Month: January 2009

I had an unusual experience with Google today. Maybe it’s been happening for a while, and maybe I’ve never noticed it before.

I was in Google, and wanted to know what had happened at the FBR Open last night (I was too tired to stay up and watch). And rather than enter www.pgatour.com into my address bar, I did the lazy thing and entered “pgatour” into the Google search box. And this is what I got in return:

When I saw the “This site may harm your computer” warning for the main PGA site I was bemused, but vaguely prepared to believe that something was up. The site could have been infected with malware, and I guess I should have been grateful that Google was warning me. But I wasn’t convinced, since I wasn’t intending to download anything. So I went ahead and clicked on the link. And this is what I got:

Okay, they did warn me, and when I didn’t heed their warning, they warned me again. Now I was really confused. For those who are interested, this is the url that was showing at the time:

http://www.google.co.uk/interstitial?url=http://www.pgatour.com/

At that point I stopped. Went back to the search results. Looked down the list, beyond all the sites clearly linked with pgatour, and found the Wikipedia entry for the PGA Tour also tarnished with the warning.

I find it implausible that Google should declare so many sites as risky. I find it implausible that just going to that site will ‘harm my computer”. But what do I know?

Views?

Melih Bilgil, who’s been working on the PICOL project, released a new video earlier this month. PICOL is “a project for providing free and open icons for electronic devices. The aim is to find a common pictorial language for electronic communication.”

The wonders of the internet. You’re about to watch a film made by a Turk in Germany linked to by an Indian in the UK. And you are what and where?

Which brings me to the real reason for this post. “History of the Internet.”. Click here to watch.

I was tagged this afternoon, by Glyn Moody. The tag requires me to

(a) republish these rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

(b) share seven (preferably less well-known) facts about myself:

• I don’t drive. Have never driven. Tried and failed decades ago. Plan to fix it this year. Planned to fix it last year, but never got around to it….
  
• I don’t swim. Never learnt to. Actually drowned once, fishermen brought my body in. Plan to fix it this year. Learnt a bit while on holiday. Love water, don’t know how to float. Panic sets in….
  
• I collect books. I have over 180 different editions of Don Quixote, covering 17th-20th century. Safely in storage. Along with around 36,000 others. Ran out of money to build my library. One day….
  
• I love chillies. I tend to have habanero-level chillies most days, in home-made sauce, bought sauce or raw. The capsaicin sets off an endorphin rush which I adore. Zubin Mehta is probably the only famous guy who does this….
  
• I will set up a school locally when I retire in seven years time, and work there for the rest of my life. Education is a personal passion, I was very privileged to receive a good one in Calcutta. I loved school…..thanks to Abu, whom I’ve known since 1966, I am now in touch with most of my class.
  
• Since leaving university I’ve never worked for a competitor. I don’t like “crossing the floor” for money…..
  
• I’m vaguely bionic. I have an Implantable Cardioverter-Defribillator. The only other person I “know” with the same device is Dick Cheney (!). Went in to what cardiologists call ventricular fibrillation a couple of times in December 2006. Lucky to be alive. I thank God every day.….

(c) Tag seven people. Here goes:

Dina Mehta.

Steve Clayton.

Kevin Marks.

Laura Fitton.

Tara Hunt.

Tom Ilube.

Sig Rinde.

You have been warned. I shall be in touch. And Glyn, you now have to sign my copy of Rebel Code.

I’m glad Fortune brought the Flint Center Macintosh video to my attention:

25 years tomorrow. Get well soon, Steve.

Original article with links to the video here, along with links to the legendary Ridley Scott commercial.

Loved this story about how David Bergman set about making a 1,474 megapixel photograph of Barack Obama’s inauguration and address:

It’s an amazing photograph. The things you can do with it, how you wander round, the power of the zoom, the quality of the photograph, the sheer usability of the tools. [My retarded hippie roots showed up very soon. The first thought that came into my mind was “I wish I could have delved into the Sgt Pepper cover this way”, soon followed by thoughts about Woodstock.]

I found out about it here, because I was following Zee here.

It’s all changing. Digital objects and how they become social, as Hugh Macleod kept teaching us. How the social object, having entered conversation, creates markets, as the Cluetrain guys kept reminding us. How those markets work and expand using social software, as tools like Twitter show us. How more and more tools are becoming available to do all this.

And how the Web is at the heart of all this change.

Web changes everything.

Incidentally, talking about non-web: Can you imagine the chaos if people attached this photo to their email and sent it around that way?