Category: Random

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…

I’ve been asked to participate in a survey about weblogs and journalism and, since it’s quite a detailed survey inviting lengthy responses, I’ve decided to put my replies online as a series of micro-articles. The first one goes up today, and is mostly concerned with my personal relationship to weblogs and my reasons for maintaining one…

On Weblogs and Journalism (Part One)
People feel pretty disenfranchised from the world around them – mostly their voices – their opinions – don’t really matter in the slightest. Weblogs – for good or ill – make people feel that they’re being listened to – that their opinions matter. If that was all they did, then I’d say that was enough…

On Friday morning, plasticbag.org reached the age of three years old. It seems like a fairly major milestone to me – maybe three years is the time when you begin to think to yourself, “Is this actually something I’m going to be doing for the foreseeable future – maybe for the rest of my life?” A scary thought…

If you’re interested enough – and god knows why you would be – you can still read the first weblog post I ever made over a thousand days ago… A thousand days… It would be good to be able to say that I’d posted almost every day of that time, but since I’ve just bunked off for almost a week, I think that might seem a bit cheeky…

So what’s happened over the last three years? What have I accomplished? I’ve met loads of new friends. I’ve gone from starting work at Time Out to being Production Editor of their website, through to unemployment, helping out on TCN, working on an education site for Europeans and Ethiopians and building a community for the BBC. Now I’m at UpMyStreet.com. I’ve had a couple of different relationships – mostly disasterous. I’ve sapped around quite a bit – as if there was a storm-cloud perpetually around me, and bounced around like a puppy for much briefer, but much more memorable, amounts of time.

I’ve written an awful lot of crap on my site, but I’ve also written odds and ends that I’ll always be able to keep and look at and be proud of. I’ve also pissed any number of people off. Which probably suggests I’m doing something right…

So where to go from here? God knows. I’d be lying if I said I never got bored of thinking of something to offer up to the world each day. I do. Show me another three-year vintage weblogger that doesn’t feel that occasionally. I don’t think the future will contain as much about my personal life, because I think after a while the more you write about something, the thinner it gets… It’s like you wear it out. After a while you want something that’s just for you – that’s yours alone and that you share with no one. I’ve already been writing less and less about what I do away from the computer… So I think the future probably lies more in the ideas that I have, or the opinions that I need to express. Maybe that’s the direction that weblogging itself will be taking as the huge Blogger Boom generation of the last two years settles down and tries to find a sense of purpose for their sites – a reason to keep writing every day. I can only hope that’ll be interesting enough to keep you guys sticking around…

In the meantime, thanks for coming and I’ll see you all in three years time… xx Tom

A weekend away from London is one thing – a weekend with the family is quite another. You never know whether it’ll be pleasant or nightmarish. Will it end with smiles or scowls? It was nearly a disaster before I even arrived. The trip across London was a nightmare in rain and public transport, and I missed my train by thirty seconds. The next train was double the price, and some bloody woman who had claimed two seats glared at me when I asked if I could sit down for the two hour journey… Halfway through the journey – an hour away from Norwich, I took a picture of Colchester station…

The following day we decided to go to the beach. My memories of the North Norfolk coast basically revolve around my step-father trying to get me to swim in the North Sea and it being cold and rainy. So I was a little grudging about the plan, but we all piled into the car nonetheless and drove north…

My suspicion had evaporated by the time we reached Brancaster. The day was beautiful, and the sky – the thing I miss most of all in London – was, well, everywhere. My mother and brother wandered off in one direction…

… while my father took the dog off for a bit of a paddle …

The beach was almost empty – there was a couple playing with a kite, and some people walking a couple of dogs on the horizon. But for the most part, there was nothing for miles around us in every direction… Even looking away from the beach…

My brother has an incredible throwing arm. He can launch a tennis ball into orbit, throwing at least twice as far as any of the rest of us can manage. Our dog – Tango – loves this, and will run backwards and forwards for hours and hours, fetching ball after ball…

At the high-water mark, the beach was crunchy with shells…

After a while we stumbled upon some mud-flats… It’s easy to walk on mud-flats for about twenty seconds, and then all the grippy parts of your shoes fill with clay and crap, which makes the soles of your shoes feel like huge slippy pats of butter, only black…

Some of the mud-flats rise up into creases by some kind of weird natural process. If you get close to them and photograph them close-up, they start to resemble hills, mountains and canyons…

Anyway – no walk can last forever, so we turned to head back to the restaurant, only to be confronted by one of the most beautiful skies I’d ever seen…

I can’t even count the amount of times recently that I’ve written about the movie Donnie Darko. I’m obsessed by it, it’s clear. But now you have the chance to get obsessed with it too, and I’m going to help you do it. No, I’m not going to pay for it. No, I’m not going to rub your ears and hold the popcorn while you watch it. Instead I’m inviting you all to come and see it with me, and with all the other loony friends that I’ve got that happened to be available on the same night. And the night? Tomorrow. Halloween.

Well that’s actually slightly innaccurate. In fact what’s actually happening is that Barbelith is inviting you to experience Donnie Darko Movie Madness tomorrow night. We’re going to claim the whole cinema for cool people, nice people, fun people – you know… my people. I’m totally serious about this.. It’s a great film and you’re all more than welcome – you’re expected to attend. And after the movie? Some kind of drinking, I should think… Yes definitely… A drink. Maybe several…