Web Monitor
15:58 UK time, Thursday, 8 October 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: the clothes line owner who doesn't have an interest in fashion shows, the Hyacinth Bucket of academia and the real reason people do and don't reply to your dating site message.
• Liam Gallagher may have left Oasis and started a fashion brand, that you won't see him anywhere near a catwalk:
"But I'm not a fashion designer. I'm not into the fashion side of it. I'm just into making top clobber that I like."
• Upbringing is an important element of your identity if you're planning to climb up the academic tree in the US. That's according to Professor William Pannapacker who is an associate professor of English at Hope College. Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor, why he feels everyone hates those, like himself, from working class homes, who desperately aspired to be intellectual.
"Unlike the independent highbrows and unself-conscious lowbrows, middlebrows, it seems, are so invested in 'getting on in life' that they do not really like anything unless it has been approved by their betters. For [Virginia] Woolf and her heirs, middlebrows are inauthentic, meretricious bounders, slaves to fashion and propriety, aping a culture they cannot understand"
• Masses of data are being collected about us from the internet, perhaps the most intimate is gleaned from dating websites.
OK Cupid regularly analyses the data it collects. The site uses its compatibility tests to work out who is most compatible and then watches whether people reply to the people they are deemed most compatible with. It turns out, OK Cupid says, people are more likely to reply based on the race of the recipient - white males being most popular. They found that white women, although they may be matched up from everything to star sign, are far more likely to respond to someone they look like. Here's :
"We've processed the messaging habits of almost a million people and are about to basically prove that, despite what you might've heard from the Obama campaign and organic cereal commercials, racism is alive and well. It would be awesome if the other major online dating players would go out on a limb and release their own race data, too. I can't imagine they will: multi-million dollar enterprises rarely like to admit that the people paying them those millions act like turds. But being poor gives us a certain freedom."
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