I’m off to a friend’s birthday in Birmingham for a couple of days. I won’t be back until late on Monday so there’ll be no posting until then.

Meantime, here’s some cool stuff to check out:

• London Bloggers organised by Underground station.
• Thirty-eight ways to win an argument.
• Top 100 Speeches, many with MP3 recording.

See you Monday!

Thought I’d share my favourite quote of the day (from Simon Savory) which seems pretty well to sum up the attitude of Londoners today:

I have to say though, it was incredible how calm and courageous the people of London were. It seemed to me that everyone (including myself), after calling friends and relatives and calming frayed nerves, soon turned their attentions to “How the f*ck am I going to get in to work tomorrow?!”

Link

Scoble has a ton of links here, here, here, and here.

One thing that has struck me during this disaster is how much better the coverage has been on the blogs and other collaborative information sources (such as Wikipedia, Wikinews and Flickr) than on the TV. The main differences are that the ‘New Media’ sources have been more concise, more accurate and less conflicting than television reports.

Television news stations are more inclined to report any news as soon as it comes in, whether confirmed or not, whereas blogs and wiki-sources tend to wait for confirmed reports. TV sources feel compelled to keep reporting whether there’s anything new to say or not. Blogs are more content to wait for something substantive to say.

All this makes for a much more fact-based and level-headed approach to reporting. I would particularly commend Wikinews and Wikipedia for their excellent reporting.

I don’t have anything substantive to add regarding today’s news from London, other than to express my sympathies for those involved. Instead I’ll provide links to the best the web has to offer on the subject.

Blogs

• UrbanGrounds
• normblog
• Skitz and again.
• Samizdata.
• London Metroblogging has excellent, frequently updated, coverage.

Other Resources

• Wikinews entry
• Wikipedia entry
• Flickr photo set from DonovanSmoke
• PM’s Statement

• Unseen Japan

Very cool collection of photos from a photography competition. My favourite. Via Trivial Pursuits

• Kurzweil Reader

Interesting collection of articles by Ray Kurzweil on a variety of topics including AI, VR and life extension.

• del.icio.us/rss/tscrace

Thought I might as well post my del.icio.us RSS feed. Occasionally I put things of interest to me there or things I might want to find again.

I spend a lot more time on the internet than I do watching TV so maybe it’s that I’ve been spoiled by technology like Google, RSS, del.icio.us and tagging but it seems to me that the Sky TV Guide (you know, the one that comes up on the screen when you press a button on the remote) is sorely lacking in features.

The number of channels we have in the UK (a few hundred) might not quite qualify TV as a true example of the Long Tail (yet) but some of the lessons we learn from Long Tail enterprises can be applied here.

The main lesson should be that massive diversity of choice without filters is just noise. Amazon is the classic example of a Long Tail business. One of the reasons they have been so successful is that they’ve made niche media available to a mass audience. But that on its own is not enough; in order to turn its huge catalogue into a success Amazon has had to be inventive in creating ways for customers to find what they want in its huge jungle of products. They’ve implemented features like search, recommendations, reader reviews and so on in order to filter out the noise and help the customer get the stuff they are interested in.

None of this has been implemented in the Sky Guide. There isn’t even the most basic search. All it can manage is to categorise the channels into predefined groups such as ‘entertainment’, ’sports’, ‘news and documentaries’ etc. These categories don’t even shift dynamically as the channels’ content changes; the category to which a channel belongs remains static regardless of what it’s actually showing.

I realise that interactive TV will probably always lag a way behind the cutting edge of filter and search technology but I think it’s about time Sky made a bit of an effort to catch up. Basic search and dynamic categorisation would be a good place to start.

If you blog click above to take the MIT Weblog Survey.

Taking a look at the survey results so far it’s very interesting to see that of the respondents to date 16750 were male while 28123 were female. This is certainly not in line with the prevailing belief in the blogging community (at least within the technology-oriented community) that most bloggers are men.

I’ll look forward to seeing the final survey results.