Damien Mulley

Steven Berlin Johnson writes about Jane Jacobs who died very recently. Jane wrote the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities which Steven referenced a good bit in his fantastic book Emergence.

Jane’s book is on my to-buy and to-read list and once I get everything else out of the way I plan on reading this. The New York Times also covers her life here. Her book is one of those books that will probably open up your mind. Cory Doctorow in remembering her work said:

Reading that book rendered visible whole rafts of secrets about how the world around me functioned. It was like taking off a blindfold.

Liam Daly mentioned on his blog before an offer of a free book to bloggers. 250 were to be given away. Perhaps Liam would tell us how that offer went? Good feedback?

It seems Liam was thinking of upping the ante himself and he is considering giving away Irish Paintings. Hugh Macleod, what have you done!

There’s quite a few of Liam’s paintings I’d love to have in my place or give as paintings but at $500 a pop they’re not the cheapest of presents though I think they’re worth it. I like art and especially the art of someone who’s “real” in a sense. Someone I know to exist outside of the signature. One person I went out with before gave me a beautiful painting as a present and though we’ve lost contact I still have that painting and still love it a lot. Course when he becomes a famous artist I’ll sell it on for the highest price. 🙂 Capitalism beats sentimentality! Anyway, back to Liam’s idea. Paintings. Probably the hardest part is logistics for paintings. Getting them delivered. I wouldn’t mind prints though or if Liam licenced his art to be used in website templates/wordpress templates, naturally with a link back to his website. Win win for both parties?

Update: Liam gives us an update on this.

Tom’s post on China blocking Technorati just got BoingBoing‘d. Hopefully it won’t be the last time for a post by Tom. Tom’s out back now having a post-boingboing’d smoke. As you do in those instances I’m told.

After reading a post where Des Walsh ruminates on blogrolls and how he clicked on a few links from someones blogroll to see what it got him and how it was related to the orginator blog it got me thinking about how it was lucky dip really when you click on someones blogroll unless they split them into categories.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a blogroll with some AJAX stuff built-in which popped up a window when you clicked on an icon next to the sitename on the blogroll? This window would present a thumbnail of the linked blog, a very short explanation of the blog and the latest posts on that blog. This preview window could be populated using data from Tailrank I guess.