http://toolserver.org/~johang/2012.html

Some of these are quite baffling.

• Why does a mountain in China dwarf all other Dutch pages, by a factor of nearly 12?
• Why is the page about the '@' symbol so popular in Spain? (Artefact of the analysis script?)
• Why are German-speakers so interested in cul-de-sacs?
• And why the obsession in France with an obscure ( Read more... )

I was reminded recently how humour sometimes doesn't work on the interwebs. A sarcastic comment may just look like idiocy when unaccompanied by frantically wiggling eyebrows and other such facial gurning signifiers.

Research suggests this has been the case ever since the very early days of the internet, back in the Middle Ages.

henry_the_2: that ( Read more... )

I could happily spend hours playing with this. But won't, as I'm supposed to be working.
inudge
You can build up quite decent-sounding sound assemblies, very quickly and easily.

As a follow-up to this post of the other week about Google Translate, here's an interesting study comparing the results of Google, Babelfish and Bing translation to and from various languages.

The conclusions:

• Google is uniformly preferred for longer text samples;
• You might think Google's statistical approach would be strongest for commonest- ( Read more... )

I was expecting the Is the BNP racist? site to be along the lines of Has the LHC destroyed the Earth? - but no, instead it's an attempt to wrest the top Google spot for that question from the BNP's own apologia page.

So not really very funny, but worth linking to I think -- maybe you will do so too.

Sprixi is a new search engine for public-domain and commercially-usable-creative-commons images. it mostly draws from Flickr and some sort of PD clipart source, so it's not like Google Images, but it has the great advantage that you can use (sometimes with appropriate credit) everything you see. And the interface is very nicely usable: much much ( Read more... )

(Also known as, closing some tabs.)

• Democracy Club -- an organization formed to help make the next UK general election more open and accountable, by crowdsourcing info. Affiliated with mySociety and other such. I've signed up -- recommend you do so too, if you are concerned about our political system and want to do more than just whinge.
• Emails from ( Read more... )

I posted here a couple of times about predictify.com, the wisdom-of-crowds site which attempted to build a business by selling the accuracy / otherwise usefulness of its users' predictive ability.

As you may have already guessed from that "attempted", theyv'e gone bust. No real surprise -- I said in the second of those posts why I thought it was a ( Read more... )

A maybe worthy project sure to interest some of you, it aims to collect info about indiepop bands, clubs, zines, labels, festivals, etc, both historical and current. Most are frankly pretty obscure -- if you look at this page and don't recognize a single name, you will I suspect be far from alone -- but no doubt none the worse for that ( Read more... )

A few things that have interested me lately:

• "Experimental" font Optica. I'm not sure if this is genius or idiotic. Apparently it's easy to read at gigantic sizes seen from some way off. (It says "Tres tristes tigres", if you can't read it at all.)
• Natural Harvest, a new book which can I think safely be described as a seminal work. The comments are ( Read more... )