Good question:

How many SEO copywriters does it take to change a lightbulb [...?]

[Via iamcal]

The NFL is returning to Channel 4:

NFL football is coming home! Almost three decades after first appearing on Channel 4, the NFL is returning to its original station in a new deal to broadcast Sunday Night Football. Channel 4 will air the league’s premier match-up at 1 a.m. every Sunday night, with the game kicking off at 1.20. The new season will begin with the Dallas Cowboys’ trip to arch-rival Washington Redskins on September 12. [...]

I used to enjoy following the NFL back in the 1980s when Channel 4 gave the sport its first mainstream UK TV coverage. I stopped following the NFL once Channel 4 lost the rights, primarily because when Channel 5 took over the contract their coverage initially centred around their live game show in the wee small hours. I could have recorded the shows to watch during the week, but somehow I just never got into the habit. In fairness, it may also have been that the generation of players I’d become familiar with when I first encountered the sport in the early 1980s was starting to retire and I felt less of a connection with the teams than I had a few years earlier.

It’ll be interesting to try to follow the sport again in the age of the internet. Back in the 1980s the Channel 4 show early on a Sunday evening would show highlights from the previous weekend’s games,¹ but given the lack of coverage of the NFL in the UK mainstream media at the time it wasn’t a problem to avoid finding out the results over the course of the week so I could safely catch up on the action on a Sunday night. Now that it’d be trivial to find out the weekend’s scores online, will I have the willpower to hold out until the next highlights show? If I can’t wait, will I end up trying to seek out game highlights on YouTube in preference to waiting for a chance to see the highlights on Channel 4?²

[Via Phil Gyford]

1. There were exceptions to that rule, with extra mid-week highlights programmes during post-season play and of course live coverage of the Superbowl, but in general Channel 4′s NFL coverage existed in a time warp. ↩
2. Of course, we don’t have full details of Channel 4′s coverage yet: it’s quite possible that they’ll put on a highlights show in midweek in addition to their live game coverage. ↩

My favourite part of this post on the signage of Sex, Gender, and Toilets is this meet-cute story:

quickstart 10:57 am on September 2, 2010
In my hometown there’s a bar where the washroom signs say “Quarterbacks” and “Receivers.” Whenever I end up there, I always catch someone standing hesitantly in front of the bathroom, not totally clear on where they should be going or how exactly to take these signs. This is actually how I met the love of my life, when I informed him he was a quarterback – he’d been standing there for a while – he said, “I know. It’s just so offensive.”

[Via The Awl]

I’ve seen a number of links to this Homebrew Cray-1A over the last day or two, but I hadn’t followed them: for some reason, I’d assumed that it was just a bunch of commodity PC hardware shoehorned into a ¹/₁₀ scale model of a Cray’s case.

It was only when I read the text of this MetaFilter post that I realised that the damned thing doesn’t just look like a baby Cray, it’s binary-compatible with a Cray-1A too!

That’s a neat trick…

[Via MetaFilter]

Wrong on so many levels.

Every thing is a play thing, or, Why Woody is like Sam Lowry and Cobb:

I’ve been enjoying the summer movie blockbusters, more or less, and have been struck by a couple that veer off in a decidedly metaphysical direction. And you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve spent a while thinking about the last few scenes of one film in particular, which may rewrite or redefine the entire narrative you’ve just seen.

I’m talking, of course, about Toy Story 3.

The Toy Story trilogy is being hailed as one of the great film series of all time, on a par with the Godfather series or the original Star Wars movies. Both of those were weakest in their third acts, while Toy Story 3 is a masterpiece. But it’s also the one that pulls together a number of strings that have run through the three films, and threatens – right at its very end – to drag the whole edifice to the ground. And it’s all done with one line of dialogue, that almost everybody else seems to have missed. [...]

(Do I really need to add that spoilers for Toy Story 3 abound?)

[Via Yoz Grahame]

I know it’s a couple of weeks old now, but Taylor Parkes’ review of ITV’s World Cup coverage is still well worth a read:

[ITV...], having paid £6 million for his services, devised a show for [James] Corden to front with his quick wit and personal charm and broadcast the results at prime time for the duration of the tournament. And with sapping inevitability, James Corden’s World Cup Live was truly, truly horrible, a cack-handed cross between Soccer AM‘s infantilism and TFI Friday‘s Class A shoutiness.

Abbey Clancy was hired to do what Abbey Clancy does; the backroom boys worked out some skits about how Uruguay’s players had long hair and looked like girls; a polo-shirted audience whooped with well-marshalled efficiency. “Lovely stuff!” barked Corden, banging his cards on the desk. Somewhere in Britain, another library closed.

Ex-footballers with nothing better to do squeezed onto the sofa with sort-of celebs like Denise van Outen and Pixie Lott, the kind of people no one really cares about, without whom no TV show is commissioned (“Have you been watching the World Cup, Pixie?” probed our fearless host. “Well, I saw the England game,” giggled the vacant Lott).

Andrew Wheeler quoted a couple of passages from a New Yorker article by Susan Orlean¹ that make me wish I could afford to subscribe to all the magazines that I’d like to read:

[A] mule knows its limits. It is characteristic of the breed to have an inviolable commitment to self-preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness. In truth, it is probably a form of genius. A horse will eat until it founders and dies; a mule will only snack, even if it happens upon an open bin of oats. A horse can be enticed to gallop, fatally, over a cliff. In 1942, the Army was researching ways to deliver mules to combat zones. Someone thought that teaching the animals to skydive would be a good way to do this. As an experiment, twelve mules were fitted with parachutes and taken up in a cargo plane. The first six, caught by surprise, were pushed out the door and immediately fell to their deaths. The next six survived. This is because they must have figured out what was going on and absolutely refused to go near the door.

…

Every mule, then, is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world. It is as if each mule knew that it had one shot at being here on earth, and risky behavior, such as jumping out of an airplane at ten thousand feel, would interfere with that.

– Susan Orlean, “Riding High,” in the 2/15 & 22/10 New Yorker

Nice work.

I wish the magazine industry would stop praying that the magazine-as-iPad-app approach will preserve their current business model and come up with some sort of central clearing house to which I could pay a reasonable sum every month in return for online-only access to a certain number of articles per month across multiple publications and publishers. I’m never going to be able to justify paying for subscriptions to the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books and a good dozen other print publications every month² but I’d be happy to pay a few pounds per month to an online library service³ for pick-and-mix access to their contents.

I appreciate that the various publishers would much rather have me signed up as one of their subscribers than get the occasional slice of my subscription when I feel like reading an interesting article here or there, but the net result of their current strategy is that they get not a penny from me. I can’t be the only non-subscriber who would send some money the publishers’ way if only they’d let me, can I?

1. Not available to read in full for free online. ↩
2. And I don’t really want the paper copies of their products cluttering up the place. ↩
3. Perhaps £5, maybe as much as £10. It would depend upon the number of magazines available and how easy it was to browse and access the individual articles. ↩

Scott Rosenberg has posted the first of a three-part series of posts in defence of links:

For 15 years, I’ve been doing most of my writing – aside from my two books – on the Web. When I do switch back to writing an article for print, I find myself feeling stymied. I can’t link!

Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also part of how I read. Given a choice between reading something on paper and reading it online, I much prefer reading online: I can follow up on an article’s links to explore source material, gain a deeper understanding of a complex point, or just look up some term of art with which I’m unfamiliar.

There is, I think, nothing unusual about this today. So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link, and found at least partial support from some other estimable writers (among them Laura Miller, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jason Fry and Ryan Chittum). Carr’s “delinkification” critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book The Shallows. I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let’s zero in on Carr’s case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his “delinkification” post. [...]

This first post suggests that some of the studies into the relationship between reading, comprehension and hyperlinks cited by Nicholas Carr weren’t looking at hyperlinks as they’re used in the vast majority of web-based writing today. I look forward to seeing where Rosenberg takes the argument in his next two pieces.

Tomorrow, in the next post in this series, I’ll examine some of the ways links are being misused on the Web today – driven not by some abstract belief in the virtues of hypertext but rather by crude business imperatives. Then, in the final installment, I’ll make the case for good linking practices as a source of badly needed context and a foundation for trust.

For what it’s worth, when I read Nicholas Carr’s post experimenting with delinkification I did consider whether it might be worth adopting the idea, but concluded that it’s a technique particularly ill-suited to a linklog like this site.

If I were in the habit of writing longer think-pieces then my gut feeling – based, I’ll freely admit, primarily on the way I’ve learned to read pieces on the web since I first encountered it in late 1992/early 1993 – is that it’s much more helpful to have the link appear at the point in the text at which I discuss the material at the other end of the link than it is to require the reader to bounce between the text and a list of links at the end of the piece¹ to get the full sense of my argument.

The key, to my mind, is that it’s up to the reader to choose whether to hare off after my link as soon as it appears or to defer following it until they’ve reached the end of my argument. As long as I don’t style my link text in a way that makes it difficult for the reader to skim the entire sentence² I think that readers should be fine dealing with a few links scattered here and there throughout my piece.

1. Or in footnotes/endnotes, or in a sidebar. And yes, I do notice the irony of my placing this text in a footnote. ↩
2. By which I mean, for example, styling the text in a way that jars with the surrounding, non-linked text. ↩

The best joke ever in the footnotes of the Journal of American History:

The best joke ever in the footnotes of the JAH – indeed, the only joke of which I’m aware in the footnotes of the JAH – follows along those lines. Bruce Schulman was critiquing the original transcription of the LBJ audiotapes:

The few transcripts compiled by Johnson’s secretaries proved unreliable: one had Johnson refer to a “pack them bastards” waiting outside his office; it turned out to be the Pakistani ambassador.¹⁰

Note 10 reads,

“… As Beschloss notes, the secretary could hardly be blamed for the error. Packs of bastards were far more likely to appear in Johnson’s conversation than Pakistani ambassadors.”

“Taping History,” JAH 85:2 (Sept 1998): 571-578; on 574.

Nice as the default view of David May’s photograph of a statue of a Clydesdale horse situated just outside Glasgow is, viewing it at Original size is even better.

In the cropped view offered by my browser window, the full-size image looks more like a pencil sketch that a photograph of a real, three-dimensional object. Lovely work.

[Via MeFi user maudlin, posting to this thread]

Why Facebook would have ruined Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

[Via The Null Device]

NASA have invited the public to choose a wakeup song for the final Space Shuttle flight. So far, it looks to be a two-horse race:

I’m a little surprised that the Star Wars theme has garnered just 0.9% of the vote. I have to assume that once their online fandom gears up they’ll crush the likes of Steppenwolf and Rush. Whether the rebel scum can defeat the fandom that managed to get the prototype Space Shuttle named after their favourite starship is another question.

(For the record, my vote went to ELO’s Mr Blue Sky, but with just 0.2% of the vote it’s got an awful lot of ground to make up.)

[Via The Awl]

Julian Dibbell has produced a readable, insightful profile of 4chan’s founder:

Christopher Poole is 22 years old, and as is often true for men his age, his mental life has been punctuated by a series of passing enthusiasms: video games, online chat rooms, Japanese animation. Currently he seems to be going through a Robert Moses phase. On the nightstand in his New York City apartment is a copy of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, a 1,300-page biography of the mid-20th-century urban planner who, in pursuing his vision of a modernized New York, destroyed one neighborhood after another. [...] On a recent Thursday afternoon, as he walked to work past Washington Square Park and observed the sweeping renovations under way there – a controversial relandscaping imposed by current city planners in the face of heavy local opposition – he saw parallels with the old autocrat’s imperious approach to such projects. “Robert Moses is probably smiling,” he said. “Like, ‘Fuck the people – what do they know!’?”

Like many people, Poole thinks there are better ways than Moses’s to manage the tangled social, cultural, and infrastructural needs of a community of millions. But unlike most people – let alone most 22-year-olds – he actually has some experience doing just that. Seven years ago, Poole created the website 4chan [...]

Adam Curtis on experiments in the laboratory of consumerism 1959-67:

The widespread fascination with the Mad Men series is far more than just simple nostalgia. It is about how we feel about ourselves and our society today.

In Mad Men we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.

[...]

I have quite a lot of film from the archives that was shot in the Madison Avenue agencies in the mid 1960s, and I thought I would put some sections up. It is great because it shows some of the major advertising men and women of the time, many of whom are the real-life models for characters in Mad Men.

But it is also fascinating because it shows how some of those individuals would go on to play crucial roles in breaking open that static world.

And in a strange way – by achieving that – those same advertising executives would lay the foundations of another static world – the one we find ourselves living in today. [...]

Fascinating. Depressing, but fascinating.

The MESSENGER space probe, well on the way to a rendezvous with Mercury next March, looked back and caught a glimpse of home.

Last.fm‘s robots.txt file is reassuringly Three Laws Compliant.

[Via currybetdotnet]

Scott Pilgrim should have taken the blue pill.

[Via GromBlog]

Simon’s Cat in ‘The Box’.

(Previously. And again.)

[Via orbyn.blog]

The Tragic Death of Practically Everything:

Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson is catching flack for the magazine’s current cover story, which declares that the Web is dead. I’m not sure what the controversy is. For years, once-vibrant technologies, products, and companies have been dropping like teenagers in a Freddy Krueger movie. Thank heavens that tech journalists have done such a good job of documenting the carnage as it happened. Without their diligent reporting, we might not be aware that the industry is pretty much an unrelenting bloodbath. [...]

[Via Ben Hammersley's return to old-fashioned blogging]