Category: Random

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)

I’ve been making diagrams. Don’t ask. I’ve been making diagrams. I’m in love with Omnigraffle and I don’t have time to post about what I’m thinking about because I’m too busy making diagrams about it. Hopefully I’ll hit some kind of legitimate plateau soon though and the diagrams will all coalesce with the stuff that I’ve been meaning to finish for ages and suddenly there’ll be loads of longer pieces from me appearing about Trackback, about Micro-paradigm shifts as a metaphor for online discussion, about social networks and the like… In the meantime, it’s brief link-log orgy time again – today mostly about online publishing work…

• Evil Nick Denton seeks Kottkesque Designer
  For some reason I keep thinking of Phil Gyford when I read this job description, although maybe Phil’s work is a bit astringent for the consumer press. Maybe Denise would be a better bet. Having said that though, Nick probably wants someone who’s not only based in the USA but also stinkingly cheap.

• Salon secures funding
  To which – in my current mood – all I can really say is “Well bully for you” – and what precisely have you done to empower the citizenry..? In the meantime, UpMyStreet has got a really nice write-up in The Register at the moment.

• The Always-On Network
  There’s something simultaneously very satisfying and utterly depressing about a stripped-down Slashdot clone founded by people like accenture and KPMG. It’s like the apex and nadir of weblog culture in one. Like Madonna singing “American Pie” – you win / you lose. They’re almost the same thing anyway…

I had a weird dream last night. In the dream, something apocalyptically odd had happened. Pollen from space, perhaps. Or a Tipping-Point style collapse where an idea or a chemical or a radio wave or something finally hit such a level that it generated utterly pandemic effects – spreading throughout the entire human population in a matter of moments. About a third of all the people on the planet suddenly became utterly obedient and suggestible – satisfied simply to serve – all apparently good-natured and pliable. One by one they’d kind of imprint on unaffected people around them, doing basically whatever they said. Initially, all the non-obedient people were horrified. They wanted their friends back, their relatives. There was research and work to try and get them back to normal. But gradually the non-obedient began to get used to it. Newly obedient people were gradually stripped of their good jobs and started to happily help out the people they were imprinted on – doing smaller jobs, littler things, menial tasks. Gradually though, the non-obedient people started to feel darker temptations, secretly and shamefully relishing the power and the opportunities it afforded them. Gradually the obedient people came to be seen as less than human, and – because they didn’t fight back, and didn’t express pain – were gradually and regularly physically abused, sexually violated and essentially enslaved. Gradually the world fell into two castes – the mainstream of humanity who could express any desire they wanted on their human ‘pets’ but who had a dark hint of discomfort and shame to everything they did, and a submissive and willing underclass. No one knew whether inside each member of the underclass was a fully conscious human being screaming in protest or whether they were as they seemed – docile, placid, unfazed. One of the people I like most in the world had become an oppressor…

Ok. So I’m back in London and I’m struggling to get back up to speed with what’s been going on in my absence. It’s terrifying how much can happen in a week. It’s terrifying how behind you can feel… Keeping hold of that sensation – where you’re actually riding the crest of the meme-stream is becoming an ever more difficult way of passing the time…

• Debates of Artistic Value in Rock Music:
  A Case Study of the Band Weezer, 1994-2001
  A shameful confession – I haven’t read this yet. Normally I make it a bit of a point of honour to read everything that I post up here. I won’t post it unless I’ve read it. But this is really long…

• What’s wrong with Dorian’s Eye?
  So I took a picture of my friend Dorian’s eye. He works next to me. He’d put in eye drops. I put the picture on my site. Ha! Ha! Very funny! Suddenly – months later – there’s a huge online discussion about why his eye’s all like that. Everyone’s taking it very seriously. Kind of strange.

• The Weblog Revolution
  Meg Hourihan brings everyone up to speed on this whole “Weblog” thing in one of the most concise and clear introductions I’ve read.

• Whitelabel.org / UpMyStreet.com
  After a discussion last week between lots of cool fun people at UMS, the people who are allowed near the code-base put Geo URL metatags into every page on the site. I’ve not really got a clear sense of what people out there might do with this information, but I’m quite looking forward to finding out…

Any minute now I’m going to have to launch into a huge tract about social software – about the good things and the bad things, about the cult that’s emerging around the term (with all it’s requisite ecstasies and rites of initiation), about how much the way people write about it reminds me of how people used to write about the internet before it became saturated with hype and the companies came and grew and then exploded in shards and collapsed upon themselves taking many good people with them. At a certain point, I might even have to mention that there’s a tremendous power here, but that it’s an extension of / redevelopment of / repurposing of earlier insights made by people making MOOs, MUDs, bulletin boards, message-boards and wikis and how I love working in it but I’m scared of the way people are talking it up and I wish people would build more brilliant things rather than talking about it. And then inevitably – shortly afterwards – I’ll probably write something more about it myself… It’s not like it was with my other baby. Weblogging grew gradually and properly and organically through the interactions of real people. This one’s being increasingly owned by the wrong people.

I’m back in London now, looking around me suspiciously and thinking about what to do next. But the first thing I want to do is resolve an issue that’s been driving me insane for about three years now. When I was a kid, my mother used to listen to fairly terrible cassettes in the car on the way to school – this must have been somewhere between 1981 and 1985. She had this album in the car and it was kind of Motown and it had a song on it which I really liked. Mum swears it was by Deniece Williams. All I remember about it was that it had a line about a guy seeming to be like Jekyll, but actually being like Hyde. You see – clearly a quality song. Anyway – does anyone (i) know what the name of said song is? (ii) know where I could get a CD or decent quality MP3 of it?

From the Financial Times this morning: UpMyStreet.com in Administration

“Upmystreet.com, one of the pioneers of the UK internet sector, yesterday followed many of its long-gone peers into administration as financial pressure led the company to file for protection as it sought a buyer. Tony Blin-Stoyle, founder and managing director of the company that provides local information to users, said the company had chosen a “prudent course of action” that he hoped would give it time to find a buyer. “We have filed for admini-stration, but still have time as we are fully solvent while looking for a buyer,” he said. Upmystreet developed a reputation for high-quality database technology that made use of the internet’s ability to link people with information relevant to them and won a string of awards. Its website links consumers to postcode-based information such as council tax rates, house prices and local businesses, while its commercial services help business and public sector bodies organise their web-based information. The group, owned in part by News International, BSkyB and NM Rothschild, earns annual sales of about £2m but has suffered from the media and technology slowdowns.”

There’s a quote going around the internet at the moment that’s widely attributed to Julius Caesar – and it’s tremendously rousing and potent and apposite. Unfortunately, I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever that it’s not also total bunk.

“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

I’m a bit of an enforced holiday at the moment. Evidently I’ve been getting too crazed with work as last week my boss started passing me notes saying things like “You need a holiday” and “Get out of my company”. So it’s ironic that after all those months of carefully tending UpMyStreet Conversations that it should be the first workday that I’m out of the office this year that the site gets Slashdotted.

I haven’t had a chance to read through all the comments yet but mostly people seem interested in the concept of geocoding content generally – with Conversations itself getting fairly limited coverage. Nonetheless I’m hoping for a few insights here and there… It’s a pity that Slashdot’s audience is so US-centric, of course – since the site is designed for people who have UK postcodes. Most of the people who come via Slashdot won’t be able to participate in any particularly meaningful way.