[web] Drudge Match — Camille Paglia interviews Matt Drudge. [via Anil’s Daily Links]

‘PAGLIA: There’s something retro about your persona. It’s like the pre-World War II generation of reporters — those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they’ve all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds — utterly dull and insipid.

DRUDGE: But you look at these tanned, blow-dried gym bunnies like Brian Williams, NBC’s next anchor — all they do is read off a teleprompter, and no one has a problem calling them journalists. In the end I really don’t care what I’m called, as long as it’s not blogger.’

[web] The Secrets of Drudge Inc — behind-the-scenes at the Drudge Report … ‘Drudge amassed a vast network of independent sources. That network of instant-messaging buddies is heavy with media insiders who use Drudgereport.com as an industry echo chamber. Drudge’s network has helped him routinely beat the big boys to the punch. In just the last few months, he broke the news of celebrity photographer Herb Ritts’s death and even scooped CNN when Walter Isaacson resigned as that broadcaster’s CEO. “There is always this feeling that Drudge is about to break something,” says Phil Boyce, program director at WABC radio in New York. That leads many loyal readers to check the site 10 to 15 times a day.’ [via kottke.org]

[tech] Compressing Webpages for Fun and Profit — a how-to about compressing pages on the fly with PHP to speed-up downloads and save bandwidth. ‘…what if I told you that you can third your content easily with no work on your part whatsoever? It sounds like a pitch I might get in a lovely unsolicited email. The secret lies in the fact that every major browser of the past 5 years supports transparently decompressing content on the fly.’ [via Neil’s World]

[web] With Friends Like These — Rod Liddle on Friends Reunited … ‘The long, intervening years since school are assumed to have overlaid a gloss of civility, nostalgia and affection but, really, they haven’t. Radgey: you can sod right off, you little thug. So can the snivelling, boring, fat boy who, in a physics class in 1976, we wired up to the mains using crocodile clips. Zzzzapp! They have photos at Friends Reunited and he is still fat. And snivelling and boring, too. He communicated with me, the fat boy, in the manner of a much-loved, long-lost friend. But really he was just curious to see whether I was in prison yet.’

[web] How the Wayback Machine Works — another interview with Brewster Kahle about how the Wayback Machine works … [via Bowblog]

‘Having the capital cost of equipment drop to effectively zero allows you to think bigger. You start thinking about the whole thing. For instance, the gutsy maneuver of saying “let’s index it all,” which was the breakthrough of Altavista. Altavista in 1995 was an astonishing achievement, not because of the hardware — yes, that was interesting and important from a technical perspective — but because of the mindset. “Let’s go index every document in the world.” And once you have that sort of mindset, you can get really far. So if all books are 20 TBs, and 20 TBs are $80,000, that’s the Library of Congress. Then something big has changed. All music? It’s tiny. It looks like there’re only one million records that have been produced over the last century. That’s tiny. All movies? All theatrical releases have been estimated at 100,000, and most of those from India. If you take all the rest of ephemeral films, that’s on the order of a couple hundred thousand. It’s just not that big. It allows you to start thinking about the whole thing.’

[web] Way Back When — a interview with Brewster Kahle… the creator of the Wayback Machine [via blackbeltjones] …

‘The whole point of comprehensive library collections is that you can’t tell in advance what will be important. The Web is the people’s medium, it’s not elitist. Anyone can publish there, so you’ve got the good, the bad, the ugly, the profane. It’s just us, that’s the amazing thing. For instance, a lot of libraries are now used for genealogical work. What would you give for a video clip of your great-grandmother? I’d give a lot. I may not watch it very often, but I’d love some way of knowing who she was’

[life] The Cost of Reunion — True life story which combines Friends Reunited, internet romance, sex and death … ‘Married for 22 years with a 12-year-old son, Joanne registers with Friends Reunited in January; her former fiance Tim responds in March; they meet up again for the first time in April, have sex once, and in June move in together, having seen each other only about a dozen times. The whole extraordinary process of getting to know a person – even if it is for the second time – flirting with them, falling for them and wanting them forever is concertinaed into just a few dizzying weeks – thanks to emails and mobile phones. In one four-week period they exchanged over 30,000 words in emails.’ [Related: Spouses Disunited]

[web] dot.conqueror — interview with Jeff Bezos … ‘He defends [Amazon] bullishly: “We’ve saved our customers money and time, and if we’ve changed anything it’s been in a good way. I don’t know how you could argue we’ve changed things in a bad way. Making products cheaper and easier to find is good.” A beat. And then the Laugh. Another beat. The acolytes laugh. What really strikes me is how utterly mirthless it is, how Bezos seems to use it aggressively to control the conversation. Today, Bezos is laughing very loud indeed.’

[books] Philip Pullman resources on the Web from Robot Wisdom … Pullman: ‘The rise of fundamentalist religion I think, is the most dangerous aspect of late twentieth-century life, whether it is intolerance among Christians or Muslims or Orthodox Jews. I think fundamentalist religion is one of the greatest dangers we have ever faced. And so if there is a source of wickedness in the book, you can place it there… What makes a religion fundamentalist is the insistence that because of some book of scriptures or some revelation given to the founder of the religion, that they alone possess the ‘truth’. And when anyone believes that, they’re wrong. I think my position would be that throughout human history, the greatest moral advances have been made by religious leaders such as Jesus and the Buddha. And the greatest moral wickedness has been perpetrated by their followers.’

[mayor for london] Another webapp to help you choose your mayor: VoteMonkey [requires Java]