Ion’s blog

The way Mr. Denton determines the theme of his blogs has less to do with his own personal interests than with the demands of the market, as determined by Google. He relies on Google’s AdSense program, which pays Web sites to publish text ads matched to the pages’ content, for the bulk of his revenue. As a result, he picks blog subjects based on the rate Google pays for clicks on ads in specific topic areas. Among the topics of blogs he plans to start this year are computer gaming, travel and politics.

He said he hoped that as the number of blogs multiply, he would reach a critical mass of visitors that he would be able to sell to larger advertisers.

“The rise of Google’s AdSense and related automatically targeted ad servers really suits narrowly focused blogs,” said Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, which uses content from Gizmodo in one of its e-mail newsletters. “It provides a way for niche media and niche advertising to find each other, with virtually no human intervention required.”

Whether blogs can ever become truly big businesses, though, is up for debate. Mr. Denton, for one, is trying to talk down the hype, at least for now. “Fantasy No. 1 is that anyone is going to get rich off of this,” he said. Mr. Denton insists he does not want to create another venture capital bubble. “I don’t want to see some V.C.’s invest idiot money in idiot people at idiot companies,” he said.

But Mr. Denton is thinking about how to expand the blog market, perhaps by creating product-focused blogs for major marketers. His next big project is a site called Kinja, which is supposed to be the blog of all blogs, compiling the best of Web log writing from thousands of different blogs.

Want to be part of a living work of art for the rest of your life? New York author Shelley Jackson plans to ‘publish’ her short story ‘Skin’ by having each word tattooed on a different person.

[…]

Volunteers cannot choose their word – Jackson allocates each one in the strict order of the story and receiving applications – but they can choose where to have the tattoo. Jackson says: ‘There is something wonderfully melancholic about a piece of writing that’s living flesh and finally dies and is grieved over. It is a revolution in literature.’ She promises to try to attend all her Words’ funerals but admits: ‘Most of my Words are in their mid- to late twenties so I will probably die before a lot of them. Maybe I will send everyone a vial of my ashes. Can you imagine if they turned up to my funeral – an author mourned by her words?’

She was partly inspired by British artist/nature sculptor Andrew Goldsworthy, whose ephemeral works in leaves, earth or snow often last for mere seconds before being obliterated.

Jackson plans to stage an art exhibition featuring photographs of the faces of her volunteers arranged in the order of the story and in paragraphs, but not displaying their tattoos because that would reveal the story.

‘Finally it hit me that there was a way of publishing my story on bodies and I just thought that was amazing,’ she said.

Police fear the want ads are a sign of the yakuza’s desperation and warn people not to get involved.

“It’s unprecedented that the yakuza have had to turn to newspaper classifieds to find recruits,” an Osaka Prefectural Police spokesman says. “We hope this isn’t just a new way to increase the number of gang members.”

Wanted ads first appeared in at least two daily sports newspapers in mid-October and continued until earlier this week. The ad sought willing bodyguards, who would receive high pay, lodgings and three meals a day. The ad also gave the name of the station nearest the place of work and a phone number. A company name bearing a close resemblance to the Yamaguchi-gumi was also listed. The phone number on the ad is registered as being a number that belongs to a Yamaguchi-gumi office.

[…]

Experts on the underworld are not surprised to see the yakuza resorting to new methods to find fresh blood.

“With the economy being as bad as it has been for so long, the yakuza are having trouble making money and finding new recruits. There’s no doubt the yakuza are trying to entice younger members to join them with the promise of making them company employees rather than gangsters,” non-fiction writer Atsushi Mizoguchi says. “This is proof that younger generations no longer see any charm in the yakuza world.”

The increase in network connection time makes staff almost a third more productive than they would have been if they had been tied to a wired infrastructure, the research claims.

According to NOP/Cisco, deployment of business WLANs in employees’ homes, as well as significant hot spot usage while on the move, created time savings of almost 80 minutes per employee per working day – an increase of almost 30 minutes per day over 2001.

Almost a quarter of employees within the mid-size and large organizations polled access wireless LANs today, up from 16 per cent in 2001. This increase in deployment, plus the reported additional time savings, resulted in the rise in annual dollar value of time saved per employee to almost $14K today, up from just over $7K in 2001.

“The increasingly ubiquitous nature of wireless LAN usage – being driven by wider horizontal roll-out within organizations – is facilitating a surging cost benefit for companies going wireless,” said Richard Jameson, CEO of NOP World Technology.

Miss Digital World is aimed at digital artists, advertising agencies, cinema production companies and videogame programmers who have created famous (or even not so famous) virtual models, following the success of videogame heroines such as Lara Croft, digital anchorwomen like Ananova and cloned actors, as in the third Matrix film, as the model in the picture courtesy by Beans Magic Co., ltd.
The “woman” who, at the end of the preliminary rounds, has the highest number of votes from net users, will be crowned on the site www.missdigitalworld.com in a breathtaking, tear-jerking ceremony.

Is this the Great Moral Shift of the Oughties? What’s driving this loss of inhibition?

It’s not a collective decision; it’s a kind of drift. No one’s forced it on them, it’s spontaneous. It’s in flux. It feels like a good thing in that people seem to be less inhibited about their bodies — they’ll show you their midriff no matter how tubby or stretch-marked it is. That seems to be a plus. On the other hand, you get the feeling that people have never been more obsessed by their bodies — putting spikes in your lips or in your tongue, which is a tremendously assertive way of magnifying the importance of your body. If you talk to [people with piercings], that’s what they say it is: They say they now have a relationship with their tongue that they didn’t have before because they’ve got a jewel festering in the middle of it. So it’s very much being into the body, but at the same time being away from it. That’s one of the many contradictions. We’ll just have to await developments.