Before I start, a brief shout-out to everyone coming over here from BBC News. I’m kind of overwhelmed by how many of you there are. I wish I’d had a bit more time to slap up a new lick of paint and fix all the little bugs that have crept into the site over the last year or so while I’ve been working my arse off.
But quite a lot of that work is really starting to pay off now, so I’m not going to apologise too much. I’m at ETech 2005 right now and I’m watching Tim O’Reilly on stage. Rael Dornfest’s just done his session on what it means to remix and why that’s the theme of the event. Tim’s talking about design patterns and Christopher Alexander and open source stuff. And as usual it’s all looking pretty interesting and plays right smack into the heart of my deeply held prejudices, which is always nice. I’m not going to post up all my notes this year – I’m concentrating on absorbing as much as possible and staying calm and focused for our presentation this afternoon: Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software (with Matt Webb, Paul Hammond and Matt Biddulph). We’ll post that presentation up after the event, of course. If you’re there, feel free to give me a ping and we’ll meet up or something! Particularly interested in talking about social software, media distribution, post-broadcast tech, PVRs and EPGs and the like…
So I’m going to start this post with a comment that someone just posted on my site, because I think it’s possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever read and I’m too sheepish to start the damn thing in any other way:
Congrats on the Bloggie! I don’t suppose you grew up in York, did you? Cos I used to babysit for a kid called Thomas Coates… and if it was you, you may well remember me, seeing as I was the babysitter who burnt your house down while babysitting for you… for which I am supremely sorry.
Thanks for the comment Clare, but no, I’m afraid to say that you never burned down my family home. I almost feel guilty that I’m the wrong Tom after such a heartfelt apology!
Anyway, so this was all a sneaky way of talking about the Bloggies which were announced today. I was really surprised when plasticbag.org got nominated for anything and I’m even more surprised that I won anything. But to win both Best British Weblog and Lifetime Achievement… Wow… The only real response that I can come up with is that I clearly don’t deserve it, and I’m so sorry that my site’s been of such mediocre quality over the last year. But particular thanks to everyone anyway because it’s completely bloody awesome!
Cred as ever goes to awesome and totally potent co-nominees over both categories who mostly rock way more than I do. I reassure myself that they’re all going to win the greater karmic battle because they’re way more deserving. So first off – all of you should go read more English weblogs and stuff cos they’re great:
And woot to all the lifetimers. God we’re so old…
Oh and to help dissolve the horror of my ever-expanding ego, it’s probably only appropriate that I burst my own bubble by posting this hideous picture that Paul Hammond took of me shortly after I heard the news. Mmm. Classy.
I’m on the train between Los Angeles and San Diego listening to Orbital and overwhelmed by how alien and beautiful the industrial landscape outside my window is. I’m travelling backwards all the way which probably means something. There are lots full of identical vehicles. One lot full of blue tanker trucks. Another full of white articulated lorry fronts. Lined up and perfect. There are buildings with connected trailers and bays numbered one to eight-eight. Train tracks curl around them. Piles of rusting metal sit under repeating arches. Large open machines turn into buildings with little evidence of where one ends and the other begins. Everything’s punctuated by massive pylons and palm trees. There’s graffiti everywhere, and it doesn’t look fake like it does all over London. It looks like it was born here.
It’s probably my clumsy sleep patterns that make everything here seem hallucinogenically orchestrated. It all seems to be begging for a soundtrack. The whole city feels like Koyaanisqatsi from the train.
My seat on the train has a power socket by it, which I find strange but useful. The man in the onboard cafĂ car apologised for having to stow everything away and made a joke about bean counters. I’ve met a man from two television series and found that a friend’s friend lives off internet poker. Words in roads and signs: peerless, thermo, blister, motor, rivera, pioneer, mason, cord. Everything’s either made of wood, metal, concrete or meat. Colours come in stripes – pink/brown, white, grey, white, pink-brown, green, yellow, dust.
One other thing I’ve noticed here is how strange the quality of light is. It’s about as grey and overcast here as it ever is in London, but there’s still something different about it. More apocalyptic. Possibly it’s because everything is designed to be seen in the bright sunshine – the primal colours of signs and adverts look like they’re clashing with the world. And the buildings – designed to contrast with the blues and whites of the normal sky – blend into it now. It’s like the natural order of the world is upside down. The smog is interesting too – American television often looks blurrier than Englih television. I think traditionally the resolution wasn’t as good. Still there’s something weirdly true about thinking of this place as lacking resolution. I think the smog in the air makes everything look less defined. A clear bright day in London in the spring makes everything seem so real. Here it makes it feel cartoonishly beautiful. Fascinating that light quality could have such an effect. I still remember the peculiar emotional charge that everything had in Helsinki in spring a few years back – the richness of the yellows and oranges – the sense that this light had something added to it that was more fundamental than the shallow shimmers we suffered with in England.
I’m meeting up with Biddulph and Hammond in Oceanside in a couple of hours. More later…