Category: Random

• Crazy Orbs on Flickr Mr Biddulph and I have been playing again. All terribly entertaining. More later…

• Worth1000.com – Current Products in a Vintage Light… Make new things look old again. Some are awesome. Some are clumsy as all hell…
• Blueprint for a widget of mass destruction – on how Tiger Widgets could represent a security hole Kind of expected this, and completely agree about the lunacy of there not being any (external) interface for managing the removal of widgets – that’s just insane…
• Paul Morley on Oasis in The Independent, as found by Matt Jones I think “Really, they were just a warm mug of artificially flavoured milky memories, passing quaint old-fashioned music through a post-punk, post-rave, post-Thatcher filter.”
• We’ve Got Time to Kill (So Let’s Smash the Clock) – Lance Arthur ruminates on goals and age and unhappiness The bit that stuck in my head was about not giving your job too much importance – I kind of don’t agree – people get this wrong. Work isn’t something you do to get paid, everything you do in your life that has a purpose should be considered work.
• FlickIt Dashboard Widget handles sending photos to a weblog or via e-mail and IM to a friend It looks pretty polished, I guess. Probably would be better as a little dedicated application, but widgets are easier to write I guess…
• Bad Wolf Hunting – Scott Matthewman on the recurrent references to “Bad Wolf” in the latest series of Doctor Who Apparently it’s appeared in almost every episode of the new series so far, leading people to wonder what it’s all building towards… Could it be The Master?
• “Am I a Freak?” Flash cartoons for teenage boys going through puberty Some of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my entire life…
• Ask Me How I Became A Pirate, by Tom Brazelton Awesome looking t-shirt that I fear just wouldn’t suit me. Yellow is such an unforgiving colour…
• Powerpoint presentation that articulates some of the key differences and divides the UK electorate It’s a really interesting way to articulate some of the major distinctions that people understand and to see overlaps between the parties
• An interesting excursion on the typographic concept of leading / line-height… “By definition, it is the vertical distance between two corresponding positions in two adjacent lines of text…”
• Judging a Book by Its Contents – exposing statistics to users to convey meaning and colour In Amazon’s case using Statistically Improbably Phrases to sell more books. It’s all about rapidly contextualising what you’re look at and in a world of rapidly exploding choice, is probably more important than it looks…
• TED Global in Oxford God I’d love to have gone to TED in Oxford in July, but it looks like they’re all sold out. Which sucks…
• The Great Flickr Tools Collection If this doesn’t act as a good illustration of why people need to open up access to their content, nothing will…

• Are You Thinking What Were We Thinking? Slightly changed the name, but anyway – a page full of hacks and adaptations of vile Tory posters.
• Build a Better DVR out of an Old PC An article for Make magazine that’s available on the website about how to create home media centres that are better than Tivos
• The DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals strikes down the US Broadcast Flag “And to the studio execs whom I faced across the table, who shouted at us and excluded us and told us that this was going to happen no matter what: NEENER NEENER NEENER.”
• Fact of Matter “We are technical consultants, advising the entertainment industry’s creative community. Whether you are working on a script or designing a production, we can help you give your project greater scientific veracity and plausibility.”
• Clayton Cubitt and Tom Carden collaborate to create beautiful portraits merged in with generative art It’s quite stunning – like you’d dropped beautiful women into a spirograph and they’d been hit by lightning and dropped into amber…
• The obsessiveness of Steve Jobs, The most successful paranoid in business history? What a strange, compelling and pointless little article. Still, it’s made me want to buy the iCon book…
• MouseField: A Simple and Versatile Input Device for Ubiquitous Computing The application in question seems dumb and less easy to use than gui interfaces, but maybe the idea of smart sensing spaces where you can put and manipulate real-world objects has some scope
• Shuffle captures 58 percent of flash players market That’s a pretty impressive number for a device that’s only been out for six months…
• Blogger Mobile launches Somehow being able to send photos or text to your weblog doesn’t seem as impressive all these months after Flickr…
• Type Cast is a nice little widget for Tiger’s Dashboard that lets you preview fonts that you have on your computer I don’t know that it’s the best use of the Dashboard or that it’s the right kind of interaction, but it’s kind of neat…
• U.S. Dollar to British Pound Exchange Rate over two years… Webb found this. Fuck that’s a scary drop in the value of the dollar. Still – makes things nice and cheap in the States!

I’ve just tried unsuccessfully to read two or three posts on other people’s sites that are more than about three paragraphs long and my eyes just slid off them like they were made of Liquid Silk. And in the spirit of this revelation, I have decided to write one small, self-contained and easy-to-read post to offset all the other long tracts that you guys have to put up with when I decide to go off on one. So here it is. Enjoy.

There was an article in the Guardian about a week ago about MySpace that quoted me and I completely forgot to point it out to everyone. If I don’t continue to point out what large national papers say about me then people will stop believing the hype! I find this unacceptable:

Social software expert Tom Coates says: “MySpace has demonstrated effectively that if you give people things to do with their friends online, then that is significantly [more] compelling than just having software that organises who your friends are. Teenagers and young people tend to use a lot more pop culture stuff to describe themselves, it’s a lot more important to their identity.”

It’s really nice to be called a Social Software expert again – particularly after slightly losing my identity inside the monstrous belly of the BBC. I have felt a bit disconnected from the social software community over the last year or so in that while I feel I still have as much to say, I never really get the chance to express it in public. And that makes you invisible and eventually redundant. I’m going to have to try and spend a little more time engaging in the debates of the day from now on, I think.

Anyway, enough about me. The article itself – about MySpace – mostly talks about how impressive the take-up of MySpace has been. It’s worth balancing that enormous take-up with how little the service has been talked about in geek circles. I don’t know whether it’s because it’s not particularly innovative, but this huge behemoth service has seemingly sprung from nowhere and yet it’s almost invisible to the social software crowd. I guess there’s a lesson here about how you don’t get rich by just following the geek next-big-thing. MySpace is now enormously larger than Friendster and more successful – it’s one of the most trafficked sites on the web in fact. It’s done well by subtly altering the parameters of a previous idea and aiming it at the right market. It’s kind of the same approach that Microsoft have taken with their Spaces project – and it’s all aimed at people completely distinct from the community in which we operate. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that there’s money in the recently-cool – that’s the space that most industries make their money in. (Danah’s also recently been thinking about MySpace a bit).

• I Voted For The Liberal Democrats Because… Well, you can read my reasons on this nice little site that can feed your reasons back to your MP

• UpMyStreet.com redesigns and bluntly – it’s incompetent A screen width that will shut out 30% of its users, incomprehensible navigation, ‘issues’ like a print magazine distracting you from the database of useful information… WTF?! Plus more pages != more ad revenue if you’ve pissed off all your users…

• Flickr Automator Action 0.1 First version of an automator action to get your photos up onto Flickr. Very cool. Watching this one closely…
• Niall Kennedy’s Weblog hosts a Nintendo Acapella Melody Highly entertaining piece of musical history / art that demonstrates that Americans are less nervous about looking dumb in public than the British…

• Simple is the new black – Ben Hammersley redesigns There really does seem to be some stripped-back aesthetic coursing through webloggia at the moment – is it the new ‘cred’
• Homosexuality 101 from threadbared.com Awesome little site that posts old pictures from clothing catalogues / patterns with occasional witty captions…

• E4 to cash in on the rise of Freeview Tremendously good news this – UK TV Channel E4 which carries a lot of classy US shows comes to Freeview
• Kerry on bad film scripts: “Three housewives leave their affluent community, with their suddenly catatonic neighbor and friend in tow, in hopes that a week-long vacation in the woods will snap her out of her daze.” “Part of their plan is to have a lumberjack screw her back to life. Seriously.”
• Ev Williams on the new productivity web-apps… “One interesting thing about starting a company today versus a few years ago: Lots of cool web apps are now available that you can more or less run you company on.”
• NetNewsWire 2.0b45 contains Automator actions Tomorrow is Tiger day. I might burst. Very very exciting. Looking forward to playing with all the sexy geek toys…
• NASA Cassini Identifies Organic Materials High Above Titan’s Surface Scientists believe that Titan’s atmosphere may be a laboratory for studying the organic chemistry that preceded life and provided the building blocks for life on Earth.
• reboot7, 10-11 june 2005, copenhagen, denmark “reboot is the european meetup for the practical visionaries who are building tomorrow one little step at a time, using new models for creation and organizationin a world where the only entry barrier is passion.”
• Making the world calmer through ambient technology A slightly banal overview of some of the work on ambient technology that’s been going on…
• A new CD of songs by the Marseille Figs is available and much much recommended “The Figs recorded a set of demos at Hugo’s Famous Speaker Palace at the beginning of January. They’re available on an 8 song CD, for the very low price of nothing + postage and handling.”
• Hollywood stars Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are in a relationship, their publicists have confirmed This breaks the half your age plus seven lower limit rule and as such is sick and wrong and must be stopped!