Category: Random

• I’m particularly loving this particular World of Warcraft simulator right about now You’ll need sound, and don’t expect too much, it’s really a one-note joke, although pretty funny if you’re on a popular server…

I’m in a filthy mood because Doctor Who sucked the big one, I missed the last two minutes of the episode (and hence the revision of a major classic character) and subsequently my laptop ran out of batteries and I lost a substantial post on revisions to some principles on social media. On the plus side, I’ve discovered a whole bunch of music that I love from Mr Biddulph that you can see being carefully collated over on last.fm, I’ve gone and bought myself some new clothes from Cult on Kingly Court and installed another gig of RAM in my lovely iMac. Also I’m knackered. I choose this moment to display this lovely picture of me as taken by Mr B to try and make me feel a bit better about life.

• Battlestar Galactica is to have a spin-off series named ‘Caprica’ set fifty years earlier and delving into the creation of the Cylons Frankly any new BSG is good BSG as far as I’m concerned, and I’ll be watching the series eagerly should it turn up anywhere British television…
• Why Content Publishers shouldn’t host weblogs… In light of some of the media organisation fuss about the possibility of giving users a self-expression space on their websites, I thought maybe it would be worth pointing people towards this thing I wrote in February 2003, which I still agree with…
• Last.fm isn’t just for humans Mr Biddulph talks about work he did when we were at the BBC, piping now-playing lists from 6music into last.fm to make a profile of their music listening preferences. Pretty cool, really. Very interesting.
• It’s nice to see plasticbag.org up in the top fifty of people’s ‘favourited’ weblogs on Technorati… The favourites feature is actually a surprisingly nice and clean little service that gets out of your way and just sort of works. Being able to filter posts by weblogs tagged with a word is a particularly nice way to attenuate your inbox…
• Wikipedia’s article on the Pirah√£ people has the most references to back it up, so I’m linking to it instead of all the other sites The Pirah√£ apparently have almost no way of counting whatsoever and appear to be unteachable in that regard. They also have incredibly limited kinship concerns, limited sense of colour, ridiculously simple pronouns and whistle their language
• Jon Rowett has a comprehensive write-up of last night’s “Beers and innovation” event I thought my colleague Mr Willison did pretty well in explaining the web. It was lovely to see Mr Loosemore, although I thought he struggled a bit in context. God knows what the chair was on… I think I misbehaved a fair amount…
• A powerpoint presentation I gave to the BBC in 2002 before I worked for them explaining why they shouldn’t host weblogs and how they could operate better with the ecosystem Best thing about these debates is that they’re so circular, you don’t even need to write anything new. I could give up thinking completely and still have a position I mostly believed in on most large organisational interactions with social media.

• “Broadband is Killing TV” sign at BBC Television Centre I’m assuming it’s for some internal point-making exercise, unless the sign-makers guild has finally decided to take up the power that is it’s natural birth-right and start making dumb comments all over the place…
• Roman historian Tacitus was a bit down on that Christ fellow He referred to Christianity as a “pernicious superstition” and that Christians committed “crimes against mankind”. My brother informs me that Romans also thought Christians were cannibals because of the sacrament. Smart people the Romans, if a bit dull.
• Baby, You Mean The World Of Warcraft To Me “I have sung your praises from the mouth of the Shadowthread Cave to the Stranglethorn Vale of the Eastern Kingdoms.” Not convinced by the accuracy, but loving the sentiment…
• The Guardian reports on the BBC’s alleged ‘radical revamp of website’ In my experience the best things the BBC produces don’t tend to be the things that get announced in this way. Vaguely appalled by the rebranding of MyBBCPlayer to BBC iPlayer. Might as well just call it BBC Playr and get it over with.
• The BBC is also considering putting adverts on the international version of its news site Don’t know what I think about this – perfectly reasonable move organisationally – after all people outside the UK don’t pay the license fee, but somehow it’s a bit creepy.
• Typography for Headlines Bit old this, but still good – a collection of many examples of typographic treatments of headlines on the web. Particularly good for ideas and for iterating around to find something new.
• One final BBC link for the day – Tom Loosemore talks about the launch of the Programme Catalogue Most important bit – there are feeds for most pages and he explicitly states that there’s a free license to use the information for non-commercial purposes. Ladies and Gentlemen we have our API!

• SteamPunk Transformers are rocking my world right about now I’m a trivial man, but still the image of Megatron built out of a huge cannon is pretty damn cool and makes way more sense than that stupid miniature gun that he used to turn into…
• Denise Richards has been presenting a pretty unsavoury view of Charlie Sheen in her divorce papers Although, the weirdest thing about it is that pretty much everything she talks about just sounds like a slightly negative portrayal of how I’d expect a Hollywood star to behave anyway, so there you go…

• Welcome to Torchwood House… Omigod, after the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who completely and epically sucked the big one, the new one rocked like a motherfucker. Woot!

• Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have given birth to a beautiful baby Scientologist How come it’s taken me this long to find out that the press have christened them TomKat, and the child the TomKitten? This seems like the bullshit trivia that used to colonise my student brain…

• “Ignore bloggers at your peril, say researchers” There’s a story in The Guardian today about the disproportionate influence held by webloggers in which I’m quoted. This may be of interest to some of you. Mum, are you out there? Check it out!
• Ryan Carson’s new project ‘Vitamin’ (A resource for web developers, designers and entrepreneurs) has launched and looks pretty awesome Beautiful bits of design work, some extremely cool people commenting and supporting the venture and cartoons by Hugh McLeod. Altogether a pretty interesting looking site.

I have an uncharitable theory this evening as I plough through several hundred backlogged e-mails and links and conversations and the theory is this – people who do a lot of punditry on their sites cannot possibly be actually getting anything useful done the rest of the time. The stuff I’d like to write about is massively in excess of the stuff that I have time to write about. Driving me nuts.

• Stowe Boyd is auctioning off his chest for the rest of the year to Web 2.0 start-ups You see at some level this is fun, but at another level it really creeps me out. It’s the same reason I don’t have ads on plasticbag.org – it feels like you’re putting something personal about yourself up for sale. Makes me uncomfortable…
• MySociety is doing another round of proposals like the ones that triggered Pledgebank, TheyWorkForYou and other sites “So, whether you have an idea you’d like to propose, or whether you’d just like to read and comment on other people’s proposals, you’ve come to the right place.”
• Make Me Watch TV – the readers choose which TV show he’ll watch and he dutifully blogs the whole thing Interesting idea! Mostly quite entertaining! Not sure he’ll keep it up very long, though. Worth keeping an eye on. I particularly like the idea that he’ll keep missing episodes of programmes even if he likes them. That’s interesting / cruel.
• USA Today reports that posting to your site can help stop memory loss and Alzheimers… “Research on animals and humans suggests mentally challenging activities such as playing bridge, learning a new language or even blogging might help build new connections in the brain”