Links for 2007-01-20

Posted January 20, 2007 12:17 AM.

• From a while back - Stephen Colbert wags his finger at Apple and the iPhone I've been distracted by other far more elaborate and confusing things than the internet for the last few weeks/months so this is a bit late in the day. Good. Funny. Stuff like that.
• Joan Bakewell reviews Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in glowing terms... "Religions have the secular world running scared. This book is a clarion call to cower no longer. Primed by anger, redeemed by humour, it will, I trust, offend many."
• The Independent's review of The God Delusion is a little more equivocal... It's a flawed review in that it attempts to defeat Dawkins on his own terms - ie. by describing religion as a trait that provides its adherents with greater adaptive success, rather than by looking towards the meme as the unit of selection.
• There's an interesting discussion going on on the microformats list about how to depict television and radio programmes The standard confusions and complexities apply - the distinctions between a broadcast and an episode (where the episode corresponds to something on a tape that can be replayed), and between episodes and the brands that link them...
• David Carr talks in the New York Times about the benefits and costs of new web-native ways of reading and writing to the business of writing newspapers... Now this is a really good article. It balances the value of 'most read' pages and blogs with the risks towards popularisation and ratings-grabbing while accepting that one way or another they're here to stay. No head in the sand.
• Spaceship Entertainment talks about symptoms of addiction in World of Warcraft and references something I wrote a while back on the subject... I'm starting to wonder if—contra Raph Koster—gaming is the memetic equivalent of sugar. That is to say it's something nutritionally empty that hijacks biological drives at the expense of its consumer...
• Andrew Leonard of Salon responds to the David Carr post I wrote about earlier and in not enormously flattering terms... And he's also got a point! saturation in the marketplace doesn't mean that everyone writes about Britney, it means that people specialise and there's more choice. The capitalist would argue that market failure is the biggest threat, not competition...
• Employment (II) (1633) by George Herbert "Man is no starre, but a quick coal of mortall fire; Who blows it not, nor doth controll A faint desire, Let's his own ashes choke his soul"
• Presentation Zen writes about Steve Jobs at Macworld and the stinking presence of Cingularity Doing good talks is something that I wish I knew more about. Mine go quite well, but they cost me so much in preparation that I have to do them a few times to make them worth the time they take to write...
• The Carson Future of Web Design conference in April looks pretty interesting Nice to see he's making a family out of these events - and I'm loving the visual design for the conference site.