Saturday, March 26, 2005

Just links

The best:

Some wonderful blogs I've been reading regularly:

+ Cassandra Pages. This woman writes beautifully about her life in Montreal. Her description of snow: "It's as if our whole world were inside an owl's wing: muffled, soft, white, and slightly blurred."
+ Budapest and the Rest. "The maternal instinct is, in my humble opinion, the instinct to get it on." Great line from an American in Budapest!
+ Meanwhile, Here in France. Another gorgeously-written blog.
+ Knäckebröd. A New Jerseyan in Sweden.
+ Stay of Execution. Sharp observations on life from rural America.
+ This Fish Needs a Bicycle. Have I not linked to this sparkling NYC blog already? The kind of blog-writing to aspire to; alas I could never be this personal.
+ Orangette. I will link to this Seattle food blog again and again, it's so yummy.
+ De Grouchy Owl. Another re-link to this descriptive account of life in urban Pakistan.

The rest:

+ Life isn't just as you want it? Remix it! "We're remixing our music consumption by buying songs online one at a time instead of in CD collections. We're remixing our TV behavior as TiVo-style video recorders let us 'make every night Thursday night'. We're remixing our media by grabbing online articles from dozens of different sources and then broadcasting our own opinions with blogs. When you get down to it, the remixing metaphor applies to almost any area you can think of."

+ Ego-casting, revisited. "Today's personal technologies, particularly the cellphone and the digital video recorder, are marvels of individual choice, convenience and innovation; they represent the democratization of the power of the machine. Our technologies are more intuitive, more facile and more responsive than ever before. In a rebuke to Marx, we have not become the alienated slaves of the machine; we have made the machines more like us and in the process toppled decades of criticism about the dangerous and potentially enervating effects of our technologies. Or have we?" Reg. req.

+ Geekfathers: CyberCrime mobs revealed. "Crime is now organized on the Internet. Operating in the anonymity of cyberspace, Web mobs with names like Shadowcrew and stealthdivision are building networks that help crackers and phishers, money launderers and fences skim off some of the billions that travel through the Web every day."

+ The inner world of Joe Blogs. "'The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything,' wrote Oscar Wilde 'except what is worth knowing.' Few things bear this out more convincingly than the world of blogging," argues The Times in their scathing attack on blogs.

+ Need a building? Just add water. "A pair of engineers in London have come up with a 'building in a bag' -- a sack of cement-impregnated fabric. To erect the structure, all you have to do is add water to the bag and inflate it with air. Twelve hours later the shelter is dried out and ready for use."

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