cities along the Rhine“.
By this reasoning, someone like Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing, should be considered relatively far downstream, with his recent entry about a spoof television ad for a Jesus Christ Action Figure.
Microphonehead blogged it back on April 2, yet Cory is considered among the top 10 most authoratative bloggers in the world.
written by Martin on Apr 29, 2004
written by Martin on Apr 28, 2004
written by Martin on Apr 27, 2004
Where are we at with speech recognition?
The Register attended the SpeechTEK conference in San Francisco last month where Opera launched a voice-enabled browser, whilst IBM updated its Websphere Voice product range and Microsoft announced Speech Server 2004.
Lucy Sherriff says: Say ‘Yes’ after the tone.
written by Martin on Apr 24, 2004
As if by magic, BBC URLs no longer require the prefix ‘www’, automatically re-directing to the correct top level domain when a website address is entered with the ‘www’ omitted:
bbc.co.uk/radio1
bbc.co.uk/eastenders
bbc.co.uk/scotland
Previously, any URL without the ‘www’ was simply redirected to the main BBC homepage at www.bbc.co.uk
written by Martin on Apr 22, 2004
The Oscars Screenwriting format page has a typo in the HTML title of the page:
“A Few Notes on Formatting – Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwritign – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.”
written by Martin on Apr 22, 2004
I’m one of the ‘lucky’ people to have been chosen for the tests of Google’s new email service (or is it ‘conversation’ service?) GMail.
More soon.
written by Martin on Apr 20, 2004
In April 2003, I commented on the ITV/Celador documentary Major Fraud, concerning Charles Ingram and his wife Diana’s guilt over the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire fraud case.
At the time, I said I would be interested in seeing a more impartial version of events.
A chap called James Plaskett contacted me earlier this week, pointing me in the direction of a lengthy essay about his experiences on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, which challenges some of the information presented by Celador in their original documentary.
As I say, it’s a bit long, but it’s an interesting read – in particular, a segment early on in the text where James recounts an incident during the making of the programme he appeared on, where a contestant was talked out of a wrong answer – and into the correct answer – by the show’s host, Chris Tarrant.
