Lame conference of the week: AjaxWorld in NYC. Cost? $1,695 for three days. What to do instead? Well, buy a book about Ajax or just go on to Google and type in "XMLHTTPRequest". If you really want to go to a conference, give BarCamp LA 3 a shot instead - you can fly from NY to LA and back again for less than the registration price. And the great thing about BarCamp is you don't need to book a hotel room. At least AjaxWorld is cheaper than London's Ajax2007 which weighed in at about £2,900. 

You absolutely have to listen to this podcast about Iraq veterans and the trouble they are having returning to ordinary life. If some of the things said in this programme don't send a shiver up your spine, I doubt you are quite fully human. I think that our political 'leaders' ought to have to visit an army hospital - without media coverage, photographers or any of that stuff - every single week until the war is over. It becomes far less easy to deny the obvious truths if you have to see them week in, week out. Still, if you want to avoid having to think about this, you can always go and read about Hugh Grant's love life or Britney Spears' new rehab boyfriend and cola addiction. 

What Newsnight didn't say 

I watched the Newsnight story the other day about Google.

What an interesting story - we didn't see quite a number of things. We still got more huff about "argh! cookies!". Gmail was singled out for evil, despite the fact that Google's algorithm works on the basis of keyword scanning. There's been big debates about all this kind of stuff which the BBC could have found by looking out at the blogosphere, but they didn't.

We didn't get anything about attention data and the idea that we own our own attention metadata.

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