www.felixcohen.co.uk

Twitter, and the whole family of tumbleloging that it seems to have inaugarated, is the bane of my internet existence. The blog is about the smallest unit of content I really want to deal with: don't broadcast every inane detail of your life, because even the most interesting person in the world spends some time kicking back catching up on 24, or similarly mundane activities that I don not want to know about. For example:

• redfern - I'm just bored less than 5 seconds ago from im
• avinashsonee - Watching movie : Simhadri ( Telugu ) less than 20 seconds ago from web
• grandmasterj - listening to my coworker eat. less than 10 seconds ago from twitterrific
• netbard At work, about to start some coding less than 5 seconds ago from im

I am getting sick and tired of cretins with 'conceptual' art projects who think that it entirely validates their process when they have a website.
It's not art because the artists believe the only way or it be considered art is for someone to buy it. Oh, and of course, it's limited, but not in any meaningful way; 1000 bags of sand is quite a few (and easy enough to copy: with better St. Davids sand!), and of course, selling more means lots of money: just shy of $1.5 million in the case of the sand: no wonder he can afford an advert on BoingBoing. Oh, and he's got a crap website.

Not quite got linked, but the lovely (and quite delectable) Violet Blue has given me much cocktail props and posted one of my old recipes, the Violet Martini, on her blog, TinyNibbles (Both probably NSFW). Thanks, V!
While we're on the subject of cocktails, I shall once again be on the bar at the wonderful Black Cotton Club at Volupte tonight: tickets on the door from 10, I think.

A few really good papers to read on online behaviour and participation. Nielsen pulls it all together, really; his discussion of users and lurkers is very enlightening. Basically, 1% of 'site users contribute 90% of the content, 9% contribute the rest and then 90% of your site members will actually just use the content. This is borne out by the way that, say, YouTube, Amazon and, yes, even openDemocracy are used. Go read.

Ah, just to let any other bloggers reading this know that we now have trackbacks enabled and (hopefully) working. We'll see...

Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006 is up for the final quarter. I love the graphs where he shows the spikes in blog posting frequency in terms of the events that are being reported on. Why the big lull before Katrina, though? A lot of bloggers glued to TV or new media outlets, waiting to see what happened as the big swirly thing moved in?
I'll be very interested to see what the next week or so looks like, now that the rational 'left' has retaken control of the House of Representatives, and looks fairly well set to at least tie the Senate. That was a pleasant thing to wake up to, unlike last time round.
Also, check out this great openDemocracy article, which brilliantly compares Burrough's Naked Lunch to the current climate change events.

Blogged with Flock

I started my first blog last week. For those of you who are interested, it can be found at www.felixcohen.co.uk. And it's probably pretty dull for most of you; lots of in-jokes about friends, things I've been doing and how bored I am with my dissertation. Blogging has become the integral core of what many people are calling Web 2.0, the enabling of the world-wide-web as a social tool. Many of you will have set yourselves up with Xuqa, Friendster or, most likely, MySpace accounts (and probably got bored within about a week!). Some people, myself included, have found these to be reasonably worthwhile, however. I can keep in touch with old friends from school, tell people what I'm doing, or what I think, en masse, and publish details for contact and communication easily and safely.