Simple can’t come to the UK soon enough! It’s about time banking had some innovation.
Just look at the care and quality that has gone into their website, their app, even the package they send your card in.
Compared to this, using HSBC internet banking is a trial. They don’t even have an app for regular customers yet.
The other cool personal finance product I would like to see come over from the States soon is Square, an iPhone accessory that lets merchants swipe credit cards.
To any of you who have followed my cartoon penguin saga, I can happily report that Google has recently re-discovered my illustration, and have seen fit to return it to the search result pages. Just like nothing happened, I am suddenly getting an extra 100+ visits per day from ‘cartoon penguin’ seekers. There is one small difference however: In its finite wisdom, Google has decided that this stub page is the best result now, not the actual blog post which includes a much larger image.
Whatever.
Would you be comfortable with an atheist president? 2011 US survey says…
Overwhelming majorities of Republican and Democrat voters say that they would be uncomfortable with an atheist serving as president (80% and 70% respectively).
And as the Friendly Atheist blogger points out, 14% of Democrats would actually be more uncomfortable with an atheist president than a Muslim president!
Common Crawl: 5 billion web pages indexed, ranked, graphed and the data made freely available.
Today […] we have an open repository of crawl data that covers approximately 5 billion pages and includes valuable metadata, such as page rank and link graphs. All of our data is stored on Amazon’s S3 and is accessible to anyone via EC2.
Common Crawl is now entering the next phase – spreading the word about the open system we have built and how people can use it. We are actively seeking partners who share our vision of the open web. We want to collaborate with individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits.
(via Common Crawl Enters A New Phase)
It seems like you could do pretty much anything with this data, including getting a head start making your own search engine. Blekko have a cool Grep the Web section which is full of ideas for the kinds of information you could discover if you had access to such a database. Basically, any kind of semantic analysis.
A brilliantly written deconstruction of the ‘social graph’, which Maciej Ceglowski argues is neither a graph, nor social. Essential reading for social media types.
We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.
Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?
We sat down with Khoi Vinh, former Design Director of NYTimes.com to discuss the subject that has made his work most noteworthy: the grid. And in his case, the “g” almost deserves to be capitalized. The result is an illuminating conversation about Khoi’s plans for the future, first interest in the field of design, and even the grid’s complex relationship with emotion.
halfblog.net 