Category: Random

Some of the things I’m thinking about at the moment – at work and not at work – that I’m having real trouble articulating for some reason but that maybe I can do something with if I set some of them free:

• Collaborative online experiences for friends, small groups, one-on-one interactions – going places to do things with friends, co-browsing, co-experiencing, what it’s like being at the cinema with a friend, backgrounded/instinctual non-verbal communications, presence-and-flocking, hello, Non-stranger-spaced, non-subject-focused discussions, tiny permeable-membrane reducers, three degrees;
• Routinely time-shifted media, ubiquities of recording and collation technologies, “Death of live”, time-based design and the end of time-based content, programming in the middle of the night is as important as during the middle of the day, navigating insane scheduling information, worn paths, distribution technologies, bittorrent;
• Simplicities of structures, metadatas, identifiers, organisational principles, multi-use tags, clumpings, technological strata versus social orders;
• Leaderships, relationships, political managements, social engagement as game, rules of games, message-boards as prime structural spaces to test political systems, American free-market reputation economies, capturing ill-formed relationships, alpha behaviour, dominance, leadership, leader-led vs. leader-less groups;
• Information in the air, tiny LCD screens, scrolling data printed on milk-cartons, teddy bears that react to the weather, Ceefax, smoke-alarms, application-updates through the radio…

Gah. I can’t think properly. Too much stuff piling up unexpressed. Too many things I’m not expressing properly. Too many opportunities not to produce stuff of suitable quality and value.

Half-Klimt (one, two, three), half-Rothko (one, two, three) – I know they’ve been everywhere, but they’re so bloody beautiful: Every Playboy Centrefold: The Decades. There’s something so elusive and gestural about them – and the traces of writing and iconography lingering around the bodies just makes the whole thing seem even less to do with flesh and still more numinous.

The same artist achieved similar effects with a triptych of stills of late night chat-show presenters and used the same process on images of homes for sale, which is equally breath-taking.

Omigod. I completely forgot my weblogging birthday on Saturday. This site has now been going for a full four years and two days. Four years and two days of almost daily pre-fabricated, disposable weblogging goodness. That’s one thousand four hundred and sixty three days since I started weblogging. Worse still – that’s three thousand nine hundred and forty nine posts. An average of 2.7 posts per day. Dear God. When will it end? Will I never tire of writing this crap? In twenty years, will I have an Established 1999 sign out front? Will I be in total information capturing mode as I’m shoved into an old folks home? Will there be a bloody keyboard in my grave? Will the first thing that happens in Atheist Heaven be that some crotchetty old bastard with a toothless smile hands me an ethereal laptop with spiritual-fidelity wireless soulnet access before demanding that I write something pithy about halos?

Central London’s bus routes have a new feature – small machines that you must buy your ticket from before they will let you embark. They have two particularly interesting features. Firstly they are the least well-designed / usable ticket machines I’ve ever seen, with the buttons that you are forced to press before you pay placed (cunningly) about half a foot below the place where you put the money in. So you see loads of people putting in money and then pressing buttons and looking a bit blank when they should be doing it the other way around. They form in little clots around the machines and make it impossible for everyone else who isn’t quite as dumb to pay for a ticket before the bus moves off. It’s very frustrating.

The other significant feature is equally annoying. The accursed machines are just too easy for people to game. Every single machine I use on a regular basis is clogged up with money at least twice a week. The reason? There’s a guy who roams up and down Oxford Street, putting in sticking and/or clogging-up substances (gum, maybe?) into the paying slot. He then waits for the money to build up and then comes along later in the day to harvesting the machines of lovely lovely cash. I have lost several pounds to this nefarious prankster. He is … objectionable … in my sight.

Anyway – yesterday I got to the bus stop, put in a pound, pressed the button (wrong order again, dammit, bloody machines), then pressed the eject button and then the proper button (first this time, good Tom) and capped it all off with the insertion of a nice round pound-coin. And what response did I get? Nothing. So I pressed the ‘eject money’ button once more. Nothing. So then I thumped it with my fist… And… Jackpot! Five shiny pounds clang down into the tray at the bottom. I am rich! My bus ticket karma is strong and I have been rewarded!

One stop later and the world finds equilibrium. Two people get on the bus without tickets. They want to get off again and buy tickets while the bus waits. The bus driver is understandably cross and refuses to let them do this as the ticket machine process is long and complex. They refuse to get out. Everyone on the bus shouts at them. Even I shout at them which is a surprise (I don’t shout at people much in public – only at the infestation of charity workers that colonise Central London). But they won’t get off. They say they’ve been waiting for half an hour. Everyone on the bus says they were waiting for half an hour too thank you very much. After ten minutes of stand-off, I get off the bus, buy them both tickets, thrust them in their hands, give them a piece of my mind about their behaviour (I’m becoming my mother) and sit down again on my seat. But they throw their tickets on the floor, the bus driver refuses to let them stay on board, the police arrive and then finally they get dragged off – possibly (for all I know) to Colditz or Alcatraz. At the next stop, almost exactly the same thing happens again! Again! Would you believe it! Another clump of people sans tickets, poncing around and shouting at the bus driver, causing a big stink and being unreasonable. Only this time I’m wise to their tricks. No buying people tickets for no good reason for me… Oooooh no… Not me.

And so time passes and we can finally see the great plan of the karmic network in its totality. For my extra four pounds that appeared from nowhere, I must pay two back and suffer over half an hour in delays. This is my destiny and I embrace it grudgingly. The world is a complex, intricate, designed place. And those bloody bus ticket machines are right at the heart of it…

So there’s an article about the BBC’s iCan project over at Wired.com: BBC Offers Power to the People. It’s an interesting, if slightly frustrating piece, for a whole range of reasons, but there’s one misconception that I think needs to be cleared up.

“In addition to finding the iCan issues a bit trivial, Kirkcaldy, a 20-year-old antiwar activist, doubts the BBC’s ability, as a government-owned entity, to objectively manage the site’s issues.”

The BBC very clearly and very much is not owned by the government. It’s an organisation originally created by a conglomerate of wireless manufacturers supported by a license fee that gave it financial independence from the Government that was given a royal charter in 1927. From that point onwards it has been answerable in principle only to the British people via the Board of Governors who are appointed to act as trustees for the public interest – ensuring it’s accountable and independent.

That’s not to deny that the BBC has a relationship with government – because members of the Board of Governers are appointed by the Queen under recommendation from the Prime Minister of the day. And the Government has a certain amount of power over the BBC – they approve the level of the license fee for a start (but are in no way responsible for its collection) – but there’s a very specific piece of legislation that guarantees editorial independence that should be evident to anyone who has seen the recent spat between the Labour government and the BBC.

If you’re sufficiently interested, there’s a great deal of information about the history of the BBC online as well as about how and why it operates.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up, there are a few more pieces up on Everything in Moderation:

1. Tagging Difficult Users with Infectious Markers
2. On Killfiles / Ignore User Functions in online communities
3. Kuro5hin’s “Notes Towards a Moderation Economy”
4. An old-school guide to Usenet Trolling

If reading (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything on the web wasn’t good enough for you then it looks like the Aula Exposure book which includes that piece, loads of other stuff from other attendees as well as writing on The Future of Copyrighted Media, Riding the Wave of Personal Publishing and Creating Celebrity, Protecting Privacy is now available for sale (in what looks like a beautifully bound edition) for roughly $50 US.

So here we go – something to do. Are you a web developer with some time on your hands that wants to do something creative, useful and potentially world-impacting? Then Tom Steinberg’s charitable web incubator MySociety.org might be an ideal environment for your talents. It’s an attempt to build applications that might enrich or contribute to civic society – applications that fulfil a need just like UpMyStreet.com andFaxYourMP.com do. There’s an article in the Guardian today which explains it more successfully and eloquently than I can hope to. Here’s a quick pithy excerpt:

We are setting up an organisation you might think of as a charitable incubator for those who want to develop software to make society better, and who want to pay the bills while doing it. We’re calling it MySociety.org. And we need your help … Companies don’t produce these tools because there isn’t money in it. Government has a different problem. It doesn’t seem able to take advantage of what the internet is best at – applications that are cheap to produce, that do something peopleneed and cost roughly the same no matter how many people are using them. Sadly, the public sector seems bound by all sorts of obligations that prevent it from being able to create such cheap and cheerful services … Complaining about this isn’t any good – we need to demonstrate how it can be done. Which is where MySociety.org comes in.

My theory regarding the awesome O’Reilly-sponsored wifi at Foyles cafÈ on Charing Cross Road goes a little like this:

Tim O’Reilly: “Hey Cory, how you doing?”
Cory Doctorow: “You know what sucks? Wifi in London.”
Tim O’Reilly: “Hmm…” {thinks}

A couple of days ago I noticed that I couldn’t add Azeem Azhar to my iChat AV contacts list. I kept getting returned “Feedbag Error 17” which seemed entirely unexpected and unpleasantly phrased. Was I a feedbag? Had iChat eaten Azeem? The mind boggled.

After several hours of consideration, another option occurred to me. Perhaps iChat was trying to protect me from excessive contact with Azeem! Maybe my beautiful new Pantherised beast was being defensive! “No, Tom!” It was going, “He’s bad news! He’ll tell you that you work in Marketing again and you’ll get all cross and defensive and make that ludicrous speech about being an artisan! Please! Please! Let me protect you from the embarrassment!” At which point, I assumed, feedbag laptop decided to chow-down on poor Mr Azhar’s AIM name with fierce hungry vengeance. I touted this theory around a few of my friends. General consensus, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”

Well now I know that I’m not alone and that it’s nothing personal, Mr Azhar! My Powerbook loves you and iChat loves you and all I had to do was throw away a couple of my childhood friends who – frankly – are never online anyway and kind of sucked at web stuff. In the end the problem was all caused by having too many friends – apparently AIM can only handle 150 contacts – at least that is according to Mssrs. Unsanity, Rael and Webb.

But it occurs to me that there’s something slightly suspicious about all of this. A couple of days ago I tried searching for information about this error message, but it was nowhere. There was literally no information. Today, there’s a search result returned, and posts about the subject on three separate weblogs. So what’s happened? Is it a new error message or is it just we’ve all hit the limit at the same time? Or has the number of buddies available changed? I smell a mystery!