- Ged Carroll writes a rather over-flattering post about something I said on Flickr I’m going to write up my thoughts on the whole PR / blog thing as soon as I get a moment. Maybe later today if I’ve got plasticbag.org’s comments working properly again.
- If you’re voting for sessions for SXSW then perhaps you’d consider giving your honest evaluation to a session on presence that Brian Oberkirch, Biz Stone, Leisa Reichelt and myself are thinking about… I’d be talking about Fire Eagle, which I’ve not really talked about at all on this site, but will be doing so soon. It’s a joint Yahoo Research Berkeley and Brickhouse project with a distinguished roster of contributors. More soon.
- Noisy Decent Graphics has a highly entertaining post on the book “Churnmore”, a satire on PR, advertising and brand people Thanks to Matt Jones for pointing it out to me. I will be heading to Amazon and buying it immediately.
- Absurd news story of the day: A man gets arrested for using someone else’s unsecured wifi network without their explicit permission. WTF!? This is insane. Absolutely insane. “This arrest should act as a warning to anyone who thinks it is acceptable to illegally use other people’s broadband connections.” Ridiculous.
- The BBC Magazine asks. “Is stealing wireless wrong?” Nowhere in these discussions does anyone ask about those people who want to leave their wifi nodes open for the convenience of other people. It’s like putting a drinking fountain outside your front door by the road and shooting anyone who tries to drink!
Category: Random
- The Last.fm Normaliser tells you which bands and albums you’ve listened to for longest (based on the average song length) If you like your Orbital, as I do, then suddenly the fact that their tunes are four times as long as music by the Pixies counts for something.
- I’ve got a bit of a lust on for the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM This is the white monster for taking interesting candid photos and nature shots. Looks heavy!
- Is it just me that’s been having trouble with Yahoo Messenger for the Mac since the Safari Betas came out? Webkit seems to have changed its behaviour in such a way that Messenger no longer works quite so well. I’ll have to find out who to talk to about that.
- I keep walking past adverts for a new George Clooney film, Michael Clayton, but I don’t know much about it… I’ve watched the trailer and it looks quite interesting, but it’s sort of appeared on my horizon without any hype at all. Anyone know what the word on it is?
- I just got friended by Björk on Twitter. Bit weird. Advertising? Sponsorship? Official? Unofficial? Not sure what I think about this. Very weird thing to happen.
- Possibly my favourite headline of recent times: Chernobyl ‘not a wildlife haven’ Pretty fascinating little article though. Superficially, the surrounding area seems to be doing okay because humanity’s absence compensates a bit for the, you know, nuclear stuff. But still, the radiation is highly damaging…
- There’s a service that can automatically generate sets of your most ‘interesting’ photos on Flickr… I used it to create this list of my top 100 photos. It just goes to show how little taste people have and how much more keen people are on jokes and conversation starters than they are on good photography.
- There’s a rumour going around that TV and Films will finally start being available on iTunes in the UK in the next few weeks… A lot depends on what series are for sale. Very different contractual relationships in the UK I imagine, with the weird relationship between satellite and digital terrestrial stuff…
- Fascinating Wired Magazine story on how using ambient feedback can help lower energy consumption… I’ve been desperate to play with a Wattson for a while. I suggested my parents get one and the look of terror on my mother’s face at the idea of my father continually turning off lights was too much for me to bear!
- The Google Health Advertising Blog asks people in the health industry, “Does negative press make you Sicko?” This has been around for a while, but still it’s weird and creepy. Uncomfortable with debate and criticism? Advertise your way out of it! And with no admission anywhere that you’re doing something dubious…
- The lovely Paul A. Young of ridiculously awesome chocolate fame has a range of videos on Brightcove explaining how to appreciate and use chocolate… It’s pretty ridiculously fascinating stuff. Ways to check how good chocolate is by snapping it and listening to the sound, by allowing it to melt in the mouth, by crunching it down. Makes me wish I can smell.
- SEO Blogs like Sitevisibility really freak me out… This is a big post about Jason Calacanis and how he said SEO was crap but is apparently a god anyway because he gets traffic to his sites. Wha?! Who are these bloody people?!
- The call for participation for ETech 2008 looks set to try and get the vision thing back… I hope it works. ETech is one of those most fickle and confusing of events. It’s not quite what it says on the tin and yet at times–apparently randomly–it has been mind-blowingly awesome…
- Biddulph pointed me towards Echocrome, a super freaky Escher like game that works on the principle that if you can used isometric flattened perspectives to make something look possible, then suddenly it is possible… Difficult to explain. Watch the totally astonishing video and then wonder to yourself if you’d have the patience to play it or if you’d sit there swearing and wanting to kill the creators within ten minutes of purchase.
- Lunatic toothbrush has a weird little thing at the back that redirects water from the tap into your mouth for rinsing… It’s the future, you see. This is an innovation that I suspect may make it into quirky production toothbrushes but will probably never make any sense for real actual like people or whatever.
- Top 10 UK dotcoms to watch as captured by Guardian Unlimited (not sure I understand why they hide half of their bloody articles with javascript though) Nice to see the cool people from Dopplr on the list. Nicer still to see the Moo chaps. Big fans of both. Many of the other ones are new to me.
- Awesome Faceball gallery on Wired.com includes pictures by yours truly… Even a couple of lame quotes as well. Weird thing, faceball.
- Wikipedia on Bokeh – the creation of purposeful and pleasant out of focus areas in photos using wide aperture lenses with shallow depth of fields… Got a new camera and am now reading up desperately on all kinds of stuff to try and work out how to take better photos. Examples up on Flickr for those of you who are interested.
Categories
Quick apologies…
I’m running towards a deadline at the moment and everything’s got a bit frantic. In the middle of this whole enterprise I decided to do a completely fresh installation of Movable Type (using the new beta version) and to import everything over into it. In the process I completely forgot to fix all the templates, so quite a lot of the functionality of the site is falling over right now. I’m afraid you’ll have to bear with me a few days as I try and get everything out of the way so that I can fix it. Very sorry!
- Poor old Mr Vander Wal, a YouGov survey of the hated technology terms puts folksonomy out in front… It seems a bit unfair since it’s such a specific piece of terminology, but hey. I still prefer fauxonomy. It’s funnier. Also hated blogosphere and blog. One of the founders of Blogger once told me she felt incredibly guilty for popularising that term…
- The lovely Lane Becker has made a reasonable argument for why Pownce is competing with 37Signals rather than Twitter! (1) Yes, Twitter is going for an infrastructure play with social stuff a gateway drug while (2) Pownce is focused with sharing/socialising. But Pownce still seems to me to be–at its core–a life backchannel rather than a productivity aid.
- The trailer for new JJ Abrams movie is pretty gripping… God knows if it’s called 1-18-08 or if this is a big preview / teaser for a real name. No clue whether the trailer represents the film or if it’s just a fragment or a sideshow. Very interesting. Nice bit of marketing. Clever.
- I’m going to be doing a talk at dconstruct that at the moment I’m calling ‘Designing for a Web of Data’ It’s going to be a fairly personal view on design process when you’re no longer knocking out brochureware and editorial sites and are looking to be part of a web of data. Bit scared of it. Too much to do at the moment.
- The question everyone’s been asking about the iPhone – what happens when you put it in a blender? The answer may surprise you. Find out more at willitblend.com!
- Uk Bump Keys are–I can attest–a good place to meet your lock-picking needs… Got my set through the post the other day. Very exciting. Now I need to go and buy some locks to pick. Went to a nutso woman’s hardware store the other day. Like a hundred years old with scarlet red receding hair and grey roots. Mad jabberings.
- How to upgrade the firmware on your Nokia N800… I’ve not found myself playing with the N800 so much recently, even though I really quite like it. Main reasons – really have to transcode video to watch it and London doesn’t have great free wifi networks. Plus I tried an iPhone…
- The most important thing to watch today: Faceball promo featuring sundry Flickrinos… Dunstan Orchard scares the living crap out of me sometimes…
- MySpace–after saying for months that people building off its platform were leeches who would end up having to pay for the privelege–now wants to follow Facebook towards openness… Facebook, bluntly, has won this particular war. MySpace is clearly on the way out. Facebook has moved itself into a place where you no longer compete with it, you compete with other people on it. Stunning move. Brilliant.
- According to the Daily Express, the BBC’s iPlayer is a significant threat to the family! It couldn’t get more ridiculous if you dressed it up like a clown and covered it in custard.
- The Media Guardian has released its Top 100 people in the media industry… Nice to see Loosemore wandering into the list. Generally I’m not overly impressed by it. Not a lot of real insight gained.
- The Bishop of Carlisle is–it seems–a bloody idiot… I can’t believe I’m linking to the Telegraph, but hey. Apparently floods in Britain are all the fault of a move away from God. The gays, as ever, are one of the core candidates for global warming. Idiot.
- dafont.com has posted up a proposed serif version of Comic Sans… It’s actually surprisingly nice. Reminds me of something. Can’t quite put my finger on it.
- Ashley Highfield is apparently looking towards Web 3.0 at the moment. He seems to have skipped over 2.0 pretty cheerfully. Lots of verbiage here, little substance. He’s now looking towards ‘the world of the semantic web, the Internet that is intelligent’. A search for intelligence closer to home might serve the BBC rather better…
- The Open Rights Group (of which I’m an advisory board member) released its report on e-voting a couple of weeks ago which is well worth a read… The conclusion is not positive, suggesting that while there are many flaws that could be fixed, fundamentally there may be very significant collisions between verifiable and trustworthy elections and e-voting as a concept.
- Universal have decided not to continue with iTunes under the same terms and will now only use it to sell artists ‘at will’. Apparently it’s a response to Apple moving away from DRM and it’s a bad move. Strategically, even if you thought DRM was perfect, it would now be time to give up on music as a lost battle and concentrate on video.
- Ben Aldred talks about their experiences at Hack Day and the layer they made between data and Twitter services… He’s right to point out that Twitter was everywhere during Hack Day. One of the major platforms that people were building against. Absolutely fascinating.
- Paul Mison talks about the Hack Day project he did with Candace to predict and be able to observe reflections of the sun off satellites in orbit… I didn’t get to see much of the Hack Day stuff as it was actually happening, but I caught Paul and Candace presenting and I was overwhelmed with what a beautiful idea it was.
- RIP Fopp Well this is sad news. The lovely high-street chain Fopp, well-known for its cut price albums and racks of £5 CDs is closing down. Very depressing.
- Matt Jones talks about visiting Interesting 2007 and the second day of Hack Day… Among many awesome things he says about both events (very jealous I couldn’t go to Interesting) he declares himself exhausted as a result! The cheek! He got to sleep at home in an actual bed on Saturday night! Ha!