Category: Random

I’ve just been reading the Media Guardian’s piece on uSwitch buying UpMyStreet. Obviously closest to my heart is what they’re going to be doing with Conversations, which I think many of us believed was only the beginning of what we could do around geocoded community features. I’m delighted to hear that they’re still going to running it – even developing it further – although obviously it’s disappointing not to be part of that process…

The site, which has 650,000 unique users a month, recently launched a message board service called Conversations that allows neighbours to contact one another. Mr Salmon said that this area would also be developed in order to get people to return more often. “I want it to be a site that people go to every day in the same way they would the BBC or a financial news site,” he said.

For a variety of reasons that I’ll go into later in the day, I’ve not found myself able to post for a good few days now, so I think I’m going to get myself back into the swing of things by a quick block of back-to-basics weblogging. All that follows is simple, entertaining and fun. Nothing intellectually stimulating, nothing ideologically threatening, nothing (indeed) about social software. Just good quality linkage:

• Damn Scientists T-shirt from Threadless
• UpMyStreet Pub-crawl generator
• Calvin and Hobbes on exciting new trends [via Cal]
• Badger rampage injures five [via Meg]
• Beautiful CSS stuff [via BoingBoing]

• Cal’s phone pics [can you spot me?]
• Rejected Google Logos [via Jason]
• EastWest.nu splits up [Choire and Philo]
• Watch the Gridcosm video [via Webb]
• Galactus’ Weblog [via Darren]

For anyone out there who is interested in another avenue for the discussion of weblog culture – particularly in the UK – I can particularly recommend the UK Bloggers Discuss list at the moment…

While we were in San Francisco, my Webb 2000 started to act up a bit. So I did what anyone else would have done, I went to the depot to see if I could get him fixed. Turns out there was very little wrong with him – he just needed a quick mental service. That’s the problem with these high-powered models. You get tremendous speed out of them – great power – but the parts wear out so quickly. While I was there I checked out some of the other models available, but although there was no obvious difference between any of them, I found I’d grown rather attached to mine. So I just got him some coolant, and we went back to work…

My browsers (both Camino and Safari) are now totally drunk on information. They’re so full of tabs and bookmark-bar stored links that they’re sluggish and clumsy and unresponsive. So in an attempt to help them back to a semblence of normality, I’m going to stick two metaphorical fingers down their collective throats and help them vomit up their linky goodness all over the blogosphere in the form of a massive blast of microcontent votage:

• Ben’s Brain on Blog
  One of the best experiences of ETCon for me was actually getting to know Mr Hammersley a bit. I had tremendously good fun arsing around with him in arch-English accents in the middle of the Westin hotel while Webb looked on indulgently. While we were out there he told us about these places you could go and pay $1000 for a full body scan. And now he’s gone and done it for the Guardian. I’m looking forward to reading about that…

• Awesome USBV spywatch
  It’s probably the least comfortable piece of tech ever made (apart from some chastity belts that Webb kept talking about in San Francisco – but you can’t put MP3s on them). Probably best to wait until tech like this is bluetooth-enabled. That would actually be pretty useful;

• Meatball on Feature Karma
  I like the concept of “Feature Karma”, which basically says that every time you add a feature you should simplify another one or even remove it. That way you keep a site or a software project clean and simple and user-intuitive. It’s more use as a buzz-word or a piece of short-hand, though – since you’d have to find the optimum level of simplicity / utility first, otherwise you’d never have any functionality at all…

• Defining Spam
  Wired’s coverage of the efforts to legislate against spam e-mail has been uniformly intelligent, apposite and good-natured. The most frustrating part of the debate is the obvious self-serving of some of the people concerned. Here’s a bit of the article: Wientzen argued that marketers should be able to contact consumers “at least once” by e-mail to ascertain whether the individual might be interested in receiving marketing messages. “How do you send solicited e-mails if there is no way to initially solicit interest?” he asked. The crowd responded with boos. How profoundly stupid can you be? You can’t encourage people to respond to those e-mails to help out the legitimate marketers if – in the process – it would get horribly abused by a thousand times as many illegitimate ones!

• Deep inside Apple’s piles
  The metaphor of piles of documents (that Apple are supposedly integrating into the next version of OSX) seems to me to be one that would work really well in a weblog context as well – loose aggregated groups of posts that don’t really constitute ongoing categories but which have similar associations…

• Acquisition X
  Now we have the Apple Music Store we probably won’t need file-sharing applications any more. Which is a shame, because Acquisition X is far superior to Limewire as a Gnutella client;

• Tesugen on iTunes
  “I have shared smart playlists such as Songs Played Today, Best Songs Played Today, and also a dumb playlist into which I drag songs that I like at the moment. (Of course, I’ve also shared my default smart playlist, which plays songs randomly selected from all that are rated 2?5, and that haven’t been played in the last 4 weeks.) Witness iTunes becoming social software?” I’m not convinced myself;

• Time magazine talks to Steve
  And Steve says, “This is really hard. Over the last several years we’ve created an infrastructure to pump oceans of bits out in the world for movie trailers and stuff, and that’s tens of millions of dollars for server farms and networking farms ? it’s huge ? and we’ve already got that in place. And to have millions of transactions, and to get our online store all tied into SAP and have the auditors bless it, that’s tens of millions of dollars…” [Is $1 too much for a track?]

• Credit Card Micropayments
  A really interesting article on how Apple may have made micropayments economically viable… “So Apple’s new music store sells songs for 99¢ per track. That sounds suspiciously like a micropayment (or at least a “minipayment”) system to me. Somehow, Apple is pulling it off using the traditional credit card system. Everyone knows your profit margin is eaten alive in transaction fees for multiple small credit card purchases. So how is Apple doing it? I think I know.”

Shaving your facial hair is, as they say, for girls… And before you start – I do not look like a tramp, and I’m trying to get more sleep…

This post isn’t meant for you people. Just go on – sod off. It’s important that I have some kind of record of this stuff for the years ahead when I’m all old and insane and bitter and… Hmm… Sounds an awful lot like now, actually…

• Barbelith mentioned on NTK not once but twice (although admittedly the second one was to try and explain to people what the crap it is), and plasticbag.org referenced in between them… Note – none of these posts are actually about me at all, but still – it’s nice, right?
  • UpMyStreet houses guy behind Barbelith
  • Retro-back link to my ETCon coverage
  • So, it’s a zine, right?
• Rusty from kuro5hin turned me into a fucking sig! That’s so cool. I met Rusty at ETCon. He kind of rocked. Hard.
• There are loads of pictures from ETCon online, most of which don’t have me in them (thank God) but some of which do. The photos I like most of the whole event are:
  • From Matt Haughey: Stewart Butterfield at the Flash Keynote & Jones, Powerpoint Monster;
  • From Glenn Fleischmann: Loads of pictures;
  • From Cory “Can’t Take A Flattering Picture” Doctorow: General Pictures Plus Emerging Man (I’m the fat spud staring into space); Actually I take that back – this is a good picture of Richard Soderbergh of weblog: Crystalflame.net;
  • From Doc “Hot for Jones” Searls: Emerging Welshman;
• For the full range of hot coverage the you have to go to the source:The O’Reilly Network’s ETCon 2003 page;

I’m going to end with two appeals – could anyone who’s out there who got pictures of ETCon stick a link to them in the comments (below) and while we’re at it – there’s been talk about how many women were at the event. It’s a legitimate question, but I’d be equally interested to know how many gay men and women were there… If you want to make yourself known, there’s a whole lotta comments facility just begging to be used…

When flying back over London, Webb took this picture with my camera… At the bottom, the Millennium Dome. Towards the top-right, Canary Wharf…

So a couple of days on since Apple’s big music announcement – what’s the reaction been like? Here’s some of the most interesting hardcore commentary:

• CNet News
  Full of interesting insights about how Apple may be pushing Microsoft towards non-proprietary standards (and how record companies are resistant to being beholden to one company’s technology) as well as the demographic information of the MP3-playing market. Particularly terrifying is this quote: “At retail, one-third of the people buying portable music players have annual incomes of $100,000 or more, according to NPDTechworld. By contrast, 55 percent of people buying Apple’s iPod have incomes in that bracket. The group also is more likely to embrace a music service and buy additional ancillary products or services than many other income brackets.”

• The Mac Observer on Apple’s DRM
  Some very good points: (1) 3-person licenses on DRM means a family of four can’t take all of their music with them (but then they’re not really supposed to, are they?) (2) 128 bit encoding on AAC might be better than MP3, but is it good enough for the dedicated audiophile? (Of course it’s possible that the Mac itself might not have good enough sound equipment to make this an issue) (3) To get your music onto another MP3 player you have to burn to a CD and then re-rip it. This is apparently annoying (although also patently missing the whole point). (4) Managing the computers you can play a song on isn’t a simple process. (5) To authorise a song you need to be connected to the internet. 6 Will Apple AAC be the future equivalent of the 8-track tape?

• Washington Times
  An easy problem to spot, but a bugger to solve – the Washington Times points out that the Apple Music service has no Beatles and no Rolling Stones.

• MacRumurs on DRM
  This is a very very thorough article on exactly Apple’s AAC DRM works in practice. Particularly useful if you’re unclear on the basics – what happens with bought songs and shared Libraries, will iTunes play other AAC’s, how many times can a playlist be burnt to CD?

• PCTS.net
  … and it turns out that you can even link to specific artists and / or songs in the Apple store by a simple link in your browser. Whether or not that will take off or not is another matter, of course…