So the first members of the weblogging extended family have been exposed to AOL’s proposed new weblogging tools. The general consensus seems to be that they are of surprisingly good quality and that they are approaching the service more like LiveJournal than Blogger, Typepad or MT. I’m going to need to ponder this stuff a little more before I’m going to be comfortable presenting an opinion. In the meantime – here are the links:
It’s been a slow-posting week on plasticbag.org and that’s directly related to fast-moving, sleepless, hectic first week of new job acclimatisation. It’s still far too early to get a sense of what our every-day work is going to be like, but if it’s anything like what we’ve been doing so far then it’s going to be extraordinarily good fun.
Sometimes at UpMyStreet I’d lament the fact that working life was so infrequently like The West Wing. I’d developed a bit of a taste for thrusting, self-determining creative work while working for the BBC’s Making it Happen project, but UpMyStreet – for all the good work we did and all the cool people I met when I worked there – was not that kind of place. It didn’t have that kind of atmosphere at all.
This job has West Wing potential. Serious West Wing potential in fact… (Guess who was in the building on Friday). I can already see myself striding through corridors telling people about wheat yields in Arkansas, colliding with other walking-conversations about speech-writing and Congress. Will I fall over the camera? Will I remember my lines?
Ok. So this brief post is so entirely not about social software or weblogs or technology or futurism or ‘the industry’. This post is – well – it’s quite a lot more shallow than that. This post (which is nearly over) is quite simply about really really hot people. In particular one really really hot person. In particular this really really hot person – currently showing in a cinema near you… Dear God… Dear beautiful beautiful God…
The web splinters that have been working their way under my typing fingernails today include:
I’ll tell you something for nothing. I’m beginning not to care who’s right about this whole bloody RSS thing. Is it Dave? Is it Mark? Is it the Penry the mild-mannered janitor? I know it’s an important debate, and I know that the world’s not complete unless we have a fourth, fifth and sixth syndication format, and I know that I’m being dismissive of a legitimate and complex debate, but you know on the other hand…
So I don’t know where to start really so I’m just going to come out and say it. After several weeks of organisation, negotiation and discussion I find myself cheerfully back in gainful employment. My new job has almost intimidating potential and at the moment is a little large a concept to easily digest, but as of ten o’clock this morning I became once more an employee of the BBC – more specifically working in Radio & Music as part of a new live research and development team.
But it’s not just the job that’s fascinating – it’s also the environment. For the first time I’m actually going to be working in and around Broadcasting House, and (even though the whole area is being ripped asunder and rebuilt and even though I’m based in an extension to the main building) just being there feels like it connects me to a larger and messier tradition of people who have worked at the BBC in Broadcasting House over the last seventy years. From the origins of television through the Blitz right through until the present day, Broadcasting House has been a key element of the legacy of the BBC and there’s ludicrous amounts of history saturating every surface.
Last year I had a chance to visit the bomb shelters from the second world war – walls of concrete six/eight feet deep covered with faded remnants of sixty years of use and disuse. It was fascinating, atmospheric, almost haunting… The BBC Radio Theatre that was in the core of the oldest part of the building has been the scene for some of the countries greatest comedic performances – from the Goons and Round the Horne right through to (almost) the present day. When George Orwell was working for the BBC writing propoganda, he was based in Broadcasting House. There’s a Room 101 in the building, and it’s widely believed to have been the basis for the Room 101 in the novel 1984. Pretty much concurrently with his work, one of the so-called Cambridge Spies – the drunken, gay, apparently sybaritic Guy Burgess was also working in the building. That is, of course, when he wasn’t working for Russia…
But it’s not just what happened inside the building that makes it vibrate with such potent historical energies. Even the sculptures on the front of the building (which are unfortunately covered up at the moment by scaffolding and screening) are significant. They were designed by Eric Gill – most familiar to graphic designers and typographers today because of his creation of Gill Sans. I heard a rumour from a friend of a friend once that the male statue originally had prominent genitals that were removed by a censorious establishment. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it would fit with Gill’s aesthetic and with what I know about the political life of the nineteen-thirties.
There’s so much more that the building has been a silent witness to over the years. It’s coped with direct-hits from Nazi bombs, coped with generations of creative revolutionaries over eight decades and now is coping with a radical rebuilding to make it a home for the BBC for decades to come. It’s going to sound cheesy, but it’s a genuine honour to work there.
When we went to Apple in Cupertino I got little Oskar a present that I thought he could grow into in a few months. And now he’s wearing it! Aw!
Lili was flustered. “But if you can do a complete revision in eight weeks, why not just finish it, then plan another revision, do that one in eight weeks, and so on? Why take five years before anyone can ride the thing?”
Why indeed?
The perpetually unfinished experimental message-board that Cal and I made is coming up with some particularly interesting debates at the moment. Here are a few of my favourite ongoing discussions:
Finally we know what it stands for…