Category: Random

• A fascinating graph shows the relative daily traffic of two major international websites Dear God are Flickr doing well. That looks like exponential growth. Or logarithmic growth. wow.
• Awesome real-world installation built with Flickr that does interesting things with mobile phones and tags… “Mobile phone or internet social networks by means of visual communication linked through mob tags and or keywords… what?!”
• The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth “America’s entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe’s biggest broadcasters — the BBC — is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.”

• Kylie Minogue ‘has breast cancer’ “Singer Kylie Minogue has postponed her tour of Australia after being diagnosed with breast cancer, her tour company has announced”
• Anti-Anti-Piracy Seal A beautiful bit of design for artists to put on their albums if they don’t mind it being shared online. I doubt we’ll see it in the wild…
• The Mermaid by Heinz Insu Fenkl An awesome piece of investigation into the figure of the mermaid, the siren and representations of female sexuality centred around the Starbucks logo
• Blogpoly board A new Monopoly-derived game board centred around the world of weblogging manages beautifully to avoid mentioning any weblogs…

• The guy who wrote this is an infant and doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously If you’re going to resort to calling someone an arsehole and mocking their accent as a way of getting your point across, then you can’t really be surprised when people stop listening to you

• Watch Greg the hypnotically swaying Google AdSense Engineer explain AdSense to you It’s terribly good and makes it absolutely clear that my site was not designed to have adverts on it…
• Sudoku Fun Dashboard widget I have no idea whether it’s any good or not but I decided that I needed a sudoku widget and this is the only one I could find

A couple of weeks of Tiger and the one thing that I keep noticing is the diminished keyboard buffer. Or at least that’s what I think is going on. In Panther, one of the things I could – and did – do regularly was press Apple-N in Mail and then without pausing I could launch into my latest missive. Now if I do it, I get a couple of annoying alert noises and the first few characters are thrown away. The same thing happens with spotlight, which in a way is worse because I got so used to using the same key combinations to trigger Launchbar.

Tiger’s been an interesting release for me. There’s something weirdly unsurprising about all the new stuff, and something unfinished about the big architectural changes. But the weirdest thing is how interesting the lapses are. It’s the bits where the new stuff doesn’t feel like it has bedded in – the times when you think you know how something should work but it doesn’t really work like it should – those are the bits that are genuinely exciting. I know it sounds like rationalisation, but some of my frustrations with the release have been balanced by a sense that the current OS is maleable, fixable. It feels like this is a release that will get people much more technical than myself very very excited because they won’t be playing with something slippery and shiny, but with something rough, tactile and improvable. Something imperfect that might be finishable. The point releases for Tiger should be really interesting.

• Ah what fun – A Personality Disorder Test You’ll all be reassured to know that there’s nothing excessively wrong with me that a few weeks on a beach wouldn’t cure…
• Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto “Imagine you’re a loner whose ideal home would be a cottage on the beach, miles away from the nearest neighbour…”
• Royksopp’s new album “The Understanding” to be released next month I hate the cover with a passion. I wonder if it’s going to be any good?
• Imaginary Girlfriends Tired of your friends and family telling you to get a girlfriend? Want to make that certain someone a little jealous?
• Six Degrees of Statistically Improbable Phrases Derive interesting phrases from books, and then hook books together by chains of them for a truly bizarre navigational experience…
• I cannot express how uninteresting I find “The Huffington Post” But I thought I’d better link to it anyway so that you guys don’t think I just missed it or something…
• A Daily Telegraph article about the Cybercandy shop in Covent Garden They’re selling sweets from all over the world. They also have a website for distributing beautiful British candy to dirty foreign people who don’t deserve it…
• The Wired 40 companies are ‘masters of technology and innovation’ Every year I kind of vaguely hope the BBC will be among them, but I guess it’s a broadcaster rather than a technology company…
• Hundreds of African boys have disappeared from London schools “Between July and September 2001, 300 had disappeared, and police fear thousands may go missing annually. Child welfare experts say the figures hint at the scale of child trafficking, sometimes for labour or benefit fraud.”
• The worst effects and the best plot to date – Father’s Day is I think one of my favourite episodes of Doctor Who in this series so far And next week’s looks bloody awesomely cool – it’s all Blitz and London and rogue soldiers and zepellins and stuff…

Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!
I get words all day through;
First from him, now from you!
Is that all you blighters can do?
Don’t talk of stars burning above;
If you’re in love, Show me!
Tell me no dreams filled with desire.
If you’re on fire, Show me!
Here we are together in the middle of the night!
Don’t talk of spring! Just hold me tight!
Anyone who’s ever been in love’ll tell you that
This is no time for a chat!
Haven’t your lips longed for my touch?
Don’t say how much, Show me! Show me!
Don’t talk of love lasting through time.
Make me no undying vow. Show me now!

Sing me no song! Read me no rhyme!
Don’t waste my time, Show me!
Don’t talk of June, Don’t talk of fall!
Don’t talk at all! Show me!
Never do I ever want to hear another word.
There isn’t one I haven’t heard.
Here we are together in what ought to be a dream;
Say one more word and I’ll scream!
Haven’t your arms hungered for mine?
Please don’t “expl’ine,” Show me! Show me!
Don’t wait until wrinkles and lines
Pop out all over my brow,
Show me now!

• Is your screen dirty? This might help! One of the cheesiest links you’ll ever see on plasticbag.org and thanks to Rebekah Ford for the pointer…

Presented with limited comment, BBC Backstage launches in beta with a stated mission to open up BBC content feeds for the public to build things with. People can also share their ideas on new ways to use BBC content:

Backstage is part of the BBCís wider remit to “build public value” by sharing our content for others to use creatively. How do you “build public value”? One of the ways is through supporting innovation as the BBC Governors response to the Graf report of BBC online makes clear:

“The BBC will support social innovation by encouraging usersí efforts to build sites and projects that meet their needs and those of their communities … The BBC will also be committed to using open standards that will enable users to find and repurpose BBC content in more flexible ways”.

backstage.bbc.co.uk aims to promote innovation amongst the design and developer community: if people are able to do interesting, productive things with the content then weíd like to support them. Finally and as a useful by-product of the above, backstage.bbc.co.uk is an opportunity to identify talent in the online community.

• On (Design) Bullshit – An interesting piece on the rationalisation for design decisions that people make on fundamentally aesthetic grounds I think it underestimates the value of the expert in knowing what will work but not being able to express it, but otherwise it’s pretty interesting and funny / relevant.
• Colonel Sanders Gets A Face Lift The omni-present feel of smoothed-out Illustrator derived imagery is starting to alarm me a little…
• A New York Times’ internal study suggests starting a weblog to better connect with their audience It’s not the dumbest idea in the world – more interesting was the stuff about putting supporting material onto the internet…
• Malcolm Gladwell on Steven Johnson on pop culture and its capacity to make us more intelligent… “At the elementary-school level, homework seems to be of marginal or no academic value. Its effect on discipline and personal responsibility is unproved… They could be playing a video game, and giving their minds a rigorous workout.”
• The Disney Muppets: why that just isn’t funny (by Caitlin Moran – ex-NME superstar – of all people) Disney bought the Muppets for $30m last year and is now relaunching them. Will the corporation get the show’s anarchic humour?