plasticbag.org

So someone wants to be my friend on Friendster. Yawn. God I’m popular. Blah blah blah. Except – what’s this – they have a user number of something like 750,000!? My god, how many people are on this damn thing!? So I go digging around in the ‘new people’ pane and the user numbers are around one million two hundred and fifty thousand! That’s insane! So I dig around and figure out you can get your own user number by clicking onto the second page of your list of friends. Assuming, of course, that you have that many friends. (Shines fingernails, looks smug.) And it turns out that my user number is 2175. Which I think demonstrates how awesomely cool I am, until I then figure out that the person I know with the lowest Friendster number is Azeem, which rather puts paid to that theory. (Shit-eating grin to camera.)

It’s such a shame we didn’t figure all this out earlier – I’d love to have tracked this stuff in some way – see a graph of how the member numbers have gone up over time. (Much like Mr Webb did with the Blogger post ids. Which makes me think – did he ever make that public? Hmm. Probably not.) So anyway – now I’ve got all these friends, what am I supposed to do with them? I had a sudden realisation that for many of my friends, I’m the only gay person they know. The whole point of Friendster is that you meet hot cool people through the hot cool people you already know. Then you make out and move in with each other. Which all rather depends on (1) Having cool friends and (2) Them knowing hot poofs. Darn it. This isn’t going to work at all…

While digging around in my site to try and find some quotes for a piece I’m presenting at EUvolt today (I’m so bloody busy my ears are bleeding), I stumbled upon an old piece on Newspaper columnists that Keither Waterhouse wrote years ago for The Journalist and which I – rather cheekily – transcribed because it was so pertinent to webloggers. Read it immediately: Keith Waterhouse on Weblogs?

“It is 106 years since Jerome K Jerome related his difficulties in trying to open a tin of pineapple in Three Men In A Boat. Unless you can improve this classic account, keep your problems with packaging to yourself.”

My colleague, Mr Webb, has done it again. Today’s project is an attempt to find The Web’s favourite colour. Here’s how it works – you take a photo of your favourite colour with your camera phone and send it via MMS to avit@historicalfact.com. Then behind the scenes, the colours in the photo are completely averaged out, creating a representation of your colour that can be given a hex value. All the colours sent in are averaged out and the background of the page comes gradually to represent the web’s favourite colour…

At the moment, the site’s quite sparse – and the favourite colour appears to be (rather unfortunately) grey. But I get the impression that there’s much more work being done. Obvious things that leap to mind would be a display of the most recently sent in pictures and rolling averages of the last hour, last day, last month. Matt’s probably way ahead of me on all that stuff though, so I’ll shut up before I embarrass myself further…

Another quote from The Cambridge Spies because I got it for my birthday and I’m watching it again because I really enjoyed it last time…

Queen: “Never trust a man with a bad moustache. Homosexualists never have moustaches… Have you noticed? I think it’s a signal… To other chaps… ‘Look! No moustache! Come and get me!’ Ponces and spies, Anthony. The people with the most to hide never have moustaches. So which are you, Anthony? Ponce or spy?”

Anthony Blunt: “Oh… A little of both… Aren’t we all?”

On The Cambridge Spies: “In a dirty bogus business, riddled with deceit, manipulation and betrayal, an intelligence service maintains it sanity by developing its own concept of what it believes to be the truth. Those agents who confirm this perceived truth – even if it is wrong – prosper. Those who deny it – even if they are right – fall under suspicion.” It all sounds terribly familiar. Perhaps internet punditry is the new espionage?

The awesome stairs of Broadcasting House…

Until I started my new job at the BBC – with the exception of miserably short stints in cyber-cafés and the like – I hadn’t used a Windows PC in getting on for two years. Now I’m compelled to. My work e-mail is only accessible if I persuade the hated beast to allow me access. Worse still is the effect this has on my outboard brain – that place where my articulation of ideas occurs, that home of recorded impression. My iBook hippocampus – the component of my prostheses that deals specifically with the creation of memory – has been hacked from the network and sits like a thousand pound brick by my desk all day.

As a result my extended connections to my social network – mediated through my alien stone, my totem computer – continue to atrophy. My sense of what’s going on around me is collapsing. I’m no longer sitting at the centre of the Panopticon. Instead I’m peripheral. What is central is the urinal of Windows machinery that, if I am thirsty for information, I must drink from. The internet that squeezes its way through task managers, continual crashing and word processors in browsers is not an internet I’m familiar with. It’s an ill-formed, thick and sticky horror – like Roast Lamb gone cold and congealed with fat. Coughed up by a used car salesman.

Or maybe the shame is that I’m beginning to get used to it…

Thanks to Mr Hammersley, I’m currently playing with version 1.1.1 of everyone’s favourite collaborative editing tool Hydra. The big change? There’s now a built in live-updating HTML preview facility. Some of the implications are fairly obvious – you can now easily collaborate on the writing of web pages in all their glory. Less obvious is the fact that you can now collaboratively write notes in HTML – which could make the composition of semantically well-constructed collaborative writing that can be easily web-published easier than ever… I’m fascinated…