- Lloyd Shepherd is leaving Yahoo again… One of the coolest people I’ve met since working at Yahoo in Europe. Hoping everything goes well for him and that his next venture is extraordinary.
- Open Technology groups want to take the BBC to the EC about its decision to go with Microsoft DRM I’m afraid I agree – the BBC using Microsoft-only DRM in its iPlayer, even if only for a couple of years, represents massive market-deforming activity in the direction of a known monopolist player.
- “Faceball: Your face, My balls” Apparently the Flickr Faceballing fetish has already evaporated, just as the game seems poised to take over the world.
Category: Links
- Moo Cards are just about to launch sticker books. Want! They’re having a party for them on my 35th birthday. I’ll totally be there if I’m in the country, which I should be. Might take a couple of days off, actually. About due.
- There’s a Hack Day Instructables group that you can join if you want… Really heating up this, now. Stuff keeps happening. Is all a bit strange.
- Gruber on the WWDC Keynote yesterday… The only thing I disagree about is the coverflow thing. I can see a lot of cases where rapidly scanning through a large number of files would be profoundly useful.
- The Telegraph has been covering the whole Olympics logo debacle in a particularly interesting way… I think people miss the point. Think about an Olympics that isn’t about the nobility of sport, Greek aspirational betterment of the soul through domination of the body, and start thinking of the energy and fun of running around like a maniac. Makes sense
- CNN Money on Facebook’s Transformation into a platform for other people’s products. Huge. Now you don’t compete with Facebook, you compete with other people on Facebook. Reminds me of Ancient Greek concepts of masculine and feminine. I suspect no one thought of this before because it’s such a male industry.
- Stephen Bayley in the Guardian rips the Olympics logo a new … er … ring? The one thing he says that really resonated with me was that people are now obsessed with brand as a mask for reality, rather than brand as a representation of something fundamental to your organisation or product. Agree with that.
- Vile Telegraph logo that rips into the people who came up with the Olympics logo… Apparently the media are camped out around the houses of people who did the work. And can I just say that ¬£400,000 is a reasonable cost for a medium sized team of people for a year doing skilled work.
- Dan Hon is moving on from Mind Candy, and is looking for a new project to get his teeth into… A lot of people consumed by the entrepreneurial bug at the moment. Dan’s awesome by the way.
- BBC News now appears to have a section called ‘Also in the News’ for ‘surprising stories from around the world’ These stories include people who drive into underground stations and people meeting leopards. And people say editorial standards are slipping…
- The rumour is that last.fm has been bought by CBS for $280 Million I find myself surprisingly depressed by this revelation, although it does sort of rather explain some of the conversations I had with them a while back about what it’s like inside large organisations and how acquirees fare…
- Apple have finally launched the DRM-free higher quality version of songs on iTunes – it’s called iTunes Plus Obviously it’s EMI only at the moment, but it’s sufficiently interesting for me to go and see if there’s anything I’ve bought over the last few years that I could upgrade.
- Weird idea of the moment: Sell the movie rights to The Sims… I suppose when you think about it, there’s a bunch you could do with this if you treat it as a sort of meta-fiction about the world outside the game and its inter-relationships with the characters within it. Still. Odd.
- A gay pub in Australia has won a court-case that would allow it to ban heterosexuals “The tribunal’s president said groups of straight women found homosexual men entertaining but that such attention was dehumanising.” I have much experience of being treated like this by unpleasant and arrogant women looking for a pet.
- John Battelle has posted his “Data Bill of Rights” and I’m finding it pretty fascinating… I’m not totally sure it’s all workable, but there’s a lot here of significant value. I’m spending a bunch of time trying to work out how to operate honourably in the technology ecosystem and how to encourage honourable business practice. This helps.
- Time Magazine’s extract from Al Gore’s book on defending reason is pretty decent… Really interesting in terms of how politics has gone and how evaluation and reason is massively under attack from rhetoric and the visual image. Quite approve. Like Al Gore.
- Awesome web cartoon about the current wifi = death absurdities… “Good night, stay safe, and live in constant, irrational, fear.”
- I’ve currently got these four pictures entered in the Flickr/Tate “How We Are Now” pool / competition… The photos are displayed in the Tate Britain on screens and then the very best will be published in the Observer or whatever. Good fun. Not sure these are my best photos. Any thoughts out there?
- Techcrunch reports on the Facebook platform. This is a very very good idea indeed. I also agree with the description of the move as an anti-MySpace move. It’s weird this stuff. Now of course there will be a whole bunch of imitators. But I wonder how many of them could have got any movement inside their organisations before this…
- The Pansy Project finds places where homophobic violence or abuse has occurred and plants a pansy on the site… I can’t helping thinking that schools would be bursting with pansies, all over the place. There wouldn’t be room enough to sit down.
- Meg Pickard on the natural heirarchy of seats on the tube… I don’t agree with some of what she says – the idea of being trapped by the end door with the window open in a train would appall me. Hard to escape. Otherwise though, desperately and depressingly insightful.