Category: Random

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…

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.

Lots to get through this morning – all the stuff that I’ve meant to talk about in greater depth but haven’t had time to do so… Apologies to all concerned for trivialising your hard work…

• My favourite new kind-of-weblog is definitely 2lmc.org. I’m a particular fan of the design, but also the really funny geek humour;
• Giles Turnbull – esteemed British web enthusiast – has written a piece called Camino and Safari Compared for O’Reilly. Good sensible stuff;
• An annoying article for Adobe compares the performance of After Effects on the PC vs. After Effects on the Mac and comes to the conclusion that Macs are half the speed. I’m not going to dispute the results, only that people should bear in mind that it’s equally possible that the two versions of After Effects might not be of the same speed or quality;
• My co-worker Dorian’s stunningly cute and gorgeous little baby boy has started doing little early-morning exercises. Aw…
• Sex in the X-men? Maybe not in the movie, but certainly in the comic book – Sex in the X-men (via The LinkMachine);
• Is Nick Jordan – esteemed British weblogger – also Nick Jordan – esteemed provider of penis-enlargment pills?
• Joho the Blog’s piece on Links with Value is a better version of what I was trying to say in my piece The Responsibility of Linkage;
• I just bought this Tucano Second Skin case for my iBook – and it’s much recommended. The only way it could be improved is if it zipped fully open so you could leave your computer sitting on it;
• Jason’s finally given in and kottke.org is now syndicating full posts through .rdf. Frankly this is delightful and means that my daily NetNewsWire browsing experience is better than ever;
• Found on textism..com – a neat way to clean up Word HTML. This works pretty well, but also seems to strip out several special characters rather than encoding them (later note – oops – should read the instructions properly);
• Lance talks about coming to London – it was great to finally meet him and I hope we showed him a good time.

This probably couldn’t be any more trivial, ridiculous or infantile. But – just occasionally – OSX’s Mail.app’s tendency to truncate e-mail subjects and place an ellipsis at the end of the line has unintentionally funny side-effects…

There’s a page on this site that’s recently been getting a fair amount of traffic. It’s a page in the gallery which includes pictures of an establishment in Norwich, Norfolk called the George Bush Funeral Home. I don’t know how I feel about this. I took the pictures a couple of Christmasses ago after September 11th but before any massive pro or anti-war demonstrations were happening – and way before Iraq was even back on the international agenda. I’d seen the building years before of course – on my way back from school when I was a kid – only suddenly becoming a source of black satisfaction when George Bush the first got into power and when the first Gulf War was underway…

I don’t get that feeling any more. People linking to those pictures in ‘approving’ terms’ seems cheap to me. Tacky. Glib. It’s not an image that helps people think in different terms about anything. It doesn’t give people any more context or an understanding of any larger issues. It’s too easy an image to be ‘decent’ (in the moral sense). I feel more and more that a grasp of this issue must be fought for, worked at. What’s black humour in times of dissent becomes propogandist in times of war.