- Looks like OK/Cancel have been meeting Dan Hill again And that is all…
Author: Tom Coates
- Stephen Colbert ‘analyzes’ Wikipedia in this You Tube clip from his US TV Show I can’t even imagine UK TV comedians talking about Wikipedia, which probably explains why the UK remains a second-class net nation. Funny but troubling piece from Colbert, though…
- The history page on Wikipedia for ‘Elephants’ shows how resistant the site is to calculated attacks like the one Colbert proposed It’s more the quiet changes where factual errors seem to me to be likely to creep in – places where the edited fact seems plausible and perhaps uncontroversial. Still, Wikipedia remains my first port of call when I want to know something…
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Do you like crisps?
It’s been getting such a lot of entertaining responses on Flickr that I thought maybe I should post this little creation of Paul Hammond and Simon Willison more publically:
I mean, who’s going to say no to that?
More seriously, it’s probably indicative of my just-returned-from-holiday state that I can’t cohere enough of a thoughtstream together to actually write proper posts. Hopefully this image is enough to tide over a weblog temporarily gone to the dogs. Right? Right? I’m sure I’ll be back on sparkling literary form shortly – I’ve got a bunch of things I want to talk about in more depth when I get a bloody moment. In the meantime, the comments on the Flickr thread are almost funnier than the thing itself. Much recommended…
- Geek in the Park is a day-long picnic cum happening cum informal conference for nerds in Leamington Spa at the end of August I was going to come along but unfortunately I’m off in the US at the time doing conferency things. It looks really good though.
- Mint Digital has published a post detailing some of the things that happened at UGTV ’06 The whole ‘making a show of a website’ idea has been around for a while though – b3ta being the best example of this in the UK. Sadly unrecognised for most of its innovations as ever.
- Wikia is tracking the furore over the censoring of major weblog sites across India This whole thing happened while I was on holiday, so I’ve missed a lot, but apparently geocities, typepad and Blogspot were affected by the ban…
- An interesting vague poll on the meaning of ‘several’ plus a million comments about it Personal conclusions – ‘couple’ means two, ‘few’ means three and maybe four, several is in excess of four but under ten, averaging out to mean a median of something like seven things…
- The BBC has this weird article on hot weather risks But screw that, the fun bit is the Flash widget thing with the slider that allows you to expose a poor fake cut-through man to increasing amounts of heat until he looks like he’s going to blow up. Nice!
- VH1’s Best Week Ever presents an alternative take on the Mac ads… Never let it be said that obsessive fanatical ridiculous Apple obsessives can’t laugh at themselves. Ironic t-shirts. Ha.
- Penny Arcade takes on Loco Roco, my new absolute favourite super awesome PSP game I bought myself a PSP for my birthday after Andy from Flock persuaded me that Loco Roco which I’d never seen was so awesome I had to have it, and now I do and it is and I’m so happy I could die…
- Awesome trailer (in Japanese) for Loco Roco that might explain why I love it so That music is played all the way through the game, sometimes with just one voice, other times with many voices in harmony. It’s hard to explain why it’s so good.
- Which five things would you print off the internet before the apocalypse came and left us without technology or something? Matt Jones asks the question that I’m too afraid to answer but has been occupying my soul for the last four days…
Tell you what – you go on holiday for a couple of weeks and the e-mail that piles up… Sheesh, I’ll be ploughing through this lot for weeks. Earlier today I think I managed to get up to a rate of replying to around ten serious e-mails per hour, but now people are bloody replying to the earlier ones, so now I’m struggling to break-even. And given that I’ve got another five hundred to plough through, I could be here quite a while. Sigh. And this is after I’ve got rid of all the bloody spam and mailing list stuff.
Anyway, one of the more interesting e-mails I’ve received was from Suw Charman of the Open Rights Group – a progressive digital rights organisation that I’m on the advisory board of. The whole thing came about because of Danny O’Brien’s pledgebank proposal during which a thousand people pledged to donate five pounds a month to support an organisation that could fight for digital rights in the UK. Unfortunately – several months down the line – there’s still a bit of a shortfall between the people who said they’d donate and those that actually have. Hence a new project – to get another five hundred people to sign-up and donate. That five hundred, along with the current supporters, will become known as the Founding 1000, and will be able to stand up proudly and say that they were working to change the digital rights landscape in the UK.
I’ve already started encouraging the crew at Barbelith to sign-up, and now I’m going to ask you lot to stand up and be counted as well. You can get badges for the ORG on this blog post: Protect your bits. Support ORG or you can just leap straight in and start supporting ORG. You won’t regret getting involved, however peripherally. It’s a really good bunch of people trying to move the culture in a really positive direction, but they need funding and volunteers to really start having an impact. You can help.
- “Back to the Future: The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance Revisited” (2005) A wonderful fifteen minute bit of video splicing together Back to the Future and Back to the Future II’s bits in parallel. Also manages to get much of the great bits of the films in, so well worth a watch…
- Pictures of a huge open pit mine near Mirny, Russia, East Siberia God knows why I’m linking to this, except that the hole looks really really big and big things are sort of impressive.
- Bend it like Gardner Someone from the CBC has responded to my post the other day about the BBC, indicating some of the stuff that happened on their side of the pond.
- Is the new Superman meant to be Jesus? This must be one of the weirdest articles I’ve read in a while – on Superman Returns, Jesus, Christian parallels, Nazis, Jewish comic book creators and crystal from Krypton as metaphors for sin…
- Find Detail in Your Photos That You Thought Was Lost using Photoshop’s levels tools A good basic introduction to some of the tricks in correcting bad exposures using Photoshop, selections and levels. The trick to using Photoshop successfully is that it’s all about selections, hence useful article…
- Atomiq talks about a nomic Digg – basically a version where you could change the ruleset I love that this idea keeps being independently rediscovered and pushed – online communities with self-reflexive rulesets is something I’ve been harping on about for years. But they never get built. Really wish I had the flexibility to explore this stuff
- My piece on “Self-reflexive rulesets in online communities…” Based on work on Barbelith and being an area that I’d bloody love to work on with people around the edges of work, but probably won’t have time to do so.
- Ian Betteridge discusses Ben Metcalfe’s recent moves I don’t have much to add about this one, to be honest.
- It seems only fair to point to Ben Metcalfe’s response to my post about Ashley Highfield even if he sort of misrepresents it Weirdly though he rather seems to confirm my case – he declares backstage underfunded, consisting mostly of RSS feeds, not impacting on the way the organisation builds its applications and hamstrung by organisational bureaucracy…
- Thingtagging: Pictures of objects A project that Mr Biddulph’s been working on for fun built off the back of Thinglink.org. I did some of the colouring-in work for him in return for his immortal soul. It’s pretty cool.