A Whole Lotta Nothing: Myutterconfusionspace

I also like Matthew Haughey’s “get the hell off my lawn you crazy kids!” bafflement at MySpace: “When you click from one [profile] to another to another, you are transported back to Geocities back before Yahoo bought it, flaming animated gifs and all. […] Apple has made the iPod the most popular music player on earth, but it’s clean as a whistle. How could the same people love their super sleek music player and also love the gaudy oversaturated flashing/pulsating monstrosity of their Myspace profile?”

Pete Ashton's Weblog: The Future of Music

Pete on MySpace and music: “to understand its success you have to understand the appalling state of band websites. Invariably built in Flash they were impossible to navigate, obfuscated all the important information, were never updated and often made you register before you could hear any music. By contrast a MySpace music page has everything you need on one page—band members, influences, biography, tour dates and, most importantly, the actual music. You could cover it in shit and it would still be an improvement.”

Foolish Vanity: The Royal Wee

On Windsor: “The castle looms over the town in a very regal way, and the rest of the town nestles around its feet like a brick and timber blanket.”

Workbench: I Enjoy Particularly Rigorous Specs

Rogers Cadenhead on why specifications matter—and why sloppy specs hurt. (And worth it for his take on RFC 2119: “You SHOULD read it. I RECOMMEND it highly.”)

Coding Horror: Code Smells

Jeff Atwood on smelliness. (I share his feelings on Refactoring: too dogmatic, too much of a catalogue, and often too obvious.)

XML.com: Dynamic News Stories

Adrian Holovaty explores some ideas to make online publishing more dynamic than the current “slap the article text on a web-page” model. Very clever.

SFGate.com: Elephant Not Interested in Using Treadmill

Probably my favourite headline of the week. Well, they are highly intelligent, you know…

Adactio: The ugly American

Jeremy is not a fan of Paul Graham: “essentially a Thatcherite screed about why businesses should be able to get away with doing anything they want and treat employees like slaves”. [Update: more on this from Tom Coates.]

SFGate.com: Famed bookstore's last chapter -- Cody's on Telegraph to close

Cody’s is going. Telegraph in decline? (Hard to see how Rasputin and Amoeba keep going, given that for used music Amazon Marketplace trounces them on both selection and choice...)