Year: 2002

Update on the stand.org.uk campaign to stop firemen rifling through your phone logs… they’ve only gone and given in already!

It’s quite difficult for me to know whether or not I’m allowed to link to this page. I guess I should probably ask permission first. But I’ve sent them the actual text that I’d like to write about them. So hopefully they’ll get back to me soon and I can put up all my opinions then….

The first version of the presentation I gave yesterday is now online. Titled “Building new communities – Learning from Weblogs”, it’s about “How weblogs straddle personal and social spaces and the potential implications for developing new communities”. You can download the PowerPoint file here: Learning_from_Weblogs_final.ppt.

Best and most fun news of the day is that friend and colleague James Cronin, one of the people responsible for faxyourmp.com was on television last night, being eighteen different types of government-ass-kicking-cool. You can watch him rule the world if you’ve got realplayer.

Ok so the day of the conference finally arrives and it is in many ways as close to a laxative as you can get without going to a pharmacy. The paper is essentially finished – so now my only concerns are how the hell to actually get it to the venue. There are times when using a Mac causes problems. I don’t have a laptop, so it will be burn it to a CD and stick it online and hope for the best…

I hate the fact that I get so obsessively picky about stuff that I’m presenting to people that I can still be chopping it around twenty-four hours before I’m suppose to present it. I hate that this might mean that I don’t get to spend the evening with Davo. I hate that I am having to figure out Powerpoint and Visio like someone from marketing. What a day…

You see one of the wonderful things about Google is that it has a good block of intelligent people constructing small systems within itself that stop hierarchies getting encrusted with process and allow everyone to come up with nice clean ideas – and to discuss it amongst themselves. I’m thinking of talking to someone at the BBC about something like this – as a process it’s lovely – as a technical experiment it’s fairly simple and easy – and if restricted to suitably small groups of people, it could have a tremendously energising effect on any company or group of people.

Currently fascinating threads on Barbelith:

• A solar system resembles ours
• Subordinating science to ideology
• Documentary on US war crimes
• The Tipping Point

Toy of the day: A terrifying glimpse into how you can construct my terrible visage out of the faces of otherwise attractive and good-looking young men.

If you want to support the stand.org.uk campaign against the infringement of your rights below and would like to have the text of it on your site, but are perhaps too lazy to actually reformat it all, then you should be delighted – you can simplify the whole process by downloading this text file and cutting and pasting the whole thing into Blogger or Movable Type – available in both ‘for lines break enabled’ and ‘completely formatted for you’ varieties.