Spam—email spam, link spam, splogs, social media spam—is evil. I waste too much of my time dealing with it. It was inevitable that this Wired article about a new search engine would intrigue me: [T]here’s a new search engine in town that’s got a fresh approach to weed out the ever-proliferating junk and spam sites polluting […]
This Slate piece about Blockbuster, the movie rental chain, is fascinating; well, it’s fascinating to someone like me who thinks formats and markets and channels and digital data and movies are interesting in themselves. Stir them all together and… In 2005, Greg Meyer wrote a letter to the management of Blockbuster. He wanted to warn the […]
I have just searched Google News for “Afghanistan”. The top three stories are, in order: 500 more British soldiers will go to Afghanistan—[report] Italians bribed the Taleban all over Afghanistan—[report] France will not send any more troops to Afghanistan—[report]
The new “un-search engine” Wolfram Alpha beat Google in at least one of my tests: Here are some of its answers to other, harder, questions.
Paul Evans worked for a company that built Websites for political organizations long before the current crop of johnny-come-latelys started twittering about “digital engagement” and “campaigning 2.0”. This post of his about the kinds of people who use the Net to harass politicians and the kind of people politicians should listen to—two groups that, in […]
Congratulations to the Web surfer brought here by a search for: “interracial dates that like Radiohead” You have hit the jackpot.
MySpace sex offender charged with running “fake” church. It’s lucky they caught him before “real” churches became associated with fraud and the sexual abuse of children.
Years ago, PooterGeek featured the “Exxxtreme Mini-Bears”, tiny, hardy, beautiful living creatures called tardigrades. Turns out they are even hardier than thought. Some of them can survive being sent into space. The “TARDigrades in Space project is, of course, going by the acronym “TARDIS”. How long before the BBC sues? This is also a lovely phenomenon: […]
I’m kind of afraid to ask why people have been arriving at PooterGeek over the past couple of days as a result of googling for “John Kettley” and “hedgehog”. I realise my publishing this post will now make things worse. Perhaps I should add the phrase “Richard Gere” as well.
These are both old (by blogging standards) and from the unlikeliest of sources, but I think they’re excellent: Marketer Seth Godin on how to send email and 79-year-old Catholic priest Pat Connor on how to choose a spouse.
Because of an ongoing1 split between two networks: that of my ISP and the one belonging to my server hosts, I can only send messages out of and receive them into my main email account by extremely convoluted means today. Apologies to anyone trying to reach me. I wanted to use “current” rather than the wince-inducing […]
If you are reading this then PooterGeek has been moved and upgraded.
Here are some sensible tips on how to send an email message.
Even the Nazis didn’t put artists out of work. – Andrew Keen, author of The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy, talking about the Internet, one minute into this interview The advantage of the Internet, as Keen reveals in the title of his book, is that, when people […]
Internet old-timers are not necessarily more polite than newcomers. They do, however, tend to know the rules, sometimes as a result of having been slapped down more than once by even-older-timers. Beginners in online communication often don’t even realise there are any rules at all. Hardcore open source geeks, for example, that is people who collaborate […]
To date, most of the political blogs that employees of the old media have paid attention to have been noisy, gossipy, and abusive ones. This makes sense: the people in the media who read them also tend to be noisy, gossipy, and abusive. Such sites don’t threaten the old order and the blogs’ proprietors are […]
This is the first time anything related to Pink Floyd has actually blown my mind: Cambridge-educated economist-turned-music-manager (Pink Floyd, The Clash, Ian Dury And The Blockheads, Billy Bragg) Peter Jenner … [has] put a figure on how much each music fan who buys music would have to pay in order for access to every song ever […]
I’m taking a few days off from blogging because I’m busy so I will leave you, as always on such occasions, with one of PooterGeek’s famously hilarious repackaged jokes. But first, this is perhaps a good time to link to one man’s account of his attempt to go without the Net for a week: Day 2: […]
Via things magazine, I discovered an article in the Archinect about how when the people of the virtual community Second Life are given freedom to build whatever they want they recreate suburbia.The author of the piece broadcasts his own prejudices. I hate shopping as well, but I winced at this: [L]ike most utopias, [Second Life] […]
Despite my slack posting there, in the few months since I started it The Wedding Photography Blog has gone to number two hit on Yahoo UK for the search terms “wedding photography”. This is amazing even to me. If you linked to it then thank you. I must extend special gratitude to the anti-Euston Manifesto obsessive in […]
Having moved out of her previous residence, Grammar Puss is blogging again at last, hanging around on street-corners, and scrounging bandwidth from passers-by.
I hadn’t noticed this until I read Tom Hamilton’s post at Let’s Be Sensible, but the Devil’s Kitchen calls the Mr Eugenides essay that I blogged about “one of the finest posts ever written”. Does Eton College do refunds? Also, having read the latest post at Never Trust A Hippy, I must revise my slur on […]
Today, unique visits to PooterGeek have been cruising at the elevated level of 50-plus an hour. Why? Because this site has just entered the top ten on Arabic Google for the search term “boobs”.
Further to this, this. METHOD: To study the effect of penis width vs. length on female sexual satisfaction, 50 sexually active female undergraduate students were asked which felt better, i. e., was penis width or length more important for their sexual satisfaction. RESULTS: None reported they did not know, or that width and length were equally satisfying. […]
I’ve met and had a couple of interesting conversations with the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute so I’m sure he’s sharp enough to appreciate the irony of his compiling a list of Internet research centres, along with links to them, and then posting this collection to his blog as a Word document. Perhaps the […]
Yesterday PooterGeek was down (and I couldn’t read my email) for quite a while beause someone “compromised” the server it’s hosted on. Sorry about that. It wasn’t my fault. I’ve been very busy lately so there’s not been much to read here anyway. This is sweet—if you don’t mind the grungey soundtrack. I am also currently offering […]
Dear Candidate If you want to be selected as the MP for the notoriously geeky and principled Cambridge constituency, spamming Labour Party members with your CV attached as a Word document sent from your work email account is not a good way to start. all the best PG
Right now, an annoying racist brat is trying to leave abusive comments on PooterGeek—my favourite so far: “niggers stink of shit”. Well, this nigger’s shit hot with UNIX. If you’re reading this, mate, I already know what school you attend and the name of your head of year. She is going to ring me back when […]
My legal adviser tells me that all members of the UK Independence Party are sane, sensible, and not closet racists at all. Google tells me that their Isle Of Wight branch’s lilac campaign caravan, the completely non-racistly named “Wight Knight”, is the seventh hit for a search on Google Images for my name. Why is this?