iPhone musique conrete: Simon's been enjoying the iPhone RjDj app, which records the sounds around you and makes real time electronic/sampladelic pieces from them. At times, quite ravishing.

Everyone's picking up on the Web 2.0 activity around this week's horrendous attacks in Mumbai, among them Forbes, the Guardian and Wired.

Nice little piece in the NYT about the "rise" of slow blogging. Not our strength, must be said.

Charlies Brooker gets on the last word on the daft Ross/Brand affair.

Our friend Nick Reynolds on the BBC, morality and John Stuart Mill: "If the BBC stopped making entertainment programmes it would be saying: Moral questions are only for people who watch Newsnight."

It's 40 years since Doug Englebart developed the mouse at Stanford. There's an interesting throwaway line in here about the length of a patent's life...

And forty years sine Apollo 8 astronaut took the iconic Earthrise photo.

Ben "bad science" Goldacre exposes the poor research and thinking behind this week's influential Channel 4 documentary about more parents deciding to go through with the birth of Downs Syndrome babies, which they're simply not.

We've never really got Second Life. With Reuters now pulling out, the hype might actually be coming to and end.

Russian games developer Russobit-M is apparently about to release a game pretty obviously based on the recent  Russia-Georgia war. Naturally enough, Confrontation: Peace Enforcement features Russian protagonists and Georgian enemies - backed up by NATO.

From the Guardian: an amusing audio precis of Gladwell's Outliers by Jim Crace.

Channel 4's exit from digital radio is still in confusion.

No idea whether this is even vaguely relevant/useful/indicative, but former MTV  "exec" Courtney  Holt has been named as Head of My Space Music.  Like we say, possibly doesn't mean anything at all, but it certainly feels weird.

Universal are crowing about half of Q3's revenue coming from "digital". Meanwhile, Bob Lefsetz is sceptical.

The Guardian talk to Peter Gabriel about his recently-launched ad-funded music download service, We7. He talks a good game, but we have to say that so far, the offer looks a bit weak to us. Still, all experiments are welcome at this point.

We've been enjoying the nifty little Typealyzer, which runs a site's or blog's content through a a Myers-Briggs-related algorithm to analyse said site's creators personality.

Its creators claim that it shouldn't be taken too seriously, but we were amused to find that while the overall Double Shot website portrays us as "ENTJ - The Executives", our blog apparently reveals us to be "ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers".  So now you know.

Simon's in New York as he writes this... which is relevant.

We've spent a lot of time this year talking to large UK-based arts venues, perhaps most significantly the Barbican and The Royal Opera House... very fine people all.

Anyway, as a result, we've done a lot of thinking about what makes an arts venue's website really work, and always trying to avoid being seduced by aesthetics and instead worrying about functionality. (Our challenge to arts bodies has always been: is your website as easy to use as the Mean Fiddler's?)

Now then, I think it's traditional for we Brits to have a slight inferiority complex when it comes to some media stuff. Yes, yes, we 're bizarrely arrogant when it comes to TV (go figure). But we can feel a bit under-par compared to the US when it comes to a discipline like web design. And often fairly.

But Simon has to report that in trying to get along to the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater to catch a rare screening of Michael Snow's 1968 minimalist classic  Wavelength, he had to use their website, which, it must be said, is a fright.

Yes, they've got the problem facing dozens of large arts organisations: a plethora of venues, programmes and sub-organisations, but really, this site is an object lesson in non-User-Centred Design: non-standards compliant, all-over the place in Firfefox on the Mac (hardly a minority platform) and shockingly bad IA. Simon reports that just finding an address for the cinema was an uphill task.

So there you go. We hope that the current significant physical renovation of the venue(s) is accompanied by an uplift in their web presence.