Category: Random

This relates to my earlier post today, particularly with reference to the Gore Vidal article which a friend and colleague was reading out loud to me. The friend concerned finished reading out a particularly horrifying bit and then said, “And it’s Gore Vidal… Gore Vidal!” At which point, for some reason, in a completely flat and apparently innocent tone – with nary a trace of eyebrow flicker, I replied, “I rather think that gay people should restrict their opinions to interior design and clothes and leave matters of international politics to heterosexual men, don’t you?” The fraction of a second of stunned silence was truly transcendent.

I’m posting a link to the Gore Vidal Observer article that was published a few weeks ago. At this point I’m going to take the cowardly option and declare up front that I’m not posting it because I either agree with it or disagree with it – in fact, on the vast majority of key points I’m far from able to confirm or deny any of the facts or opinions stated – but simply because I have as yet not seen it published anywhere online. Again – it may have been put online by someone weeks ago, and I may have simply missed it. So here it is: Gore Vidal on the enemy.

I don’t know whether to be delighted or grumpy about iBlog – the new weblogging software package for Mac OSX. I’m delighted because I’ve been thinking about how you might develop something very much like it. And I’m grumpy because I’ve been thinking about how you might develop something very much like it. Do you see how that works? In fact, I spent a good couple of days working on a design / concept mock-up of how I thought such an application should work. This work is now essentially useless. Still never mind.

Nonetheless, here are some of my thoughts about desktop weblogging applications:

• Firstly, an application of this kind should allow people to design modules and interfaces for the various packages, services and softwares already in existence (Blogger, Movable Type etc).
• Secondly (and related to the first point), the application should be able to function as an interface to an online service where posts could be stored centrally , Blogger-style. This would allow a web interface which is a crucial part of the whole ease-of-use weblogging aspect. The application could sync with the most recently updated or created posts, which can then be worked on and edited offline without compromising that sense of possession and security that comes of having the files locally.
• Thirdly, Apple should be building an application of this kind as an iApp because it extends the ability of the less web-savvy, web newcomers and the people who turn to Apple because of clarity and ease of interface. They should also be doing it because it could potentially add substantial value and utility to the .mac service.
• Fourthly, Apple controls a vast amount of other information which can be published to the web or specifically to .mac services – from iCal diaries, address book contact information and iPhoto albums. Even iTunes has spawned applications designed to make it easy to place what you’re listening to online. I makes total sense to organise a potential central point where you could bring all this information together – just as personal weblogs have been doing for the last few years.
• Fifthly, Apple made a terrible mistake in allowing other people to use the brushed metal finish which has been associated with their core applications. The metal made them seem stable, solid, reliable and core to the operating system – ie. trustworthy and reliable. This piece of branding genius is now inevitably going to be compromised….
• Sixthly, I much prefer the name iJournal, myself…

For more debate and discussion e-mail me or post a comment to the Blogroots thread, which I will check on regularly…

The Absolute Bottom 50 Urban Legends (number 17): “This buddy of mine who works in San Francisco – he knows this guy who worked for a DotCom company that wrote a business plan, broke even, cut costs, and is on the road to profitability!” [via Mr Webb]

I’ve just stumbled upon a fascinating piece by Dan Hon which goes into considerable detail about the way in which the UK weblogging scene evolved a community of sorts – a community that not every UK weblogger is a part of, but a community of and for webloggers anyway. To my knowledge, this is the first time this micro-history has been written down and published on a site and it may be of interest to anyone who cares about the ways in which stuff that happens online solidifies into matter and then collapses into real-life communities. One of the most interesting aspects of the article is that it posits that often the community (or the potentiality for community) radically predates the tool or forum used to facilitate it. Related posts: I talk about what it means to be part of a community | Meg writes about community versus community tools.

From Dan: “Would anyone say that a community existed? Possibly. Maybe not quite just yet. What you would be able to say, though, is that there existed an arbitrary set of people, say, people who write blogs and live in the UK, who were on the tentative cusp of actually starting to talk to each other on a regular basis – they hadn’t yet got organised.”

There’s no need for favicons. No need at all. They’re normally badly designed, they extend page design into the application itself (which I think is probably wrong) and they make your favourites menus all messy. Nonetheless, they are extraordinarily good fun to design – tiny little micro-branding-projects in 16×16 pixels that don’t take long and can be strangely satisfying. All this I discover years after everyone else of course. You can see the new favicons on this site, Barbelith and on the never-was-finally-build project, filmsoho.com…

You know what would be incredibly useful? A little application that you could run on a whole batch of MP3s that tried to work out what they are based on length and any text that was in the ID3 tags. So you’d grab all your MP3s that weren’t fully tagged up and you’d chuck em all in a folder. You’d get your ID3alizer and set it to work. It would have song length information and a set of search terms that it could run against each one of them (derived from whatever dysfunctional tags you had to work with, if any), starting with the artist. It would then present you with a screen that had the current ID3 tags on the left and the suggested replacements on the right with a simple ‘Is this correct? Yes / No’ set of functioning criteria. If it wasn’t correct, it’d just suggest the second alternative. Stick a track preview button on the same screen (to remind you what the track is if you’ve forgotten) and you’d have an incredibly useful little application.

Useful related links: CityofSound says: “Sounds like it might work nicely as a brute-force, lo-fi (cheap!) alternative (or precursor) to the collaborative-expert-based service I outlined previously.”

So we wake up to a world in which G.W. Bush has more power than ever, which is not a world that feels any safer to me. Across the world the rather resigned expectation is that the USA will be even less interested in the views of the international community than before – even as a new book is published that aims to explain to Americans why the world isn’t entirely thrilled by the behaviour of their government:

How the world sees Americans
“I was surprised that people were really able — and I heard this repeatedly — to distinguish between America and Americans. There’s America in the sense of the official government and the military. That official face of America in the world is not very well liked. And then there’s Americans — the people of the country, the ideals of the country, our popular culture. It was quite a sophisticated view, I thought, considering that they are very far away. Yes, America is in their face all the time, but the part of America that is in their face is that official part. They were able to still say, but you know, we love Americans and we love what you stand for. I heard that over and over again from all different walks of life and all different parts of the world.”

I’ve been thinking of buying an iBook for well over a year now. Well over. Maybe like two years or something. And now Apple have announced that they’re dropping the prices (substantially) and upping the specs a bit. And the lust is overwhelming. I genuinely need one now. It’s like a craving. It’s beyond a craving. It’s like a biological urge. I’m like a salmon being pulled upstream by an instinct so strong that I’m prepared to risk being pulled out of the river on a small piece of string, be gutted, coated in breadcrumbs and fed to some over-bited inbred Appallachian teen hairdresser-wannabe. That’s how much I need one.

In related news, Anakin Skywalker tired of the Jedi’s blue-sword-of-death and decided to switch to a more idiosyncratic and stylish brand, Apple have released a Powerbook that could outrace Superman and also burns DVDs, and I really really want an iBook.

More observant plasticbag.org punters may have noticed that there’s been a new addition to the gallery: A weekend in Norfolk.

Some of you might be wondering how this happened… “How did Tom,” you might ask, “take all these lovely photographs of Norfolk beaches and skies when his camera was stolen only a few weeks ago?”

Losing my camera really upset me. It was bought for me by some of my closest friends and some of my favourite web people – really really sweet friends who clubbed together for my thirtieth birthday. So when it was stolen it was as if someone had smeared mud all over one of my favourite memories. I was gutted.

Anyway – time passed and then suddenly out of the blue without any warning whatsoever I found a paypal payment for $400 in my inbox complete with a link to this web-page. All my friends on Barbelith had clubbed together to replace not only the camera, but to claim the memory back as well… I’d had absolutely no idea whatsoever – they’d conducted all their business on an invisible Barbelith ghost thread!

So now I have a twice-bought camera saturated with happy memories of my thirtieth birthday and valued friends – only now it’s enhanced by an incredible act of charity from a group of lovely Barbelites… You couldn’t have asked for a better gift…