Category: Random

As of this coming Thursday I’m heading to California (San Francisco first, then Santa Clara for Emerging Tech, before returning to SF) for a total of twelve days of intense West-Coast mind-expansion. I’ve not looked forward to anything quite this much in years – although the difficult situation at UpMyStreet is obviously preying on my mind and for a while made me think that I might not be able to go…

While I’m in the States, I’m keen to drench myself in everything interesting that’s going on in the industry as well as meet all those people who (at the moment) I only know online. If you’d like to meet up while I’m in the area – either socially or professionally – then drop me a line at tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org. Oh. And Webb’s going too.

There was a slightly weird article in the Guardian a few days ago about UpMyStreet & MyVillage that I don’t really have an opinion about. But it inspired an interesting response from Tomski’s weblog where he talks about several interesting ways of estimating site traffic as well as an interesting suggestion about the way traffic could be plotted against alexa rankings to see if any predictable curve emerged…

There’s a road in the middle of London called Oxford Street. It’s the main thoroughfare for shopping in the capital. One night on my way home I spotted an exotic advert – a actual pair of trousers apparently suspended in water. It was dark, so the lights inside the advert seemed to make the bubbles blown in from the bottom glow like tiny jellyfish as they crept and teemed around the pockets and the button-fly. I took a picture to try and capture the atmosphere but in the process got a ghostlike image of myself on the left of the frame. Beneath my face you can see fragments of red lettering – the upcoming-bus-times displayed behind me on the bus stop… I’ve submitted it to The Mirror Project, of course…

Because you turn around for a moment and he’s gone and posted another dozen links (and because – if I’m honest – I’m seldom resistant to repurposing his work), I present “Meta-kottke: Reading the remaindered so you don’t have to” (filtered from Jason’s recent remaindered links bin):

• Apple buying Universal Music
  Good story if it’s true. If it’s true then it’s connected to the other big Apple rumour – that they’re going to be selling MP3 equivalents over the interhighweb as quickly as next month.

• So webloggers talk into a video camera and it gets on TV?
  What a dumb / brilliant idea. Way better than that thing with the monkey that Pepsi want to do that I was talking about yesterday…

• Converting PC applications to OSX – Apple’s interface guidelines are totally fascinating. One of the best things I’ve read today. Thanks Jason!
• Article about Powerpoint. And let’s end with a profoundly annoying post. Argument: You either too much writing on your presentation and everyone reads it instead of looking at you or you don’t write anything and the presentation means nothing when you’re done. Why argument is bunk: Because there’s a bit under the slide where you can explain what the slide means – the equivalent of having someone there to talk you through it. If you write the bloody thing.

Let’s end the working day as we began it – with a few lists of cheery links to help us wind down…

• Origins of woot! – good fun from Google Answers, with an infinity of online investigation that (in the process) mentions my graph;
• Iraq Justification Process – because Meg is as (rightly) obsessed with Omnigraffle as I am. Expect more diagrams;
• Guardian’s Life This Week – great new section which explains the science behind the week’s news stories;
• Iraq War Poster exhibition – graphic design and political dissidence – a potent combination. For more, check out: Graphic Agitation;
• Apple Music Service – people are still talking about this, and quite rightly. I just wish they announce it already;
• PodWorks – the best way to get your music off your iPod and onto your home / work / laptop. Very much recommended.

Ok. This is a bit of an experiment in how bored people can get on Friday afternoons as well as a bit of collaborative editing fun. It’s also a way of avoiding having to do anything myself. Basically, I want you – the weirdos who are are dumb enough to read a weirdo who is dumb enough to write about stuff on the internet – to help me write my one-page site biography. It may sound self-indulgent, but I don’t care – I can’t write the damn thing myself, I’ve been trying for days.

First things first – here’s the current page on the site. It used to be a hell of a lot longer and self-indulgent and then I got uncomfortable with the level of information that it contained about some parts of my life. This came to a head when a fairly prominent warblogging site decided to do a competition in my name (The “Tom Coates Award for the Most Bloodthirsty Warblogger” or something). I edited the text right down to the simple paragraph we see today:

• The Current Page

Anyway – since I decided to put up a link to that page from – essentially – every page of the site (as a way of explaining myself, I suppose), that simple paragraph doesn’t cut it any more. So I’ve co-opted a page on the Barbelith FAQs Wiki for a bit of collaborative writing.

• Edit my biography

To make this an easier / more entertaining process, I’m going to be available via AIM for the next few hours under the handle stinkbadger – so if you have any questions or want to ask anything, then you can just ask me directly!

I know it’s kind of a dumb idea, but I’ve been pulling my hair out for days over this – I just don’t know how to write the damn thing. Probably, no one will be interested. If it works, I’ll stick up the text (along with the names of anyone who I know worked on the thing in question) up on the site as soon as I get a moment. And if it doesn’t? What’s the worst that could happen? A few people get exposed to a Wiki. Not the worst thing ever…

Time for another massive explosion of satisfying link-goo to get us through the last wheezing gasp of quite a difficult week:

1. “War is over, if you want it…” – and we should all now be focused on the creative and productive work of rebuilding the broken governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. In an unrelated move, the BBC announces that Killing Badgers ‘not the solution’;
2. In the running for the worst game-show idea of all time: Pepsi’s win-a-billion game: “An unusually dexterous monkey” will do the picking, says executive producer Matti Leshem. “It’s the ultimate slap in the face to evolution: the fate of a billion dollars will be in the hands of a monkey.”;
3. The US might have the fattest people in the world, but the UK has the best snack-food and don’t you forget it. Introducing snackspot.org – the slashdot of the teenage lust for sugar, fat and monosodium glutamate. Sample article: Confirmed Sighting: Bob the Builder’s Cheesy Toolbag
4. Could this be the most entertaining range of novelty S&M-wear ever made? bitch, dog, slut;
5. And finally… As OSX update 10.2.5 is finally software updatable, Apple announce a brand new product…

A few days on, here’s what the media and webloggia thinks about UpMyStreet (where I have worked for the last eight months or so) going into administration:

• Bowblog
  “While I was running another.com, we thought the UMS guys were golden. They were supposed to have survived the bust, they were supposed to have a bullet-proof (at least not chewing gum and string) service-based business model with recurring revenues. They had groovy, meaningful technology and excellent people who weren’t running dog dot.com opportunists. What happened, guys?”

• Blog.org
  “I hope that someone decides to pick up its assets and do something with them. The idea of linking information and discussion to postcodes is an excellent one and with the growth of location-based services of all kinds the site is bound to have a future – its directors say it is “only months from turning a profit”.”

• Guardian New Media Diary
  “Diary was disappointed last week to chronicle the demise of UpMyStreet, the innovative dotcom that allows you to check house prices, crime rates, listings and so on in any given area. The site is to go into administration in the hope of finding new backers. UpMyStreet was one of the few good ideas of the dotcom goldrush.”

• NewMediaZero
  “There’s no doubt that UpMyStreet provides a unique, quality service online. Its distribution on the Web through third-party commercial sites is second to none. It’s been backed by News International, which has helped its move onto Sky’s interactive areas. And it’s also deeply involved with Government plans to bring public services online.”

• NTK
  “It’s not often – but, we guess, not rare enough either – that a company gets slashdotted and receivershipped in the same week. But that’s what’s just happened to one of Britain’s pluckiest start-ups, UpMyStreet.”

• Whitelabel.org:
  “Buy my baby, please.”

In related news – some of my co-workers are prudently updating their CVs just in case the worst does come to past and the company doesn’t find a buyer.

• Phil Gyford
• Matt Webb

The wonderful weirdness of print publishing schedules means that the latest issue of internet magazine contains a news story about Google buying Blogger – a full five weeks after the story broke online. It’s got a few comments from me in it – which I think always greatly improves a publication – but even apart from my individual wisdom, the article itself is pretty cool. But enough about them…

    Tom Coates, author of the opinionated Plasticbag weblog (www.plasticbag.org) said webloggers themselves have been sorting out the Web’s content for some time. ‘There are a million webloggers out there, all writing stuff and linking to things in neatly organised and timely chunks,’ he said.
    ‘Webloggers are collectively, hyperactively and accidentally making sense of the Web. So it’s not so much about categorising weblog content as it is about using them to categorise everything!’
    Coates said he doubted that there’d be a Google News of weblogs, but thought that their links would be used to “add value” to existing news coverage. “Putting some of the good weblog posts at the end of conventional online news reports might bring that kind of context and grass-roots reaction back into online news,” he said.

God knows if I did say all that. It sounds pretty good though, so I’m not going to protest. I even agree with most of it…

A couple of interesting thoughts from Jean Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil (Verso 1990)

     And why does terrorism exist, if not as a violent form of abreaction in the social realm?
     The most stiking thing about events such as those that took place at the Heysel Stadium, Brussels, in 1985, is not their violence per se but the way in which this violence was given worldwide currency by television, and in the process turned into a travesty of itself.
     ‘How is such barbarity possible in the late twentieth century?’ This is a false question. There is no atavistic resurgence of some archaic type of violence. This violence of old was both more enthusiastic and more sacrificial than ours. Today’s violence, the violence produced by our hypermodernity, is terror. A simulacrum of violence, emerging less from passion than from the screen: a violence in the nature of the image …
     Another remarkable aspect of a happening like this is that it is in some way expected. We all collude in the anticipation of a fatal outcome, even if we are emotionally affected or shaken when it occurs. The Brussels police have been criticized for failing to avert the explosion of violence at the Heysel Stadium, but what no police could ever guard against is the sort of fascination, of mass appeal, exercised by the terrorist model. (p.75)

From a different article in the same book:

     The high degree to which AIDS, terrorism, crack cocaine or computer viruses mobilize the popular imagination should tell us that they are more than anecdotal occurrences in an irrational world. The fact is that they contain within them the whole logic of our system: these events are merely the spectacular expression of that system. They all hew to the same agenda of virulence and radiation, an agenda whose very power over the imagination is of a viral character…. (p.57)