- Absolutely extraordinary World of Warcraft adverts, featuring William Shatner and … insanely … Mr T! Approaching the funniest thing I’ve seen in forever. Like the man says on the web page, almost enough to get me to play WOW again, but that way dark dark unproductive madness lies…
- Ronan Bennett responds in the Guardian to Martin Amis’ comments about Islam and Muslim people… Spotted via CityofSound “Ask yourself what you are reading. An important question from a leading literary figure? A brave revenge fantasy? No. A major cultural and literary figure endorsing prejudice against Muslims.”
- The UK Government has lost records pertaining to 25 million British people as a consequence of sending a few bits of physical media through the post… A reminder–if ever there was needed one–that government is neither consistent enough in the long-term nor competent enough in the short to be entrusted with ever more information about its citizenry.
- My old department at the BBC has launched a blog concerned with its R&D activity and exploration of new technology… It looks like Tristan and Chris have really managed to take the team that Webb and I used to run to new heights. Really want to know more about what they’re up to at the moment.
- Revenue from print advertising is in radical decline with online advertising taking up much of the slack.. If I was a betting man, I’d say that you could expect broadcast television advertising to be the next to be dramatically hit, in favour of targetted advertising packaged around on-demand download video.
- It’s worth reading through Engadget’s full list of posts on the Kindle from Amazon That the future of content is digital distribution over the standard web is not a shock to me. Television is the obvious next step here too. I don’t think it’s here yet, but the mainstream ebook reader is definitely now on the horizon.
- Flickr’s awesome new ‘Places’ feature has launched, allowing you to go and see the best pictures of all kinds of places all over the world. Lovely stuff. Develop a body of data (photos) and then hook it up with other data sources to enhance both. Each dataset navigable in terms of the other. The combination makes both more valuable.
- Happy birthday to Danah Boyd on turning 30! For anyone out there who’s worried about turning thirty, let me reassure you. It’s fine. it’s great, actually. Thirty-one, on the other hand. That’s a pain. You don’t really see it coming.
- Ben Goldacre writes a long, brilliant and–please god–persuasive debunking of Homeopathy for The Guardian The horror for me here is that cultural studies’ critiques and examinations of the process of science are partly responsible for the public suspicion of evidence and rationality. Makes me very sad.
- Linzie Hunter’s spam one-liners are just extraordinarily good. She takes spam subject lines and turns them into typographic art. They’re really lovely. She made some Moo cards with them and they looked awesome and I’m wondering if the Moo crew should try and bring her on as one of their regular designers.
Category: Random
- The BBC’s Children in Need Doctor Who special generated a little squee in my mind that I feel compelled to share with the internets.. It’s a dumb, sentimental and clumsy little micro episode, but Peter Davison was my Doctor too and therefore it means something to me. You rock Peter Davison!
- Fire Eagle and Brickhouse make Business Week The recent press around Fire Eagle has been pretty interesting. It’s always interesting to see where they get some of the facts wrong. Helps me work out where we’ve not got it quite right yet.
- John Gisby’s headed over to Channel 4. He’s a nice chap who I rate and wish all the best at his new job. Channel 4 seem to be assembling quite an interesting team of people, including quite a lot of my favourite ex-BBC-ers. Very different structure by all accounts. Interested to see what happens there.
- A fascinating guide to thirty beautiful green websites! For some reason I find myself looking for ideas about how to add a layer of shine to very vibrantly green websites. Lots of ideas here…
- Vimeo.com has the world’s best Log In screen… Cal reminded me about it the other day, and since I’m in the mood for a good bit of vibrant web design action I decided to post it. Feels nice to be posting things again, by the way.
- Jeff Jarvis reports on the fun he had in London It was really nice to finally meet him. We had a great conversation about future journalism, the web of data, the XO from OLPC and the BBC. Really lovely evening. Never seen Paula squee so much either!
- ‘The Web 2.0 Grail’ is a water bottle that Tim O’Reilly drank from at Web 2.0 Berlin, as put on ebay by ‘Mister Wong’ for for some reason (I’m guessing clumsy PR)… It’s actually ridiculous enough to be funny, particularly because you just know that Tim would be completely mortified by the idea. Only useful if you want to build up your O’Reilly DNA repository, I would guess.
- Foamee is a fun, and beautiful, little site by Dan Cederholm built off the back of Twitter It’s lovely. Simple and silly, but lovely. Yum yum. I hope I get to work with Dan someday.
- I really like the idea of the Holocene Calendar. I like the idea of having all of human civilisation in one timeframe. Being able to know that everything that we know that humans have done around us fits within a few thousand years is pretty extraordinary.
- What PC talks a little about Fire Eagle. Interesting response… I think the thing I hear most from people are anxieties about their privacy. It’s a reasonable anxiety and the one that we’re most focused on alleviating with sensible precautions.
- Chris Anderson’s brilliant piece on PR people getting blocked from his blog I imagine he has to deal with at a whole other level of stuff to me. PR people are sending unsolicited commercial e-mails. It is spam! And they’re trying to commandeer the conversation. It may be inevitable, but it’s also repulsive!
- Nice Splashcast interview by Chris Valance of Cory Doctorow on whether ISPs should be responsible for identifying copyrighted works that go through their servers Good, solid bits of argument in there. Cory speaks extremely well on these matters, clearly and without umming or ahhing. Unlike myself!
- Lovely Robot Overlord t-shirt by Tony Aguero on Threadless Beautiful and awesome. Unfortunately it’s not on the really nice t-shirts so I’m not so sure I want to buy it. Grr.
- Simon Batistoni’s guide to relocating to the US is proving invaluable to me at the moment It’s all bloody terrifying, and quite badly timed. A fair few sleepless nights at the moment.
- Part two of Simon’s relocation blog posts. This one seems–if anything–even more terrifying than the last one… I’ve probably got less than a month in the UK now. This is basically the first time I’ve written about it on my site. Hum. Probably makes it real then.
- The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web One of my favourite books applied to the web by Richard Rutter and Steve Marshall. I feel like I ought to help them out in some way, it’s such a good idea.
- Fascinating move by Electronic Arts to say that they’d be interested in standards being adopted for gaming platforms I wonder if someone would always try to get a run on the next generation of technology by creating something future-facing. Could be all commodity stuff in the end – buy a new console because existing games look better on it?
- Interesting post on URLs over on jerakeen.org, which I think misses the point a bit It’s easier if you think of URLs in two types – either referring to a specific first order data object (in which case it doesn’t need much nesting) and then lists, where the cuts and stuff make much more sense. Calcify the common paths, leave the rest.
- JK Rowling says Dumbledore was gay, and I couldn’t be happier about it. I’ve seen too many gay characters recently in films and theatre and TV that are filthy old stereotypes for an audience to find amusing, like pets… I saw Stardust yesterday and loved it. But I hated that the gay character in it was obsessed with women’s clothes and dancing around. I saw Spamalot and I loved it. I just hated that the weak girly man was gay, and the butch gay man liked disco… Idiots.
- Loving the ratings joke on the Radiohead “In Rainbows” review on Pitchfork Media Just in case you wondered, the actual rating is 9.3 which is pretty good…
- Kevin Rose on cover of new Captain America comic? Certainly there’s a figure wearing a Diggnation T-shirt. Some evidence, at least, that what happens on the net doesn’t stay on the net, even if it may be popular with our nerdy selves…