- I’m playing a bit with widgets for getting access to Basecamp on Dashboard… Obvious really – store data in the cloud and access is locally with one keystroke. Very interested in dashboard widgets as lightweight interfaces to online storage of data…
- A guy uses a bunch of items of clothing and sleeping bags to make himself look like sundry animals I need Simon Willison to do the one on the bottom right. Too funny.
- I have no idea how or why this Mail.app speed-up tip works, but work it does… I’ll probably discover that I’ve deleted all my mail from the last ten years. I’ll take no responsibility if you destroy your computer. In the meantime though, this had an amazing effect on my machine…
- It’s not every day you see a brand new sort of interface on the web, but that’s what you get at oreseg.com It’s an online video portal with a difference. Not sure what I think about it, but the interface is certainly thought-provoking…
- The d.Construct 2007 User Experience Design Conference has a pretty nice holding page Good odds I’m going to be talking at d.Construct this year. Not certain by any means, but good odds.
Category: Links
- There’s an article on the BBC about Al Gore post-Oscar and whether the US is ready to warm to him… Interesting question. From a geek perspective, most of the Gore coverage has been pretty glowing since the Wired article a couple of years ago. There’s this energy consumption debacle going on, but that seems more like an attack than an insight…
- Birth rates around the world – how far down the list is your first world country? Germany has an almost terrifyingly low birth-rate. I wonder why.
- I remain totally weirded out by Ning, even after their relaunch as a roll your own social network service I honestly have no idea why anyone would want this, and it makes me sad because I feel like I’m missing something quite profound. The benefit surely would be in overlapping social networks? In values in scale? I’m totally lost.
- BBC News reports that the gene that allows most Westerners to consume cow milk effectively only appeared in the last few thousand years Apparently it gave humans such an enormous advantage that it subsequently spread like wildfire through Western Europe.
- Interesting old piece of video from Steve Jobs about Microsoft and their lack of taste… “I’m saddened … not by their success, which I think they’ve earned … for the most part … I’m saddened by the fact that they just make really third rate products…”
- Alister McGrath is all over the place (including the Daily Mail) in an attempt to promote his book, a response to Dawkins’ The God Delusion The Dawkins book is, it has to be said, clumsy and yes, sure, Dawkins himself comes across as arrogant and rude. But while McGrath takes delight in picking apart some of Dawkins’ strategies, he doesn’t really counter his arguments…
- Henry Jenkins has made his comments known about the Second Life debate and Clay Shirky’s quantitative style of historical impact measurement… I agree with the argument that something can be significant and influential even if it is not particularly popular. See the Pixies for more information on that one. However, it is reasonable to interrogate statistics to measure whether something has mainstream appeal and whetheras it standsit’s likely to eat a generation. Evidence on Second Life, not so much.
- Phil wrote a month or so back on haddock’s directory ceasing to publish its internal link log… We’ve been having conversations around it again recently, trying to work out if there’s any useful way to bring it back without killing everyone or whether to do so would be a waste of time. Inspired me to some good thinking, either way…
- I find myself increasingly interested in OmniFocus and other GTD applications as I find myself with lots of dumb little jobs to do I’ve never been totally convinced that GTD stuff works for those territories where you have to mull or let things gestate or circle around them before coming to conclusions. Want to be proven wrong.
- 50% of people answer their e-mails immediately they receive them?! Who are these people!? Let’s just say that if I did this I probably wouldn’t have 22,000 unread things in my mailbox creeping me out…
- George Takei responds to Tim Hardaway’s recent comments about being homophobic… Now this is where we should be. This is gay satire unashamed to take the piss out of idiots. This isn’t apologetic rhetoric, it’s full-blown ridicule assuming the audience is on your side already. Awesome.
- Eric Meyer writes about the gender imbalance at conferences I’ve written about this before myself. We should be aware of the possibilities of bias and not be complacent, but at the same time we have to accept that there aren’t enough women in the industry as a whole for 50/50 conferences to be vaguely plausible…
- Video of my Del.icio.us Pecha Kucha from Bar Camp in London in which I say a few clumsy clumsy things and dance like a gimp Loved del.icio.us pecha kucha. Totally fun. Think I called Mike Arrington a grumpy bastard though, which may be unfair. Never talks to me at conferences though. Sob.
- Simon Willison writes about six cool things you guys out there could go and build right now using OpenID I’m particularly interested in the SSO problems inside firewalls. This seems like a highly elegant idea. Use software that supports OpenID and then constrain it to your local provider. Tada! You have integrated SSO across multiple internal services…
- Rory Bremner apparently rang up a highly-placed government minister and had a conversation with her while pretending to be Gordon Brown… Margaret Beckett has said that if such a conversation took place it would be, “both an unprincipled and unpleasant breach of privacy” and I absolutely agree with her. Illuminating it might be, but it’s also not really terribly cool.
- Bandwagon is a piece of software for the mac that backs up your music online every so often… I’ve not had a chance to play with it yet, as their first customers basically brought down the service with the scale of their iTunes libraries. I suspect mine would similarly cripple them. Lovely idea though…
- New colleague Rabble is doing a track on social change and communications at this week’s Emerging Telephony conference It’s not an area I know a lot about, but it looks interesting and noble.
- With all the conversations about social media going around at the moment I thought I’d link back to this old piece of mine from March last year… It’s a bit of a messy and clumsy piece. I think it’s important to remind ourselves that media has often been meant to mean simply a container for information. Think of it as social storage plus collaborative creation.
- There’s an interesting article on space.com called, “When Did Science Become the Enemy?” which I’d recommend you all read… I loved my degree and my time teaching undergraduates, and I really liked the disorienting effects of the humanities and philosophy, but I’ve regularly wondered since leaving whether they do anything but create the next generation of marketing executives.
- People still seem to be having the conversation I accidentally started last year – where are all the bloody UK start-ups? I can’t claim to be thrilled that we’re still wondering around the territory a year later. What a depressing situation. Maybe venture people should start actively courting forward-thinking technologists in the UK?
- Hitwise UK does a comparison of Google and Yahoo! in Britain… Vaguely interesting article. One of those territories where my eyes glaze over a bit.
- Kwiqq has an interesting comparison between Bar Camp London and Future of Web Apps… I’m not sure it’s totally fair, but I think it’s true that something changed about Future of Web Apps. More business-oriented than creative-oriented. I wonder if the UK is non-start-up friendly because technologists haven’t felt inspired enough?
- One thing much remarked upon – OpenID was really the core of the FOWA event in London. It was everywhere… I think we have to start facing it, there’s a momentum here and I don’t doubt that OpenID will be a major player in the world over the next few years…
- The Virus 2 Flash Game lets you play a hexagonal virus as it spreads through a multi-coloured population Nicely self-referential, I suspect it mirrors the game’s own viral spread through popualtions of OCD nerds. Reminded me a lot of Webb’s games as cleaning metaphors, which I think are more dullgames as imposition of order on chaos. Sorting.
- Very much on the rumour mill – but I’m sceptical about it’s truth: Are last.fm about to be bought by Viacom for $450 million I’ve said it for ages that someone should try and buy them. I heard rumours in the past that they’d turned down overtures from a few large companies. They’re certainly a huge potential player over the next few decades…
- The Del.icio.us Pecha Kucha presentation creator allows spontaneous presentations based on your last twenty links in del.icio.us We did a bit of this last night at BarCamp London before an endless series of games of Werewolf. Easy prey. Yum yum.
- The difference between religion and science encapsulated in one easy to digest tiny little flow diagram As I get older I get less interested in the intellectual paradoxes that language allows us to get lost in, and more interested in affecting the world around me. My patience for religionand philosophyhas diminished enormously.
