Category: Random

• LA Times ‘wikitorial’ gives editors red faces At the end of a 1,000-word editorial about the war in Iraq, online readers were invited to “Click here to Wiki this morning’s editorial”. But by Sunday, readers were met with the following statement: “Where is the wikitorial?”
• Katie Holmes’ Missing Days “Four days later, Holmes was still in New York and was photographed at VH1’s “Save the Music” concert. She still had not met Cruise. The next time anyone heard from Holmes was on April 27, when she appeared in public as Cruise’s girlfriend and love of his life…”
• Royals cost Britain £36m a year Mr Reid said: “We believe this represents a value-for-money monarchy.” Love it. Value-for-money monarchy. Sweet.
• Very useful tutorial on how to empty the MT-Blacklist log when it gets so big that your server would rather die than show it to you… I reset the damn thing yesterday – this morning I’d had nearly a thousand spam filtered by it. Stupid intolerable spam wankers.
• The Onion 2056 Leather-Clad Nomads Seize Power in Australia / Million Robot Mark Attended By Exactly 1,000,000 Robots…

• Technorati relaunch with a shiny new front-end And very nice it is too. Suddenly appeared on my radar about ten minutes ago…
• The Very Model of a Modern Labour Minister This Flash video about the National Identity card is possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever seen ever in my life ever.
• Pranksters Undo Ten Years Of Cruise Auditing “By lunchtime on the West Coast, it’s unlikely that there will be a single human being who hasn’t seen the video of Tom Cruise getting blasted in the face with water from a prankster’s microphone”
• A slightly old piece on the stuff you can learn about Google’s search engine behaviour from their patent documents… “Google recently filed a US patent which reveals a great deal of how they rank your web site. Some of it you could never have guessed at…”
• The Pan & Scan “Giant-Ass Image Viewer” Once they get this working on IE effectively, then this is going to be a really nice and elegant way of displaying larger images and maps across the internet. And all inspired by work by Google…
• Skyscraper News, the place on the internet where you will find everything you wanted to know about the brightest rising star in international architecture Despite being a World City, London has suffered years of neglect in the high-rise stakes as the conservatism of heritage bodies and the worries of planning bodies have scuppered any attempts at a skyline…
• Dirac Video Codec The BBC R&D produced free video codec is available on Sourceforge (just in case you missed it a while back)

• Microsoft to Create Competing BitTorrent Technology This kind of thing was pretty much inevitable as the larger software companies look to find effective ways of distributing big files without crippling people financially…
• Griffin Technology’s iFill “.. streams mp3 files from thousands of free radio stations directly to your iPod.”

You might vaguely remember that about a week ago I was on the BBC Radio 4 series Broadcasting House. Well thanks to the miracle of computers, if you want to you can hear the whole feature on corporate weblogging over here. It also features a variety of other comments by people like Heather Armstrong, if that’s your kind of thing. And now – I’m off to explore the wilds of Hayes Valley, find Cal Henderson and have a drink before I fall over and go to sleep.

• Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech I haven’t listened to this yet, but by all accounts it’s pretty inspiring.
• Tom Cruise engaged to Katie Holmes Godsmackingly weird – I mean what the hell is she doing? I mean, someone’s clearly doing this for publicity of one kind or another. How come it feels like everyone is in on the joke?

Heathrow Airport. How I love thee. With thy little tax-free shops that are still too expensive, and the hidden power points by the columns that took me hours to find the first time I flew from here. I commend thy expensive wifi! I celebrate thy Bagel shop! But soon I must leave thee for San Francisco…

Ah, San Francisco – my spiritual home. Geeks as far as the eye can see in every direction – all my peers from the time of my first creative tinkerings online. I love going to San Francisco. It really cheers me up. And all that time stuck in a plane when you’re allowed to potter around and think about things and write stuff up. I’m almost looking forward to going headblind from lack of net access, because I think I might actually be able to catch-up on some writing I’ve been meaning to do. Dead time in the Interzone is good.

And what to do while I’m in San Francisco? Well, obviously I’ll be eating and lounging around a bit, but I also want to spend some time drinking from the nerdy wellstream and reinvigorating myself. And that means, big discussions and new perspectives and stuff. So if you’re interested in any of the following, feel free to e-mail me ( at tom {at} the name of this website) and maybe we’ll be able to find some time to chat. Things I’m interested in at the moment:

1. Supplementing and enhancing broadcast with social software (or social software in general)
2. Programme information, distribution and future post-broadcast media consumption
3. Social Software for Set-Top boxes and assorted other connected home entertainment systems things
4. The Age of Point-at-Things and identifiers / URLs (see also Matt Biddulph’s ‘Application of Weblike Design to Data
5. Weblogs and Mass-amateurisation and all that general palaver

Other nerdy wellspring opportunities to catch up with me: I’ll probably be at Supernova on Tuesday and Wednesday, hanging out with the O’Reilly crew and trying to push myself to think in unexpected non-work-related directions. I may also be wandering up to PARC to see a few social media types, and I’m hoping to get to see much-missed friend Cal Henderson‘s impromptu one-day workshop on Building Flickr. So if you’re going to be at any of those, look out for me. I guess this probably doesn’t sound like much of a holiday to some people, but I’m really looking forward to it. Probably because beyond all that stuff – lurking in the shadows, with their faces lit up by screenlight – are all the people I don’t get to see enough.

Anyway, my plane’s probably boarding about now, so I should probably close the laptop and get myself ready. See you on the other side…

• Flickr Album – an elegant bit of Flash using their API You have to grab the corner with your mouse and literally turn the page over for it to work. Nice implementation though.

So here’s the plan – I’m flying to San Francisco on Saturday and I’ll be hanging around until the 26th with all my geek hipster friends. But don’t take that to mean that I’m busy all the time – I’m keen as ever to see (and meet) as many neat people as possible. When I go to San Francisco, I normally try and set up some kind of drunken evening at the Tonga Room – because the rain and the thunder and the tiki stylings and the lounge act are all so cool. But I am also aware that the cocktails are terrible and that maybe I’ve milked the experience as much as I can. So, guys, does anyone have any better ideas?

While I’m at it, I might as well put out another call – are there any glorious geek events, any particularly cool exhibitions or bars that I’d regret not going to? It’s not every day I get a full week in my spiritual homeland to reconnect with the mothership. So what should I be doing?

Of course, no trip comes without its inconveniences, and this one is particularly poignant – while I’m on the flight to SFO I’ll be missing the big reveal in the final episode of Doctor Who. This is doubly galling since I’m currently enduring hundreds of lunatic comments on my Doctor Who and Bad Wolf post. Regular visitors to the site may be getting bored of hearing about this, but things are way out of control – the post has received seven hundred comments as of now, and sometimes they come in at the rate of one or two a minute. The whole thing’s starting to remind me of Kottke’s famous Matrix meltdown. All of which is a roundabout way of saying don’t spoil it for me until I’ve got my hands on a copy.

Anyway, as of this evening, I’m either in pre-flight limbo or stuck in some terminal interzone, and I’m hoping to take the opportunity to catch up with all the notes and writing I’ve been doing recently but haven’t had a chance to post to my site. So more later…

• The Futurama Taglines Flash Slideshow includes every tagline from every episode in seasons one to four… You can’t really go far wrong with Futurama. Except the taglines. Which were rarely funny. Better here than on TV.
• The Helvetica Meditations from Typographi.com Some beautiful and oddly poignant pictures containing Helvetica. #24 is kind of darkly entertaining I suppose as well…

• The pilot for the TV show of the “Global Frequency” comic book has found its way onto BitTorrent Apparently the show itself didn’t get picked up by any networks, so this is all there is. No idea yet whether it’s any good or not…
• How to Make a Million Dollars, by Marshall Brain It seems so sensible when it’s written down. I don’t know why everyone hasn’t done it, frankly…
• Bottom Drawer weighs in on the issue of Britain’s Missing Bloggers “the UK sees the internet as a resource for information rather than a medium for personal expression, and the perception currently is that blogs are more vanity publishing than information resource.”
• OmniGraffle 4 beta version has been released OmniGraffle is one of those (not so) little applications that makes it possible for you to look really professional relatively quickly…
• I really want to get the new DVD of The Daily Show’s election coverage Unfortunately I’ll be flying back from the States the day before it’s released. Nngh.
• A really interesting article on declines in human productivity when working in ‘crunch mode’ I tend to encourage workstreams in three month cycles, limiting any crunch periods to the last two or three weeks
• Alex Bosworth’s engaging and well thought-through articulation of mistakes that people can make when using Ajax “Ajax is also a dangerous technology for web developers, its power introduces a huge amount of UI problems as well as server side state problems and server load problems”
• Missing Dalek found on Glastonbury Tor “A Dalek stolen from a Somerset tourist site has been found on Glastonbury Tor after thieves said it was “too hot”.”
• How to avoid libel and defamation A must read for every British weblogger – a guide to defamation and libel under UK law…