Year: 2005

Simple framing

September 24, 2005 / Links / 6 Comments

Framing – using words to build a frame of mind.

A Senator goes on a Fox News show in which a conservative argues with a liberal. The conservative host says: “Some say that more tax relief creates more jobs. You have voted against increased tax relief. Why?” The Senator is caught. Any attempt to answer the question as asked simply reinforces both the Tax Relief frame and the “Tax Relief Creates Jobs” frame. The question builds in a conservative worldview and false “facts”. Even to deny that “tax relief” creates jobs accepts the Tax Relief frame and reinforces the “Tax Relief Creates Jobs” frame.

PostSecret

September 22, 2005 / Links / Leave a Comment

PostSecret, where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard. Showcases the extremities of human idiosyncracy.

Innocent in London

September 22, 2005 / London 2005 / Leave a Comment

Innocent in London.

LONDON (Reuters): – A London underground train station was evacuated and part of a main east-west line closed in a security alert on Thursday, three weeks after suicide bombers killed 52 people on the transport network, police said. A Transport Police spokeswoman said Southwark station was closed and Jubilee Line services suspended between Waterloo and Canary Wharf in the east London business district.

This Reuters story was written while the police were detaining me in Southwark tube station and the bomb squad was checking my rucksack. When they were through, the two explosive specialists walked out of the tube station smiling and commenting nice laptop. The officers offered apologies on behalf of the Metropolitan Police. Then they arrested me.

ALL MEN ARE SUSPECT. BUT SOME MEN ARE MORE SUSPECT THAN OTHERS. (with apologies to George Orwell)

Autoblog

September 14, 2005 / How I do things / 1 Comment

I have an automated (and lazy) way of finding interesting sites. This is what I do every day.

  1. I get the del.icio.us tags of every URL I blog about. (It’s available at http://del.icio.us/rss/url/ followed by the MD5 hex version of the URL).
  2. I pick the most popular tags (at least 50 links must have this tag), and use them as my “preferred tags”
  3. I scan the most popular sites on del.icio.us, and get each site’s tags
  4. If a site has my preferred tags, I give it points (the number of points is equal to the number of times I’ve blogged that tag)
  5. I pick the top 5 sites based on my points, and read them.

There are two problems I have now. Firstly, I will find sites similar to those I have blogged about — not discover anything new. That’s fine to start with — I can search for those manually. The bigger problem is, this is restricted to del.icio.us. There are two ways I can extend this (lazily).

  1. By finding new sources of popular URLs (which requires a site with a list of popular URLs updated daily, which I will find interesting)
  2. By finding new sites that tag URLs (which ideally requires an API to get the tags for a given URL)

There are lots of sources for popular URLs. But though many of sites, including notably Technorati, tag URLs, but none of them I know have APIs.