- Moo now has everything you need in place to make cards, stickers and notecards with photos from Facebook Lovely people, the Moo crew. It seems like a no brainer that they’d do a distribution Facebook app to get people’s mindshare around this though. Gah. Spending too much time in the US.
Category: Random
- Beautiful pictures of Jodrell Bank Talking a bunch about Jodrell Bank at the moment, and looking at the lovely, lovely pictures.
- Motion Blur interrogates my belief that PR is an intrinsically more cynical and fake process than human self-representation and expression on blogs (or elsewhere) This is another articulation of the idea that since all human beings attempt to make themselves look okay, that they’re engaging in public relations, which in turn acts as a de facto license for any kind of marketing, advertising or pr strategy…
- Actually semi-decent Mexican food in London? Whatever next! I can quite seriously recommend Wahaca. It doesn’t make me happy like Pancho Villa in San Francisco makes me happy (Prawn Tacos, drool), but it’s way better than most other Mexican food I’ve had in the UK
- According to Zagat (as reported widely in The Guardian, Independent and BBC) London’s restaurants are now the most expensive in the world… I can believe this. I’m not as convinced that the food is as poorly rated as people see to think it is. Perhaps you have to know it well enough to get the best out of it.
- I’m seriously considering getting myself some plasticbag.org branded M&Ms They’re just so totally awesome that I find it astonishing that I don’t have them already. God knows what I’d do with them except give them to people at conferences…
- FiveRuns RM-Install appears to be a nice self-contained Ruby on Rails stack that you can just install on your computer fairly effort-free Of course, installing something doens’t mean automatically that you understand it or how it works. I have discovered.
- Last.fm have a gorgeous new app for doing audio fingerprinting to sort out the metadata around music The double-translation of similar track names to audio fingerprints is a bloody fascinating way to get good solid real-world identifiers around objects like songs. I’m installing it immediately.
- Martin Klimas gets porcelain figures in total darkness and then drops them on the ground. The sound of them touching the floor triggers a light allowing a nearby camera to capture their ‘moment of transformation’ Extraordinary imagery (thanks Kerry). The picture of the liberated hummingbirds is my favourite.
- Andy Budd wrote a post about SXSW the other day and how much he dislikes it when speakers stand up and say that they were up to 4am the night before doing their slides I started my dconstruct talk a little over a month ago, and was still finishing the slides an hour before my talk at 3pm on Friday. Absolutely terrifying. Still, it came off okay I think.
- Jeremy Keith’s overview of dconstruct is pretty fun reading… He liked my talk, which makes me happy.
- Chicken Yoghurt has a wonderful Open Source Press Release that I’d encourage people to read and post to their own sites… Solid and entertaining.
- The Government, in responding to a petition about the iPlayer being cross-platform, has said that it’s a condition of its launch and will be made so as soon as possible My big hope is that this convinces any laggards at the BBC that going for the Microsoft-only route is not now and will never be an acceptable approach for a public service organisation in the UK.
- Women with meat for hair as spotted by Jason Kottke It made me think about what it would be like if your hair was actually made of sheaves of your own personal meat and was used, like dogs use their tongues, to cool you down. Gross.
- Just so people know, I’ll be doing an overview and introduction to Fire Eagle at the Future of Web Apps Expo in London in about a month I talked a bit about Fire Eagle at Hack Day and at dconstruct yesterday, but we should be pretty close to letting people see things a little more clearly by then.
- Newsdesigner has linked to video from TED of awesome Microsoft photo-related exploratory semantic-ness… Fascinated to see where this goes next. Would be amazing on the surface table…
- Newseum is an interactive museum about news Best thing is that it gets the front pages of a few hundred newspapers every single day. Which is neat.
- The new iPod Touch looks pretty astonishing, although it also looks a bit like a cut-down iPhone which is somehow less fascinating than a touchscreen iPod Lots of space in that display for other apps. Weirded out that there’s no Mail client.
- Lord Justice Sedley has made the extraordinary statement that he believes that all of the UK’s DNA (and the DNA of anyone who visits the company) should be permanently on file This really is quite extraordinary. With such a limited sense of how such information could be used and abused in the future making a call seems completely indefensible, particularly in the name of fairness…
- Kevin Marks talks about Andrew Keen and ‘slumming’ I find the idea of the net as corrupting as fascinating, given that my experience of the net has been of a culture that has been corrupted by business, media, public relations, self-important careerist journalists and the like…
- CollegeHumor.com shows what a meeting would be like if everyone who worked at the company acted like they might in comments threads on blogs… It’s all ‘first’, tit jokes and “ura ‘tard”. Funny, scary and depressing in roughly equal measure.
- Corporations are apparently not getting a lot of value from being in Second Life… This is not an enormous surprise, even if I think they’re missing out on some of the softer benefits. In the end, it’s press that they’re really going for. And a hint of future-looking zeitgeist-catching flare. That’s all.
- Yay! Dopplr crew have got some nice sexy funding from Joichi Ito, Saul Klein and sundry other excellent people That means Biddulph gets to work on it more over the next couple of years. Happy-making. Little jealous.
- Fascinating interview with John Humphrys on the threats to the Today programme and radio’s suitability to new media Deeply interesting to me and I couldn’t agree more with much of it, not that my voice counts for much. He’s not resistant to the future, he’s arguing for something counter-intuitive but clearly true.
- Tom Carden responds to my comments about Twitter Blocks It seemed only fair to link to him so that people could hear his feelings about people’s responses to them. Read my comment for more context.
- Eat 2 Love is a food blog that seems to get ripped off a lot by the mainstream press Her instinct is that people are just reading her site looking for interesting feature ideas and then ripping them off wholesale. There’s little she can do about it but draw people’s attention to it. So I thought I’d help.
- A really nice post by Dan Hill on the views that he’s experiencing in Sydney and the lack of skylines in London One of the things I’ve always found most unbearable about London is the lack of sky. There’s nowhere to get any distance and space around you, to see for a while. I grew up in Norfolk, where you have nothing but sky.
- Work hard and be nice to people Difficult to find fault with that as a sentiment, except that sometimes it’s very hard to be nice to everyone and that when you work too hard, your tolerance for people diminishes dramatically.
- Awesome! Fake Steve Jobs has said what I’ve been arguing in TV circles for bloody ages. I mean he’s a bit aggressive and stuff, but long-term there is limited future in broadcasting. The future’s in content production. The sooner some of them figure that out the better! It’s all about the rights, bitches!