plasticbag.org

• Creative Commons and Wired create the Wired CD
  With a whole variety of random artists including the Beastie Boys and Thievery Corporation
• Paula LeDieu will be attending a session to talk about the BBC’s Creative Archive Project later this week
  The Creative Archive is a fascinating concept – and hopefully one that the projects I’ve been working on for the last few months will help to realise
• Help promote Firefox by getting your name in the New York Times
  $30 a shot gets you a name in the New York Times advert as well as helping the open source community and encouraging real human beings to use the best browser on the PC (although not necessarily on the Mac)
• Unjustified – why justified text so often doesn’t work on the web
  Some really nice insights here about text formatting and page layout in general
• Wikipedia’s article on MI5
  Within the government community, MI5 is colloquially known as “The Box” (after its official address – PO Box 3255, London SW1P 1AE) or simply “Five.”
• Business 2.0 on Firefox – “Microsoft’s Worst Nightmare”
  I think the most interesting thing about the article is that they’d open-sourced the browser to try and make it survive and take off. And for years it didn’t look like that was going to happen. And then, you know what… It did…

• Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief
  A stunning BBC documentary tracing the history and key figures of atheism – and one I doubt you’ll find accessible with BitTorrent
• Stunning pictures of ‘the Gherkin’ skyscraper in London
• The Donut Hole
  “It’s the Quality!”
• International Standard Recording Code is the international identification system for sound recordings and music videorecordings
  Each ISRC is a unique and permanent identifier for a specific recording which can be permanently encoded into a product as its digital fingerprint. Encoded ISRC provide the means to automatically identify recordings for royalty payments.
• Wikipedia’s entry on Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
  When Springfield became over-patriotic and took the name “Liberty-Ville”, Apu quickly caught on. He renamed his kids Lincoln, Freedom, Condoleezza, Coke, Pepsi, Manifest Destiny, Apple Pie, and Superman.
• New Future Needed: Apply Within
  If you ask me, we didn’t look past 2000 as it approached and now it looks like it’s going to be ten or fifteen years until we’ve regained enough perspective to provide interesting views of the future
• Fiona Romeo talks about the upcoming web creative generation
  Another piece that gestures towards the upcoming mass amateurisation of nearly everything
• Usability thoughts on a sitemap on every page
  This work was behind some of the thinking on the new Flickr bottom bar and I think probably influenced some of the design work on iCan and other Matt Jones projects
• The original PoorButHappy Columbia site demonstrating the large but apparently useful bottom navigational sitemap
  This link courtesy of the Wayback machine, since the original page is now offline
• Colloquy IRC 2.0 beta is available to play with
  I can very much recommend Colloquy for the Mac – it’s for the most part a really nicely polished and elegant to use little application

• The Baghdad Blogger goes to Washington And the immigration people have the nerve to ask the stupid question, “Sir, are you religious?”
• Big Brother builds ‘Truman Show’ village People expected to “spend decades” in the built-for-tv town
• Jeff Veen talks about Adaptive Path’s reworking of the Creative Commons site I love the process and applaud the clarity of the final product – but slightly disappointed that it looks quite bland
• The Morning News hosts a roundtable for MP3 Bloggers So this is a little old, I’ll accept, but I never post something until I’ve read it.
• Bat Boy: The Musical A Rocky Horror meets Little Shop of Horrors meets Edward Scissorhands musical that I attended last night. Difficult to put into words what I thought of it…
• This is the way that I’m currently posting my linklog via delicious to plasticbag.org It’s clearly provisional functionality and I have my thoughts on how it could be improved, but at least it works
• AudioSlicer chops up MP3s at the quiet bits Didn’t work so desperately well for me, but the concept is exactly what I’m after…

• From Wikipedia: The many meanings of Constructivism Across graphic design, teaching, philosophy and many others…
• Flash do-it-yourself Constructivist Compositionals This is really nice – flash posters in a Constructivist style that are covered in structures of colours and shapes that a user can turn off and on at will – it’s like a structure for art rather than an art-work in itself.
• Video for Franz Ferdinand’s “This Fire” Still with the Constructivist theme – this new video from Franz Ferdinand manages to merge Constructivist poster art with comic books, megalomania, infographics and 80s Synth Pop style. Awesome.
• Radio 4 on Microsoft PowerPoint and the Decline of Civilisation (Real Audio) “Part of a controlling tendency of modern life – taking things that are long, complex and serious and turning them into something simple and trivial.” I think to an extent this is bunk – but the representative from Microsoft doesn’t do them any favours.

• A definition of Skeuomorph from Wikipedia
  “It refers to a derivative object which retains now useless design elements which were necessarily present in the original. Skeuomorphs may be employed to add an air of authenticity and/or antiquity. It derives from the Greek words for ‘vessel’ and ‘shape

• Cocoal.icio.us – Cocoa del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X I’ve been looking for a URL manager app for a while, and Cocoal.icio.us also hooks in with tag-lovely del.icio.us as well
• CNN.com – Transcript of Jon Stewart on Crossfire I wish we had something like The Daily Show in the UK – our political comedians routinely miss the point, I fear. I guess we’ve got Have I Got News For You.
• Video of Jon Stewart on Crossfire As currently destroying BitTorrent and world bandwidth courtesy of Mr Leonard Lin (hey Leonard!)
• FAQs for the X-box game “Fable” Includes tips on getting yourself a man-wife
• Drop-down menus – use sparingly An old Nielson article from 2000 on the appropriate use of drop-down menus. Still some good stuff in it…
• Mixed reviews for Team America: World Police But I still want to see it – The South Park movie was art.

• David Sifry’s Wiki: BlogsAndPolitics This is an attempt at generating a comprehensive timeline of when weblogs had a significant impact on politics
• Poll reveals world anger at Bush Eight out of 10 countries favour Kerry for president – I only wish that I would trust all Americans to think that it would be in their best interests to hear the world’s anxieties about their president rather than to be affronted by these polls and react
• The World backs John Kerry in the US Presidential elections Unfortunately none of us get to vote, which frankly is beginning to be a problem if you consider the enormous impact that the policies of the US administration has on the rest of the world
• What the world thinks of America (Flash) A slightly more in depth trip through the statistics
• Frankie roberto on the BBCi Interactive TV Spooks Game
• Parallel text commentary to audio tracks using .movs
• Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay guide
• MediaGuardian.co.uk | Broadcast | The making of the terror myth
• We like Americans – we don’t like Bush Another article from the Guardian that goes into detail about the world’s opinions of President Bush. I can honestly say that I have no comprehension of why anyone could consider voting for him. Key line: “It appears to be personal because the public draw
• Thatcher – Hurry up and die… Posters spotted by my colleague Mr Biddulph illustrate a commonly-held desire in the UK

Sandi Toksvig – a bright and highly entertaining British comedian and presenter – has this to say about the upcoming civil partnerships bill:

About three years ago I asked a member of the Labour NEC why the government, with its huge majority, was taking so long to get rid of the iniquitous section 28. The white, middle-aged, middle-class man said: “You have to understand Sandi, we’re all middle-aged, white, middle-class men and actually we don’t give a damn about gay rights.”

If the government had truly cared, the legislation would have started in the Commons and the Parliament Act could have been used to push the law through. Sadly it is a way of doing business which is reserved for foxes and not human beings.

Thanks to thegayvote.co.uk for that one. I find the world extremely depressing sometimes. Extremely. Extraordinarily.

It’s a bit late in the day, but if anyone wants to join Jim Speth, Ben Cerveny and myself for a breakfast around 18th and Castro, we’ll be at a place called Luna from around 11 until around 1ish. That’s when I have to head off to the airport.

I’m back in San Francisco after the Online Community Report summit and most of a reasonable night’s sleep (didn’t wake up until nearly 6am) and now trying to work out what to do for the next twenty-eight odd hours or so before I have to be back at the airport. A few days ago I mooted the possibility of a big breakfast with cool people somewhere tomorrow morning – however (1) Cory has suggested that my proposed venue wasn’t terribly practical and (2) I don’t know how many people are interested in coming… So I’m not totally sure what to do about that. Anyone got any ideas?

Otherwise pretty much the world’s my oyster today. I need to get some clothes and visit the Apple store while I’m here (mmm – weak dollar is gooood) and I think I’m going to visit Gayland this evening, which should be cool – but the rest of the day is totally up for grabs. Ping me if you’ve got any ideas… I’ll be on- and off-line all day.