Insurers Test Data Profiles to Identify Risky Clients – Intriguing research from the WSJ, and sheds light on possible downsides of all the information we’re sharing online. The concrete examples seem highly unlikely to pan out though, we’ve had detailed household purchase data available for decades, and insurers haven’t found it useful.
IP over Avian Carriers – My favorite part is the test implementation.
A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web – The writing and human-interest angles on this article are excellent, but its central thesis that Get Satisfaction and other review service are boosting complained-about sites PageRank is completely wrong. They use rel=”nofollow” specifically to avoid those sort of manipulations by spammers, as do all the major services that support user-generated content. Even Thor from GetSatisfaction was baffled – “The article approaches SEO in near-mystical terms”
HMS Invincible – Interested in a cheap aircraft carrier? I remember walking around this ship on Navy Days (my grandad was in the service), a bit of a shock to discover it’s being sold off.
The Xenotext Experiment – Encoding poetry on the genome of a bacteria capable of surviving heavy radiation and hard vacuum. If this works, the poem will endure until the sun burns out.
Pete Warden's blog 