A good article in Wired, about The “Long Tail”. Basically, it discusses how the economies of scale and vastly increased information about products that the Internet and other technologies have produced have expanded the market for entertainment. A wider availability of products and more fluid pricing now mean each product gets a demand and supply mechanism of its own, rather than being crowbarred into a single inflexible market designed for only the biggest-selling products. Couple that with “People who liked this also liked this…”-type metadata and it means niche products are now able to be discovered and bought much more easily.

I found it especially interesting as it coincides neatly with a set of lectures I took on the Socioeconomics of Innovation - I may take on the topic and use it for one of my termly essay papers.

Boing Boing point out the cool feature in Multimap that allows you to overlay maps on satellite photos of various areas. However, by far the coolest use is when you look at the aerial photographs of military installations like Fylingdales, Menwith Hill and Aldermaston and compare them with the surprising lack of information on the official OS maps.

Grrr. Was meant to spend the whole morning reading, but instead I got sidetracked by the little bit of fun that is Polidex (via Tom Watson MP, whose own stock is rocketing) - it’s like Popex, but instead you trade in shares of MPs. So if you want to own a bit of Boris Johnson, now’s your chance. I don’t know what possessed me to buy shares in Hilary Benn, though. 27% loss in a single day - great.

Unlike Popex or Celebdaq you can only profit from the market itself, rather than dividends being paid on how your MP does in real life. Which is a shame, it would be nice to have some reality-based influences on the market.

Right, I’m going to check my portfolio for the ninth time in an hour…

Finally, a decent combination of location-based services and good metadata…and better than that, it involves beer!

Simply text GOODPUB to 85130 and in a jiffy you’ll receive the location of the most proximate public house as recommended by in The Good Pub Guide 2005.

Wait, there’s more…

Reply to the original message within two hours with the word NEXT and you’ll be sent details of another nearby inn - thus enabling the SMS pubcrawl.

Now, if only I had my mobile. Still waiting for the insurers to deliver a replacement, a month after I lost the bloody thing.

I have to say I am loving the idea of Team America : World Police - partly as it’s being made by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, partly because the Boing Boing preview of it sounds great (the trailer isn’t as revealing), but mostly because of its gloriously Stuckist approach to film-making with no vacuous CGI, instead it uses well-crafted (and deliberately mishandled) marionettes and traditional model-based SFX. Though I’m not so sure about the alleged puppet fellatio.

Annoying thing is, though the US gets to see it in less than a fortnight, we’re going to have to wait until the New Year before we get a look. Why can’t us in the rest of the world get a look in at the same time?

The BBC News wikiproxy (via every UK geek blog in the world) is, I have to admit, quite cool, as a proof of concept. But as well as wincing at the bandwidth & processor time that it must eat up, I think it is limited in scope - why just Wikipedia references? The promise of a Firefox plugin to the same sounds a lot more exciting - if it could be made adaptable with the Firefox search plugin and all the already-written search engine metadata, so we could add in our own choice search engines (rather than add yet more demand to poor old Wikipedia) it would really bring out the potential of cross-referencability in the browser very nicely.

So, not only can British citizens be extradited at the whim of United States government, but once extradited, we’ll be stripped of any right to not get tortured, if Congress gets its way. Grand.

(via Ben Hammersley)

Great. Fifteen years of playing at a ground lumbered with a crappy sponsor’s name. And although the Guardian speculates whether fans will take up the new name, I don’t think we have much choice. Bolton and Leicester fans don’t have alternative names for their new home grounds.

Why Emirates anyway? I mean, at least in Bolton and Leicester’s cases, the Reebok and Walker’s firms had historic connections with the city, while I don’t see much connection between North London and the national ariline of a undeomcratic oil state.

Not happy about this, not happy at all.