Arts and Crafts in the Family

In tonight's post, I'd like to return the favour to two talented artists and wonderful individuals who have helped promote Life User.

My mom is a talented impressionist painter and a budding photographer under her husband's tutelage. She showcases her pictorial work on her blog, Lunamoth, which updates one to five times weekly (no regular schedule) and is free of external ads.

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Arts and Crafts in the Family

Anti-Semitic Semantic Search

Nazis cause Jews, Arabs cure them, hookers are best treated with steroids and Adobe Photoshop, and one of the benefits of diabetes is copying documents. Narcissism is treatable by both aggression and Freud, but the latter may cause arthritis and great anguish and destroy your career. Marijuana can "assess psychometric accuracy" and help you "achieve wider social acceptance".

This is just a sampling of the medical advice dished up by HealthBase, a new semantic search engine evidently released into public beta prematurely. As TechCrunch reported last week, HealthBase drew some minor controversy for listing "Jew" as a cause of AIDS. Treatments include "Arab", "gene", alcohol and coarse salt. In an analysis of the benefits and drawbacks, "Pros of Jew" include "endorse extrinsic religiosity" and "facilitate Americanization", while cons include "enemy", "plague" and "kill Christian". On a more paradoxical note, the causes include "Nazi" and "Hitler".

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Anti-Semitic Semantic Search

Five Great YouTube Heavy Metal Music Videos

One of the great advantages YouTube has over MTV or MuchMusic is how well it caters to metalheads, no matter the subgenre. You can see a Tupac or Britney Spears video anywhere, but no TV channel will regularly supply your fix of Dream Theater or System of a Down. While pop videos rely on cleavage and ridiculously frequent cuts to hold viewers' interest, and hip-hop videos rely on flashy cars, jewelry and guns, many metal videos can be legitimately called works of art. Here are five of the best official videos you'll only find online.

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Five Great YouTube Heavy Metal Music Videos

Engrish Locks!

Do not little. Drink tobacco. This WC is free of washing. Remember to flash the toilet. Scanner something error happens. It can't get it on under 12 years old. Expose yourself. Let's make violent sports together. I like a check very much. However, a good thing is beautiful always.

This is just a sampling of the wisdom you'll find at http://Engrish.com, a site dedicated to humorous mistranslations from Japanese to English.

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Engrish Locks!

Goodbye Associated Content and Bukisa, Hello Blogger!

(All figures in this post are in US dollars unless otherwise noted.)
Not everyone who can write well can make a living on Associated Content and Bukisa.
That's been the message of my seven months' experience writing online and attempting in vain to earn something approaching my local minimum wage (CAD$9.50/hour, US$8.72/hour at the time of writing) doing so.

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Goodbye Associated Content and Bukisa, Hello Blogger!

Twitter is a feed, not a blog

On a blog, you can take several paragraphs per post to describe things in detail, attach images or video clips, and receive equally detailed replies through comments.

In an RSS or Atom feed that's going to be useful to a typical reader program (especially one on a mobile phone), you only get one URL per entry, one line to describe that URL in, and no multimedia or rich formatting (such as colours, bold, italics and alternate fonts). But feeds are easier to read on mobile phones, both with and without browsers; Yahoo! offers RSS alerts via SMS, while Google offers a version of its Reader application for mobile browsers.

With its smaller post size limits (and the terser description that results), as well as a lack of multimedia or rich formatting, Twitter is really more like an RSS feed than a blog. Just as a blog can't be replaced with an RSS feed or vice-versa, neither is it interchangeable or comparable to Twitter. The apple doesn't make a very good orange.

Twitter is a feed, not a blog