Web Monitor
16:28 UK time, Wednesday, 1 July 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
We're looking around the web for the most interesting sites for you to enjoy at your convenience. Make sure you share your best links with us by sending them via the comment box.
• James O'Malley has issued a challenge to Web Monitor readers. He's started a blog, , to collect local newspaper articles on Michael Jackson. He is doing it to emphasise that "local newspapers have a long tradition of tenuously linking major news stories to local people". So far he's found such gems as "Michael Jackson's album sales up by 500% at Asda", (that's Asda in Spondon, not across the UK, in case you were wondering). If like James O'Malley, you have a good link share it with Web Monitor by sending it via the comments box.
• If you journey onto , you'll see a different plea: "Enjoy my blog? Then stop freeloading and help me pay my rent." That brings us onto a debate that is running between what two heavyweight "pop-thinkers" about the future of getting the internet for free.
, Malcolm Gladwell of The Tipping Point fame has been laying into the ideas expressed by the editor of Wired, Chris Anderson, in his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The idea in Anderson's book is that the money economy is on its way out as advances in technology allow many things to be produced for more or less nothing, leading to a flood of free goods. Gladwell took exception to this, citing YouTube, a free service, making hardly any money for Google. Gladwell says this is because Anderson has not taken into account that although technology is almost free, when 75 million people use it, that pushes the cost of almost free up quite a bit.
This has caused an internet furore, with on Anderson's side and, , the Times awarding the prize to Gladwell on points.
The last word in this debate could go to - £8.54 is the price of Free. Web Monitor couldn't find a copy of Free for nothing on the internet. If you find it, send the link to Web Monitor via the comment box.
• wasting his time learning a useless language. He's enrolled himself in a self-taught course in echolocation instead. That's dolphinspeak. The point? Well, according to Hadley, within a few weeks, humans can learn to "see" objects in the dark the same way dolphins and bats do by using tongue clicks to visualise objects by listening to the way sound echoes off their surroundings:
"To master the art of echolocation, all you have to do is learn to make special clicks with your tongue and palate, and then learn to recognize slight changes in the way the clicks sound depending on what objects are nearby."
• the sticky business of studies into how the mind evolves. He looks at recent studies into birds learning how to make tools.
The researcher who did the study into rooks, satisfyingly called Christopher Bird, says:
"This suggests that they are using insight or rapid learning to solve these problems."
But Kloc concludes that disagreements over what the mind is leave him to wonder if they're even asking the right questions.
• Gabriel Martinez used to be a deaf gangster. Now he plays a deaf gangster on TV. his life of art imitating life in this most unusual of personas. Being deaf led to miscommunication with police and having to do favours in prison as he said he needed protection. After jail, Martinez didn't want to be in a gang any more but couldn't get a job so started off working for films to give them background information on gang life. Now he's an actor and has worked on more than 40 films.
• From moving on to a new economic system to reverting to an old one, is feudalism back? The question is spawned from the news that ex-newspaper tycoon Eddy Shah wants to rent out his land as allotments in return for 60% of the produce, which he would use in his restaurants. Singer points out:
"The allotments idea comes at a time when there is a national shortage with waiting lists of up to six months in the Wootton Bassett area of Wiltshire where Shah has his club. However, those who can get a council allotment in nearby Swindon can keep 100% of their produce for the princely sum of £39.25 per year."
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