Category: Random

• My GamerTag stats for Halo 2 I’m Orlando II, by the way. You may have noticed I’m not positng that much at the moment. I’ve just lost two evenings to 50 games against American teenagers who call people “Faggot” a lot… Wankers. Good game though…

• MusicBrainz come to the BBC’s learning lunch After working on a project around programme information for most of the last year, I’ve started to get really interested in standard identifiers and metadata for all kinds of things. A universal CRID for songs is – I think – just a question of time…
• Millions to miss out on the net “By 2025, 40% of the UK’s population will still be without internet access at home, says a study.”

• The Homosexual Agenda “I know that many of you have heard Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others speak of the ‘Homosexual Agenda,’ but no one has ever seen a copy of it. I have finally obtained a copy directly from the Head Homosexual.”
• Skeletal Systems of cartoon characters “I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.”

• MSN Spaces (Microsoft’s entry into the weblog / representation of personal identity online sphere) include support for “Music Lists” The idea – that you can make a list of songs and post them up on your site – isn’t particularly revolutionary, but it’s not that far off integrating with your music app (Windows Media Player) and becoming a nicely distributed audioscrobbler…
• The bodging of the BBC “And none of this has anything to do with bricks, mortar and the ability to chart a course. None of it helps an institution we could easily help by guaranteed licence fee and lengthened charter if we wanted to, for barely the price of a new ID card.”

Hm. I didn’t realise that Google now had de facto ownership of the term “weblogger”. While trying to play with the new version of Google Groups this afternoon, I was confronted by this infuriating error message:

So years ago I did a journalism course and one of the early lessons in news reporting was just an exercise in trying to collectively define news. It was a pretty heavily-directed effort, and I think it had to be, because like many other things that we’re so used to in our everyday lives, it’s weirdly difficult to explain to people. Anyway, I’m cleaning up my flat and I find the definition that we came up with on a piece of notepaper, and I’m looking at it and I’m thinking: “This is actually quite interesting – and possibly quite useful for people who are setting up subject-based weblogs”. So here it is:

“New information of significance, interest or relevance which affects the lives or interests of a particular group of readers / listeners / viewers”

It’s not perfect by any means, but it gives you some places to start when you’re thinking about what to write. Know your audience, make sure you’re giving them information, and make sure that the information is actually going to matter to them. It’s not exactly revelatory information, but I figured someone out there might find it useful. And now I’ve transcribed it onto the net, it means that I can throw away the piece of paper!

• I’ve been playing with and installing MediaWiki And I have to confess – I’m pretty bloody impressed. One of the easiest installations I’ve ever done for a wiki and very powerful and flexible. This might be the core of a future project
• SXSW Interactive Festival Does anyone know how they source people, papers and panels for the SXSW Interactive festival? Let me know if so…
• Mr Jones on Tony Stark on ETech “The line up for 2005’s Etech has been posted, and so far it seems like the same people talking about the same pet subjects. Not many ‘genuine outbreaks of the future’ so far.” Plus, I’m a Beatle. Which is nice.
• Captcha as distributed handwriting recognition systems “Distributed CPU cycles are worthless unless you’re SETI or Pixar. Distributed brain cycles… now that’s a much more intriguing proposition.”
• Tiny hats on Innocent Bottles made by real grannies! ” As we speak, lots of nice grannies at Extra Care and Age Concern centres around the UK are knitting us mini bobble hats for our smoothies. For each bottle sold in EAT outlets across the UK, innocent and EAT will donate 50p to Age Concern”
• The weblog of Miss K, transgendered z-list celebrity Not only beautiful, well-constructed, web native and elegant – but also bloody interesting. It’s probably cos I’m a poof, but I find this way more interesting than Belle de Jour…
• Vaughn pulls out of these new weblog award things because he doesn’t like the company Like much of what’s been happening online, I’ve completely missed the ‘2004 weblog awards’ (no relation to the Bloggies). I think this one emerged from the mostly right-wing ex-warblogger politico community/ecosystem…

• Awesome collaborative blast from the past: The ESP Game
  Every two months or so I lose the URL for this and want to find it again. Two players who have never met try to guess words to describe a picture. If they match they get points, and the image gains useful metadata… Awesome stuff…
  (categories: distributed folksonomy fun game games identification image internet metadata photography play socialsoftware tag tagging tags web)

• Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Year 2004
  “Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer”
• Cat and Girl on “Sissy”
  “Sissy is a pejorative term for boys who appear effeminate – typical for a society that considers the separation of male and female identified characteristics more important than the separation of church and state…”

• The Tiny Random Hat Project
  Concept in a nutshell: buy drinks with hats, give money to charity, wear tiny hat, get someone to take a photo, look dumb, get dumped by your partner, embrace the fundamental pain of existence. You know, for kids!
  (categories: drinks dumb flickr hat hats humour innocentsmoothies knitting photographs stupid thetomcoateshatproject tinyhats wool)
• Health toll of anti-gay prejudice
  “Discrimination is being blamed for high rates of mental health problems amongst gay men and lesbians, a study suggests. A survey of 1,285 homosexual and bisexual men and women found just under a third had attempted suicide.”
  (categories: anxiety discrimination gay harrassment health homosexual mentalhealth politics prejudice suicide)
• Simple guide to .htaccess-based password protection
  Not terribly thrilling this one, but always useful for quick reference when you need to protect some admin interface or back-end that’s lying around the place.
  (categories: apache htaccess html htpasswd password passwordprotect php protect protection unix web)