- Google Mars It’s just beautiful and awesome and fascinating and cool. That’s all. Difficult to argue with how neat it is.
- Office Lendorff sells some awesome pixel art knitwear Hats, scarves, bags, lasers, explosions, rockets. I’m so going when I’m back in London…
Category: Links
- This Life returns after 10 years This is going to happen every ten years for the rest of my life, I suspect. I’m going to be haunted by these actors representing my early twenties until we all drop dead together in twenty-fifty years time…
- Londonist versus Platial stalking Doctor Who Really nice. Really entertaining. The foundation for Doctor Who walking tours of London.
- The upcoming Yahoo Hack Day’s going to feature a full day of tutorials and talks I have to say that this event really does look like it’s going to be extraordinarily entertaining. It’s the main reason I’m staying in the Bay Area for a little while longer.
- Cameron Marlow posts Weird Al’s White and Nerdy “I’m fluent in Javascript as well as Klingon” – I don’t get why people think this is insulting. It’s totally awesome. It’s like an anthem!
- “Apple takes a gamble: so you want to watch films on your iPod?” The Guardian reports on Apple’s incursion into the video on demand and digital sales space. Pretty interesting stuff.
- Dr. James Watson reflects on DNA research in the 21st century Lovely article on ZDNet’s Between the Lines, a site I’ve never really looked at before, but which seems to have an unusual quality of contributions…
- Octet – the eight big ideas you need to know to understand the 21st century Ben Hammersley has announced the cover and subject of his new book. Looks really really interesting.
- Hot TV presenter in critical condition “Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond is in a critical condition in hospital after a crash in a jet-powered car while filming for the programme.”
- Weird BBC puff piece for a new and rather unfunny Onion-rip-off I’m a bit puzzled by this one. The BBC normally takes such enormous care to not be seen to be endorsing or advertising other people’s products.
- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is looking for a Sr. Interaction Designer You have to be a temple-worthy church going and have five years web experience. That might be limiting the field a bit, so I thought I’d give them a hand. Thanks to Matt Jones for showing me the path.
- Stormhoek Pinotage has won an award for quality of flavour as well as novelty of marketing I’m actually really glad about this – it’s nice to see that the marketing wasn’t the sole distinguishing factor, and that it isn’t only bad products that explore unorthodox or new engagements with the internet…
- Awesome Daily Show clip from yesterday on Gays in the Military Apparently a large proportion of gay men drink each other’s urine. Difficult to argue with that, really.
- Techcrunch on the flickrization of your business cards Some interesting commentary and responses around the MOO/Flickr Minicards launch…
- Death of the Author Wikipedia has a pretty decent article on Roland Barthes arguing for the death of the author and the various responses and implications to and of that initial postulation, including Foucault’s much more interesting commentary…
- The Cathie Marsh Centre is doing a survey on webloggers and their attitudes to privacy It might be worth your while contributing to this if you find it interesting, although obviously they’re likely to get a pretty skewed survey with this kind of selection metrics…
- David Gregory vs Bush on the so-called ‘Torture Bill’ A decent question is asked, a reply with almost no substance is returned. Hideous little weasel.
- Anne Galloway’s collated a list of prominent women working in Pervasive Computing Alongside my post from earlier in the day, I thought it would probably be a good thing to try and do my bit to make some of the women (in particular) working in the industry fractionally more visible.
- BarCamp has a diversity page, which could do with some attention If there are people whose voices you think are under-represented within the community, or if you’ve got ideas about how to make the conference scene and the technology idea more diverse, then you should add your comments to the page in question…
- Popsugar – one of Mike Arrington’s ones to watch I’m surprised at the moment given the resurfacing of all the old gender arguments that no one but me picked up that Arrington referred to this in his speech as a ‘women’s issues and celebrity gossip’ site. Seemed desperately clumsy to me.
- Weird review of the Future of Web Apps event from ZD Net The last section on ‘worst session’ seems to me to sum up in a nutshell the culture clash between traditional software development practices for desktop applications and a culture of web native young technologists. But maybe I’m just drunk or something.
- Fiona Romeo has put out a call for ideas around future technologies of surveillance and spying I’ve got the Barbelites thinking about this as well. Could be really cool to be involved in this project.
- Spotted on Dan Hill’s weblog – the honest in flight announcements of the future? “In-flight announcements are not entirely truthful. What might an honest one sound like?”
- Breathing Earth I’m not normally one for large Flash visualisations, but this representation of people being born, dying and the different countries of the world expelling CO2 is quite extraordinarily beautiful and informative…
- Metacritic has the pretty much excoriating condensed versions of reviews for “Another Gay Movie” Ah, my people. How proud I am. Anyway, it looks terrible, but I’ll probably go and see it if only so I can write an outraged weblog post about how gay people are being turned into pets or self-ghettoising or something.
- BBC News talks about the Microsoft Zune Come on, doesn’t the name say everything you need to know about this product? It’s supposed to sound future and cool and hip, but it’s more like your gran saying ‘zany’ to seem down with the kids. I can’t see it getting very far.
- Another BBC News story ‘reveals’ that most iPods are filled with CD-ripped tracks rather than iTunes downloads This can’t be a shock, can it? My personal shift happened about three years ago from buying CDs to listen to towards thinking of CDs as music delivery systems. Best thing about them? You get MP3s you can do what you want with and you always have a backup.
- Emily Bell joins Guardian Newspapers board Now that’s bloody interesting. Bloody interesting indeed. I shall think further on this.
- The new iPod Nano looks super sexy and the adverts are even sexier I’m guessing they had glowsticks or something originally and the Nanos were edited in in post production? No idea really. Or I suppose it could be computer animation and they could have just been holding a placeholder of some kind that was easy to track.
- I’m in a mildly sacrilegious mood, so let’s all sing along with Jesus… There’ll be a come-back. I’m sure of it.
- Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at the Emmys “Good evening, godless sodomites!” Best thing that’s happened on television ever.
- A huge fluffy planet in another star system appears to be confusing astronomers It’s apparently larger than Jupiter but half the mass. No current theories of planet formation seem to be able to explain it. Super awesome. Other planets. Woof.
- The BBC has an interesting article about the rise of weblogs at political events It still sort of astounds me that seven years after I started my site, and when I kept trying to say to people, “no really, they’re sort of interesting”, with everyone looking at me like I was nuts, that they’ve gone on to take over the whole bloody world
- Erik Benson is dead. Long live Buster Butterfield McLeod It’s a good name. A classy name. A name that will ring through the ages. A name of someone having altogether too much fun.
- Architectures of Control in Design “How products increasingly control and restrict your behaviour” – weblog by Dan Lockton. Really interesting.
- Slashdot’s discussion on Facebook and its recent problems with privacy is pretty interesting I need to develop and extend some of my ideas around this territory quite bit.
- Kim Plowright writes up some of the sessions from today’s d.construct Wish I could have attended this, but the fear has set in for my talk next week and my entire head is focused on defeating my fight or flight instincts and staying focused. Mostly unsuccessfully so far.
- Google Image Labeler Basically it’s the ESP game from a few years ago, only now actually being used (presumably under license) by Google. Interesting.
- Schulze & Webb articulate some provocative design ideas around the future of meat Difficult to explain. Sort of brain-expanding and eye-opening while simultaneously quite funny. Makes me simultaneously sort of hungry and slightly queasy. I quite fancy eating a Pink Panther.
- Amazon.com Unbox Video Amazon have launched their first on-demand TV download service and have called it Amazon Unbox. It only works in the US and it only works on Windows XP. Not sure what I think about it.
- Yahoo’s having a public Hack Day which you should all attend Should be really good fun. Unfortunately I’m unlikely to be in the US otherwise I’d be totally there.
- A pretty good Infographics pool on Flickr Some nice stuff, to lead you deeper.
- Ryan Carson on the Four-Day-Week challenge I’m jealous, but I don’t have time to get the stuff I want to get done in a five-day week. I’m often sprawling over weekends, as I will be this weekend in fact, and did last. Bloody knackering.
- Tom Watson MP puts his letter of resignation on his weblog I’ve met Tom and I believe that he’s doing this for honourable reasons and that he honestly feels that Blair needs to go. I’m not sure I share those feelings, although I’m pretty clear that the authoritarian streak of the Labour party is creeping me out.
- The Sun has its own take on what’s going on with Blair and Brown I honestly don’t believe a word that The Sun says. It all seems like campaigning with their florid rhetoric. Still interesting to see where their loyalties lie.
- Marvel reverses labeling policy for gay characters This actually happened a week or so ago, so I apologise for clumsily referencing the labelling policy a couple of days ago without checking. Good news anyway.
- Russell Davies (note not Russell T Davies) and friends take on “In Our Time” with “In Our Own Time”, this week about Buffy the Vampire Slayer I’ve only listened to the first ten minutes of the programme so far, but for an amateur effort it seems relatively entertaining. Love the idea though. The BBC should encourage this kind of thing…
- The Web Credibility Project Another interesting project from Stanford researching how and why people evaluate what to read or believe online.
- Danah Boyd is trying to collate current research on Social Network Sites I might steal this idea. I’m looking to find some interesting stuff around collective intelligence and social motives.
- “Online video vault YouTube is place to see and be seen” Medium-dull article features some less dull insights into why people do this kind of stuff in the first place from Clay Shirky, who – frankly – gets around a bit online…
- Alex Russell writes a really nice (and personally flattering) summary of FOO Camp Really glad to have got some people’s attention with the Dirty Semantics stuff. I’ll probably be putting in for a talk at ETech around the subject, if I can really get a grasp on it before then…
- Magma have some of the best dedicated design stores in the centre of London And it looks like they have a pretty good mail-order outfit too for design books, t-shirts, posters and assorted sundries.
- Cabspotting I didn’t link to this at the time, and I’m mystified as to why I didn’t – beautiful and fascinating visualisations of cab paths around San Francisco
- My Society put up some beautiful travel heatmaps a while back that I wanted to talk about but haven’t had time One thing I’d suggest is to overlay maps where the starting location is different (either each major city or tube stop, or at the end of each square half mile). That should give you a sense of which areas in London are best and worst connected…
- Trustmojo On ongoing project investigating trust on the new web. Interesting ideas, beautiful site.
- PICNIC ’06 looks pretty interesting Difficult to believe that I’ve only just noticed that it existed. Thanks to George Oates for pointing it out…
- Meet The LocoRoco Kid on Kotaku See how she sings! Beautiful singing! I miss Loco Roco. I may have to go and play more.
- Motivating participation by displaying the value of contribution Looks like an interesting article, which I will attempt now to buy and read.
- Suw Charman on how to speak at and organise conferences This is a good solid piece that I don’t think would necessarily please a lot of the people who think about these things. The gender thing is a particular community flashpoint.
- Dion Hinchcliffe reports on ‘Five Great Ways to Harness Collective Intelligence’ I agree that the harnessing of collective intelligence is one of the core big ideas of the new bubble, but I’m not convinced by some of these examples.
- Nat Torkington on ‘Rewarding Users for Contributing Data’ I couldn’t agree more with a lot of this – points-based reputation / prestige systems and financial incentives are generally bad ways to reward contributions in social environments.
- Cameron Marlow talks about privacy, transparency and the Facebook controversy I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and have come to the conclusion that it’s never so much about how private something is, it’s about how much it deviates from what people expected the privacy level to be in that particular service…
- The question, ‘Daddy or Chips’ has long confounded man. But Google trends has the answer… It turns out that until the middle of 2004, it was very definitely all about chips. Now however, it’s all about Daddy. Who knew!