Blurbs

I remember hearing this grammar mnemonic before: “It’s not its unless it’s ‘it is.’” It doesn’t seem like it would work, but somehow it does, even when you can’t see it written out. Thanks to recursiveness? Or repetition? Something along those lines.

This is, by far, the most random post I’ve made on my blog in some time. Feels pretty good!

Ben expounds on a theme I’ve thought about many times — the world loves HTML because it’s easy, but some vendors try to make it hard.:

“The idea is to…raise the barriers [so] the monkeys will wander off and find something else to play with. View source used to be a lot more fun for a lot more monkeys than it is today.”

There’s an old New Yorker cartoon that shows some dogs at a computer with the caption “on the internet, no one knows you are a dog”. It’s a Web 1.0 joke about privacy and anonymity. But today, with the rise of blogs and websites like Flickr, del.icio.us and 43 Things, the joke is, “offline, no one knows you are a talented photographer, that you want to learn Italian, that you discover great links or know some great people”.
—Josh Peterson, Robot Co-op

A cute concept:

conveyor-belt sushi:
An approach to syndicated data where items are aggregated into a single sequence, where the expectation is that popular/important items will reappear at a later date (and where the “stale” items are quickly discarded).

This was the text-part of a spam I just received:

distinguish one bird from the other. By mistake he caught the
its craft. To eliminate the craftmanship you eliminate the
essentially the only aliens who can to be trusted by humans. They have blonde
being taught are affected. The basic drafting skills are still

I wonder how well Bayesian filtering really works when more and more spam content becomes this weird, almost Mark Leyner-style copy (not an insult to Mark, I’m a old fan of his humor), instead of being an actual communication.

There are four fundamental assumptions bad critics make:

1. There is one universal and objective measure of how good and bad anything is. 2. That the critic is in sole possession of the skill in making these measurements. 3. Anyone that doesn’t possess this skill (including the creator of the work) is an idiot and should be ridiculed. 4. That valid criticisms can and should always be resolved.

—Scott Berkun, for UIWEB.COM