As reported in The Guardian: I’ve never read a book, says Posh.

I would have thought that should anyone have actually wasted their time considering this issue, they would have assumed that was the case anyway?

Baby, Scary, Ginger, Sporty and Bookish probably wouldn’t have had quite the same ring to it. Despite penning a 528-page autobiography charting her rise to the top, Victoria Beckham has admitted that she has never read a book in her life.

The revelation emerged in an interview with the Spanish magazine Chic. Although the issue in question has yet to the hit the shelves, details were leaked to the Spanish press over the weekend.

“I haven’t read a book in my life,” Beckham confesses. “I don’t have the time.” However, the 31-year-old former Spice Girl does shrug off suggestions that she is a philistine. “I prefer listening to music, although I do love fashion magazines.”

She also admits that having given birth to three boys – Brooklyn, six, Romeo, two, and six-month-old Cruz – she would like a daughter and could imagine “painting her nails, putting on make-up and choosing clothes” with her. Beckham also said she was not jealous about the attention paid by other women to her husband.

“I know what other women think and I say to myself ‘He is very good looking, he dresses very well, he is great with children and he has an enormous heart’. I am not jealous and when people look at him, I think it’s because he’s great.”

Her library-dodging confessions may come as a surprise to fans impressed with the literary style of her autobiography, Learning to Fly.

In the book, she recorded how seeing the film Fame encouraged her to seek stardom. According to the blurb, “A line from the theme song stayed with her – ‘I’m gonna live for ever, I’m gonna learn how to fly’. With this amazing book she gives us the chance to fly alongside her on her journey from lonely teenager to international star…”

Will start having a post with various links I have come across which don’t necessarily need any further comment from me. Rather than have a link per post, I will save them up during the day and then post when I am finished. There won’t necessarily be a post like this every day, but they will provide a fairful useful (for me) guide to what I’ve been reading about.

Without further ado, here’s today’s links:

• BBC: How the Wikipedia principle can transform the information age
• BBC: Web trade threat to rare species
• Palimpsest: Metro: A Literary Whodunnit
• Guardian Online: Life in the fast lane
• Guardian Online: Return of the hi-tec hunger
• Guardian Books: Mystery man

The Blogger Buzz blog announces a new tool for Blogger – an extension for MS Word that allows you to write and post entries direct from the word processor. Cool. It’s been imaginatively called Blogger for Word.

Saw this on Slashdot:

An article over at BoingBoing discusses what appears to be a viral marketing ploy appearing in a Wikipedia entry. Quote: “Someone has apparently abused collaborative reference site Wikipedia in a viral marketing campaign for a BBC online alternate reality game.

The BoingBoing article states:

…In fairness, it is also possible for any individual unaffiliated with the BBC (or an employee acting without network approval) to create a Wikipedia entry on their own. Comments on the Wikipedia “talk” page for this entry, however, suggest that a related entry for a fictional band called “Boy*d Upp” were added from someone operating inside the BBC’s network.

So, some questions: is a person (or persons) acting on behalf of the BBC responsible? What will happen to the entry, if it is indeed a bogus publicity entry? How often does this sort of thing happen?

One thing I do know: Wikipedia tends to be hastily self-correcting. Bogus or erroneous information of any kind doesn’t tend to last long there.

Further updates state that:

The corresponding discussion page now includes mea culpas from persons responsible for two of the bogus entries. One of them, “Jon_Hawk,” identifies himself as someone unaffiliated with the BBC who just digs the game.

Please do not use my edits to slander the BBC. If this were part of a viral campaign, the grammar of the article would almost certainly be better. I suspect the article would have been created at the same time as the game started also. Jamie Kane was mentioned on several blogs on Friday – did not one of you consider it was created by someone who reads such things? I’m nothing more than a student. I’m sincerely apologetic for purposefully omitting the true nature of Jamie Kane.

But the other, “MattC,” identifies himself as a BBC employee:

I created the Boy*D_Upp page from inside the BBC network on Friday evening after stumbling across the Jamie Kane entry linked from the Pop Justice forums. My action was in no way part of an orchestrated marketing campaign on behalf of the Jamie Kane project team nor was it intended for my page to be attributed to the BBC, which has been implied. It was nothing more than common garden vandalism for which I am sorry.

I take two things from this. One: traditional media organisations need to be careful how they use the new methods wikis and blogs present to promote their own output, as credibility can be lost fast. Secondly: community sites such as these are very quick to spot spamming, marketing and suchlike, and are very quick to stamp down on it.

Over on Palimpsest we have had a couple of issues with authors falsely reviewing their own work. We have come to be pretty good at spotting this sort of thing, and once exposed, these people tend to disappear very quickly. Those who populate the ‘net are pretty savvy people, it would appear.

Just as I upgrade WordPress, another new version comes along!

Had a lovely trip to Ellesmere this afternoon for bike rides and a picnic. Took a couple of photos – some of which are over on my Flickr page.

 

My blogroll has always been accessed via BlogLines, though it has recently fallen behind since I started using FeedDemon. So, to get things updated quickly, I exported my FeedDemon list of blogs into an OPML file, which I then imported into Bloglines. And it works!

This afternoon, I ‘designed’ a quite frankly rubbish link icon for this blog, in the style of the little rectangles one sees on many blogs, including this one. Here it is:

The font is Jason Kottke’s Silkscreen, perfect for this kind of small scale work.

Just noticed from the phpBB site that version 2.0.17 has been released. Hopefully this will solve some of the security problems we have been having over on Palimpsest, where various web robots have been brining the site to a standstill, creating multiple database sessions as they plough through the site.

Nice profile of Tim Berners-Lee, ‘inventor’ of the World Wide Web, in today’s Guardian:

There are, according to recent figures, more than 35 million web users in the UK today. More than 15 million British homes have internet connections and, thanks to faster broadband technologies, we are living in a radically different world from that which was predicted.
The world wide web has changed millions of lives in little more than a decade. For some it has changed fortunes as well: this week was the 10th anniversary of what is widely acknowledged as the beginning of the dotcom boom – when the web browser firm Netscape floated on the US stock market before ever turning a profit. That sparked a technology goldrush that has transformed modern communication. And while much of the boom was hyperbole, one rock solid fact remains: none of it would have happened if it was not for Tim Berners-Lee.

Sir Tim, named last year as the greatest living Briton, is rightly heralded as the godfather of the web. It was he who, as a physicist working in Switzerland, turned the internet from a disparate collection of academic and military computer systems into an international network. Without his input, arguably, the world would be a far duller place. The global village would still be under construction, technology would still be the preserve of an elite, and revolutionary companies such as Google, Amazon – and even easyJet – would not exist.

Links:

• Tim Berners-Lee page at w3.org
• Wikipedia entry