Author: Tom Coates

Random

Links for 2006-01-05

Ricky Gervais and Matt Groening have a little love-in as Gervais completes his first full Simpsons episode… “The Simpsons creator Matt Groening said Ricky Gervais did such a good job writing an episode of the hit US comedy show that he wants him to do more.”
Retrievr allows you to draw sketches in an MS Paint style and then find similar Flickr photos… It looks like they’ve gone and done some analysis on some of Flickr’s most interesting pictures to try and match them up. If you play with blocks of colour you get some really nice and occasionally startling results…
Weinberger writes a really interesting and solid piece on why (and how) the Media gets Wikipedia wrong so often… “Jimmy has been all over the news telling people that Wikipedia is not yet as reliable as the Britannica, that students shouldn’t cite it, that you should take every article with a grain of salt.”
Bodytag – a glorious selection of explorations in web programming, visualisation and play Mr Willison, co-worker extraordinaire, introduced me to this cornocopia of beautiful fragments of insight and play. Very very classy indeed. Yay the web!
The Stokke Xplory series of prams and pushchairs elevate children so they can see what’s going on around them… They look beautiful, but they also look really unstable to me – almost dangerous. I’m intrigued by the height question too – is it useful for children to be elevated, or should they be getting familiar with the way the world looks at their height?
Weirdest moderation technique ever – Second Life griefers are sent to ‘The Cornfield’ If you misbehave a fair amount you are sent to this weird environment with only a slow tractor, lots of corn and a depressing film playing in black and white on an old TV for company. The big question is whether or not curious people will act up in order to see the weird new territory…
Technoranki – a weblog ranking and authority service I have no idea whether this is any good or not as a service, except that it seems to be being used by the BritBlogs people for their charts at the moment. Anyone got any experience or thougts about it?
Allegedly psychic Flash game works out what number you were thinking of… Or at least so it seems for about the first three minutes you play with it. Have a couple of goes and then see if you can figure out how it’s done. There’s at least one ingenious twist in the whole thing…
Blogger Web Comments for Firefox The most interesting thing about this is how the weblog is becoming the default platform for pretty much everything and individual expresses online. Why would you use a dedicated web annotation service when you can just integrate it into your site?
My favourite new Social Software enterprise is the beautiful and well-developed extratasty.com! For sheer class, check out the submit a recipe page – all the ingredients come from a controlled vocabulary, are translated automatically into tags, and it even writes the recipe for you as you submit each component. Plus you can register on the submission page in just three fields (one of which is hidden until it knows you’re new). Very very nice indeed.
What’s the deal with the self-referential sign…? A sign that warns you about itself? That sounds like Banksy to me, but it can’t be – surely? Speaking of which I saw another weird traffic cone orb in London yesterday. I wonder if it was him…
Current favourite character in all drama: Titus Pullo Probably just toppling Doctor Jack from that Lost TV series. I believe the term is something like ‘silver fox’ or something. Dodgy tough-as-old-boots grey-headed soft-hearted violent impuslive grumpy bastards. Cough.
The Patent Epidemic from Business Week One of the weirdest things I’ve had to get my head around over the last couple of months is the US patent culture. There’s no patents for software in Europe yet, so it’s been a total culture shock…

Humour

In praise of chocolate business cards…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date January 4, 2006
7 Comments on In praise of chocolate business cards…

Earlier this year I went to State of Play III and I always meant to write up what happened there, but I never had time. Too easily distracted by shiny new things and by the confusion of switching jobs and trying to make sense of Yahoo and worrying about things and playing a little too much World of Warcraft (European servers / Dendrassil / Pentheus or Andromache – should you want to say hello).

Well don’t think for one moment that any of that confusion has changed, or that I suddenly have enormously more time, because I don’t. And this is simply another post in the ‘any movement is good movement’ attempt to unclog my weblogging self. So what I’m going to talk about instead is the really cool chocolate business card that Kenyon & Kenyon gave out in the goodie-bags, which I’ve just rediscovered, photographed and then promptly eaten. The chocolate was at the better end of American shop confectionary, but not enormously good. But it was free, and it sure as hell made me remember the company. Maybe you could make business cards out of pressed ¬£50 bills or something. That would probably rock a little more. But not much…

Addendum: (Added Thursday January 5th 2006): I’ve just got an e-mail from Justin Blanton who did an internship with Kenyon last summer and says that for Christmas 2004 they got given a huge slab of chocolate decorated with a picture of their New York offices on the front. You can see the beautiful object here: Kenyon Christmas Chocolate.

Design

On the clumsy milking of mass amateurisation…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date January 4, 2006
9 Comments on On the clumsy milking of mass amateurisation…

It’s reading all this processed text that gets me so backed-up, I’m sure. I need a webloggic irrigation to get the flow back. But at the moment, every scant fragment is a movement in the right direction, so I’m going to start with this little tiny observation. I’ve talked before about mass amateurisation and how larger companies are spotting the creative activity that’s bubbling up from the newly empowered masses. Sometimes, of course, these larger companies don’t always operate as scrupulously as they might. So I was out the other day with Mo Morgan and his lovely lady, and we spotted this in a highly-designed expensive-looking shop called Carbon 28 on Neal Street in London:

It’s fairly entertaining, I suppose – there’s something about Princess Leia holographic projectors in there and light sabres and bionic eyes. It’s just a shame it’s a reworking of the rather well-known, rather funnier and rather better printed shirt on Threadless. Now I don’t think there’s anything illegal about this – the two shirts are different enough from one another, and you could probably even argue that the Carbon28 t-shirt is a parody of the Threadless one. But it’s… disappointing… you know? Cheap. Clumsy. Inarticulate, inelegant and tawdry. We should be doing better by each other.

Random

Links for 2006-01-04

It’s January, so it must be time for the Bloggie nominations! The only weblog awards thing that I ever participate in, the Bloggies are voted for by the community itself and have been going almost as long as my weblog! Try and celebrate the more obscure sites this year!
World of Warcraft remix of Lord of the Rings… Particularly guffawing at the LFG, rez, aggro and breath jokes. No one who isn’t familiar with WoW will have the slightest idea why it’s entertaining…

Random

Links for 2006-01-02

Mr Morgan cut all his hair off! This is almost certainly of limited interest to those of you who don’t know early UK weblogger and notable grumpy bugger Mo Morgan. But for those who do know him, woyzer!

Random

Links for 2005-12-22

A court in the Pennsylvanian town of Dover has declared it unconstitutional to teach Intelligent Design in the town’s schools… I think my favourite comment about the whole thing comes from Pat Robertson who said that the move risked provoking the wratch of God – despite the ID prononent’s assertion that it wasn’t a religious theory…
“One in 10 UK websites fail to work properly on the open source Firefox web browser, a study shows” And the Odeon website is explicitly named again! That must be years now after they were first taken to task for it. They’ve made some improvements it’s true, but how long will it take for them to realise that it needs root-and-branch rebuilding?
Kevin Marks explodes Susan Cheever’s ludicrous take on the copying of digital artifacts… “It’s a strange experience to see your own property so appreciated. It’s disorienting and beguiling. You’ve been quoted. That’s how it feels when something of yours suddenly appears in cyberspace…”
DIY Paper bookmarks This has been all around the web, but still – it’s a neat and simple idea. Printable corners that you can stick on books to keep your place or to annotate the content at that point. Annotation is everywhere.
An awesome post by a Barbelite colleague on “Christmas Trees and the God of Yule” I bloody loved reading this – it’s all about Freyr, a Norse god of fertility, one of whose symbols was the Christmas tree – within which each Winter he would be reborn. This is way more fun and spiritually satisfying than Christianity!
Wikipedia has an awesome article on Freyr full of enticingly obvious symbolism! “The most important Freyr myth relates Freyr’s falling in love with the giantess Ger√∞r. Eventually she becomes his wife but first Freyr has to give away his magical sword.”
“How Google woos the best and brightest” One thing occurs to me is that such structures should either be well known, or kept very secret. All recruitment seems to be a gameable system. Ideally they should be well-known, so that everyone has equal access to the cheats…
‘Gay weddings’ first for Belfast “Two women, Shannon Sickles and Grainne Close, exchanged vows at Belfast City Hall, followed by a gay couple and another lesbian couple.” Lovely. And about time, frankly.
A Flickr photoset of the notes taken during the inaugural ORG meeting, designed to try and capture the major issues that people felt about digital rights… Named, “Digital Rights in the UK: Your Rights, Your Issues”, this gets to the heart of many of the core issues that people are worried about w/r/t digital rights, although I’m sure there are more. Probably worth annotating for clarity?

Random

Links for 2005-12-21

One Billion Internet Users (from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) “Some time in 2005, we quietly passed a dramatic milestone in Internet history: the one-billionth user went online. Because we have no central register of Internet users, we don’t know who that user was, or when he or she first logged on.”
The guy from Suprnova explains why the site went offline a year ago… He tells the story quickly, but it sounds like quite a scary situation to find yourself in. Still, it also sounds like the story ended fairly well. I wonder what happens next…
Roger Ebert describes his best 10 Movies of 2005, and mentions a whole lot of other films that nearly made the list or deserved a mention It’s a fascinating group of pictures. I can’t quite fathom why everyone in the US was so taken with Crash – it didn’t work so well for me, and I don’t think it did enormously well in the UK box office. Maybe it’s a cultural thing.
Saturday Night Live’s “The Chronic of Narnia Rap” This one’s really spreading – I heard about it on a mailing list from a friend in the US about six hours before Cal sent me the URL. I’m guessing it’ll have eaten the internet by Thursday.

Life

A quick note from jetlaggia…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date December 20, 2005
2 Comments on A quick note from jetlaggia…

It’s this direction that’s the killer – not being able to sleep until 4 or 5am and not feeling awake and fresh until the middle of the afternoon. I’ve been back in the UK for a couple of days, but I’m still living in that hallucinogenic twitchy overwarm zombie space, and I suspect I’ve got at least one more day of it to go. Thank god for Christmas. Posting will be irregular until the middle of next week, I suspect. Fragments of my incoming stimuli will continue to be captured on my Flickr photostream as normal.

Random

Links for 2005-12-18

John Spencer, who played The West Wing’s Leo McGarry, has died aged 58 God, what terrible news. I’m astonished that he was only 58 – he looked ten years older at least. It turns out that he was younger than my stepfather.

Random

Links for 2005-12-16

Wikipedia survives research test “The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows. The British journal Nature examined a range of scientific entries on both works of reference and found few differences in accuracy.”