- I’m afraid I got rather cross with Nick Carr again for doing another one of his posts about why everyone’s missing the point… Arguing that the Web 2.0 rhetoric is keeping people too focused on the browser would be rather less stupid if he’d actually read any of the Web 2.0 rhetoric, focusing as it does significantly on data, services and the way they manifest everywhere.
Year: 2007
- There’s uproar around BlogNation (replicated here on owstarr.com) as a former contributor decides to eviscerate the founder, Sam Sethi God knows if it’s true or not.
- Hm. According to Sam Sethi himself the writers will be paid before Christmas, which does seem to suggest they haven’t been paid to date… Yeah, that’s just dodgy, that right there.
- Valleywag looks at Cisco’s new cubicle-less working environment and is suspicious of the ergonomics Unusually sensitive of Valleywag, I thought. Personally, I consider cubicle culture demonic and counter-productive. A combination of conversational and quiet spaces would be my preference.
- Not safe for some workplaces: Late night potty mouth and all-round entertaining individual Charlie Brooker takes a look at the ‘Ten Biggest Cocks in UK Advertising’ Sent to me by my younger brother and possibly rather beyond the standard acceptable threshold for some offices, exemplifying as it does the very best swears in contemporary UK usage applied vigorously and often to adverts…
- Another appalling Charlie Brooker video that you absolutely should not watch: 10 biggest Cocks and she cocks in advertising Actually there are bits where you do shift a little uncomfortably, even if–like me–you just think swearing is funny and cool. My mother would be appalled. I’m like Dexter only with bad words instead of murdering people.
- Slightly more seriously, the Open Rights Group and the electoral commission looked into e-voting and found it was massively flawed. The Government doesn’t care. Deeply depressed by this one. One of those situations where very intelligent professionals work hard, independent groups agree with their conclusions and yet they’re completely ignored by people with power.
- OAuth Core 1.0 has been published. We’re using OAuth on Fire Eagle should that be interesting to you in the slightest. For those of you who don’t know, OAuth is a spec for the kind of process that Flickr does when you tell it you can share information with a third party site.
- LiveJournal’s moving to Russia! Bumped into David Recordon yesterday at an Oauth brunch and he mentioned that there was some kind of gathering today, but he didn’t say why. I guess this is it. Anil kept schtum as well. Cheeky swine.
- Super lovely video animation introducing the 2010 Olympic Mascots… Really like the visual style of this. Looking for more bits of illustration and animation at the moment that do landscapes in interesting ways…
- Ridiculous hysteria and computer illiteracy evident in this trailer for “Untraceable” From the idea of an untraceable website, through to seeing every keystroke because you’ve got access to someone’s wireless network… Bunk! Bunk I tell you! He hacked into my car’s computer! Can you hear me rolling my eyes?
- The BBC has lost Neighbours to Five, and is now commissioning a new Australian soap opera to fill the gap… Seems a little over-literal to me. Next on the BBC: 23! Will John Bayer be able to stop terrorists who have made time run slightly faster in this taut near-real time drama that’s been sped up by 1/24th?
- There’s some absolutely beautiful work going on at LouLou Illustrations… Just gorgeous. Inspirational. Beautiful. Really really nice.
- I can’t quite believe that I’m linking to the Daily Mail, but there you go – a series of ridiculously appalling sexist adverts from (mostly) the first half of the 20th Century When I was at University I met a lot of people who found the idea of feminism silly and gross and couldn’t imagine why anyone would be such a weird radical. This is why! That we’ve come so far as a culture is down to them.
- Incredibly awesome lego-related t-shirt for depressives… “Where is my happy face?” I might have to have that. Sending it to Cal first though.
- Lovely design blog with a fascinatingly wonderful logo: It’s Nice That It’s just so gorgeous. I can’t stand how gorgeous it is. It’s so fucking nice. Now I’m swearing. Jesus Tom, what the hell’s wrong with you?
- Carphone Warehouse is under fire in the UK under claims that their staff are telling potential iPhone customers that they’d need extra insurance The rumours I’ve been hearing are that the iPhone’s margin is much lower for resellers than other phones and so some of these companies are trying really hard to push people onto other phones or upsell them as much as possible.
- There’s a new N95 firmware update out and apparently it massively improves GPS performance. Interesting! Matt Biddulph found this one. Anything that’s good for the N95 is good for Fire Eagle. Mobile phones that you can build on with GPS units installed are cool and future and stuff like that.
- One of my absolute favourite films of recent years, you have to go and see ‘No Country for Old Men’ It sounds like a tedious movie. It’s anything but. The thriler-like aspects are astonishing, the attention to detail incredible, the creativity and insight astonishing, the cinematography absurdly good. Must see.
- Interesting news – Billie Piper is to return to Doctor Who for three episodes in the new season… Don’t quite know how they’re going to pull that particularly one off.
- BBC News story about the $100 laptop and the political problems that are stifling it It’s not by any means obvious that a laptop per child is the most urgent need in some countries, but it clearly could help some countries dramatically leapfrog their next generation. I for one hope it finds a market.
- A capture of the proposed new BBC homepage as spotted by Jeremy Keith People always get designs of homepages wrong. They ask what the homepage is for. What they should ask is what the site is for and make the homepage reflect that. Does anyone know what the BBC’s site is for?
- Absolutely beautiful portfolio-style site (in Flash) by Kashiwa Sato Flash has its place as componentised blocks on HTML, addressable pages. Here it basically occupies those pages completely, but is still beautiful.
- Freaky old video on You Tube advertising the Apple Lisa with Kevin Costner in it… I think I nicked this one off Kottke. Wouldn’t be the first time. A bit puzzled by what it’s trying to say. His work day gets done really quickly because he has an Apple?
- Kevin O’Neill talks about “The Black Dossier”, the intricate and fascinating multi-media collage of a comic book history of their League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I got this the other day in San Francisco and the depth of the referencing within it is terrifying and incomprehensible. And yet somehow the plot sneaks through, and it all feels rather good fun.
- Delighted to hear that A&Mi at the BBC are so passionate about URLs and looking forward to seeing what they produce around them I have to be honest, I’ve not been overly happy with the way that the work we started at the BBC with PIPs progressed after I left. This could drag it back on track, I suppose.
- My article from a few years ago on developing a URL structure for broadcast radio sites… Radio 3 was supposed to be the model for a reinvigoration and restructuring of the whole URL space and programme represenation at the BBC, but I hear it got rather screwed up by the iPlayer and similar follies…
- Spotted by Dan Hill of cityofsound.com, After Our Time is a blog that responds to and comments upon BBC Radio 4’s awesome “In Our Time” I was introduced to ‘In Our Time’ by Mr Webb and it was the first show that he managed to get out of the door in a podcast format. It was also the one that I was most interested in being annotated. Nice to see it happening.
- After Our Time also has a wiki for more rigorous collaborative annotation of “In Our Time” I haven’t had much of a chance to interrogate this yet, but conceptually at least it’s a lovely idea. I do rather wish the BBC had done it (or something like it) though. Ah well.
- Fifty transcripts of “In Our Time” episodes from the last few years… Some good ones in there. Perhaps not for idle reading unless you’re interested in the subjects, but still. Desperately interesting to annotate and fact-check them ,TheyWorkForYou style…
- The Dangers of World of Warcraft Found on iamcal.com, it’s funny because it looks like it’s funny because it’s true.
- Is Twitter Down? A simple web page for answering that most important of questions.
- Green Team with Will Ferrell – not entirely sure what it’s a satire of, but it’s pretty entertaining if you like your comedy on the disturbing / spicy side It’s like environmentalists multiplied by Clockwork Orange, only a bit gone to seed.
- In a similar vein, an old clip from Chris Morris’ TV show “Jam” concerned with lizards and televisions It’s a slow-builder this one. Give it some time to emerge.
- Awesome pictures from a book called Military Deceptions about the ways that disinformation was used during the Second World War Inflatable trucks! Offices disguised as rubbish tips! Hollowed out tree stumps! Part of me squees with delight, part of me is a bit suspicious. Boy’s own adventure stuff, this. Gloriously entertaining.
- Cal spotted this awesome “Bat for Lashes” video… Atmospheric, funny, interesting and ingenious. Presumably accomplished by cutting the screen vertically and splicing in various elements with the lead singer hiding the gap in the middle.