Category: Random

• Blogging 101 explains how to do an interview for your weblog… Apparently I’m a low-grade Tom Cruise. Someone should tell Vanity Fair.
• Simpsons movie on its way Obviously I’m looking forward to a Simpsons movie, even though I don’t really have any idea how they’d write it and whether it would work at all…
• This week’s audioscrobbler charts show an extraordinary disposition towards Coldplay Mr Biddulph and I are really interested in the distributions – why are some album tracks being listened to by 3000 less people than other album tracks?
• “Joss Whedon is my master now” – Where can I get one of these T-shirts? I just want to restate that Firefly was awesome and that Serenity will rock and that I’m not a huge nerd…

• The Technorati beta redesign is up and it’s pretty fine. Classy work by Mr Derek Powazek as always It really does look like a quantum leap in apparent respectability and makes them look much more obviously professional. Nice logo too.
• Quite cute this – a seven year old who has seen all the Star Wars prequels watches the original for the first time “Why are red leader and gold leader the leaders? They don’t know what they’re doing…” Ah so wise, and so young…
• I can’t believe it’s true! Cats really do make men scruffier and women more attractive / slutty… Seems a bit unfair, really… So I’m so using this as the major excuse for not wearing my suit very often and getting a bit fat. Parents exposed me to cats at an early age.
• Bart talks about how much he wants children and how difficult he knows it’s going to be for it to happen It’s a post very close to my heart and one that I found quite surprisingly moving. I can’t actually imagine anyone being a nicer parent than Bart…
• Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex – the original Larry Niven investigation of the physiological issues of Superman attempting to mate with a human Beautifully blunt. “Were they human sperm, they would be out of luck. But these tiny blind things are more powerful than a locomotive. A thickened cell wall won’t stop them. They will all enter the egg, obliterating it entirely”
• Asynchronous slow-gaming on the front of your fridge with magnets (as described on Wonderland) Good idea for a family home – I wonder how you tell people who’s turn it is.
• Where are Britain’s Missing Bloggers? “If you start from the more obvious people, you rapidly end up going in circles around the same small and overlapping groups”
• A mobile tale of three cities “Spanish sociologist, is completing a study conducted for the Digital World Research Center at the University of Surrey in England of mobile phone users in London, Madrid and Paris to compare behavioral changes between cultures and over time…”

A brief welcome to everyone who listened to Broadcasting House this morning and find themselves on plasticbag.org for the first time. If you’re looking for posts about weblogs then I can recommend the Personal Publishing archive. If you’re unfamiliar with weblogs, then probably the best way to describe them is as a launchpad to express your opinions, engage in conversations and note stuff down in public. I’ve been writing this particular weblog since November 1999, when it was very informal and only for a few friends. Today all kinds of people seem to get value from it. At the moment those people seem (weirdly) to be Doctor Who fans who have seized a little post I wrote a couple of weeks ago and have decided to use it as a launchpad for slightly over-the-top theorising. I think that post got sixty comments yesterday alone. To be honest, I couldn’t be more delighted.

I’m probably more known for my thoughts on social software, future media consumption and net culture in general. I’m also in the process of trying to find my father and I write about that whenever I get any news. If you want to know more about me then I can recommend reading About Tom Coates. If you’re interested in finding out more about corporate weblogging in general then I can recommend posts by Scobleizer, Anil Dash and an article called The Unbearable Rightness of Nick Denton. Nice to have you with us!

• LukeW on AJAX Interface Design A couple of weeks old this one – but some useful tips for designers thinking of exploring AJAX
• Rands in Repose on the ‘Holy Shit’ moments that have defined his experience of computers and computing His list: Macintosh, Windows 95, Telnet, Mosaic, Napster, Ebay, Doom. Good list.
• Kevin Marks is hosting a video of the Steve Jobs WWDC keynote. The podcast section is particularly interesting. Two reasons: Firstly because the BBC’s In Our Time is beautifully promoted at the top in the middle, and because Steve calls podcasting the hottest thing in radio…
• Robert Cringely thinks the Apple switch to Intel processors is about Apple+Intel vs. Microsoft I have no idea what to make of this article. It looks – frankly – like total balls to me, but….
• I’m spending much of my time watching the Flickr photostream of Reboot with barely-controlled jealous rage When are Flickr going to do some kind of interactive TV client. I’d love to be able to watch these as they came in like a rolling webcam…
• Brian Walden talks about “the West” as a term that emerged in response to Communism, and suggests that without that spectre the term will soon become meaningless Nice link found via Mr Webb which articulates nicely the emerging differences and conflicts between the major nations of the Western World
• On Bees, six-dimensional manifolds and a peculiar sensitivity to Quarks Another one found via Mr Webb of interconnected.org – this time on the waggle dance that bees do to communicate
• Happy Slapping Webloggers – it’s the new craze that’s spreading across webloggia Yeah thanks so much Meg Pickard. Be warned – soon the craze will spread to your area…
• Five Years Later – British webloggers get together for the fifth anniversary of the first UK blogmeet God it was weird. Everyone’s exactly the same only a bit fatter and a little more tired. Except Jen and Katy and Mo who remain slim..
• To cut a long story short – a Guardian feature about the cynicism of trailers and how comfortable they are lying about the films they represent Not sure I agree with all of it – a trailer that effectively sells a film but portrays it incorrectly, can bring the wrong audiences or spoil the film for the right audiencs. This affects word-of-mouth. Film flops.

God, I have so much I want to write about. I want to tell you guys all In the City Interactive and what apparently smart people were saying about convergence. I want to tell you all about the debate I had with BPI-chief Steve Redmond and Factory records’ grouchy swearing pop svengali, Tony Wilson. I want to tell you all about the Geek dinner for Robert Scoble that I attended with about a thousand other people, and where I had too many margaritas and scabbed Lucky Strikes off Hugh Macleod. I want to talk about hanging out with Joe Clark, Andy Budd and the @media folks at Pizza Express last night.

I want to talk about the complete absence of news about my father, and how much it’s preying on my mind and about the mini-reunion I’m going to this afternoon for people who were present at the very first few blogmeets in London, five years ago this weekend. (Full blogmeets to follow.) And then there’s all the chat that I’d like to be doing about what I should be doing in San Francisco (arriving a week today, free up your diaries), and the fifty ideas for posts and things-to-build that are clogging up my Ideas for things.txt file on my laptop and which I see little prospect of ploughing through…

But no time right now. Sorry. I swear to God that I’ll get some of it done over the next forty-eight hours or so. One thing I will mention though is what I’m doing tomorrow morning – where I’ll be extemporising at length about corporate weblogs on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House between 9am and 10am. As ever, if you find these things interesting, you can get a pretty much moment-by-moment guide to my life by subscribing to my Flickr photostream, which currently includes photos of me in a radio studio being interviewed and a stunningly realised representation of Andy Budd as exotic Spanish dancer.

• Graphic Design on Logo Trends for 2005 “Discover new directions. But remember: With any trend, it is better to realize how you arrived than to know you have arrived.”
• “We are holding the Dalek captive and in isolation. For the safety of the human race we have disarmed and remove its destructive mechanism. We demand further instructions from the Doctor.” Absolutely the best thing that has ever happened in the history of the world. They’re going to get Colin Baker to talk to them. I think that’s awesome.

• A picture of Stewart Butterfield wearing a suit He’s also got a weird little Flickr Alien button glued to his belly. I wonder what that’s about and where I can get one…
• Many of my American friends have no idea that the UK, Great Britain and England are different things. So I thought I’d link to this page on the Act of Union… So first England and Scotland merge to become “Great Britain”, and then later Great Britain merges with Ireland to become the “United Kingdom”. Wales had been previously annexed in 1536…
• A good review of the Marseille Figs’ awesome album Boum Boum Constant Marseille Figs are a definite new plasticbag.org favourite, only partly because one of the band is an awesome ex-coworker and friend

• Potentially enormous spoilers on IMDB’s Guest Appearances for “Doctor Who” (2005) Don’t know if it’s accurate or not – and please God don’t blame me if it ruins the surprise – but IMDB’s list of guest appearances does appear to give the game away…

• In which I get attacked by a Crow at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005 Mmm. I have a big bucket of Coca-Cola. I could do with one of those right now. Nice shirt too.
• The rumour that’s everywhere: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips If nothing else, it ties together the fortunes of desktop computers so that if the architecture stops developing, no company gets an advantage… Don’t know what I think about that…
• A really snotty response to my earlier content that Trackback might be dead in the water… My counter response – I use MTBlacklist, and have an up-to-date installation of MT. I don’t find WordPress attractive, and I don’t have time to spend my life in an arms race with spammers. For the value I derive from Trackbacks, it’s not worth the bother.
• The Slingbox from Slingmedia grabs your TV pictures and redistributes them to other devices and computers around your home (or elsewhere) I don’t quite get why this is cool. Explore the product spec for an awesomely dumb neologism: “Placeshifting: the SlingboxTM lets consumers shift the place they can watch TV the same way a VCR shifts the time they can watch.”
• In which the Doctorovian sees God in a cup of chocolate He’s hanging out in Florence with Ben Hammersley and drinking hot chocolate until he falls into a stupor. Lucky bastard.

I’m getting a bit of an influx of people coming to plasticbag.org right now because they’ve just watched the (really rather good) Boom Town episode of Doctor Who and for the first time they’ve heard the words “Bad Wolf” uttered out loud. And quite reasonably, they now all want to know what the hell is going on… For some reason this little post of mine is high on search results for Bad Wolf. So to try and be helpful, I’ve added some resources for people looking for a next step. If you know anything that people should know about (or if you have any theories of your own), then you should go and post some comments so that everyone gets to see them.

While I’m on the subject – What an episode! It was well-directed, had lots of intrigue and lots of plot arc advancement. A real character piece which – not for the first time – contained a good bit of flirting and dubious sexual intrigue. Very classy. Very cool. Just a little bit slutty.