There’s a slightly Freudian typo in BBC News’ latest article about the joint Blair / Bush press conference in the states. Or at least I assume it’s a typo and Blair didn’t just squeeze in a bit of a massive policy U-Turn while no one was looking:
Outlining the coalition’s strategy, the prime minister said: “First, we stand firm. We will do what it takes to win this struggle. We will not yield, we will now back down.”
It probably won’t be there for long, so enjoy it while you can…
Those of you in the UK today may have stumbled upon Radio 1’s Ten Hour Takeover – in which members of the listening public got to choose which songs were played – only using the magic telecommunicative power of text messaging. What you might not know is that this was another BBC Radio and Music Interactive enterprise! Better still, some of the creative parties involved have been able to write up some of the technology and experience on their weblogs – Matt Biddulph (head of our architecture team) has written up his exhaustive and open thoughts on the design and implementation of the project in a piece called Moyles-proof code over on hackdiary. And Dan Hill’s also posted his thoughts about the project in a post called Takeover Radio. More satisfying still is that conversation around the even has even started to creep over the rest of webloggia – with David from Fuddland posting about his experience of the day (10 Hour Takeover). I was listening to the radio at exactly the same time as David and was equally impressed at the quality of the selections – although I’m not convinced that the person in the car next to us at the traffic lights near Bluebell Lane in Norwich was as delighted by Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” as I was.
From Barbelith as found by Matt Jones:
“…imagine what would happen to Pulp Fiction if, when the character of Jules looked into the briefcase, he “woke up” in mid-scene and not only realized that he was a character in a movie, but also realized that he “was” also Mace Windu and Shaft and a bunch of other characters in realities he can scarcely comprehend, while also glimpsing an uber-reality where all of those realities are just movies and he’s an actor called Samuel L. Jackson.”
Right. That’s it. Enough already! I’m just going to go and launch the damn thing and let everyone else find all the bugs and the crappy bits of code and the hacked together bits of shit and I’ll fix em all later when I’ve had a bit of a break. Otherwise it’s going to suck up every last bit of my life forever as I fiddle and fuss around some of the obscurer areas when I should be throwing enough people at it and see how many land on something spiky.
So with that in mind, I’m here to announce the 87% complete new version of Barbelith – the online community that actually doesn’t just talk shit all day (although it does that too). As ever with a redesign it’s got a good few rough edges that will get worn into shape over time. Unlike most redesigns that I’ve been involved with it’s also full of really bad code and there are places where the new lick of paint could do with a couple of more coats. But then again, unlike most commercial redesigns of any scale, this one took four weekends from start to finish. I am sooo looking forward to going outside again. Anyway – have a poke around – be nice to the locals and feel free to leave your thoughts:
And projects just go on and on and there’s no resolution to them whatsoever and it’s quite normal for them to take every working hour of the day and it’s just as normal for you to have no real sense of what you’ve accomplished at the end of the day. I’m in a bit of a funk at the moment – trying to get some sense of what I’m accomplishing and how to accomplish it better – how to make something truly worthwhile and valuable. A lot is going out the window while I try to make better sense of everything. Back shortly…
Another friend asked me what Trackback was today and I showed them my old guide to it and to be honest it wasn’t very helpful for them. But I found a way to say it more simply even than that. Here is trackback in a nutshell: If someone links to one of my posts, my post will link back to them.
Dear Mr Winer,
I should add that I don’t really have much of an opinion about the whole Typekey thing at the moment. Certainly we need something to deal with comment-spam, certainly a centralised service will help with that and make things easier, yes I’d rather have an open standard or set of protocols that allow completely decentralised system if I could think of any way it could be done (but offhand I can’t).
Addendum: I have to confess that I’m not terribly interested in this stuff – I was making a fairly light-hearted and facetious point that really wasn’t particularly well-expressed. I was clumsy in a variety of places, and for that I apologise. All I was saying, I guess, is that Dave’s questions made it sound like Six Apart had a reputation for proprietorial formats and patenting stuff and not opening up APIs – and that I don’t really see any evidence of that. And – realistically – Dave is still associated with Userland and Userland is still a competitor of SixApart – so I can’t really see why they should feel any particular obligation to answer those questions. (Particularly given that Userland attempted to trademark RSS a few years ago – a move that could be seen to be directly against the kind of openness that Dave’s interrogating Six Apart about.)
Anyway, I certainly don’t feel qualified enough to comment in any depth about the business practices of either Six Apart or Userland in this context and these are not positions that I’d be prepared to battle to my last breath to protect. So I’m going to back down gracefully, only saying that I hope that it’s clear why I had the impression that I had, however inaccurate it may or may not have been. I also apologise to anyone who was offended or feels mischaracterised and I hope we can put this all behind us.
I know I’m being obtuse, but I’m really not getting the whole Belle De Jour obsessiveness that’s spiralling its way across the web and into the print media. The latest incarnation of this particular ludicrousness comes from the Independent newspaper (Who is the real Belle de Jour, the internet’s best-read whore?), in which the woman in question is variously identified as Sarah Champion, Michel Faber or – of all people – long-time plasticbag.org favourite Andrew Orlowski. The latter has certain perverse logic to it – his journalism has a tendency to roam near the outer edges of the barely-plausible and uses such blatantly evocative rabble-rousing language and vitriol that you can’t help but view everything he says as being heavily coloured by his own spitting phobias and/or desire for attention. Certainly I wouldn’t put it past him to take that final leap into fantasy in order to make a point. Assuming of course it would be fantasy and that The Register haven’t just run out of money…
But who cares?! I know I’m missing something here, but how can we really be so shocked and startled by the idea that one of the enormous number of prostitutes in the world has decided to write a weblog? Certainly it’s worth a read. She seems like a nice, sorted, intelligent person. And yes – she can write reasonably compelling posts in good quality English. Certainly it’ll get more people going to it than some site about a granny and her cats. But realistically, does it warrant this level of media attention? It’s not like sex is something that only the terribly rich and the morally repugnant can get away with! It’s not like she’s in the middle of Iraq having sex on top of Saddam Hussein’s palace! It’s not like she’s fellating moon-chimps on CNN or inventing orgasm-generating laser beams! So she reads a few books! What’s the big deal? My theory: England has too many sexually-frustrated journalists without book deals. If we want a better press, getting them laid would be a really good start.
I don’t know whether it’s articles like these (on why people give up weblogs) that I get annoyed by or responses like this from 2lmc, but either way I’m pissed. I don’t know how obvious it has to be before people get it – lots of people have weblogs and find value in them, and – yes – lots of people don’t! This is a shock to precisely no one! Moreover, there has never been anything on the web that some people have liked and some haven’t. Every single online community, bulletin board, mailing-list, online social-networking tool, web-application or published site ever made has had people who start using them and then stop. There’s even an industry word for it: “churn”.
Getting three people’s comments on why they don’t read BBC News might be an interesting read but it wouldn’t be a story. It wouldn’t reveal anything particularly good or ill about BBC News. And anyone who was seriously using such a piece to illustrate their own counter-factual hobby-horse would just look highly selective in their source material, slightly duplicitous in their arguments or basically a bit stupid. Why is this any different?
Wow. That was a bit of a head-rush. The busiest day of traffic ever on both plasticbag.org and Barbelith. Between the two of them a meaty 25,000 page impressions logged up in 24 hours. If I include Everything in Moderation as well, it goes up to 25,027. Cor. In unrelated news I shaved my beard off this morning, and I’m just about to go in and have all my hair hacked off. I look really different without a beard. I don’t look as tired, I don’t look as ‘manly’ and I think I look a hell of a lot bitchier. And a bit fat.