Have recent events turned you against the established Labour Party? Then why not join the Communist Party of Britain? Or the Communist Party of Great Britain, or the New Communist Party of Britain? Or the Communist Party of Britain Marxist-Leninist, who are not to be confused with the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). There’s also the Upward Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communist Group.

If the ‘Communist’ bit is a bit too much for your taste, then you could always try the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Equality Party, Socialist Party of Great Britain - not to be confused with the other Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Labour Party, the International Socialist Group, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, the Revolutionary Democratic Group, the Left Alliance, the Workers Party or the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Well, what are you waiting for? Workers of the world, unite!

The Worst Album Covers Ever, and The Worst Album Covers Ever II

A Google search for “miserable failure” now turns up President Bush’s homepage.

Ignoring the fact is that George Bush is not a failure - despite not being very good at anything, he’s managed to become the most powerful man in the world - there is a more essential point: This is yet another ignorant attempt by members of the blogosphere to Google Bomb:

‘This is just one of those spontaneous things that a blogger will post something and other bloggers will say, “This is a great idea”‘

Translation: “Let’s have our tiny cabal politicise the world’s most influential reference with misinformation for fun.” Only 32 pages were needed to put this search term top of Google.

Not wishing to sound too much like Andrew Orlowski but the bloggers are becoming dangerous - distorting everything they get their hands on (vis. the empowering concepts of Smart Mob and the Second Superpower being turned into much more airheaded technocratic fancies) in favour of some vacuous ideology-free postmodern showing-off.

To be fair, Google is not a public body, it is a private company who happen to do internet searches, but it is still the world’s foremost information resource, and to distort it on political or personal whims is childish and dangerous. How can we have the ‘freedom of the Internet’ the bloggers claim to be the vanguard of (when they’re not, ironically, moaning about blog spamming), when they’re happy to fiddle the results as they please?

Of course, all this could be solved if Google took blogging properly into account when doing PageRank, but they seem remarkably lax about this…

PS: Yes, I know I’m using my blog to slag off blogging - I’ve done this before. So what if I am? The point still stands.

This is an idea I came up with when forwarding an article on the BBC website that I liked to a friend. Steganography is the art of hiding information (as opposed to cryptography, which is the art of encoding information). Steganography has been around for centuries, my favourite example being the ancient Greek practice of shaving the head of a messenger, writing on his bald pate, then wait for the hair to grow back.

Anyway, my method is similar to that employed by poor people in the 19th Century. Letters cost more to send than newspapers then, so poor people would send newspapers to each other, with pinholes made above certain characters. When put together, these characters formed a message.

Similarly, we could use these on the internet, and for absolutely free. Take a news article, and work out which characters you want to use. To make the encoding more efficient, we just send the number of spaces between each character, e.g. If you want to send the 2nd, 5th, 11th and 27th letters your encoding would be 2,3,6,16. (If you wanted to be even more efficient you could probably encode each difference in one byte and you wouldn’t need the commas). You will probably need to send some indication of the starting point of your counting as well.

With this encoding, use the ’send this to a friend’ function to forward the URL, and send the encoding as the ‘accompanying comment’ to the article. The user at the other end can then decode this.

To be honest I know it’s not very practical or secure (unless you come up with a cryptic way of encoding the differences, and I suppose the start point could be a key), but it’s a funky idea nevertheless.

If I get a bit of time I might come up with a script or two to do it.

The Mail will be launching its own news website next year. I don’t know why they’re bothering, given there’s enough like-minded material out there…

Someone has been archiving the shitty photomontages that CNN.com use to illustrate their stories. In an interesting yet hideously amateurish way they document the past year’s news, although some pictures (like this one, and this one) defy description.

Sadly no-one has done the same to BBC News‘ equally horrifying efforts (like this), although NTK held a Worst BBC graphic contest a couple of years back. Hmmm, maybe I could start building an archive…