Month: February 2001

Last night I went for a few beers after college with my tutor – not being sucky, you realise, but just having a few jars and putting the world to rights. Conversation revolved around relationships (what else?), college, getting older and music. All very interesting, I must say.
Tonight’s plan – ah, yes, more beer. Splendid.

Just got a spam mail (“LOWEST RATE LOANS EVER!!!!”) which features the following as the email signature:
“Let us continue to suppose that any exponential Folklife coefficient requires considerable systems analysis and trade-off studies to arrive at the greater fight-worthiness concept. Presumably, any associated supporting element delimits the sophisticated hardware. Of course, the product assurance architecture recognizes the importance of other disciplines, while taking into account the overall negative profitability. In respect to specific goals, the earlier discussion of deviance appears to correlate rather closely with problems of phonemic and morphological analysis. From the intercultural viewpoint, most of the methodological work in modern linguistics is holistically compounded, in the context of the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. Based on my own fieldwork in Guatemala, a large proportion of intercultural communicative coordination adds explicit performance limits to nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory.”
hmm. Educated spammers?

hmm. It seems that Grayblog has been nominated for an award in the Anti-Bloggies, presumably in the “most depressing weblog” category. And I probably could have walked it if I hadn’t consigned all the really depressing stuff to a dusty corner of the web where you can’t see it. Well, if the judges really want to see it, and if there is a real chance that I might win a prize, they had best ask me….although isn’t this just by popular vote? in which case, no tearful acceptance speeches for me.

Went out last night for a beer and met up with Paul F. Put the world to rights, and actually (hold your breath) cheered up! Well, a little bit anyway.

Blogger is not well, and I, for one, am worried. Blogger provides an excellent service – ok, it has its ups and downs, but overall, it’s pretty good. But I’m worried that if the service appears weak, people will switch to alternatives like Greymatter, or even Atomz Publish, and then the commercial future of Blogger will be *really* weak. I’m surprised that Ev didn’t see this coming – as a marketer, I hold to the basic tenet that if you have a good idea, some bugger will come along and do it better. The trick is to do it better yourself before they have a chance. In the case of Blogger, the “do it better” trick is to do it *and* make money.
But then, if even the big players on the web can’t make money, what hope is there?