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- Freaky old video on You Tube advertising the Apple Lisa with Kevin Costner in it… I think I nicked this one off Kottke. Wouldn’t be the first time. A bit puzzled by what it’s trying to say. His work day gets done really quickly because he has an Apple?
- Kevin O’Neill talks about “The Black Dossier”, the intricate and fascinating multi-media collage of a comic book history of their League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I got this the other day in San Francisco and the depth of the referencing within it is terrifying and incomprehensible. And yet somehow the plot sneaks through, and it all feels rather good fun.
- Delighted to hear that A&Mi at the BBC are so passionate about URLs and looking forward to seeing what they produce around them I have to be honest, I’ve not been overly happy with the way that the work we started at the BBC with PIPs progressed after I left. This could drag it back on track, I suppose.
- My article from a few years ago on developing a URL structure for broadcast radio sites… Radio 3 was supposed to be the model for a reinvigoration and restructuring of the whole URL space and programme represenation at the BBC, but I hear it got rather screwed up by the iPlayer and similar follies…
- Spotted by Dan Hill of cityofsound.com, After Our Time is a blog that responds to and comments upon BBC Radio 4’s awesome “In Our Time” I was introduced to ‘In Our Time’ by Mr Webb and it was the first show that he managed to get out of the door in a podcast format. It was also the one that I was most interested in being annotated. Nice to see it happening.
- After Our Time also has a wiki for more rigorous collaborative annotation of “In Our Time” I haven’t had much of a chance to interrogate this yet, but conceptually at least it’s a lovely idea. I do rather wish the BBC had done it (or something like it) though. Ah well.
- Fifty transcripts of “In Our Time” episodes from the last few years… Some good ones in there. Perhaps not for idle reading unless you’re interested in the subjects, but still. Desperately interesting to annotate and fact-check them ,TheyWorkForYou style…
- The Dangers of World of Warcraft Found on iamcal.com, it’s funny because it looks like it’s funny because it’s true.
- Is Twitter Down? A simple web page for answering that most important of questions.
- Green Team with Will Ferrell – not entirely sure what it’s a satire of, but it’s pretty entertaining if you like your comedy on the disturbing / spicy side It’s like environmentalists multiplied by Clockwork Orange, only a bit gone to seed.
- In a similar vein, an old clip from Chris Morris’ TV show “Jam” concerned with lizards and televisions It’s a slow-builder this one. Give it some time to emerge.
- Awesome pictures from a book called Military Deceptions about the ways that disinformation was used during the Second World War Inflatable trucks! Offices disguised as rubbish tips! Hollowed out tree stumps! Part of me squees with delight, part of me is a bit suspicious. Boy’s own adventure stuff, this. Gloriously entertaining.
- Cal spotted this awesome “Bat for Lashes” video… Atmospheric, funny, interesting and ingenious. Presumably accomplished by cutting the screen vertically and splicing in various elements with the lead singer hiding the gap in the middle.
- Absolutely extraordinary World of Warcraft adverts, featuring William Shatner and … insanely … Mr T! Approaching the funniest thing I’ve seen in forever. Like the man says on the web page, almost enough to get me to play WOW again, but that way dark dark unproductive madness lies…
- Ronan Bennett responds in the Guardian to Martin Amis’ comments about Islam and Muslim people… Spotted via CityofSound “Ask yourself what you are reading. An important question from a leading literary figure? A brave revenge fantasy? No. A major cultural and literary figure endorsing prejudice against Muslims.”
- The UK Government has lost records pertaining to 25 million British people as a consequence of sending a few bits of physical media through the post… A reminder–if ever there was needed one–that government is neither consistent enough in the long-term nor competent enough in the short to be entrusted with ever more information about its citizenry.
- My old department at the BBC has launched a blog concerned with its R&D activity and exploration of new technology… It looks like Tristan and Chris have really managed to take the team that Webb and I used to run to new heights. Really want to know more about what they’re up to at the moment.
- Revenue from print advertising is in radical decline with online advertising taking up much of the slack.. If I was a betting man, I’d say that you could expect broadcast television advertising to be the next to be dramatically hit, in favour of targetted advertising packaged around on-demand download video.
- It’s worth reading through Engadget’s full list of posts on the Kindle from Amazon That the future of content is digital distribution over the standard web is not a shock to me. Television is the obvious next step here too. I don’t think it’s here yet, but the mainstream ebook reader is definitely now on the horizon.
- Flickr’s awesome new ‘Places’ feature has launched, allowing you to go and see the best pictures of all kinds of places all over the world. Lovely stuff. Develop a body of data (photos) and then hook it up with other data sources to enhance both. Each dataset navigable in terms of the other. The combination makes both more valuable.
- Happy birthday to Danah Boyd on turning 30! For anyone out there who’s worried about turning thirty, let me reassure you. It’s fine. it’s great, actually. Thirty-one, on the other hand. That’s a pain. You don’t really see it coming.
- Ben Goldacre writes a long, brilliant and–please god–persuasive debunking of Homeopathy for The Guardian The horror for me here is that cultural studies’ critiques and examinations of the process of science are partly responsible for the public suspicion of evidence and rationality. Makes me very sad.
- Linzie Hunter’s spam one-liners are just extraordinarily good. She takes spam subject lines and turns them into typographic art. They’re really lovely. She made some Moo cards with them and they looked awesome and I’m wondering if the Moo crew should try and bring her on as one of their regular designers.