Neat data visualisation of BBC spending by department (the large version is here) by Information Is Beautiful. As mentioned in the latest episode of the House of Comments podcast.

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Speaking of OK Go, last month the lead singer Damian Kulash wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times on EMI, viral videos and Youtube embedding that’s well worth a read.

In 2006 we made a video of us dancing on treadmills for our song “Here It Goes Again.” We shot it at my sister’s house without telling EMI, our record company, and posted it on the fledgling YouTube without EMI’s permission. Technically, this put us afoul of our contract, since we need our record company’s approval to distribute copies of the songs that they finance. It also exposed YouTube to all sorts of liability for streaming an EMI recording across the globe. But back then record companies saw videos as advertisements, so if my band wanted to produce them, and if YouTube wanted to help people watch them, EMI wasn’t going to get in the way.
[...]
Now we’ve released a new album and a couple of new videos. But the fans and bloggers who helped spread “Here It Goes Again” across the Internet can no longer do what they did before, because our record company has blocked them from embedding our video on their sites. Believe it or not, in the four years since our treadmill dance got such attention, YouTube and EMI have actually made it harder to share our videos.

[UPDATE: I ought to point out that, as evidenced by the fact that I just embedded one of their videos in my last post, EMI aren't restricting embedding any more. But they were.]

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Most of us know that OK Go make some of the best music videos in the world, but I am utterly speechless at this one, for their new single This Too Shall Pass. It’s just astonishing. I can’t believe they did it. I’ve embedded it below, but it’s worth following the link and watching in HD.

There’s also a 4 part ‘making of’ series.

Most amazing thing? This isn’t even the official video for the song. This is just a video the band made for fun. The official video is also one of of the best music videos I’ve seen in a very long time.

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A bundle of 7 Mac apps including RipIt, Clips, RapidWeaver and, amazingly, Tales of Monkey Island for $19.95. That’s, like, £12 or something.

Go on. You know you want to.

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That’s worked OK, but if you use an RSS reader to view the site, you’ll still see the title twice over – one linked to this site, the other to the site I’m trying to get you to visit. Here’s a screenshot from Google Reader, to show you what I mean:

The way I see it, that’s all the wrong way round. The emphasis should be on the link – this blog is just a journal of interesting stuff I’ve seen elsewhere; my site ought to take second stage to whatever site it is that I’m linking to. So, I started using a Wordpress custom field to store the URL of the page I’m linking to, and altered my RSS feed so that that URL appears as the link for the entry, not the page on this site. Suddenly, the RSS feed looks like this:

Huzzah and Hoorah! Birds sang, Angels flew, and much more besides. I imagine it probably confused one or two people at first that links which previously came here now went elsewhere, but overall I think it’s an improvement.

Unfortunately, there appear to have been one or two unexpected side-effects.

After we’d finished recording House of Comments last night (the new episode will be up later today, hopefully) Mark mentioned something a little strange. Ollie Cromwell at The Red Rag has used Wikio Labs to compile an estimation of this month’s Wikio Top 40 political blog rankings, and as strange as it sounds, it shows this site at number 39. Last month, for context, Sharpe’s Opinion was at 82. Either something exceptional has happened to the amount of people linking to this blog (curiously coinciding with a drop in traffic of over 25% over the past month), or something has gone very wrong with Ollie Cromwell’s rankings. Perhaps with the official rankings too – but since they haven’t come out yet, it’s possible they won’t show the same.

So what the hell has happened to give me such a high ranking all of a sudden? Some further investigation revealed that Wikio appear to be listing over 133 backlinks to this site over the past month (By comparison, Google blogsearch reveals 13 backlinks over February), and from a much larger variety of sources than usual. In fact I seem to have an enormous number of links from sites which, upon further inspection, don’t appear to have linked here at all. But, and herein lay the key to the puzzle, those sites had linked to some of the same sites I had linked to.

Playing Watson to Mark’s Holmes, I concluded that Wikio must compile their rankings, in the Labs at least, based on the <link> tag in entries from the RSS feeds they monitor. Because the link tags on this site contained URLs from other sites, Wikio were counting links to them as links to my corresponding posts. What has ensued has been, as they say in technical circles, utter madness.

The upshot of it all is, at least as far as Ollie Cromwell’s estimations go, that my Wikio rank for February has been massively inflated.

Now, there’s a lot of ‘ifs’ in the above. I guess we’ll only know for certain when the official rankings are published, which should be in a few days. The best case scenario is that either Wikio will have noticed the problem and fixed it, or that their actual ranking system works somewhat differently to the pageranks on their Labs site.

So, what to do about it now? Well, I could just leave it. I have, after all, apparently stumbled across an astonishingly effective system for gaming the Wikio rankings. I could, alternatively, contact someone at Wikio and ask to either be removed from their system or have my unusual RSS feed taken into account. I could put my feed back the way it was (and for the moment I have indeed done this), though I confess I quite like it with my modifications.

I haven’t decided yet. I’ll email Wikio later on and let them know what happened. In the meantime, I suppose I ought to let this stand as a lesson to anyone who puts too much faith in blog ranking systems. Or considers mucking about with their RSS feed.

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A very well considered post by Andy Hinton on the uncertain future of 6Music, and more generally on the failure of DAB radio. He also makes the point I would have made, which is that the station itself is not as important as the content it carries – if Radios 1 and 2 were more like 6Music, we wouldn’t actually need 6Music any more.

People once again seem to be labouring under the impression that a Facebook campaign will influence the BBC’s decision on this. The only thing that will save 6Music is if lots more people start listening to it.

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A surprisingly interesting interview with Jim Reekes, who created the Macintosh startup chime (also WALL•E’s startup chime) and also named one of the original Mac’s alert sounds ’sosumi’.

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Mark Reckons, asking a question worthy of John Rentoul’s ‘Questions To Which The Answer Is No’ series. First of all, only a Government can ‘lose’ an election. Secondly, an election hasn’t been called yet. And on this point, I agree with Will Straw: the election will be on May 6th.

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Why do I read a post that I agree with, and then just move on? I think the reason is that I subconsciously think that a comment which just says “Yes, absolutely right, thanks” is not worth making. A comment without any real intellectual content is somehow pointless; I am, after all, adding nothing to the discussion

Hmm. True, that.

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A comment from Ladytizzy reminded me of this Wired article from a few months back. Apparently, we’re gradually becoming more susceptible to placebos and their miraculous curing effects:

It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late ’90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

‘Alternative medicine’ is seen by most rational people as, in effect, a group of highly advance placebos¹. If these results are anything to go by, though, alternative therapies may be becoming more effective at curing ailments over time.

1. “You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proven to work? Medicine.”

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