- Just over a week ago Techcrunch UK launched keeping track of the tremulous UK start-up scene I hear really good things about Techcrunch UK, but haven’t yet been keeping much track of it. Nice to see that I get a mention though.
Author: Tom Coates
- E4’s running a parody of The Sopranos credits sequence and it’s awesome and YouTube has it Probably won’t make much sense to people outside of the UK. Love the Wicker Man joke. Also Scunthorpe.
- The more I see of Schulze & Webb’s site, the more I think they’re using NLP to make us think of them as the design equivalent of an underground electronic music collective This looks so much like an album cover. Like something by AIR or Godley and Creme or something. I’d go to a concert by these guys. We need some kind of teenage magazine-style periodical full of fanboy pin-ups of design nerds with pin-ups and stuff. This would rock.
- sudo humour from xkcd We’re using this in the office now. “Get me a drink?”, “No”, “Sudo get me a drink?”, “Okay”… etc
- Ryan Carson explains, “Why I don‚Äôt use social software” I’d argue that he does, of course – and that he’ll use more in the future precisely because he has trouble maintaining all the relationships that he has now, he’ll need some form of software prosthetic to make that stuff easier.
- Philips announce production-ready clothing that can act as a simple light-emitting display medium God that was hard sentence to squeeze out. Anyway, it’s called Lumalive and looks surprisingly cool. First application I could think of – a pattern on the lapel that pulses when you have a phone call. Particularly good if you’re somewhere noisy and dark.
- Wikipedia talks about food irradiation or so-called ‘cold pasteurisation’ Advocates consider it a cheap and effective way to preserve food. Critics say that it’s a cheap way to kill bacteria in faecally-contaminated or badly-prepared food.
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My dark secret is out….
It seems my secret is finally out – I pay my bills and lead my decadent glamourous lifestyle through my experitise in online poker! And I live in the Castro Valley! And my beard is awesome! Thanks to Nikolaj for spotting this one:
- Ev Williams on why pageviews are obselete There’s clearly a need for an abstracted measurement to help advertisers work out where they’re going to get the best return on their investment, but god only knows what it is…
- Venn diagram on Wikipedia Examine, if you will, the distinct differences between Euler and Venn diagrams and in the future use the terms appropriately in order to impress and confound your friends and seem cool in mathematical company…
- Midnight Inbox is a new GTD application currently in beta I haven’t had time for much of a play yet, but I’m really looking for something that can help me do this kind of stuff. It’s more about keeping on top of things than getting things done…
- One beautifully laser-etched Powerbook crafted at FOO camp Beautiful, gorgeous, interesting. Wish I’d thought of something cool like that.
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A week in the US nears its end…
Given that I’ve been running around like a lunatic for the last month or so – and I never have more than ten minutes to sit still in any one place – I guess I should stop trying to write long posts for a bit and just report on location. I am in Sebastopol at FOOCamp, I spent the previous week between Berkeley and San Francisco presenting things and brainstorming and working generally ridiculously hard (but making it look easy) while hanging out with Simon and Biddulph and Paul and Cal and a whole bunch of other neat people. It’s been a really really challenging and fascinating week but it’s shortly about to end just as I’m starting to get into my flow. Tonight I drop off Simon and Paul at the airport and then tomorrow I fly back to the UK. I’m there precisely two weeks and then I’m back in the Valley for the next Future of Web Apps conference. Travel, travel, travel. Fun, fun, fun. Tired, tired, tired.
I’m not even going to try to digest my thoughts about all the things I’ve seen or heard or been talking about yet – it’s hardly practical given that I’ve also got a post in front of me that I started writing a month ago which was just trying to detail where I’d been travelling recently that I didn’t manage to finish. I’m going to try and take some time next week to flush my brain onto paper, but I’m afraid if you want to know any more you’ll have to wait a little. In the meantime, here’s something to whet your appetite about some of the less formal things we’ve been doing with our time:
I’ll explain that one in a little more detail soon. Promise! In the meantime you can see the picture in context over on Paul Hammond’s photostream!
- Kevin Anderson’s off to be Head of Blogging and Interaction at the Guardian Interesting and exciting. Well done old chap.
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Superman vs. Wikis…
It’s not really versus as such. I went for the sensationalist title. Apologies. Anyway, a depowered Clark Kent in the latest issue of >52 has an assistant use a wiki to look up a weird alien creature that has appeared in the middle of Metropolis holding a submarine in its maw. Reminds me of the time a few months ago I discovered that Ms Marvel was writing a weblog in-comic. Like, “Today I got totally into this fight with this guy and I used my super punching but he just wouldn’t stay down and then… etc.” Awesome. Next month, Wonder Woman spends all day on You Tube…
For those of you who can’t get through the very bad picture, it reads, Wow, that was a good guess… Here we go! Ballostro, a mythic protocrustacean beast rumored to attach itself to seacraft in search of land prey. S’pose we can wiki out the word ‘rumored’ right, Mr Kent?
- Mr Hammond sent me this OK Go video featuring eight treadmills Bloody awesome. Bloody awesome. Gets better the more times you watch it. Very funny. Very cool. Treadmills.
- An awesome flash representation of the music that’s playing on US radio stations (in real time) Lovely bit of work this, built by the people who are doing a ‘rate the music you hear on the radio’ application that really reminds me of the Phonetags work we did at the BBC
- A rather frustrating article from The Independent about Ashley Highfield I think my opinions are relatively well-known, so I think I’ll keep my mouth shut on this particular one.
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A quick disclaimer…
In keeping with my piece on Ethical Weblogging a few days I should declare that Nokia have sent me a piece of hardware to play with that they’re looking to get geek feedback upon. I’m not going to be talking about the product on this site unless it becomes completely enmeshed with my life, but anyway, that’s full disclosure and you can come to your own conclusions about any subsequent posts I should make about the company. The post on Ethical Weblogging that I made the other day was in fact a direct result of being approached by Nokia for feedback and trying to work out what the appropriate response would be. Hopefully this is open and fair enough to be honourable.