Year: 2005

Random

Links for 2005-09-20

I can’t quite believe I didn’t recommend this at the time: Pandora Music Recommendations engine I’m talking to a lot of people at the moment who think that one (folksonomic) way of navigating data is going to win over all the others. But it’s ludicrous, we need all the dimensions we can get and user-generated stuff sits perfectly well alongside and/or on top of top-down or expert categorisations
Mobile Music Workshop 2006 at the University of Sussex – looks pretty neat… “How can we push forward the already successful combination of music and mobile technology? What new forms of interaction with music lie ahead, as locative media and music use merge into new forms of everyday experiences?”
Consider this an appeal – can someone with clue please fix the Wikipedia article on “Penis envy”? So, I’ve studied a fair amount of psychoanalysis, and I know this article on penis envy is bullshit, and it’s been on my ‘to do’ list of things to fix for weeks, and I’ve got nowhere. So I’m putting out an appeal – can you make this better?
“Flickr and Yahoo: please support open identity standards” Interesting piece this. Open Identity standards are pretty complex things, but it does seem pretty clear that there would be enormous benefits to be reaped from being the first organisation to embrace these standards (ie. all your services would already work with the identity system that everyone wanted to use)
A new Penny Arcade depicts a historic conversation between myself and Matt Biddulph So far, it all appears to be working quite well. Speaking of which, back to ETech stuff…

Random

Links for 2005-09-19

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date September 19, 2005

Global Warming ‘past the point of no return’ “You’re essentially changing land into ocean and the creation of a huge area of open ocean where there was once land will have a very big impact on other climate parameters”
Beatles hailed ‘best of British’ “The 1967 Beatles track A Day In The Life has been hailed the best British song of all time.”
How single people are facing financial meltdown… It’s way way way more expensive to live by yourself, or to buy a home buy yourself, than it is to do so with a partner to share the burden…
BBC News reports that Blair ‘attacked BBC over Katrina’ ‘Prime Minister Tony Blair believes BBC coverage of Hurricane Katrina is “full of hate” for America, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has claimed in a speech.’
The Guardian’s report: Blair attacks BBC for ‘anti-US bias’ “The comments threatened a new rift between the government and the BBC following the Andrew Gilligan affair over events leading to the Iraq war and recent criticisms of ministers Today presenter John Humphrys, which were controversially leaked to the pres
The Independent’s coverage of the alleged comments by Tony Blair to Rupert Murdoch Greg Dyke’s comment: “It may not come as a great surprise that the Prime Minister aims to please Murdoch but it comes as a bit of a shock he goes this far.”

Random

Links for 2005-09-18

Yahoo! Movies hosts the trailers for Brokeback Mountain What can I say – it looks moving, interesting, depressing and er… kinda hot. Um.
The Question: Is it OK for a public figure to say arse ? “What happens with a lot of these words, like arse and piss and shit, is that they’re acceptable until about 1450,” says Jonathon Green…
You hate yourself & you must die (on Flickr) Notes in offices got less and less subtle as the years passed…
US teens ‘reject’ key freedoms “Over a third of the 100,000 students questioned felt the First Amendment went “too far” in guaranteeing freedom of speech, press, worship and assembly.”
The Independent talks about Kate Bush’s reappearance after twelve years… “She was wacky, she was mysterious, she was a child prodigy who topped the charts… and then she disappeared without trace. This month Kate Bush is back with her first single in more than a decade”
Nintendo Revolution Controller Unveiled, And It’s Revolutionary Mr Webb will be please – haptic interfaces, accelerometers and the like make it unlike any other controller on the market. Game interfaces are up for experimentation for the first time in years and it’s all nintendo’s fault…
There’s a party over at the Flickr ranch on Monday (I think) and everyone’s invited Of course, I’m several thousand miles away so I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it…
He Man does 4-non-blondes So it’s basically a gay joke and I’m a bit conflicted about it, but what the hell… S’kind of funny…
Troubling Exits At Microsoft “There’s a plea for action to Gates and Ballmer to do more — slash the bureaucracy, tend to morale, and make it easier to innovate. But is anyone listening?”
meebo.com – bloody astonishing multi-platform IM client in your browser Doesn’t seem to work so well on Safari – or at least not with the amount of tabs I have open normally, but still.

Random

Help me decide what to write about…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date September 17, 2005
24 Comments on Help me decide what to write about…

I have an almost impossible amount of stuff to do this weekend, and a good block of them involve writing things for this site, and it’s already eight o’clock on Saturday evening. I don’t know where the time goes. I want to talk about my trip into the heart of government a week and a half ago (Andy Budd wrote a lot about it) and I want to talk about going to Our Social World a week ago and what I thought of that. And I want to put the presentations I did at each of them online in some form. I also want to remind people to get their ETech proposals in by Monday. That one’s very very important. There’s another post I really want to write about Microformats, and yet more about replacing controlled vocabularies with URL clouds, using pre-existing semantic structures to navigate around tagged content, and conceptual page-rank following on from Mr Biddulph’s post from the other day. And I have about a billion links to post – in varying levels of detail. And there’s at least one really big thing that I need to talk about that I’m not quite ready for yet. Oh and I really want to talk about the web-like qualities of Guardian redesign as well.

I genuinely have no idea where to start. I feel like I need a month off work to get everything out of my head and somewhere more useful. So in the absence of any discrimination from my side, and with absolutely no commitment from my side to actually write about any of the things above, what would be most interesting to you guys? I don’t really agree with the idea of a weblog having an audience, but I do believe in the idea of it being my voice in a community of peers. So what do you want to hear about?

Random

Links for 2005-09-15

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date September 15, 2005

Critics savage Ritchie’s new film The ads have looked good(ish) but the reviewers aren’t so keen. Interested to see what it’s like…
Privacy Enhanced Computer Display A lovely bit of tech this one that makes what’s on your monitor only visible through special glasses. Reminds me of the LCD screen that’s completely unreadable from the sides…
The Guardian’s Editor’s Weblog shows immediately the discussions and background behind the decision to un-drop Doonesbury At the smallest level this really does seem to have been a way that the editorial team can talk outside the publication in a less formal voice than ever before. Interesting stuff…
A new design over on BenHammersley.com A new aesthetic that reflects – perhaps – his new hairless kilted visage as seen down the pub this evening.

Navigation Technology

In which Google launches blog search…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date September 14, 2005
9 Comments on In which Google launches blog search…

Okay, so the big weblog news of the day is that Google have launched their Blog Search. First impressions are that it doesn’t feel right, that quite a lot of the spririt of the weblogs and the faces of the people involved come through better via Technorati, and it doesn’t seem to leverage as much of Google’s other functionality as you’d expect (when I do a search for Matt Webb for example, it doesn’t bring back interconnected.org as a recommended weblog, even though it’s the #1 entry for Matt Webb in their main index, and they already know that site is a weblog).

But of course they are going to have some advantages. Unlike Technorati I pretty much guarantee that they’re not going to suffer problems with scaling their infrastructure, and that’s going to make them more reliable. And of course they have the Google brand behind them. I suspect this one will go through a couple of iterations before it feels right. Makes me wonder if all the rumours about Technorati being about to be acquired were right, and – more interestingly – makes me wonder whether it’s less or more likely to happen now that Google have shown that large search engines should be interested.

Random

Links for 2005-09-14

Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone Age This piece really reminds me of my old boss Stefan Magdalinski, except without the slightly crazed look, bead of sweat and slathering…
Xenu – “In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a galactic ruler who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs.” It’s no wonder I’m an atheist – the faith of my forefathers is so dull. I want aliens and lasers. Now there’s something to believe in…
‘Proof’ our brains are evolving – a really interesting BBC News piece on genes associated with acculturation.. “The microcephalin variant appeared along with the emergence of traits such as art and music, religious practices and sophisticated tool-making techniques, which date back to about 50,000 years ago.”
Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain takes top prize at Venice I’m kind of obsessed by this film, because it’s been a long time since I saw a compelling mainstream drama with gay people in it. Plus they’re cowboys. Hot cowboys.
Shelley Powers takes Our Social World apart for being too dominated by males and not having enough minorities. (1) I am gay, (2) I spent three post-grad years working around identity politics, feminism and queer theory, (3) There are iniquities that need to be rectfied, (4) I think this argument is illogical, insular, self-defeating and insulting.

Design

On redesigning icons, Superman and politics…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date September 12, 2005
7 Comments on On redesigning icons, Superman and politics…

So it’s a rare week that sees me talking about the redesign of two icons – but with both Superman and The Guardian fighting for the little guy in brand new outfits, I couldn’t really not comment. My first reactions to theguardian‘s redesign – now that I’ve seen it in the flesh – are almost uniformly positive. But I think I’ll write about that more thoroughly later in the day when I’ve really had time to get my head around it. In the meantime, I don’t think you’ll find a more detailed or painstaking or (well) longer analysis of the whole thing than Dan Hill’s piece: Assessing the new Guardian, with brief nod to the avant-garde (aka Grazia, Heat and The Sun). Aggravatingly, he’s even thought to place the front cover on Flickr and annotate the bits he thinks are particularly interesting. I wish I’d thought of that. Maybe in a couple of days I will have done.

Anyway, despite the evident interest that everyone has in the Guardian, this post was about that other subject that no one but me appears to care about – the redesign of the Superman “S” logo that I wrote about earlier in the week. I can’t quite figure out why it hasn’t got the design / typographic community frothing in their lattes, but I guess that can’t be helped. I’m still fascinated by the cultural associations and design history of this particular logo. I can’t remember who said that decades alternated between ‘Batman’ decades and ‘Superman’ decades, with the popularity and reclamation of each character following cultural trends and cultural optimism, but it’s hard to deny that it’s true. The world of comic books in the eighties was dark and mercenary, the nineties optimistic and bright, and the most recent decade has seen an enormous swing towards darker stories and a more interventionist Dark Knight politics. What’s interesting to me then is how the evolution of Superman reflects these changes, how our delight in – and suspicion of – the idea of a super-powerful alien is reflected in the way his design is treated.

All of which is a pretext to link officially through to a site dedicated to the evolution of Superman’s “S”. And that link is itself a pretext to reproduce this image from the site, showing an enormous range of logo variation, way beyond the simple changes I indicated in my last post:

Random

Links for 2005-09-12

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date September 12, 2005

Some page scans from the first issue of the new Grant Morrison / Frank Quitely “All Star Superman” It’s kind of nice to see a good old-fashioned super-intelligent super-villain again. Missed those…
An animated short film about trusted computing Pretty interesting and beautifully animated piece explaining the issues behind the industry’s adaptation of the concept
“Anti-gay activists who stood up to be counted are counted” I don’t know what I think about this – it’s like some kind of bigot-outing, which seems both poetic justice and a little cruel…

Academia Health Journalism Politics Religion Science

On Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science"…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date September 12, 2005
6 Comments on On Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science"…

While I’m talking about the Guardian (reports from friends within the printing presses are that it’s looks beautiful), i thought I should probably mention an article that I read on Thursday last week which I thought was one of the most important things I’ve heard people say in the media for a long time. Ben Goldacre’s piece on why bad science gets promulgated by the media hit more chords for me than any nearby troupe of jazz pianists could have accomplished in their natural lifetimes. And while I thought it was a little blanketly dismissive of ‘humanities graduates’, I do fundamentally agree that humanities graduates are now taught to mistrust science and push the idea of it as just one of many competing discourses. Over the last six or seven years I’ve become more and more suspicious of these rhetorics in the arts, and more and more aware of how they’re being appropriated by mystics and creationists in the States.

The other thing that frankly scared me was that the article – for the first time I think – really expressed the damage that the media can do with the rubbish it writes in search of a story. That I’m not sure I could stand up and point to one news organisation that takes their responsibility in this area particularly seriously really brought home Ben Goldacre’s point for me. If you can stomach it, you should read the whole damn thing: Don’t dumb me down – We laughed, we cried, we learned about statistics…

A close relative of the wacky story is the paradoxical health story. Every Christmas and Easter, regular as clockwork, you can read that chocolate is good for you, just like red wine is, and with the same monotonous regularity, in breathless, greedy tones you will you hear how it’s scientifically possible to eat as much fat and carbohydrate as you like, for some complicated reason, but only if you do it at “the right time of day”. These stories serve one purpose: they promote the reassuring idea that sensible health advice is outmoded and moralising, and that research on it is paradoxical and unreliable.

At the other end of the spectrum, scare stories are – of course – a stalwart of media science. Based on minimal evidence and expanded with poor understanding of its significance, they help perform the most crucial function for the media, which is selling you, the reader, to their advertisers. The MMR disaster was a fantasy entirely of the media’s making), which failed to go away. In fact the Daily Mail is still publishing hysterical anti-immunisation stories, including one calling the pneumococcus vaccine a “triple jab”, presumably because they misunderstood that the meningitis, pneumonia, and septicaemia it protects against are all caused by the same pneumococcus bacteria.