Links for 2006-08-07

Posted August 7, 2006 1:17 AM.

• The Musty Man talks about travelling, backpacking, hating America and I suppose - sort of getting older The lovely Mr Bergman through this in my direction and I'm bloody glad he did. It's a thoughtful and interesting piece on what it means to travel and what it means to come home and what the world looks like while you're doing it...
• Monopoly is moving towards using Debit cards rather than multicoloured cash I wonder how many years we are away from a cashless Monopoly board, and whether we'll get there before we do so in the real world...
• Ben Hammersley is in Afghanistan, taking amazing pictures that he's putting onto Flickr There's something about having a friend in a warzone that makes the conflict very very real. His photography is pretty stunning too
• A spoof of Al Gore that was put on YouTube, allegedly made by a teenager, may have been made by a PR firm with Exxon as a client Wow, this is super low and horrible. Makes the whole Cillit Bang thing seem like a real PR victory in comparison. This is like Ethicopocalypse. I don't understand how these people sleep at night.
• An interesting article on C|Net about Google's resolute refusal to play social networking games... For me, 'social networking' in the longer term remains a structuring principle rather than a product, but you need a the network to be able to layer it into your products, and Orkut isn't it. Blogger's rather been left to rot too...