Author: Tom Coates

Core objects on the internet, individually addressable, that are a platform that can be annotated, described and connected, making a web much more exciting and navigable and powerful than it could possibly be otherwise – all illustrated through a wonderful little story about Cheese illustrated on Flickr. Here is a picture of some cheese from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London which I’ve raved about before:

So I’m looking at this picture and I’m thinking how much fun it would be to tag it up with all the names of the cheese which are so gloriously evocative like baylesford, gubbeen, ogleshield, spenwood and kilcummin. No one will have used those tags before, I think to myself. And then I type in Linconshire Poacher and suddenly I can almost taste the cheese in my mouth. It’s like this particularly pungent and strong hard cheddary cheese, only much more powerful and delectable.

And so I click on the link to see if anyone else has tagged it lincolnshirepoacher. And not only is there an awesome picture, but it’s available under a Creative Commons license requiring only attribution and non-commercial usage. And it’s actually a picture of the guy who makes the cheese! And his name is Simon Jones. The whole arc is complete and beautiful and I’ve got an insight into the production of this cheese and a story behind the whole thing and it’s all awesome and gorgeous. And because it’s all Creative Commons, I can post it here without any anxieties:

Of course these things go both ways, and while I can state with total confidence that my impression of the Lincolnshire Poacher people has gone massively up, the same can’t necessarily be said for the crew behind Naked Juice who have a Flickr account under the user name Juiceguys, which included rather too many disturbing pictures of their entirely freaky Halloween office party. Shudder.

Eurgh. I don’t know what the hell happened, but I’m all over the place biologically today. Hideous gut pains and regularly visits to the unusables aren’t the half of it. I have this horrible feeling it’s one of those not having a sense of smell and not checking the best before date things. Update: Things are not getting better as much as they’re getting worse. As a result, I’m afraid I’m no longer going to be able to make the Apple Store event this evening. I’m basically spending much of my time making pained faces and running backwards and forwards between larger and smaller rooms, and I don’t think that’s necessarily something that a hundred or so people really need to see. The event looks great though, so you should all be going to it – I’ve spent a bit of time talking to Mecca this lunchtime and she’s got her stuff nailed down and it’s great. Again, apologies to all.

• Firefly¬†<¬†Serenity So this guy wants to prepare his friend to watch Serenity, and so makes him a thirty minute introduction to Firefly which he’s now circulating for free on the internet, even though he’s going to get crushed by the law.
• A bashed and broken Powerbook still mostly works – it causes me pain this, after seeing such a similar fate befall my work Powerbook… “Matt Johnson sent around this jaw-dropping picture of a Powerbook. There’s no way to describe the scene in words so you just have to look at the photo.”
• These poems showing the absurdities of English spelling are pretty astonishingly fun to read out loud fast But while I laugh, can I just point out how upsetting I find the Simplified Spelling Society. I’m afraid I believe that the systematic simplification of spelling strips language of its etymological roots and would diminish the language in resonance and associative power – that is to say, it would make the language flat, dull and unpoetic.
• People in Florida are too scared to send their children to London because of the threat of terrorist attacks Extraordinary, but entirely familiar. During the first Gulf War, tourism from the US to Britiain dropped enormously, despite the fact that the war could have little or no direct impact in London at all.
• Timeline of Apple Macintosh models from Wikipedia Nice bit of work this – classy and up to date. I can identify several major product lines that I’ve been lucky enough to own.
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – David Byrne and Brian Eno’s classic album from 1981 – has a beautiful site for its upcoming reissue But more interestingly and more importantly, they’re opening up two of the tracks, and all the various parts of them, up for a remix license so that people can use and sample them and put them in their own tracks – for free! Stunning. Beautiful.
• Various people have been writing up the various MacBook Pro noises that have plagued some early adopters Apparently some of them are fixable (and may have been fixed) with software, while others have been fixed in later versions. Many other users are not experiencing any problems at all…

• Atom vs. RSS – Atom wins! It seems to me that as far as the world is concerned Atom is RSS anyway.
• You Tube has the footage of Danah Boyd on The O’Reilly Factor Weird piece of video – Danah comes off extremely well and presents a reasonable case for what’s happening on MySpace. It’s difficult to tell whether O’Reilly is satisfied with the piece or whether he was hoping for something … else
• YouTube has a trailor for The Simpsons Movie – apparently coming out sometime in 2007 Hm. As Homer says so eloquently in the trailer, “Uh oh, We’d better get started….”
• Birth rates in the European Union are falling fast as many people simply choose not to have children This stuff is fascinating to me – I’ve already really wanted children, but simply can’t conceive of a way in which I’d be able to do it (even excluding the gay thing). It’s not a shock to me that other people of my generation feel similarly.
• Singing might have helped social cohesian in early humans and may even predate language “Because music has grammar-like qualities such as recursion, it might have served an even greater function. With music in the brain, early humans had the neural foundation for … symbolic thought and language.”

• Richard Bartles’ article, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs” An old classic of an article. I’m not sure I buy the divisions but there’s a good articulation of the space. What I want to know is how much of it is translatable into other socially creative spaces…

Okay – given my post earlier in the day about some of the abusive comments I’ve been getting recently, this couldn’t really be a more obviously bad idea, but hey – I’m refusing to get beaten down by it all. I’m really playing with my site for the first time in getting on for a month, and I have faith goddammit that everything will. be. okay.

Basically there’s this feature on Odeo that I haven’t seen massively promoted as yet and which I wanted to play with. It consists of a web page that I can link to from which any of you people out there with computers with microphones can send me little voice messages. It’s a beautiful bit of work, and pretty damn sexy and only a bit of a diversion from their original (?) podcasting enterprise. My sense is that it’s not really a fully baked thing, and it’s really looking for some people to find some use for it, and maybe that’s something we can do here today. We’re here to have a bit of fun and hopefully something will come of it that isn’t entirely embarrassing.

Now I’ve been thinking around what people might do with this kind of functionality and frankly the possibilities are endless. You could use it to collect content for your own podcasts by getting submissions from members of the public, you could use it to leave little excruciating love messages on your partner’s iPod, or use it to remind yourself of little jobs you have to do. You could treat it as a dictaphone conveniently incorporated into your internet-enabled microphone-enabled top-of-the-line Apple laptop. You could even attach a link to Odeo’s ‘voice commenting service’ to every weblog entry you produced – opening it up both to truly moving personal expressions from real listeners and to weird and intrusive comment spam about mother-daughter incest from unscrupulous bottom-feeders!

Anyway, what I was thinking was that I could ask you guys a question and then get you to answer it and then later I’d create some dumb weblog post in which I post or link to some of the more entertaining (and less embarrassing) replies and then we see if that’s interesting and if it is maybe we do it more often, and if it isn’t, maybe we don’t. And I thought given that it was my website and I was feeling particularly full of myself today, I thought maybe the first thing I should try to get from you guys was If you could ask me one question, what would it be? To answer this question just follow this convenient link or click on the bloody big icon below. And please, try and be nice!