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- London’s about to host a fairly forward-thinking little summit called ‘UGTV ’06’ focusing on User-Generated television… Interesting meme and nice coinage – the UGTV summit looks relatively interesting. Unfortunately I’m in another country when it’s on – hopefully someone with a weblog will report what it was like…
- PhotoVu seem to have some decently sized and not-entirely-revolting LCD wifi-enabled photoframes I’m not sure I’m up for coughing up $700 for one, but there’s a bunch of stuff I’d like to do with em. Really interesting.
- Cambrian House is the LazyWeb reborn with a face-lift and an eye firmly set on intergalatic stardom Like the LazyWeb I think it’s a bit of a creepy and slightly self-serving idea, and I’m not convinced it’ll work, but I love the design of the pages. Does that make me shallow?
- The Gawker shop has a bunch of not-entirely-sucky-looking t-shirts I particularly liked, “It’s Like, Yeah, Motherfucker, I’m Fine”
- Random new Mastercard rebrand Getting on the gradient fills bandwagon just as it’s changing to gradient patterns and aqua effects. Poor form, Mastercard!
- Mr Biddulph’s been playing with GPS and Google Earth Assistant I just bought a little GPS thing. Lessons I’ve learned with GPS – it’s a good rule of life to watch what Matt Webb’s doing now and then make it comprehensible to real people three years later…
- A pretty stunningly glowing review of the Holux GPSlim (GR-236) GPS unit I need to get me one of these. I have no idea what to do with it, but it’s pretty fascinatingly awesome…
- “Comedian Jim Davidson has been declared bankrupt after failing to keep up payments on a ¬£1.4m tax bill” Good. Poisonous little right-wing ideologue.
- The new adverts for Film Four feature Lucy Lui, Ewan McGregor, Willem Dafoe, Dame Judi and many others Is anyone else as weirded out by this as I am? And while we’re on the subject – advertisers, please put your ads and trailers online. That way if they’re good we can point to them! This will help you do your jobs!
- MOG is a new attention-tracking site for music It’s a bit strange. It’s got some attention because it was linked to from BoingBoing, but I have to be honest, at first glance it looks a lot like a crappy last.fm – a site that they completely haven’t acknowledged in most of their press.
- Stephen Hawking is about to argue that we have to think of cosmology backwards Rather than look for initial physical laws that have always applied and understand our universe to have unfolded from them, we instead have to view our universe as just one expression of an initial much wider set of possibilities, all of which once co-existed..
- The Australian reports on the culture change of having Ray Ozzie looking after Microsoft I can’t remember if I’ve met Ray Ozzie at some event or other. If I did it was briefly. But after seeing him at ETech and from what I’ve heard of his work, I can’t help thinking he’s going to have a positive impact at Microsoft…
- Paul Graham has written up his XTech keynote on ‘Why Startups Condense in America’ I’ve just re-read it and the first thing in my head is that he doesn’t pay attention to the contextual benefits that the US has in terms of global media dominance, ready availability of cash / massive living space and expansive natural resources. To an extent, having a tenth of the planet’s land-mass for 1/25th of its population has got to make it easier to accomplish good things.
- Wordcount It’s a bit of a classic visualisation in Flash of the frequency of the usage of different words, but it’s a good one. Very nice indeed.
- The Beazley dictionary of Classical gods, cities and things Lovely resource, with pictures and all kinds of neat stuff. Looks a bit crappy, but probably pretty easy for search engines to parse…
- XHTMLized – you do the design, they build it in valid XHTML and CSS in a week for $149 I can imagine a load of friends of mine using this service. In fact, I can imagine myself doing some design work for plasticbag.org and then deciding just to give it to them to build properly rather than spending a week fighting with code outside of work
- Ryan Carson announces ‘Amigo’ – a new service for hooking together advertisers and people with e-mail newsletters I have no idea whether it’ll work or not, but it’s interesting. Ryan keeps observing these very small, niche markets which actually do have money to spend, but which probably wouldn’t be large enough for bigger companies to notice. Pretty clever (if it works)
- The Royal College of Art Summer Show 2006 The product-, interaction- and various other forms of applied design-show starts tomorrow (Friday). Simon, Paul and I are likely to wander down late this afternoon to get our yearly fix of inspired (and bizarre) new ideas. Good head fodder and a glimpse of the future…
- Imagining Albion: The Great British Future Radio 4’s doing a show this evening about the history of Britain as expressed in Science Fiction. Looks pretty interesting, although unlikely that I’ll get near a radio to actually hear it, unfortunately.
- Yahoo! Local / Maps now support Microformats “Starting today, we‚Äôre happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews”
- BumpTop Prototype uses a more physically realistic desktop metaphor, while combining it with the affordances of paper It’s completely beautiful and totally insane. God knows whether this will be the metaphor for manipulating documents in a few years. I wouldn’t be surprised if large chunks of this kind of interaction appear all over the place. Beautiful. Interesting.
- Pitchfork presents 100 Awesome Music Videos All complete with embedded YouTube links so you can actually watch the damn things. Copyright infringement by the megaton, but it’s fascinating, beautiful and completely absorbing. I’ll be playing with this a lot this evening. Mmm. Classy.
- Empty plinth sidelines sculpture “An artist’s sculpture has been rejected by the Royal Academy of Arts which has instead opted to display the wooden support it was put on.”
- I’m completely obsessed with Coca-Cola BlaK I have no idea what it is, I have no idea what it tastes like, it’s almost certainly revolting. But I must try it. It sounds extraordinary, and the branding is so… weird!
- According to the BBC, 24 and Buffy are the latest TV shows to be offered for download “Films and TV shows such as the first series of 24 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are to be offered for download.”
- The BBC has a new ‘most popular now’ feature, complete with Flash maps and stats features It’s all very shiny and everything, but I can’t help thinking they’re missing the point a bit. It’s very pretty, but there aren’t any addressable archives to speak of. A decent infotoy, but a toy rather than a resource. Disappointing…
- Apple has a trailer for Monster House and it looks pretty cool In a nutshell – It’s a big scary house that eats people. Thanks to Kerry at mugwump.typepad.com for sending it to me, cos it’s ace…
- George Nimeh has used his IA ninja skills to visualise Yahoo’s complete network and turn it into a poster Click on the PDF for the full orgiastic infographic – just be prepared for your computer to run like a dog. I think we might get this printed out for the office…
- The Michael Jackson 45 degree tilt trick Apparently originally done with cables in the video, but accomplished in a completely different (and patented) way in stage shows…
- I have to say I’m impressed by Yahoo’s Gay and Lesbian Pride portal It’s really quite classy of the organisation to do something like this – and dragging in so many cool bits of the company too. Surprisingly happy about this.