- FiveRuns RM-Install appears to be a nice self-contained Ruby on Rails stack that you can just install on your computer fairly effort-free Of course, installing something doens’t mean automatically that you understand it or how it works. I have discovered.
- Last.fm have a gorgeous new app for doing audio fingerprinting to sort out the metadata around music The double-translation of similar track names to audio fingerprints is a bloody fascinating way to get good solid real-world identifiers around objects like songs. I’m installing it immediately.
Year: 2007
- Martin Klimas gets porcelain figures in total darkness and then drops them on the ground. The sound of them touching the floor triggers a light allowing a nearby camera to capture their ‘moment of transformation’ Extraordinary imagery (thanks Kerry). The picture of the liberated hummingbirds is my favourite.
- Andy Budd wrote a post about SXSW the other day and how much he dislikes it when speakers stand up and say that they were up to 4am the night before doing their slides I started my dconstruct talk a little over a month ago, and was still finishing the slides an hour before my talk at 3pm on Friday. Absolutely terrifying. Still, it came off okay I think.
- Jeremy Keith’s overview of dconstruct is pretty fun reading… He liked my talk, which makes me happy.
- Chicken Yoghurt has a wonderful Open Source Press Release that I’d encourage people to read and post to their own sites… Solid and entertaining.
- The Government, in responding to a petition about the iPlayer being cross-platform, has said that it’s a condition of its launch and will be made so as soon as possible My big hope is that this convinces any laggards at the BBC that going for the Microsoft-only route is not now and will never be an acceptable approach for a public service organisation in the UK.
- Women with meat for hair as spotted by Jason Kottke It made me think about what it would be like if your hair was actually made of sheaves of your own personal meat and was used, like dogs use their tongues, to cool you down. Gross.
- Just so people know, I’ll be doing an overview and introduction to Fire Eagle at the Future of Web Apps Expo in London in about a month I talked a bit about Fire Eagle at Hack Day and at dconstruct yesterday, but we should be pretty close to letting people see things a little more clearly by then.
- Newsdesigner has linked to video from TED of awesome Microsoft photo-related exploratory semantic-ness… Fascinated to see where this goes next. Would be amazing on the surface table…
- Newseum is an interactive museum about news Best thing is that it gets the front pages of a few hundred newspapers every single day. Which is neat.
- The new iPod Touch looks pretty astonishing, although it also looks a bit like a cut-down iPhone which is somehow less fascinating than a touchscreen iPod Lots of space in that display for other apps. Weirded out that there’s no Mail client.
- Lord Justice Sedley has made the extraordinary statement that he believes that all of the UK’s DNA (and the DNA of anyone who visits the company) should be permanently on file This really is quite extraordinary. With such a limited sense of how such information could be used and abused in the future making a call seems completely indefensible, particularly in the name of fairness…
- Kevin Marks talks about Andrew Keen and ‘slumming’ I find the idea of the net as corrupting as fascinating, given that my experience of the net has been of a culture that has been corrupted by business, media, public relations, self-important careerist journalists and the like…
- CollegeHumor.com shows what a meeting would be like if everyone who worked at the company acted like they might in comments threads on blogs… It’s all ‘first’, tit jokes and “ura ‘tard”. Funny, scary and depressing in roughly equal measure.
- Corporations are apparently not getting a lot of value from being in Second Life… This is not an enormous surprise, even if I think they’re missing out on some of the softer benefits. In the end, it’s press that they’re really going for. And a hint of future-looking zeitgeist-catching flare. That’s all.
Andrew Keen makes me furious but I don’t write about him as a rule. Why not? Because you don’t feed the trolls. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so clearly acting like a troll. I mean, you only have to read his post Etes-vous elitiste in which he declares that people have labelled him an anti-Christ and then uses that as a platform to sell his speaking gigs, while the right-hand column of his website lists all his media appearances. He wants to stir up an argument to get attention. We’re not supposed to enable behaviour like this in our children. We have to be firm. He must be placed on the naughty step.
Andrew is the chap who thinks that the whole internet is full of amateurish morons and that nothing rises to the top and that professional media has become corrupted and less good as a result of all this stuff. I could agree with his comments about mainstream media losing the plot if it didn’t seem to be quite the other way around. As far as I can see in the US at least, mainstream news became about entertainment way before the bloggers came along, there’s lots of money in cinema still and Harry Potter sells by the ton. I watched a TV programme about how in the US they sold Life on Earth as basically animal on animal bestial snuff movies. Presumably also the effect of the nascent internet, even if about four people in the world were using it back then. And clearly the blunt utility of Wikipedia counts for nothing, the beautiful pictures in Flickr aren’t worth looking at, Keen’s own blog presumably yet another indication of how low you now have to stoop to make an impact in the world rather than something we should celebrate – another citizen gets to express their opinion and try and persuade the world he’s right.
The thing is about this, all this conversation is a total waste of time. I don’t understand why he gets the traction he does. I mean, what is he actually trying to accomplish? Does he think that the millions of bloggers will get bored and go home if he explains why their voices don’t count? Does he think that Wikipedia will stop being useful to people (even with its inaccuracies) or YouTube will stop being entertaining? No, of course he doesn’t. He can’t honestly think he can accomplish anything. The future comes, for good or ill, whether you like it or not. The best you can do in such a situation is try and work to fix the issues you see. No market for decent commentary and opinion? Look for a business model that could support it! No way that Encyclopedia Britannica can compete with Wikipedia? Well then why not move some of the resourcing of Britannica towards creating a trusted version of Wikipedia? Check articles every so often for factual accuracy, pull them aside and enhance them and make that your business.
The world we have as a result of technologies of the internet is not a world I find particularly troubling, because it’s a world finding its feet and its a world that has also created significant beauty. It’s a world I feel comfortable in, and there is always a market for what people want and often for what people need. I don’t doubt that journalism will survive or resurge but it will have to adapt.
People like Keen are professional complainers, stirring up fights, decrying the state of the world that we find ourselves in without facing the fact that it is where we are and wishing won’t make it not so. If you don’t like the way the world is, then use the tools that exist and push them further and find a way to compensate for the problems that you think the existing technology has created. I’m afraid it’s a cliché but it’s true. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The world we have is the world we can work with, and anyone wanting to push it back to the fifties will fail.
And that’s what really gets to me. Because it’s pretty clear that he knows this. He’s writing his own bloody blog for a start. He knows he can’t win the battle, but he’s put himself on the side of respectability, trustworthiness, reliability and is decrying all the terrible new things in the world. As I once said of Nick Carr, this is a brilliant strategy to make yourself like a terribly intelligent and responsible, serious person without actually having to go to any of the trouble of thinking. That’s why he’s a troll – because his opinion cannot do any good, cannot change anything for the better, but in its decrying of the nascent environment of millions of people finding their voices for the first time, he can get nothing but attention, media coverage and book-sales. It’s not an appeal to better standards, it’s not an appeal to quality or tradition. It has no aspirations to honour. It’s disingenuous to the core, manipulative of the people, anti-progressive, cynical and hypocritical.
- Yay! Dopplr crew have got some nice sexy funding from Joichi Ito, Saul Klein and sundry other excellent people That means Biddulph gets to work on it more over the next couple of years. Happy-making. Little jealous.
- Fascinating interview with John Humphrys on the threats to the Today programme and radio’s suitability to new media Deeply interesting to me and I couldn’t agree more with much of it, not that my voice counts for much. He’s not resistant to the future, he’s arguing for something counter-intuitive but clearly true.
- Tom Carden responds to my comments about Twitter Blocks It seemed only fair to link to him so that people could hear his feelings about people’s responses to them. Read my comment for more context.
- Eat 2 Love is a food blog that seems to get ripped off a lot by the mainstream press Her instinct is that people are just reading her site looking for interesting feature ideas and then ripping them off wholesale. There’s little she can do about it but draw people’s attention to it. So I thought I’d help.
- A really nice post by Dan Hill on the views that he’s experiencing in Sydney and the lack of skylines in London One of the things I’ve always found most unbearable about London is the lack of sky. There’s nowhere to get any distance and space around you, to see for a while. I grew up in Norfolk, where you have nothing but sky.
- Work hard and be nice to people Difficult to find fault with that as a sentiment, except that sometimes it’s very hard to be nice to everyone and that when you work too hard, your tolerance for people diminishes dramatically.
- Awesome! Fake Steve Jobs has said what I’ve been arguing in TV circles for bloody ages. I mean he’s a bit aggressive and stuff, but long-term there is limited future in broadcasting. The future’s in content production. The sooner some of them figure that out the better! It’s all about the rights, bitches!
- Joel Spolsky talks about the lack of value that anonymous comments (or maybe comments in general) offer the blogger Allowing people to post without registering has been considered insane for online communities for a decade at least, and I’ve argued that comments are unnecessary because people can post on their own sites. But I’m not sure I’d go as far as Joel…
- Post one: A protest that the state of the art in tagging hasn’t progressed enormously in the last four years. Now here’s a confession. I spent quite a lot of last year working around tags and I’m just a bit unsure how much of it I can talk about. It’s all very aggravating. The project didn’t launch.
- Michael Cross talks about the problems getting the Ordnance Survey to open up its data for public use The Ordnance Survey has a great opportunity to support creative work around geo as well as new business opportunities by more liberal terms for opening up its data, but chooses not to explore them. It is aggravating.
- Bob Truby’s Brand Name Pencils is a strange but fascinating little site full of information and pictures of practically antique pencils Fascinating in and of itself, but also a sample book of fascinating design approaches. You could do a lot worse than choose a few of these colours schemes and type choices for your blog’s look and feel.
- I have a freaky name doppelgänger in the US asking very sensible questions on YouTube Hearing other people say, “Hello my name is Tom Coates” who aren’t, you know, me… Strange.
- Entertained but a little puzzled by Twitter Blocks. Click here to look at my ‘plasticbagUK’ relationship blockgraph… I’m not sure this is much more than a beautiful and interesting folly, but it’s beautiful and interesting which is more than can be said for most of the internet. Yay Stamen!
- Amazon are going to be launching a DRM-Free MP3 Store in mid-September Of course it’s going to be relatively sparse to start off with, but I can’t help thinking with Amazon behind it the sales will be sufficient that record companies will eventually change their tune.