Category: Random

Being a list of (relatively) recently-found funny and/or weird links that are too insubstantial to write anything critical or interesting about and that have been piling up in my ‘do something with’ box for quite a while, only to be released on a Friday evening in an almost sexual explosion of trivia and spontaneous uselessness:

• From B3ta‘s photoshopping crew comes: Basically, it was fucked…
• Home Despot: “Free election fixing reminders! Loads of oppression advice!”
• If Blog Names Were Band-Names. Plasticbag, “sounds like Sigue Sigue Sputnik”.
• 100 Greatest Music Videos from Slant.
• Stunning Recursive Flash Imagery that’s likely to boil your mind.
• Tatooine chic meets Blancmange Telly-tubby underworld: BoVision
• Don’t buy stinky diamonds for your woman says Anil Dash.

Just in case you haven’t heard yet – iPhoto 2 and iMovie 2 are now both available for download. I’m off to get my copies now and if I have anything pertinent to say about them, you can be sure I’ll post about it… In the meantime, if anyone has any criticisms or thoughts on how they’ve been improved / debased, feel free to write a comment below…

From What is a Designer? by Norman Potter:

“In the field of product design, the professional extremes might be said to range from studio pottery and textile design at one end of the spectrum to engineering design and computer programming at the other. This is a very broad spectrum and clearly there are serious differences at the extremes. In the communication field, a similar spectrum might range from, say, freehand book illustration, to the very exact disciplines of cartography or the design of instrumentation for aircraft.”

I think it would be going over the top to say that the web has been rocked by suggestions that a group of Texan webloggers have ‘gamed’ the Bloggies. After all, the awards are very clearly niche-interest and geeky. More than that, even – they are supposed to be trivial – fun. In fact I think the reason they’re not uniformly despised is because of the innocence that surrounds them – an innocence that was the main reason why participating and being nominated was such a pleasure. These are your geeky peers. This is what they think. So you have to ask why on earth would anyone want to game them? It just makes the whole event, which is supposed to be a kind of weird coming-together of webloggers, just feel like every other kind of award ceremony – a scrabbling for adulation with no shame, no solidarity, no sense of community. It’s a shame.
I understand Nikolai‘s resistance to getting involved at this stage, but just for the record this is what I think should happen. Firstly, the people who have block-voted should have their sites removed from the nominations. Secondly, the votes they cast during the judging process should be discounted. Thirdly the list of five best sites that emerges from this filtered judges’ list should be merged with whatever’s left from the current five nominations. And then voting should begin again. It would probably mean a few more people in each category – maybe up to eight in some – but I think it’s the only way to handle it appropriately. Let the community decide.

I’ve heard it before and I know it’s not a particularly stunning thing to say, but I still feel a weird rush of pride and enthusiasm when someone says something like this: “Weblogs are arguably the first form that is native to the Web. They emerged from two key elements of the Web: hypertext and the ability for anyone with an Internet connection to create a Web page.” [NY News]

So here’s a conversation that I’d love to have been party to: Douglas Rushkoff spends a couple of hours with Al Gore. And in his post about it, Rushkoff has the charming naive enthusiasm of a teenage crush. And by all accounts with good reason:

But still, I could imagine him back in the dorm room, sitting up all night with the rest of us and dreaming about how things might be – if we were ever in charge. With Gore, much more than Clinton, we almost got one of us in there. This was an inspiring thought to me, until I realized that this might be as close as we ever get

I’ve had a couple of minor collisions with Douglas Rushkoff in my life. I e-mailed him once about our mutual crush Grant Morrison, and managed to keep a conversation going online for a few days about The Bomb and whether or not he was doing a treatment for an Invisibles movie. And then a few years later Davo and I went to see him speaking in a café in Golden Square, where I desperately wanted to speak about a dozen times and finally squeezed out one rather hopeless question before becoming distracted by a cute bloke.

Nevertheless, I consider this to be one degree of association between us – the same solid degree of separation that would exist if we had shagged like bunnies or grown-up together in Arkansas. Diseases I had that day may have infected him. It’s possible. Which means that Al Gore could have been en-common-colded by me once-removed. If the disease lay dormant for just over twelve months and only sprang into action at the hint of uncharismatic but otherwise cool presidential candidates. We’re practically brothers.

There’s no denying that 8 mile is a perfectly serviceable bit of cinema. And there’s no denying that it packs a few punches and that Eminem himself pulls off a perfectly adequate performance. And the world that is represented is compelling and mostly realistic. But I have to confess, as I looked at the seriousness with which they approached the combative rap scenes, I found myself unable to fully grasp why these were quite such big deals. It’s two grown men calling each other names in rhyme, surely? It’s artful and creative – gutsy even – but at no point did you get the feeling that these were battles of life and death. And weirdly, in the background, the threat of eviction and homelessness with a small child to look after seems almost trivial… Strange priorities…

According to Mr Webb and Mr Gyford (with whom I work), it is inappropriate web behaviour to have four full lines of bookmarks in your Mozilla toolbar, all waiting to be properly written-up and posted to your site. Probably less appropriate still are the eleven tabbed browser windows I have open as well, each containing something I’d like to talk about in more detail. So – because it remains vaguely fashionable, and because I’d much rather go and play Black and White – I’m going to do yet another link-dump. Don’t hate me. I’ll come up with some proper content one day. I promise…

• Wireless Cultures at the Tate Modern
  “Driven by a Brechtian ideal to ‘mobilise the user and redraft him/her as a producer’, small grassroots groups are connecting neighbourhoods into local area internet networks. How can these spark new areas of creative practice, and what precedents were set by the historical radio pioneers? This half-day seminar explores the use of wireless communication in artistic and social contexts…”

• Butterfly etymology
  In what must be one of the most deliciously wonderful pieces of etymology ever, I discovered today that the word psyche – which I knew came from the Ancient Greek word for ‘soul’ or ‘wind’ or ‘spirit’ also meant butterfly. The word today – of course – generally refers to a quasi-scientific concept of ‘mind’ that is heavily implicated in Platonic divisions between mind and body…

• People react to the Bloggies
  Despite the fact that the nomination and judging process of The Bloggies is open and well-known the first round nominations seem to have surprised quite a few warbloggers and celebrity bloggers. There are a number of possible reasons for this, of course. One reason is that right-wing warbloggers are self-selecting to be less community-spirited and engaged in ‘society’ (these being the realms of wooly liberals) and so may simply not have bothered to volunteer to be first round judges. Or of course it could be that warblogging and the associated celebrity figures are much more widely read by members of the public than they are by other webloggers. Admittedly some of the nominees are a little weird and there are some very notable absences, but it hardly seems fair to lambast the nomination process for their own inability to motivate their colleagues to take part… (The nomination process is as follows: members of the public nominate and some volunteer to be first-round judges. Then a percentage of the volunteers are randomly chosen to become second round judges who visit a substantial block of the nominated sites and then vote on their favourites, whittling them down to a manageable five per category. These five are presented to the public to vote upon.) And anyway – it’s supposed to be a fun content to take part in – a way for a community to get together and chat about stuff. Like a village fete or something. It’s not particularly serious…

• 10 ways to tell if your co-worker is an extra-terrestrial
  “Many top scientists believe that aliens live secretly among us. The sneaky intergalactic travelers often pose as our friends, neighbors and co-workers while they learn the ways of Earth. But how can you tell invading aliens from real humans?”

• Joe Clark talks balls
  One of the most interesting things about Joe Clark’s site is how often his arguments hinge upon how everyone has a vile self-serving secret agenda, or how they’re nasty manipulative people that want to squish the common {gay cinema/web usability/accessibility expert} man or that they occasionally make typos (and are therefore clearly incompetent and unpleasant).

• They don’t get blog
  Found while wandering through the Bloggies nominations for best article, this piece on how people like Andrew Sullivan miss the point with weblogging (spitting on community, talking about publishing) really hit home for me and reminded me a lot of a piece I wrote a while ago for a talk at the BBC. In it I argued that mainstream publishers had – to date – only interacted with weblogs on the most superficial level, as something to write about or as a territory to claim. Journalists often take the second approach when they go online. I also wrote about this in my debate with Simon Waldman about the Guardian’s Best British Blog prize. There is something very profoundly different about the polyphony of voices interacting and arguing one another. It’s not just a way to shout your opinions as loudly as possible in as flat and featureless a way as possible. Engaging in that community – not of webloggers, but of citizens who happen to be empowered to respond and engage with you – is the whole point as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t believe we ever needed more reasons to love Kurt Vonnegut. But if we did need more reasons, Matt Webb’s extended quotation from the Vonnegut book Bluebeard would certainly suffice. In the excerpt, three types of people are outlined who must be present during any kind of intellectual revolution: the Genius, the Expert and Christmas Turkey. Sometimes you have to wonder if any industry has ever been more full of the third type than the web industry:

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. ‘He will say almost anything in order to be interesting or exciting,’ says Slazinger. ‘Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.’

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell called these people “Mavens”, “Connectors” and “Salesman” and we all bought his book and called him a genius. Go figure.

Well the nominations have been announced for Bloggies 2003 and this year I’ve not been nominated for either “Best Poof” or “Best Eurotrash”. It’s always a terrible shame when people who do so well in childhood fail to live up to their early promise, don’t you think? Nonetheless, there is cause for celebration! Of all things, plasticbag.org has been nominated for the category of “Best Designed Weblog”!

My co-contenders in this category include Snazzykat, Neurotic Fishbowl, the gloriously lovely Loobylu — subliminal: she eats babies and kicks puppies – you don’t want to vote for her – plus anyway she’s far too good — and the frankly intimidating thinkdink. Obviously I don’t hold out tremendous hope for victory, but that won’t stop me pulling out my bull-whip and looking threatening until you agree to go and vote for me…

Typically, of course, such a nomination couldn’t have come at a worse time. There are small oddnesses creeping in around the site which you probably haven’t noticed yet, but will shortly. Something is stirring beneath the placid exterior of plasticbag’s webloggery that may give you pause to wonder, “What on earth is he up to?” Trust me, it’s nowhere near as exciting as it may initially sound. More later…