the tweney review

Ben Schott, author of the entertainingly eclectic Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany, charts the past 5 years: Five Years of Consequence

How philosophy can help create secure databases — or, more likely, create massive non-data maintenance headaches: Cryptography | The non-denial of the non-self | Economist.com

Target’s “Franklin Roosevelt” action doll looks curiously anachronistic for a mid-20th century President…

I love the loud jazzy text-movies of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, which has been around for a few years and continues to produce funny, engaging new works in the same vein. Granted, their use of Flash technology doesn’t sound like a recipe for entertainment: words flash on-screen in stark black and white, always with the same Monaco typeface, accompanied by an intense jazz accompaniment. There’s no interactivity. You just watch, and listen, and over the course of each 3-5 minute piece you absorb the text of a poem, or something much like a poem. But it works. Some examples: Dakota is angry, violent, and brilliant (and a bit of a tribute to Ezra Pound ); Samsung relentlessly mocks corporate branding; even YCHI’s Urgent Request makes begging for PayPal donations (something I’m not above doing) into an art. Most pieces have versions in Korean, English, and in other languages. Amazingly absorbing.

I’ve been having a hell of a time getting Technorati to recognize the “haiku” tags I add to every original poem posted on tinywords, the haiku site I publish. I’ve tried everything I can think of: tinywords is a registered blog on Technorati, every haiku carries an internal “haiku” tag link as well as a link to the Technorati tag page for haiku, I ping Technorati (manually), I moved my internal tag link into the body of each post, I even restructured tinywords’ archive URL to ensure that Technorati actually recognizes it as a collection of tagged posts. No dice.

Technorati is picking up on site updates — in a blog search for haiku I can find tinywords, and it appears in that list as having been updated 8 hours ago (correctly). But a tag search doesn’t show the current day’s haiku at all.

Technorati’s help pages are no use — I’ve followed all the instructions there with no effect. I’ve bitched about Technorati before, so maybe someone there is pissed off at me — who knows?

Anyone have any ideas how to fix this?