Friday, 26th July 2002
Here comes another meme
Via Kottke: True Porn Clerk Stories, a hilarious, touching and insightful journal of the trials and tribulations of a female Porn video store clerk in Chicago. This is some of the best and most original writing I’ve seen on the web in a long time. It is also quickly turning in to something of a meme. When you’ve finished reading the journal, be sure to have a look around the rest of the site it is hosted on—the community there is undergoing something of a trial by fire, with over 180,000 reads of the Porn Clerk journal resulting in massively increased traffic and a flood of new members that threatens the stability of the existing community. They have even had to open a PayPal scheme to help cover the dramatic increases in bandwidth ($15/month is now up to $25/day).
Google and the semantic web
I’ve long been wondering what kind of research Google are doing with respect to the Semantic Web. August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web (via From the Orient) is a superbly written essay which explains the concepts behind the Semantic Web through a “history” of how Google has become the world’s largest marketplace by the year 2009. Stuart has written his own essay discussing some of the issues raised by the piece, such as security and classification problems.