lintonchiswick.org

A Dutch photographer on Europe, fresh food and real riches

Blogger Jörg Colberg interviews Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen and finds him in robust mood. The interview's interesting, touching on European cultural identity and definitions of poverty. There are photographs, too.

A filter for stupidity

StupidFilter is a project aimed at providing an open-source solution not to comment spam but comment stupidity... the hurried, publish-now-think-later, typing-not-writing brain-splurge that's the Internet equivalent to a primordial grunt. Using similar technology to the Bayesian method for spam filtering, the software will learn to recognise stupidity by drawing rules from a sizeable sample of YouTube comments. Perfect:

So acronyms, poor spelling, expletives, (hopefully) excessive use of exclamation marks will all register as signs of stupidity. From the FAQ:

Isn't filtering stupidity elitist?
Yes. Yes, it is. That's sort of the whole point.

Surely even the most enthusiastic fan of Web 2.0's ease/speed of publication and the democracy engendered by that can't pretend to be delighted by the comment blight that's resulted? And the dirty secret is that if every blog entry those very same fans write isn't followed by a string of nonsense, then they're already manually filtering out the stupid. Believe me.

The Guardian expresses concerns about any potential stupid filter's accuracy. They're concerns that all - to different degrees - apply to spam filters... but we've learned to live with their imperfections, and we'll learn to live with the StupidFilter's, too. LMFAO!!!!

Technorati Tags: Web, Web2, web2.0

Rat and Mouse service announcement

Regular readers of the Rat and Mouse - London's property blog - might be wondering, well, where it's gone. Since yesterday, mid-day, the server's been attacked by hackers. It's a shared server and the break-in most likely happened via a different website. The hosts are currently working on the problem and hope to have service resumed shortly.

The Virginia Tech shootings - the aftermath online.

For The First Post.

The Virginia Tech shootings and citizen journalism

For The First Post.

On the fallout from the Kathy Sierra incident

... and Tim O'Reilly's attempt to clean up the blogosphere.

Kathy Sierra, missing at ETech - and the darker side of the blogosphere

Free speech and anonymity are cornerstones of idea-sharing on the web. But isn't it crushingly disappointing when the subject becomes about defending the rights of people - who should be more evolved - to act like children in a playground? The whole Kathy Sierra nightmare, in The First Post.

Technorati Tags: Kathy Sierra

On US and UK media gossip...

... and why UK readers of a cult New York media blog were met with a blank screen last week. And - if you find this interesting - go here to read some correspondence between Gawker group editor Lockhart Steele and Time Inc.'s lawyer Nick Jollymore.

Getting Things Done

For a number of years, I've been interested in California's personal growth movement of the 1960s and '70s. And it was from that perspective that I became curious about the Getting Things Done meme that began replicating online in 2005 and continues to organise business leaders and the internet generation. I thought I'd put it to the test, see if it can do anything for me... and guess what? Anyway, for the Financial Times, I spoke to GTD's author David Allen, to GTD blogger and extreme multi-tasker Marc Orchant, and to lifehacker-provocateur and GTD blogger Merlin Mann. Click here to download the piece.