Archives for October 2004

In his post The
gender profile of Wikipedia Joi ito writes

I haven’t conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much
more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point
out that ratio of men at conferences on blogging and ratio of men who have loud blog
voices seems to be quite high.

The core mistake in the assumption Joi Ito makes here is in assuming that participation
is equivalent to talking about participation. I’ve seen several statistics and surveys
on blogosphere (God, I hate that word) participation which all seem to point to the
same conclusion; the number of female bloggers tends to outnumber the number
of male bloggers.

For example, according to the LiveJournal
statistics page there twice as many females blogging as males in that community.
Given that LiveJournal is one of the oldest and largest blogging communities with
almost 2 million active blogs (and almost 5 million user accounts) I think this
counts for a lot more than claiming that a lot of women aren’t seen at geeky
conferences like Web 2.0 or Tim O’Reilly’s FooCamp.   

O

…excerpt from: Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me� well, so says the quote. But honestly, with so many conflicting claims and lies, I�ve become increasingly frustrated by my own inability to figure out what�s actually true. Whether it�s lying through omission, lying through misdirection, or outright lies, it�s awfully hard to extract nuggets of truth from the noise.

So, being a civic minded individual, I did some extensive research, and am pleased to offer this guide to detecting who is lying during this joyful campaign season:

• Anyone who explicitly claims to be telling the truth � is lying. Groups with �truth� in their name, lie �Swift Boats for Truth� � dead giveaway. If they weren�t lying, they wouldn�t need to convince you otherwise.
• Every political advertisement lies (by omission- obviously).
• All issues ads lie (you know, the kind that aren�t sponsored by the candidate, but rather by their best friend, leading contributor, ex college roommate, etc.).
• All news broadcasts lie. The one exception: Jon Stewart�s Daily Show, which claims to lie, has a higher degree of truth than any news broadcast. This is not surprising because all comedy is ultimately based on truth.
• Anyone claiming the other side is lying, is lying (Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh, you know the type).
• All the candidates and their spokespersons lie. You see, if they actually said anything truthful the media would squeeze it of any ounce of subtlety and portray it as a mistake or gaff. So the campaigns must stick with caref

…excerpt from: Dan Appleman: Kibitzing and Commentary

Cory Doctorow:

Windows errors on giant public billlboards are their own cult Internet photo-genre, but this is a great example of the species: an enormous Windows error dialogue-box on the towering billboard across from Toronto’s Eaton Centre. It showed up in my RSS feed of images on Flickr tagged with “Toronto.”

Link

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…