Category: Random

• “British blogs have recently found themselves getting comments from a fictional character who promotes a household cleaner. Weblog Watch looks at a new, personalised form of advertising…” Interesting BBC News story that references the Cillit Bang fiasco from around these parts…
• An insanely thorough list of OSX keyboard shortcuts – very nice stuff… Lots of great stuff here – from collapsing and expanding folders, logging out, emptying the trash and the like…
• NYC Subway Flash Overlay for Google Maps is absolutely fascinating and well-assembled… I wonder if anyone’s got the strength of character and will to try and do an equivalent for the London Underground
• ‘ShrinkSafe is a JavaScript “compression” system. It can typically reduce the size of your scripts by a third or more, depending on your programming style.’ I don’t write a lot of JavaScript to be honest, but a lot of people I know do, and hopefully they’ll get some value from this service…
• iWood nano – a beautiful slim natural wood case with a monogram on it that I want more than anything in the world… I wonder what wood I’d get… I’d have some form of pipe, and a wallet of the finest leather and I might have a monocle as well. For effect…
• I know it’s fashionable to make Americans look stupid, so I’m going to preface this by saying that I fear you could make a video like this on the streets of most Western nations… Still, it’s kind of terrifying. I notice suddenly that this is not the most useful or descriptive of comments about the content of the page… Sorry…
• Google Personalised Search adds tagging… “Google has silently added a Bookmarks feature to My Search History, enabling you to quickly tag and comment any web page you‚Äôve visited.”
• “Safa Rashtchy, managing director at Piper Jaffray, moderated a panel with five Bay-Area teenagers.” Remember – what starts in San Francisco ends up around the rest of the world pretty quickly. This is the future of your kids, and from where I’m standing it’s pretty cool…

• Jet lag update: Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body “With a good night’s rest increasingly losing out to the Internet, e-mail, late-night cable and other distractions of modern life, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that too little or erratic sleep may be taking an unappreciated toll on Ameri
• The Ta-Da Widget from Keegan Jones looked really really sweet, until he accidentally deleted the whole thing… Will someone please fix the damn thing, because I could really do with a copy…
• Subtraction on designing the grid for the Onion redesign project I’m really interested in grids at the moment. I think grids and swatches and styleguides and widgets are the new .psds
• I’ve been trying to develop a rollyo search engine for social software related stuff, but I’d really appreciate any recommendations for URLs that I should add… I’m still kind of 50/50 on Rollyo’s utility, but I can’t deny the implementation is pretty amazing.
• Online Information 2005 in Olympia looks pretty bloody amazing and I really want to go to it… Peter Morville’s speaking, as is my old colleague and friend Ms Margaret Hanley. Who rocks…
• “Voters are becoming more rude to politicians – and the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman is to blame, a senior Tory says.” Balls. Most of the people in the country don’t know Jeremy Paxman from a hole in the ground. The reason they distrust politicians is because politicians are often untrustworthy…
• In introduction to LambdaMOO I spent a fair amount of time on Saturday at State of Play using LambdaMoo as a backchannel with Mr Webb and Mr Hammersley instead of my normal IM. Sitting in the hot-tub listening to lawyers was a strange, strange experience…
• There’s a great post on “Creating Passionate Users” called ‘How to speak at a tech conference’, which isn’t really about the style of talking but about how to get accepted to attend.. It’s a good read, it’s solid and it’s true – I’d recommend everyone who is interested in submitting papers should read it thoroughly…
• Unicef bombs the Smurfs in fund-raising campaign for ex-child soldiers “The people of Belgium have been left reeling by the first adult-only episode of the Smurfs, in which the blue-skinned cartoon characters’ village is annihilated by warplanes.”
• “The network effect causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service.” Personal opinion – whatever Web 2.0 is, one element of the future is a network effect of services and an interconnected functional platform in which each new function added to the collaborative web adds value to every other app…
• “Influential indie band The Pixies are stalling over the recording of a new album, for fears of ruining the bands impressive legacy.” If only all bands were like this. The Pixies are my favourite band of all time, and I have to say that I would not wish a new album out of them if it sounded like a bunch of old farts. They were always better than that…

And I can’t tell you how happy I am. Jon Stewart and the Daily Show every night on British terrestrial television. It’s almost more than I can bear. I’ve been waiting for this for ages. Although tonight’s episode kind of sucked a bit. I kind of hoped Jon Stewart would mention something about his new British audience. But no. Sigh. Instead he made this face:

Check out the logo in the bottom right, American fools! We have your Daily Show. It will cost you mucho dinero to get him back…

• JotSpot Live – basically SubEthaEdit on the web – feels quite good and appears to mostly work The most interesting aspect of this for me is that it assumes that in the office you’re online all the time. The assumption of always-on mobile connectivity is something that would have made this seem ridiculous a few years ago.
• Wikipedia’s article on the Scott Trust, the financial structure that allows that keeps The Guardian ticking over “The Trust is responsible for appointing the editor of The Guardian … but apart from enjoining them to continue the paper’s editorial policy on “the same lines and in the same spirit as heretofore”, has a policy of not interfering…”
• The Guy Ritchie film “Revolver” got terrible terrible reviews, but on the poster there was a quote saying it was “Ritchie back to his best”. The quote came from a PR microsite the Sun was paid to carry… These marketing types are so ethical… “We try to connect with niche audiences in their home environment,” says Hamm. “We use bloggers as much as online journalists.”
• Metacritic starts running TV reviews, and one of it’s first celebrated shows is Brit animated classic “I am not an Animal” “Its mix of twisted laughs and surrealist visuals smacks of something you‚Äôd see between Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman on the Cartoon Network‚Äôs Adult Swim hours.”
• Signal vs. Noise asks its readers whether iTunes should keep all its songs at a flat-rate of 99c or follow the wishes of the record industry in putting in price variety Lots of people have argued that songs should be sold at different prices because then the market can be optimised. But that assumes Apple have a monopoly. Other vendors can try variable pricing – if it works, Apple will follow suit…
• Google has launched an RSS reader / aggregator called “Google Reader” It’s frankly a bit weird. It’s going to take me some time to get my head around it…
• Chameleon: an icon set from SimpleBits that changes color… “Chameleon is a unique stock icon set for the web that features simple, friendly, universal shapes designed and hand-crafted by SimpleBits”

• We Make Money Not Art reports on the height of Dutch design – Amphibious houses “The Dutch are gearing up for climate change with amphibious houses. If rivers rise above their banks, the houses rise upwards as well”
• Malcolm Gladwell on selection policies for Harvard (much more interesting than it sounds, and weirdly much less judgmental than it could have been) “If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn‚Äôt be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn‚Äôt be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears.”

• Tim Worstall’s got a book coming out: “2005: Blogged: Dispatches from the Blogosphere” “Featuring writing from the rising stars of online journalism, this is an entertaining guide to the year 2005. From dedicated bloggers to total Internet virgins, this book will be useful for those who want to look back at the big events of 2005, as seen through the writing of the world’s most opinionated bloggers”

I’m on my way to New York for State of Play. Arriving around midday New York time, leaving again on Sunday evening. Running enormously behind though. Barely got to check-in in time, they were calling out last something-or-other. Very alarming. Now stuffing face with bagel while trying to work out who I’m staying with when I get to the other end. Don’t know how much time I’m likely to have to hang out with people, but e-mail me anyway and we’ll work something out. Assuming you’re all not at Web 2.0 without me. Laughing.

• Yahoo! have only gone and bought upcoming.org Now that’s pretty interesting. I wonder what they’ll do with that. Seems like everyone’s going to work with Yahoo! nowadays.
• Joss Whedon’s Serenity hits #118 on the IMDB all time best movies Whether this high opinion will last is unclear. Currently, however, it’s beating Return of the Jedi, is the eighteenth best movie of the 00’s, and the 38th best fillm ever as voted by women (but not by men)
• Katie Holmes is pregnant with Tom Cruise’s demon child God this is creepy and wrong. I mean Katie Holmes was meant for Cal! He told me that years ago…
• A review with screenshots of the BBC’s iMP – currently released to a trial for a few thousand British citizens… Generally favourable response so far. Interested in what else people make of it.
• Cleaner caught playing dirty on the net “Household products usually promise to help get rid of dirt, but one leading brand has been shamed into cleaning up its own act after an internet marketing campaign backfired spectacularly.”

• I’m famous! Check out the front of the DVD kiosk at the Sony Metreon in San Francisco! It’s a review I wrote for the BBC’s film website several years ago. Not my finest piece of work, although it looks pretty classy like that. Wasn’t for BBC News though…
• Today the Guardian carries an obituary for… er… Tom Coates?! But that’s me?! Surely?! “People recognised his quiet, seemingly effortless ability to influence others.” How true.
• Serenity takes $10 million in it’s opening weekend – not enough to topple Flightplan from the top of the charts Will it build momentum on word-of-mouth? Will this be enough to ensure it a sequel? I’m not convinced at the moment. Get people to go and see it! It’s good! Really!
• The new Guinness advert “Evolve” is pretty bloody awesome – although this tiny tiny version doesn’t really do it justice You know what I don’t understand – people pay a fortune to put the ads on TV, but normally they don’t make it possible for people to find them, watch them and link to them online. Seems like it would be an easy win…

• Google offers San Francisco free Wifi… “Google Inc. has offered to blanket San Francisco with free wireless Internet access at no cost to the city, placing a marquee name behind Mayor Gavin Newsom’s effort to get all residents online whether they are at home, in a park or in a cafe.”
• Boing Boing link through to a site that sells black loo-roll No 1980’s style bachelor pad filled with American Psycho-style stylish corporate types should be without it. I might have to get some…
• Introducing the Kinkless “Getting Things Done” System for OmniOutliner on the Mac Really interested in this, although not tried it out yet. I think you might need OmniOutliner Pro, which is an upgrade for me. Will ponder further…
• Last year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005 ‘regendered’ I was trying to find something with a lot of names in it, and this kind of seemed a perfect (if controversial) choice. Whatever my disagreements with people about the reasons for the lack of women at ETech, I’ll agree with them that it’s far from ideal…
• There’s a lovely little widget available for listening to podcasts available on Odeo.com at the moment It’s just been updated to make it even shinier. Lovely bit of work this that Apple can’t / haven’t competed with…
• Wired News’ take on Joss Whedon’s Serenity Yet another pretty glowing review. It notes some of the script’s shortcomings and structural problems, but still comes to the conclusion that you really shouldn’t miss it. How many people have to tell you this before you’ll believe me?