the author of perdido street station and scar comes out swinging…. Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious – you can't ignore it, so don't even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there's a lot to dislike – […]

Pandora Bots. Pandora Botshttp://www.pandorabots.com/ Welcome to pandorabots.com, the place where you can create and unleash virtual personalities. Pandorabots.com is an experimental software robot (bot) hosting service based on the work of Dr. Richard Wallace and the A.L.I.C.E./AIML free software community (www.alicebot.org). From any browser, you may create, design and publish your own software robots ‰¥ã […]

Hotels of Doom. Hotelchatter. The ever-prolific Rusty of Kuro5hin fame has a new website out. This one is a collaborative weblog for reviewing hotels around the world. Having had some bad hotel experiences, I fully endorse the idea, but will people be motivated enough to write? [MetaFilter] —- this is interesting, some nice little stories […]

This week i have to finish my proposal stuff, get out a few job applications, and finish writing a book review for david. all in all, i'm busy. nothing new there.

IMing at Work. From the CACM Newstrack: A recent study of 300 firms in the U.S. and Britain÷ the world's two largest instant… [zephoria] —– both of my co-panelists, Anabel Quan-Haase and Gina Neff, at the aoir internet environment as work environment panel spoke of interesting studies related to IM'S, i don't really think that […]

US develops lethal new viruses. A scientist funded by the US government has deliberately created an extremely deadly form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus, through genetic engineering. [Gyre.org] —— hmmm, it makes me wonder, doesn't it make you wonder? i wonder things like 'when will it jump species?' or 'which human will […]

New Online Information Review. The new issue of Online Information Review is now online. Only the table of contents and abstracts are free online. Here are the OA-related articles. Hussein Suleman and four co-authors, Building digital libraries from simple building blocks (on OAI interoperability) Margareta Benner, The digital archive of the Swedish East India Company, […]

Open Source Software economics: “Linux has been around for quite some time, yet Apple came in and created a Unix operating system with a much easier to use and comprehensive UI, becoming the number one vendor of desktop Unix in a few short years. This demonstrates another pitfall of OSS: distributed part-time development on a […]

well virginia tech beat miami, i could still here the low roar of the fans about 2]30 minutes after it was over, though i live about a mile away and my windows face away from the stadium. it's amazing, all that energy could probably change the world, and there it is trapped in a stadium. […]