BurningbirdWhen a Japanese whaler developed a fire and put out a distress call, it was a Greenpeace vessel who responded with offers of help.
“No thanks”, the Greenpeace ship was told.
More on the Japanese whaling industry incidents with anti-whaling forces.
I guess now it’s OK to be against nofollow. Well, thank goodness our opinions have been validated.
Seth Finkelstein has a Guardian article up on paid blogging and high rent versus low rent bloggers:
There’s a class division, where membership is exclusive and expensive, while payment is common and cheap. But both are monetisation of attention. If we want there to be areas of human interaction which have some protection against commercial pressures, blogs stopped qualifying long ago.
This also follows on a discussion Dave Rogers has been having with Doc Searls this week. The ‘money quote’:
I am opposed to the unchecked expansion of commercial activity at the expense of social and political activities. Markets are not conversations, because conversations are a social activity, not a commercial one. But if you tell people markets are conversations, then it stands to reason that conversations are for sale.
We’re in no danger of losing our heads, what else would marketers have to market to? No, we’re in danger of losing the notion that life means something more than an economic calculation or a commercial transaction.
There’s a person I read off and on. This week the person has mentioned one company in several different posts. I almost wrote in comments, “Are you being paid by this company?”, but didn’t. Doesn’t matter, though, because I realized that I can never approach this person’s writing in the same way again. I doubt I’ll even continue reading their weblog.
Uldis Bojars writes:
Pipeline architecture itself is not unique to Pipes. Applying it to the Semantic Web (or to RSS) is not unique either – many have been collecting / integrating information from a number of sources and asking questions like “show me the publications by people who know [user input here, e.g. “Stefan Decker”] and filter the answers according to some criteria” and passing the results to other applications in JSON or RDF/XML. That makes a simple pipeline, even if it is built manually and without a nice UI.
What is unique, though, is how easy it is to create new mashups with Yahoo! Pipes and the potential they provide to make Semantic Web used by a large group of people.
Leaving aside fixing Pipes to work with RDF rather than syndication feeds, another problem with Yahoo Pipes it is seems to have missed its target: the only folks playing around with the site are people capable of creating their own mashups. I’ve seen no interest in Pipes outside of the geeks.
We have a genuine, honest to goodness blizzard blowing in today. Nothing better than to sit at my computer, looking out the window at those poor souls having to unbury their cars.