Bill Bollinger was an important post minimalist sculpture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of a generation of people who changed what sculpture meant. [more inside]
posted by PinkMoose on May 17, 2012 - 7 comments

Out of thin air? "Have you ever said something like 'Let me buy you a beer next week'? I'm sure you have. We all issue promises of this sort. And we frequently use such promises as a form of currency... I have just described a simple credit exchange. Societies rely heavily on promising-making and promise-keeping. It is the foundation of all financial markets. I'd like to point out something about the promises you make. They are made 'out of thin air.' " [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Apr 14, 2011 - 47 comments

Surviving the Age of Humiliation. Jeffrey Zaslow: "It's no longer just celebrities and business executives who need to think about aggressive reputation-protection and face-saving techniques."
posted by The Mouthchew on May 11, 2010 - 57 comments

On Karma: Top-line Lessons on User Reputation Design is an excellent overview of reputation system design concepts from the excellent-in-general blog of Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass, authors of the recently-released O'Reilly book Building Web Reputation Systems.
posted by cortex on Mar 23, 2010 - 17 comments

The Bitchun Society is now open for all of your Whuffie-market needs. Or cynical mocking, take your pick. Via (of course) BoingBoing. Can a brother get a ping? Confused?
posted by loquacious on Oct 6, 2006 - 58 comments

Online reputations. Anything to scoff at? Yeah, yeah. I found it at /. But what importance do we place on online reputations? This could mean anything (This could include your own personal web reputation all the way up to a corporation's "web-presence"). Just how important in affecting the world at large is the "Online Reputation" versus the viral spread of "small talk"?
posted by crasspastor on Feb 18, 2003 - 25 comments

Is It Better To Look Marvellous Than To Sound Marvellous? Like The Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop and (controversially) David Bowie, Patti Smith, specially when photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, looked way cooler than she sounded, imho. What other rock legends were more beautiful than the music they made? And, conversely, which artists' music was better than the image they projected?
posted by MiguelCardoso on Dec 30, 2002 - 88 comments

From the jawdropping-stupidity-in-advertising dept: Target recently pulled its "eight eight" line of clothing upon learning of its neo-Nazi undertones. At the same time, British sneaker pimp Umbro got spanked for naming a new line of kicks "Zyklons" — which may seem like a meaningless Decepticon-esque fake word unless you happen to remember that the Nazis used Zyklon B (hydrocyanic acid) in their death chambers. But, OK, still, some marketing twerp that doesn't know his world history, working for Umbro — fine. Pull the sneakers, no harm, no foul.

But Umbro is not the only manufacturer trying to get some play out of the Zyklon name. Turns out that Siemens — a German manufacturer — wanted to have a new, Zyklon-branded line of appliances. Among the to-be-branded Zyklon products?

Gas ovens.
posted by blueshammer on Sep 6, 2002 - 34 comments