Category: Random

I’d like to thank everyone who voted for plasticbag.org at the Bloggies, where I’ve accidentally picked up Best British or Irish weblog. I’m particularly surprised given given the quality of the other candidates: Going Underground’s Blog, A Teenager Blogs, Greenfairy.com and The Big Smoker.

More importantly, I’m genuinely delighted to report that I somehow won the Best Essay Bloggie as well for (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything. If anything I think that one is the more important to me because I spent a long-time writing that piece and thinking around it and I think it’s one of the best things I’ve written. I’d love it if more people read it and responded. So thanks again to everyone involved!

The big winner of the night was Boing Boing, who took home the Best American Weblog, Best Group Weblog and Weblog of the Year. I’m kind of surprised – given Cory’s alleged nationality – that they didn’t win Best Canadian Weblog too! Lifetime achievement rightly went to Heather Champ, whose creative output online has been astonishing for as long as I can remember. Well done!

Wow. What a frustrating few days. I’ve been working on a project in the background (not too exciting – don’t get your hopes up) that vaguely involves PHP and I know nothing about PHP. I’m a programming weenie. You know – I do words and layouts and stuff. And occasionally ideas. So I’ve been throwing myself at it with profound diligence, concentrating like some kind of concentrating ninja on the task in hand. And after two days of as-much-concentration-as-I-can-manage-nowadays I find myself with something about a third done. And kind of done a little bit wrong as well. Thanks to Matt Biddulph for the PHP parsing guidance…

Ok. It’s driving me so mad that I’m forced in the end to appeal to the general public. My laptop appears to be beeping at me. Every so often – no more than once a day, for some reason which appears to be hardware-related (I’m not even sure it’s coming through the Powerbook’s speakers) it beeps at me. Two sets of two beeps in the form: beep-beep beep-beep, always the same tones. There doesn’t appear to be any particular rationale for when it beeps, except that it could be related to whether it’s on my lap or not (I’ve never heard it happen at work) and/or whether it’s being charged (I don’t think I’ve ever heard it beep when it wasn’t being charged). It’s really worrying me as I don’t know what’s causing it to protest. It could even be a bloody alarm clock for all I know (except that it doesn’t seem to beep at any particular time of day). It’s driving me insane – does anyone know what the hell is going on?

Very late – here are a selection of pictures from the periphery of ETCon, pictures about arriving, seeing things unfold, being repacked and then finally departing. There are no pictures of the events themselves. They are in roughly chronological order:

So it occurs to me that UI design for applications isn’t easy at the best of times, and that one key area of UI design is the toolbar filled with icons that sits at the top of most applications. It also occurs to me that this space is one that can be edited and changed very easily by users – should they wish to do so. So then it occurs to me that perhaps there are usability lessons that can be learned from looking at the various custum configurations that people use on these applications and that applications should prompt users a couple of days after they have made significant UI changes to ask them if information about their new configuration could be sent back to the developers. It should then be relatively simple for the developers to keep a live track of which parts of the UI are most commonly adapted and to pull out statistically which configurations people find most useful (with the aspiration of being able to improve that structure over all subsequent versions of those applications). Until that day, here are a few of my customised toolbars:

• Mail
• Firefox
• NetNewsWire

This is the second time it’s happened and it’s as weird as the first. On the bus this morning I was reading the latest issue of MacUser (nice magazine redesign, shame about the old-style Mac typeface in the logo) when I find myself reading about myself.

Back in the real world, Tom Coates has been blogging from his trip to Los Angeles, lamenting the lure of the Apple Store and that all-so-familiar dilemma of need versus want. “The shoes that I needed to replace last year at ETCon are still firmly on my feet. And I have no new clothes of any sort. I do, however, have an enormous pile of stuff from the AppleStore and a desperate salivating urge to go back and blow another £200 on a new iPod. I only wish I could claim to be surprised by this turn of events.

Weird. In case anyone is interested, I did not buy an iPod after all, although I kind of wish I had. I bought an iSight, which I can recommend whole-heartedly, some Apple earbuds that sucked ass with such commensurate skill that they should set themselves up with a business catering to the needs of Hollywood celebrities, and some rather useful and not-available-here Apple-oriented screen-wipes. Since my return I have bought myself shoes by the same company as my last pair (I’m not a great shoes man) and basically the same green as my last pair went after a couple of years. So in the end, everything worked out OK, I guess…

There are many organisations in my working life that I have decided – retroactively – to refer to as the Air Ministry:

“You can have any combination of features the Air Ministry desires, so long as you do not also require that the resulting airplane fly,” said Willy Messerschmidt, preeminent World War II German aircraft designer.
[From The Humane Interface]

From a pithy and somehow true post by Stewart Butterfield on the problems of creating visualisations of social networks:

Artist/curator friend Mark Soo did a piece for one of the Infest openings where he visualized the curators’ social network using balloons with people’s names printed on them as the nodes and ribbons tying them together as the edges (the data comes from “invites” he got the curators to send to one another). This was a great, inviting, tactile “graph manipulaton interface”. But the reason I liked it so much was that it really brought out the problems of social networks visualizations as a way of learning about the networks being visualized: too confusing!

He also cites a few examples of some of the attempts to visualise them – the problems should become self-evident:

• GameNeverEnding Social Network Graph
• FirstMonday Social Network Graph
• Friendster Social Network Graph

Two things immediately occur to me – firstly how do we as humans make sense of this data in our everyday lives (because we’re incorporating at least some of it into our mental models, surely, and understanding that would make it easier for us to enhance those models rather than creating new ones that create nothing but cognitive overload), and secondly What would Tufte do?.

The secret of successful weblogging is – it seems – never to pause for a moment. Never let the fact that you’re kind of not in the mood for a few days to stop you putting some old crap up on your site. Because the longer you leave it, the more pressure there is to make your return worthwhile, valuable, interesting. I am currently backlogged with about three weeks worth of things I feel I need to say – mostly about ETCon, but also about online communities, social software, ConCon and politics – but I know now that I’ll never manage to get most of it out onto the page. Had I not been so self-indulgent about making it perfect, then anything useful I had to say would actually be out there doing some limited good rather than festering in my head. It’s all terribly frustrating.

Imagine a circumstance where someone was building a weblog aggregator like Haddock Blogs, but imagine for a moment that they were doing it with the full text of other people’s weblog entries, sectionalised by theme and with the name of the writers put by them (like a byline), but without any link back to the site where they originated. You might have to look pretty close to realise that the posts didn’t originate on the aggregator site in the first place. That would seem, well, wrong to me – like a kind of passing off. But as far as I can tell, there isn’t a single Creative Commons license that wouldn’t allow someone to do that with your work if they wanted to perfectly legally. There’s something weird there about the nature of attribution on the web, I think, that maybe doesn’t sit too well with the concept of attribution named in the Creative Commons licenses. Naming an author isn’t enough to attribute online, you should be making a connection with them…