plasticbag.org

• I have a new favourite episode of Futurama: “Less Than Hero” Includes the classic, awesome, beautiful line: “a badger with a troubled past and nothing left to lose”…
• Flickr Sucks! Highly entertaining riposte to Canadian photo-sharing site
• Wikipedia’s guide to Podcasting “The term podcasting plays upon the terms broadcasting and webcasting and is derived from the name of the iPod portable music player, the playback device of choice of many early podcast listeners.”
• What was in the Apple Store’s “Lucky Bags”? The Lucky Bags may contain a selection of the following items in any combination: Airport Express, Wireless Mouse, Wireless Keyboard, D-Link, Keynote, .Mac, iLife, iSight Camera, 20GB iPod, Silver iPod Mini, JBL on Tour…
• Steven Berlin Johnson moots two types of writers – those who own a space and those that traverse multiple spaces – which seems to have resonance to those of us whose work tends to wander across discipline For a while in 2000/2001 it felt like I could have become a pundit or consultant around weblogs of all things, but I went in another direction and then another after that. I wonder if that was the right thing to do…
• And lo they asked Metafilter “What’s the most head-scratch inducing present you’ve ever gotten?” I’ve already posted mine – a couple of years ago my uncle gave my brother a packet of crisps and me a can of Thai Chicken Soup. All beautifully wrapped up and everything…
• Matt Jones proses “Smart Muzak” Lovely ideas here – use ‘on hold’ music to convey through mood and pace and rhythm your place in the queue and how long it’ll be before your call is answered…
• OmniOutliner 3 Professional Beta OmniGroup are – as far as I’m concerned – the third part of the holy Apple trinity along with Apple themselves and Adobe. And OmniOutliner is a lovely little app…

I can’t be the only person who is suffering from an enormous collapse in motivation as we enter the last week before Christmas. I only wish I could say for certain that the timing was the only cause. Anyway, the consequence remains the same – I’m not feeling that an enormous amount of value is coming out of my head at the moment. And the stuff that does come out of my head isn’t necessarily often being translated to the written word.

I think there’s a danger that we conflate these things – that a site that you’ve used to express your thoughts for a very long time starts to become a burden/pressure and an impediment to thinking. So you don’t write your thoughts down in the same way. Are you still thinking? And if not, are you not thinking because you’re hung up on the immediate expression of those thoughts. Is the act of writing something down a process of ‘capturing’ your ideas, or is it just packaging and selling them off as quickly as possible. What if the social nature of your platform isn’t something you have time to engage with? How long does it take for a one-sided discussion to lose all meaning?

The big push in my life over the last few weeks has been a very different one. I’ve been organising stuff. Mostly I’ve been trying to impose order on my flat – working my way through many many years of paper and bought things and odds and sods of crap that I thought I couldn’t live without. I’ve learned two things – I can live without a hell of a lot of crap and that all imposed order is fleeting. In cleaning my flat I’ve recognised that writing for my site has come to have the same atmosphere to it as sorting through paper and doing the washing up. It feels like an action that is pure maintenance. Day on day, work must be done. But where’s the end result? Where’s the epic project with the huge pay-off or the addictive sense of satisfaction that makes everything else seem worthwhile?

I’ve been pushing for that feeling at work a lot too. Being at the heart of a big project that I really believed in has spoiled me for much of this other stuff. Those sensations of getting somewhere, of contributing and of helping to build something great are quite intoxicating and rewarding. But what to do when your have to move on? How do you get yourself re-engaged in a new project? When your back is to one source of heat, maybe it’s harder than ever to discern other warmth around you. Unless, perhaps, the heat is moving with you?

My feeling is that the process isn’t enough, the thinking isn’t enough, the milking and shifting of thoughts from my head onto screens and across the world isn’t enough. Organising stuff, maintaining stuff, keeping the wheels turning – not good enough. I want more. I need more. But maybe there isn’t more. Because there aren’t ends, there aren’t conclusions. Histories are structured in the act of telling. Breaks and shifts – beginnings and endings – these appear after the fact through interpretation. Am I struggling for a narrative closure and a ‘brand new chapter’ that the world simply cannot afford me? Am I struggling to fit the flows of experience into the same structuring world-views and aspirations to totality that I use professionally every day?

Or maybe I need a few days off and a bit of a change of context. Maybe all I need in the run up to Christmas is a few easy drinks, some food and family in Norfolk and a complete forcible dislocation from the most challenging, frustrating, rewarding and hard-to-get-over year of my life so far. I’m hoping it’s true. Is a phase shift on the horizon? I think that it might be, but it could be a mirage. Roll on 2005? Well I guess we’ll see.

• BBC press release about Radio stats – mentions our podcasting trial The podcasting trial of ‘In Our Time’ that Mr Webb’s been pointing to over at his site gets a good positive push by esteemed leader, Simon Nelson…
• Mr Webb talks about podcasting ‘In Our Time’ I meant to post this ages ago. Who knows – maybe I did post it ages ago. Anyway, you can get – for a limited time – MP3s of In Our Time delivered to your computer and from there – your iPod…
• Slightly weird and clunky BBC Zeitgeist page still includes interesting factoids Fascinating project this one – with clear parallels to the Google zeitgeist pages – except with an enormously smaller user base. Interested to see what direction it moves in. Could be too literal…?

• Trusty Sidekicks A new comics-related weblog by the gorgeous and charming Sparky of Ultrasparky.org – replete with nostalgia, full of cool old ads from comic books and dosed up on homo juice. Awesome…
• BBC relaunches 6music’s website So the department in which I work have relaunched the website for 6music and – along with the Radio 3 site that I helped out on – it’s one of the most true-to-the-medium sites that the BBC’s done to date. Very nice.
• The new home secretary is sticking with ID cards – despite the fact that I don’t know anyone in this country who actually wants them “The new home secretary, Charles Clarke, today rejected calls to reconsider plans for ID cards after Labour backbenchers suggested the departure of David Blunkett yesterday should prompt a rethink.”

• Get The Booty Ye Deserve! Watch in shock as the ninja / pirate battle moves into altogether more modern and frankly litigous grounds…

• UK: 2004 TV shows fail to generate mass audiences Only six programmes in 2004 attract an audience in excess of 15 million viewers. In 2003, 50 programmes got between 17 and 20 million viewers. In 1999, 177 programmes had more than 15 million viewers.
• But though the big programmes are losing out, the audience isn’t watching any less TV (pdf) “Television viewing has proved remarkably resilient to increased demands on consumers … and in fact has increased slightly over the last decade (from 25.6 hours per
  household per week in 1993 to 26.1 hours in 2003)”

• 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.”