plasticbag.org

So after a conversation with Chris Heathcote earlier today, it has occured to me that I should let people know about the current status of Barbelith and remind people about some old bits of functionality that we had in the day that suddenly got popular in the background and which I completely forgot about…

For those of you who don’t know, Barbelith is an experimental discussion board that I set up a few years ago with later help from Cal. It’s a discussion board with a roughly counter-cultural / intellectualist spin, and it’s been running now for about six and a half years. It has fora on all kinds of neat stuff, from gender politics and philosophy through to chaos magick, film theory and comic books.

Unfortunately a (long) while back it came under attack by some really persistent trolls and so as a consequence we temporarily closed it to new memberships until we could do some technology fixes behind the scenes. These fixes were designed to really push the envelope of community design around some interesting principles that I’d been thinking around. Unfortunately, both the redevelopment work and the weblog I started to discuss creative online community development stuttered under the weight of work pressures and haven’t really started since. So the community hasn’t had many new members except ones that I’ve manually let in. This has been a terrible terrible shame and hasn’t helped the community develop, but the board’s members have fought manfully through this period and remain an engaged and intelligently argumentative bunch.

Recently some of the community proposed that they should come to my rescue by taking on much of the work that was supposed to be systematised and doing it by hand. It’s a tremendously cool response from them – and one that I think could work (at least for the short-term). The consequence is that now, if you want to join Barbelith as a member then there’s a better chance now than pretty much at any time over the last year. All you need to do is to read this thread here and do what it says. Fundamentally it just comes down to you persuading the members concerned that you are roughly who you say you are and that you’re not a lunatic. If they’re comfortable with that, then they’ll e-mail me your address and I’ll invite you onto the site sometime in the couple of weeks after that. It’s not the most elegant of systems, but I think it’ll work until we can sort out something better.

Alongside this I should also talk about the Barbelith RSS feeds which we launched in August 2002 (wow, nearly three years ago now). At the time I don’t know that we really expected the explosion of interest in RSS that has happened more recently, and since I always assumed that the existence of the feeds was pretty well-known, I’ve never really bothered to promote them. Anyway, there’s more information about them here: RSS Feeds and Newsreaders – including ways to hack the URL so that you can get feeds for specific parts of the board. Can I particularly recommend these following feeds as being a really good way to keep up with things that people are talking about:

• Latest threads about philosophy, science and current affairs
• Latest threads about chaos magick, religion and mysticism
• Latest threads about books, comics, music and film
• Upcoming Barbelith Events

I might try and get a little work done on these feeds over the weekend, but no promises. In the meantime, add them to your RSS reader today. Now it’s nearly 1am again and I need to go to bed.

• Whaleflip is a happy Greenpeace game of whales saving submarines
  The blue whales extrude bubbles, the pink ones pulse elevating noises. It’s easier than it sounds…
  (categories: denisewilton)

• It’s not funny because it’s rude, it’s funny cos…
  Well because it looks like it’s funny because it’s rude…
• Lions in coffee cream
  Beautiful, elegant and I hope it was intentional
• Mediocre reviews for Daft Punk’s new album: Human After All
  I’ll buy it anyway, of course, and pray that everyone else is just wrong…
• Rogue Amoeba is “Airfoil” allows you to pump any audio from your computer through AirTunes
  We tried it with some television last night and it was a full two-seconds behind. Someone has to fix this. It’s too important…
• Many-to-Many: Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases
  Amazon pulling out improbable phrases from books – could they be used for fauxonomic tagging?
• Another year another “Is ETech discriminatory” thread
  I wish I could say I agreed and saw a cause here worth fighting for, but the argument is starting to sound a bit shrill to me now…
• Matt Jones on the new Doctor Who
  Interesting thoughts on the publically-leaked series from the BBC
• Another attempt to formalise and structure fauxonomic tagging which I fear is doomed to fail
  But it triggered some interesting ideas for me around how a site that aggregated tags should operate…
• If you hug a needie the other two bitch about the third one behind his back…
  Wonderful implementation of pervasively networked toys from Tom Igoe’s talk at ETech 2005
• Junkie’s Little Helper – as mentioned by Tom Igoe at ETech 2005
  Tracks your drug use and keeps all your friends informed about how high you are in a chatroom
• Cat fungus rots your brain, and makes you slutty or mean…
  I’m suspicious of the science, but I love the story. Thanks to Dan Pike for pointing me in this direction…

Oh shit. I think I just woke up everyone else I’m staying in the hotel with by sticking headphones into my Mac, pressing play and then ramping up the volume when nothing appeared to happen – forgetting that the computer was busy streaming all the noise to Matt and Matt‘s stereo in their room downstairs. I’m going to get lynched.

I’m in Los Angeles now at the glorious little Farmer’s Daughter Hotel near the Farmer’s Market with Manar, Webb and Biddulph. It is raining outside. The hotel’s suites are awesome – although we’ve already put paid to much of the ambience by dousing the entire place in cables, airport express wifi networks, pizza boxes, beer bottles, bottles of coke, bits of paper and chunks of apple packaging. Ah, beautiful geekdom. I salute thee. Tomorrow it’s off to the airport and back to London.

I’m still in ETech recovery mode – I’ve been processing and reprocessing my notes, trying to find the themes of the year, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait a little longer for that because they’re not ready yet. My general reaction has been a bit subdued though. The last two years I’ve been to the conference I felt as if someone had hit the brain-reboot button a couple of times. This time, for the most part, little came as a surprise. The positive spin on that might be that I’m now so well-connected in the future tech sphere that I’ve become cynical and hard to impress – but I don’t think I believe that for one moment. Matt Jones has taken back his scepticism about this year’s agenda, but I’ve still yet to make up my mind about whether or not he was right all along…

There were more than a few things that got the heart pounding, of course. I’ve never been more delighted to have my cynicism proven wrong than I was during Ev Williams / Odeo / Podcasting talk. In the space of about twenty-five minutes I went from wondering if Ev had burned-out on Blogger through to evangelising Odeo all over the place and wondering if he had any jobs that I’d be good at. I’ll write more about this later, I think, because there’s so much there that people should really be getting excited about and I want to do it justice.

The two papers we were in town to do felt completely different to me. I’ve already written a bit about the Reinventing Radio paper, but I didn’t say much about the reaction to it. In the room somehow it felt a bit flat to me – that people weren’t sparking off it as much as they’d expected to. There was uniform engagement, but at a rather light level. I’ll be posting some more stuff around this area once I’ve had a change to take stock a bit and get myself in the right frame of mind – and I think we’re going to try and open up one of the demos we did during the event as well. That might help people start to get the directions we were talking in.

The Programme Information Pages paper was a completely different kettle of fish though. The room was barely a third full to start off with, and I was worried enough about people getting why it was exciting beforehand that I felt compelled to actually state out loud beforehand that they might not. And then the screen went down in the middle of Gavin’s part of the session which threw everyone off whack a bit. Things did not – in a word – appear to be going terribly well. Even when the paper ended, a good block of the audience seemed entirely non-plussed by the whole thing. But what was extraordinary to me was that there was a proportion of the audience who genuinely seemed to get what we were talking about and when they did they got very excited. After the paper each of us got into separate passionate discussions with three or four people who had really seen some of the implications of the very simplest of ideas implemented properly and what that could mean for a world in which at least one significant group of people were moving into a post-broadcast mindset. I felt much much better about this paper than I did about the radio one – and I’ll be posting up the presentation itself in all its slightly unstyled glory in a few days.

In terms of the BBC presence at the event, I think that Paula LeDieu’s final High Order Bit on the Creative Archive really drew everything together and people who’d seen all of our papers started to see the edges of a unified vision of the future. Or at least I hope that’s what happened. Paula’s brief paper blew the room away at least a couple of times. It’s an exciting time to be at the BBC…

• A really nice and positive response to our ETech paper on Programme Information Pages Yeah, I got quite over-excited by the end of the paper and couldn’t stop droning on about it…
• Robert Kaye on the “Reinventing Radio” talk we did at ETech 2005 “I can only hope that some folks from US radio companies are paying attention to the BBC. If you aren’t you’ll be out of a job soon!”
• David Weinberger summarises the “Reinventing Radio” paper “They end by asking what the social implications of networked TiVo would be.”
• David Weinberger summarises the “Programme Information Pages” paper A couple of the quotes could be misinterpreted, but otherwise not a bad nutshelling…
• I keep coming back to typographica’s top fonts of 2004… …so I guess I should actually bookmark the damn thing. Currently loving the look of Neo Sans and Neo Tech…
• The route of the trainline that we took down the West Coast of America Did you know there are no clear train routes between LA and San Francisco? Bizarre!
• Chive restaurant in San Diego Pros: Food good. Cons: No obvious ones. Possible correlates: Felt a bit kak all evening.

• The Project for Open Source Media “POSM (The Project for Open Source Media) is an independent research and development entity for the development and deployment of a standardized Open Media Platform.”
• It looks like The West Wing is coming back for another season Which is a really good thing – because the current series is kind of rocking my world…

• The future of web development is here
  Or is it just a passing fetish?

When I first heard the word “Folksonomy” I was sure it was fauxonomy. Everyone was kind of reeling at the neologism but for me it sounded neat. Fauxonomy! Like a fake taxonomy! Or a false one! Nice. I mean it’s a hideous hideous neologism, but hey… When I found out it was folksonomy I was a little disappointed, to be honest. I mean it’s a neat enough word, but somehow the sound is better than the spelling, and the associated meanings are so different. Not that I wouldn’t rather someone came up with a nice properly international Greek-derived word that everyone else could understand. But hey…

This post is coming from the Folksonomy panel at ETech 2005 and was inspired by lots of people shouting at me on IRC to write this up as quickly as possible. Whatchagonnado?