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Linkspam: Life on Mars, paid protest, Wikipedia gives up, and Wordpress is so cool...
- El Reg reports that you can now rent people to join your protest in Germany. Potential protesters get paid, but aren't obliged to agree unless it's something they agree with. Hmm, attack on the principles of democracy, an example of 'everything for sale', or a simple way to motivate otherwise apathetic activists? Let's face it, if you were going to be paid to turn up at the next Parliament Square protest, you might actually do it, right?
- Right then, Life On Mars I've heard many many good things about this show, and then today
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mng linked to loveandgarbage who was linking to this awesome trailer for the next series, which shows the main characters as if they're in Camberwick Green! How cool is that? I hate to do this, but The Sun has the best version of the promo picture. So, maybe I should've bought the DVD box set in the January sales for £20 after all? Ah no, Sendit has it for £16 and Choices for £14. Bargain. Now if Mike had any decent image manip software, I'd be iconning myself up, they're so cool. - Now, I read about this on
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roughtype a few days back, but have been busy/net deprived, but Wikipedia has implemented rel="nofollow" for all outgoing links. This is a BAD BAD THING. Now, whatever we think of Google the corporation, Google the search engine, and specifically the PageRank formula, is essentially democracy in action. The readon it works is because it aggregates all the links out there and figures out which are the most popular (and therefore useful) sites. rel="nofollow" is there for webmasters to say that they don't trust a link, or they don't want to vote
for it. By putting nofollow on all its outgoing links (in a spurious and useless attempt to fight spam), Wikipedia is effectively both denying other sites their votes (and opting out of the democracy), but also asserting clearly that their content is untrustworthy, cannot be guarnateed and they don't want to give legitimate credit. That last links to a Wordpress Plugin that I'll be putting in next time I update, and from now on I'll be nofollowing any links to Wikipedia that I make, and I urge others to do the same. If they want to opt out of the Google democracy, they should do it both ways (as, for example,daweaver's The Snow in Summer already does) and say they don't want inbound links either. Of course the real issue is linkspam in the form of blog comments, and of course disreputable Search Marketers who do things the bad way, as Tim described one company to me, a bunch of spamming twunts
. - Last up (for now) Wordpress 2.1 is out, which means
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lj2wordpress should be kicking start a little more, I need to catch up with some things, and reply to a few emails, but this particular project looks like it'll have real legs. After all, Livejournal is slowly dying. Journal Press will rock. Hopefully.
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The problem is that they can't really know which comments are real, if it's published on another site, especially if it's embedded in a wikipedia article, how would they know? That's what nofollow is there for, shame it sucks and sort of defeats the purpose due to overuse.
They are working on something, but what it will be will always be unknown, the algorithm is a closely guarded secret for anti-spam purposes...
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I had heard many good things before and after, so was going to follow my usual buy/borrow it plan anyway, but that sort of tips the balance.
And I see it's not just me wants many icons...
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Of course the problem is that I have no LJ room for any more icons now. Time to do some pruning before I can use these (http://starbright.dyndns.org/jac/icons/) ...
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OK, I'm pretty sure I'm going to as soon as I get back to my PC, but it's still crazy.
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I was very amused by your visit to Hampstead!
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I'll put up full details when I've moved in and it's finalised.
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I think perhaps there's an issue of misdirection if one disgruntled person can hire 500 people to make a small grudge seem like a political issue, but then that's no different to well funded minority groups making sure that certain issues are constantly in the media spotlight.
(And yes, I do mean fox hunting)
So really, nothing to see here, move along :-)
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Hi there. Great to hear you’re interested in meeting up. I think central London is going to be the best place, seeing as we’re all scattered in and around London.
Now we need a date. I have some possible dates listed here. Can you confirm which you would prefer, and if there are any that you definitely can’t do. I’ll then look at everyone’s availability and choose the best date for as many people as possible. Dates are Sunday Feb 18th, Sat Feb 24th, Sun Feb 25th, Saturday March 3rd or Sunday March 4th.
Next, does anyone have a preference as to where we go/what we do? I guess in a way, this is dependent on numbers. I’m all for starting at somewhere like TGIs, but we could do a cafe like Starbucks, a bar... What would you prefer as a meeting place? I guess age comes into play in this. If you’re under 18, please let me know.
Lastly, it would be nice for everyone to know a little about each other’s Torchwood interests before we meet. If you’re happy to give me your email I can do a generic meet up group email so we can swap info more easily. As for me, I’m not that big a Doctor Who fan. Started becoming a JB fan during How do you solve a problem..., re-watched the Jack Doctor Who episodes, became hooked on Torchwood before it started because of what I read, strange as that may sound. I think a lot could be improved, but I love the idea, and I love the characters (Yes I really quite like Owen. Gwen’s my least favourite). I read lots of the fic, write some fic when I have the time, but I guess first and foremost I’m really into Jack/Ianto. Come on, tell me I’m not the only one!!!
Anyway, will update you when I’ve got responses to hopefully name the date, time and place.
If you have any queries, email me at asudderick(at)aol(dot)com
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So no, not really, but I will be working with Mike at making his place more habitable in the short term, as I'll be there a lot. Ten minutes walk max though, which is good.
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