Okay new one:

Is this what the Tories meant by DFS style advertising? I think I had better balance it up tomorrow with an anti-Tory anti-Labour ad as opposed to this anti-Labour anti-Tory ad.

Damn you Google. No sooner did I post my rant about organising data-mining in some way did you come up with ‘Google Personalized’.

Always one step ahead. Eh?

First hit on searching for PostModernism produces this with the personal filter maxed up we get this a result more tailored for me apparently.

MSN BlogBot a new service from Microsoft will aggregate content from hundreds of thousands of Web logs and index that content based on which Web logs are most popular and credible. Defined by whom exactly?

I generally find these services useful, its good to get a snapshot of what’s popular on the Internet. But ‘god is in the details’ as the saying goes. The diversity of thoughts available on the Internet is one of its biggest strengths. As with conventional media this will simply be a large corporate entity editing what we see. Already on Blogdex a large component of the items are from the dead trees news outlets of Grauniad, NYTimes, BBC and Washington Post. They are always going to be able to out-publish individual bloggers.

Don’t get me wrong, services such as this are much need to sift through the literally billions of sources. However, editing the edited is a one way street.

I would like to see services that can be controlled themselves. Maybe an Amazon style ‘if you liked this, then why not try this’?

Also what if one of the most popular Blogs was about how crap Microsoft are or how great Apple are..would these still get up there?

Far Out

In 1610, shortly after viewing the sun with his new telescope, Galileo Galilei made the first European observations of Sunspots.

Monthly averages of the sunspot numbers since 1749 show that the number of sunspots visible on the sun waxes and wanes with an approximate 11-year cycle.

A theory [Sekhmet Hypothesis] believes that musical trends follow solar cycles, i.e. every 11 years there’s a quantum shift.

• 1966//Psychedelia
• 1977//Punk rock
• 1988//Acid house
• 1999//NuMetal

Apparently this is due to cyclical development of movements in “youth culture” which emerge with fresh strength and get absorbed by business within a decade. Suggesting therefore that ‘Uth Cultr’ when at its ‘peak’(or most its ideas prove the most appealing?) matches the peak of sun spots and within time get absorbed by the mainstream. So that means for example that the origins for punk rook started around 1967-70? Well yes apparently

So could sun spots really affect us here on earth? Sun Spots are defined as ‘Relatively cool regions in the solar photosphere that appear dark. They contain intense magnetic fields which provide the energy for solar flares. Sunspots occur in groups.’.

So its magnetism eh? And what effect may these have on “youth culture” I hear you type?

• Changes in neural electrophysiology
• Changes in neurotransmitters (which affect motivation and pain perception)
• Decreased memory, attention, and slower reaction time in school children

Sooo Psychedelia/Punk rock/Acid house/NuMetal could be the resultant effect of huge amounts of magnetism on young brains? I have to admit there is more a passing resemblance between ‘Changes in neural electrophysiology’ and those music types, especially in reference to drug taking.

And what else causes large magnetic surges? Mobile phone masts. Shit, well we may all be vegetables but we’ll have some funky music to listen too.

Of course all this is a fairly arbitrary theory. What makes a scene ‘good’, how do we define what the scene is? Indeed there may very well be a correlation, but as with everything, it is difficult to pin things such as this down to absolutes as there are always going to be other effects on the collective creationistic tendancies of youth.