Tom Raworth Lays the Smackdown on The Independent

'Dear Mr Raworth Copyright infringement I am writing in relation to your website http://tomraworth.com (”the Website”), which has recently been brought to my attention. Independent News and Media Ltd (“INM”), registered in the UK, is the publisher of The Independent and Independent on Sunday newspapers. Your web page http://tomraworth.com/bindy.html currently displays, in full, the obituary of Bill Griffin which was written by Nicholas Johnson, and originally published in The Independent on 20 September 2007. In addition, this webpage page includes advertisement tags and other content owned by INM.' 'Dear Legal Department, I’ll reply to this piffle in the morning, hoping that sleep will have stifled my laughter. Do you have many teacups in your office to hold the tiny storms? Goodnight, TR' Link

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But Google Only Want to Help

'The start of your search is typing in a query. A common cause of frustration is if you don't know the correct spelling of a word! Spell correction - which seems like a simple and obvious feature - hides many technical challenges. No common English dictionaries would ever include the correct spelling of Britney Spears, for instance (who, probably completely unbeknownst to her, has become the poster child example for this feature). We do a huge amount of analysis of the billions of pages on the web and our query logs to determine what are 'real words' on the web, and what are likely to be misspellings. The system that gives you the spell correction has to, in a fraction of a second, consider a huge number of possible words you might have meant (vastly greater than any dictionary ever manually constructed) and determine if there is a more likely query you meant to type. When we are confident that you actually meant to type something else, we take a rare liberty with our search results: we try to distract you from looking at the top result on the page. The spelling correction is in your line of sight and colored a bright must-see red. Furthermore, we now make sure that nothing else on the page is red, unless it is as important to you as spelling! (so far, nothing is). The algorithms involved in spell correction are constantly getting better. They now work in a large number of languages and are even better at detecting when you have made a spelling mistake. Getting the spelling of your query right is so important that we are considering showing you the results of the spell-corrected query in the middle of the page (just in case you missed our bright red text at the top and bottom!).' Link

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architecture for cartography (5/7)

'Suppose that you are trying to decide whether to read some poems by Robert Creeley or Stephen Rodefer. It’s a difficult decision in this scenario, because neither is obviously better than the other, and because they write very different sorts of poetry. Further, you know that your choice will in a sense be automatically right: if you read Creeley, you will learn to like Creeley, Rodefer likewise. So we’re dealing with meta-preferences – not what you'd like, but what you'd like to like – with nested and dynamically-linked preferences.' Link

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MTV2

Kevin Doran's response to Regarding the Next Counterculture.

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Artists' Books Online

Artists' Books Online is simple and beautiful. It respects the work and presents it in a way that makes you want to spend time in front of a screen, reading. It's a multitudinous a achievement and worthy contemporary with other must-visit sites like UBUWEB and PennSound. Read more about the project here.

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