“Luxury car maker BMW has had its German website blacklisted by Google after it was caught trying to artificially boost its popularity ranking on the world’s leading internet search engine.” (Age)

“Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows.
Researchers found that the brain makes decisions in just a 20th of a second of viewing a webpage.” BBC

Ten years of blogging!

I’ve realised that it’s ten years since I started blogging. Not that blogging was really invented then – I was just making ranty web pages about people, things and news articles that annoyed me. I think it all started when I made a page based on an email conversation between Kirsty, Fraser, Zora, Paul and I.
Looking at my 1996 entry, I must have started on December 17, 1996, so I’ll try and have a little celebratory post on December 17, 2006.

If I ever get around to making more web pages, I’ll be checking out this Colour Scheme Generator.

I went to the London Girl Geek dinner last night. I met a variety of people, and there were some interesting speakers – I was particularly interested in the talk on mobile usable interface design.
Not everyone was technical-geeky but in some ways it would be missing the point to have a ‘geekier than thou’ attitude there, and I did meet some wonderfully technical women. And I guess that’s the difference between ‘Girl Geek’ as defined on the page, and the ‘traditional’ ‘geek grrl’.
But generally, even though we might not understand the details of each other’s technical or sector-based specialities, I love that we don’t have to explain basic tech facts to have a conversation, and that we don’t have to deal with the misconceptions (and under-estimations) about women in IT/new media.

Science ‘not for normal people’ BBC

In the US, annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.
Well, you can still annoy them, but you must disclose your identity. So, not much use in the lesbian world, then, where you’d generally know who’s annoying you.
God only knows how they’ll interpret ‘annoy’, and no idea what impact it might have on internet usage in the rest of the world.
In other news, I’m going to have to ditch nedstats because they seem to be putting a pop-up in their code.

To balance out my excitement over having a TV (and University Challenge again), I’ve decided to keep a record of the books I’ve read this year. There’s an excellent library in the flat I’m minding, and I’ll have to be careful not to stay up late reading every night.
So far I’ve read Amy Tan’s “The Hundred Secret Senses”, which was much better than I thought it would be. Slightly less sentimentality, and I like the way she handled characterisation. It might not be terribly subtle, but it worked.
I’m currently reading Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Swimming-Pool Library”, which I’m enjoying, but it does seem to be an early version of “The Line of Beauty”: handsome Oxbridge graduate with a bit of a thing for black guys sleeps around a lot and enjoys the privileges of the British upper class.
I’ve also read Judith Butler (“Imitation and Gender Insubordination”) for a theory reading group, which has been great fun. I can feel my brain getting used to thinking about critical theory again.
I read “The Mill on the Floss” just before moving, but that probably doesn’t count.