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The importance of proofing…

Proofing and subediting are tricky, demanding and under-rated skills.

Still, the time to find and listen to those skills would be before printing thousands of carrier bags.

Then again, maybe not.

Mrs Kibble's Spelling bags

Let the presses roll. Oh, and see if we can find St Christpoher’s Place on Google Maps…

UPDATE: I’ve shown this to 8 people, none of whom found the typo without prompting.

Sienna Miller to save planet by ‘taking less (sic) baths’

Design and Society: Celebrity worship isn’t restricted to ‘low-brow’ media

Heh – gloriously tart-yet-restrained review by Nico Macdonald on Sienna Miller’s appearance on the Today programme. A deft swipe at celebrity vapidity, unchallenging interviewing and the content-free orthodoxies around ‘carbonanitification’ discussions. I won’t quote it – just have a read 🙂

“Welcome to Westminster” – traffic warden’s contribution to the Tour de France

This made me chuckle: an over-zealous, non-cycling, generally unaware parking attendant in Westminster seems to have missed the fact that Pall Mall was closed specifically for the TDF official cars, but hey ho. Can’t imagine this being chased all the way round the Tour though…

Otherwise it was a really fun day: hanging out with Matthew and Al, shuffling along the Mall and watching the heads of cyclists we didn’t know pass in a blur in the distance.

London seemed to swallow the vast number of spectators, and some welcome sun gave everything a warm, holiday feel. Despite so many roads being closed there seemed to be limited disruption (I scootered straight into town and parked easily on St Martin’s Lane, just a few mins from the screen, stands and presentation area in Trafalgar square). The wide space on the Mall and Pall Mall meant that there wasn’t really a crush anywhere.

Now, all I need to do is watch what happened on the telly 😉

“Swim across the Atlantic Ocean – 3,462mi”: Google

from: New York, NY, United States of America to: London – Google Maps

googleNYLON.jpg

Oh, I know it’s doing the rounds of the web, and it’s also probably a cunning joke by those oh-so-funny folk at Google, but it is rather charming literal response to a mapping question.

The big, unanswered question, however, is why the landfall in France?

This isn’t just an anti-London/UK dig since the routes to Dublin and Cardiff also hit France first… Maybe a love of tunnels by the Map Bot? We should be told!

BBC NEWS – Pig fat to be turned into diesel

I’m not sure what to say. Chatting to a friend over the weekend about biodiesel we were debating whether the water cost (for growing the crops as biomatter) would become as problematic as the carbon cost – especially following an interesting article in the RSA journal a month or so ago about how some food practices “export” the water impact from rich countries to poor. The article, entitled “Water Fight” notes that “it takes 11,000 litres to grow the feed for enough cow to make a hamburger, and between 2,000 and 4.000 litres for that cow to fill its udders with a litre of milk”.

That’s quite a thought – especially for a Londoner with the drought conditions of last summer still in mind.

Leaving aside the rather unpleasant thought of smouldering pig-fat emanating from the exhaust pipe, I wonder whether the overall impact of raising more swine – with the cost in foodstuffs, slurry, the electricity or gas to render the corpses and other cheery thoughts – will actually end up being more sustainable than burning old trees or non-oinking biomass.

Itchy Squirrel: Wine bottle trick

With thanks to Jayne for this tip – a really fun site.

It’s a three-trick website and really not as unpleasant as the URL might indicate – certainly work-safe (until you start snorting at the hate mail section though: awesome).

I like this guy’s writing. Pity he’s too lazy/selfish/restrained to write more 😉

Enjoy! I don’t want to spoil the surprise by telling you more, but it’s good to see that primary research is not dead 🙂

Card Bawdy. Card is a four letter word.

Glorious site!

I’ve already posted about the origami envelop from the good folk at Flying Pig. Their recent newsletter mentioning the Christmas models for you to cut out and make (ideal for entertaining the kids).

The newsletter also mentioned, tongue in cheek, that the owner, Rob Ives, has “been forced” to remove links to the ‘naughty’ card creations – CardBawdy (as in ‘cardboad-y’, I assume. Heh). You can see the delightfully British ‘bonking bunnies’ above.

It’s a cute piece of marketing since – unsurprisingly – Rob’s the person behind CardBawdy too.

At £2.95 for the rabbits though it’s hardly any more expensive that a posh birthday card, yet way more fun.

Pass me the scissors, please!

IBM squares up to Amazon: ‘IBM patented ecommerce’.

IBM Sues Amazon for Violating 18-Year-Old Patents

I’m tempted to chuckle at this as being the latest manifestation of the US ‘bizmeth’ patent madness, in which people can ‘protect’ the process of doing something obvious in a sensible fashion.

IBM’s patents are gloriously old, and predate the internet as we know it. These are akin to finding feudal land rights, or ancient rights of way, impinging on the gleaming new freeholds of the web.

I’m not a fan of bizmeth patents, as this thread on NowEurope demonstrates. Greg made some good and sensible comments there about the need for quality, how it’s the process that’s protected rather than the implementation and the difficulty protection. Greg also provided a succinct position paper on the defeat of the European Software Directive.

I don’t really mind who – other than the lawyers – profits from this: I’m just going to enjoy for a moment that the ‘inventors’ of the ‘1-click ordering’ (“whereby the item is ordered without using a shopping cart ordering model”, to cite their patent) are getting a taste for being sued for inventing the obvious, or discovering the optimal.

“Interact with your piers”… ‘pillars’ of the internet?

Bravo to the marketing team at Centaur for their email invite to the IMA awards which gushed into the inbox so:

Even the medium of the Internet has its limits

Because some things just have to be face to face.

For an opportunity to interact with your piers (sic), see who’s doing what in the industry, and have a wonderful evening at one of London’s top hotels, make this experience a tangible one: Attend the 2006 Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards, being held on the 8th November at the Royal Lancaster Hotel

With such a collection of piers I’m sure the event will be “well supported”….