New Orleans

On Flickr right now, a wide array of photos from New Orleans and many other affected areas following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. In particular, have a look at this collection, amassed from various sources.

A post from Dave Winer: "On CNN, Aaron Brown asks what the city will look like when the water recedes. The correct answer … is that the water isn’t going to recede. The only way to get the water out of the city is to pump it out…" – consider this diagram (the cross-section, bottom right of the pic) to see why this comment is quite true.

Yahoo! and Altavista

As far as I can tell, Yahoo! own Altavista. This is almost certainly old news, but slightly embarrasingly I’d never spotted it before.  Altavista is owned by Overture, which is in turn owned by Yahoo!

Only happened to spot this when I saw that Altavista.pl is hosted within Yahoo!’s IP range.

People’s Network

http://www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/enquire.html

The idea is that you submit a question to ‘the system’ and somebody from the UK or international library system will try and answer your question in real-time. Jolly neat idea, but I’d love to see a log of previous questions to see exactly what people have been asking (I’m nosey like that…)

Blogging in the mainstream

Last night at the cinema, a trailer was played for a movie called The Perfect Man. Remarkably, the trailer started with lead Hillary Duff writing an entry into her blog (the voiceover/narrative of the post began ‘Dear fellow bloggers…’). Yet another confirmation that the word blog has entered mainstream media.

I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by the way… quite good. Better than I thought it could be, but still basically a kid’s movie 🙂