Category: Random

Too much work to do, but lots of interesting ideas going on in the background which makes a nice change. I was interviewed briefly on BBC Essex yesterday morning alongside a pretty smart American lady from HitWise. It was a pretty genial affair, even though the guy did ask me whether or not I kept a diary as a child (answer, “No, I don’t really think weblogs have anything to do with diaries”) and whether or not I have a life, to which there really aren’t answers that don’t make you sound like an arse. I’m assuming that no one who reads this thing actually heard the interview in question? I’m also assuming that no one who heard the interview came onto the web to find my site either.

Which reminds me – I got no traffic whatsoever from being mentioned in the Evening Standard. What does this mean – do people who read the Evening Standard not use the internet at all? Are they just completely uninterested in technology? Are people unable to make that context leap from a newspaper to a website without an immediate functioning hyperlink to click on? Was the article just a bit dumb? Seems to me that there’s a remarkable disjunct between lean back media and the internet. People just don’t seem to go to URLs mentioned on air. Makes you wonder a bit about all the URL-based advertising you see on TV, and why so many people seem to think it’s the only way to get traffic to your site.

• Yahoo! Search – Audio Search Now this is very interesting indeed. I’ll be exploring this one a lot more over the coming days…

• It’s kind of been everywhere, but Apple have announced their new ‘Mighty Mouse’ product Interesting design decisions – electronics replacing mechanics, non-obvious physical interfaces – but still kind of compelling…

You know actually, as I read the Evening Standard piece in its full published version, I’m a little less comfortable with it than I thought I was. It really does concentrate completely on the idea of weblogs as diaries, which I’m afraid they’re just not – people use them to talk to each other, to express their opinions and to invite response. So basically it’s a complete ‘here we go again’ of an article – the same article that the British press write every single time they think about weblogs. In fact it’s so familiar that I believe I’ve even written this kind of semi-stroppy response before. Several times. Here’s the most recent one: On how journalists write about webloggers. There’s no questioning about why millions of people would suddenly start writing diaries in public, no sense that other media can be organised chronologically. I can’t blame them for writing it in this way, but it is really kind of boring.

What I think I can get a little narky about is the description of this site as a place where I detail everything about my life, “accompanied by photographs”. Over the last few years, I’ve posted very little about my life at all. It’s just wrong. And it’s worse that it’s under a heading like, “Dear London, today I wore blue socks to work…” That seems to me to be just sloppy work with a little bit of fiddling your facts to fit your story.

Almost exactly five years ago The Evening Standard did its first article on weblogs and I contributed to that too. It was called ‘Blog On for an Ego Trip’ (the fault of the sub-editor rather than the journalist concerned) and I wrote about it here. It was actually a pretty decent article, much like most of this one. It got some stuff wrong, and the title was a nightmare, but these were early days when there were only a few thousand webloggers in the world. Now there are millions. The weblog world has moved on enormously and has had an impact in altogether unexpected places. I think it would be reasonable to expect that the press would keep up with these changes. Maybe I’m being mean. Dunno.

Anyway, for those of you who have found themselves on here for the first time and are wondering what to make of it all – it’s still great to have you here. I’m afraid I don’t write much about my personal life, so if that’s what you’re looking for I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. I tend to write more about the stuff I work around – social software, personal publishing, design and the future of TV and radio. If that stuff appeals to you, then we’ll probably get on quite well. And almost every day I get together a list of the stuff that I’ve found interesting on the web. Some people find that kind of useful.

Bloody hell, everything’s kicking off now a bit. Er. Where was I? So there are a few random quotes from me in an Evening Standard article tonight. The journalist has decided to focus on the few scant bits that I write about my personal life and the stuff I’ve written about my father – rather than the bulk of the stuff I write, and he completely ignored most of the stuff I said about weblogs as conversation. But although it’s a bit too focused on weblogs as exhibitionists, and a little slight on weblogs as conversationalists, it’s not a bad little piece. Journalists always look for hooks that their audience will understand right-off, and I guess people talking about their personal lives is easier to communicate – particularly to a nation obsessed with a show in which young women perform ‘sex acts’ in desperate attempts to make themselves famous.

A nice man from the Standard took some photos of me looking weird and a bit zombie-like as well, but I have a funny feeling those may not end up in the paper itself. They’re that creepy.

While I’m in the middle of own-trumpet blowing, I should probably mention a rather more rounded article that was put up on Ideasfactory.com a few days ago called Blog On. It’s got much more of the context and background to the emergence of weblogging. Be warned though, this comes at a cost. There’s much more of my laboured droning through the whole thing.

Anyway, if you’re on the site because you’ve read either of those articles – it’s nice to meet you, please feel free to explore a bit further and read some of the stuff around the archives on weblogs, design, politics and future music technologies, and leave a comment or two if any of it’s been interesting. And more importantly, if it’s got you thinking and you’re curious, why not start a weblog of your own over at Blogger or Typepad.

The big fun nerd news of the last twenty-four hours has – of course – been Flickr’s interestingness pages which use information like how many people have commented or tagged or ‘favourited’ or viewed each image to pull out the coolest ones of the day and make them browsable. Some of my favourites include: A picture of the Bay Bridge (which is CC so I can show it below as long as I credit Thomas Hawk), Pure Luck, Eye Love U, Infinite Flickr #69, For Mother and we unwind the coils fo complexity and find elegance. Pretty stunning.

• Identity Cards? If you’re not a fan, there’s a Pledgebank thing you can sign up for. I’m getting more and more fascinated by Pledgebank, but I’m mostly fascinated by why no Americans seem to be using it. This could be huge. Is the UK focus too parochial?
• BBC opens TV listings for ‘remix’ “Developers and designers are being encouraged to come up with innovative ways of using TV and radio schedules by taking part in a BBC competition.”
• An old post from last year on a Google audio search Did anything happen with this? Does anyone know if there was any movement here. I’d be really interested to know what’s going on…
• AIM Fight – pit two AIM names against one another and see which is in the most buddy lists across the world… Got this one from Anil Dash (‘anildash’). If you want to pit yourself against me, my IM name is plasticbagUK
• Google look for an office in Victoria I wonder what proportion of the staff will be developers making new products and what proportion will be to do with localisation and sales
• Andrew Orlowski, Sloppy Journalist or Bold Faced Liar? One of a series of articles that have emerged since Scoble and Orlowski broke into open warfare. My opinions of Orlowski’s journalism are a matter of public record…
• “Bloggers and journalists responsible for shades of gray between them” “Orlowski doesn’t take the sort of chances that Winer is referring to. He has, for as long as I’ve been familiar with his writing, taken liberties instead liberties becoming of a buffoon.”
• False breasts betray exam cheats “A Russian youth wearing a drag outfit which gave him improbably large breasts has been caught trying to sit an entrance exam for a female friend.”
• Danny O’Brien: The right to digital freedom “While these conflicts are tremendously important, they are more than 3,000 miles away. Battles for Britain’s digital future are taking place more locally – yet we barely hear the fights here.”
• A body-modification project that builds eyeglasses that pass through the nose It’s pretty stunning, although I keep wondering about magnets. Does that sound banally stupid? Magnets.

• Barbelith examines the shifting political narratives of American media by looking at the pro-Afghanistani tendencies of Rambo III ‘These poor people, underfed, and under-armed? They’re a noble people! You’ll never beat them! They would rather die than be slaves under your rule!’
• Orlaith leaves the Big Brother house I couldn’t believe that Kemal got evicted. I loved Kemal. He was so cool. Orlaith – not so much…

• A pamphlet on the horrors (and very real problem) of blog-related depression Fascinating stuff. Not that I’ve ever suffered from it myself, of course…

I keep seeing adverts for the DVD of Alexander and they keep using the words, “action-packed” and “a new version” and “director’s cut”, and all I hear is, “now with less gay stuff”. I haven’t seen it yet of course, so I might be being unfair. I wrote a note about the reaction at the time called On Alexander and Uncle Tom, if you’re interested…