Category: Random

What happens when the Plastic Bag is finally consigned to history’s landfill. Will the world’s antipathy have been rained down on it so hard that the name itself will live through history in infamy? In which case – excellent – no problems there – I can keep the domain name cheerfully! But what if it becomes a name lost in history? What if in two years time no one has even heard of them. People forget so quickly. I know – after all the barbelith was a perfectly cromulent word for ‘happy fun place’ merely three weeks ago… But today, no one has the slightest idea what it means…

I don’t know what’s more terrifying frankly – that the European Union are considering an eye-bleeding new logo to represent themselves with, or that the logo resembles almost exactly an eye-bleeding site I’ve just built for the BBC‘s intranet… [also BBC News]

So what will be in the next release of OSX? A build-in chat app for one (although I’m not sure that’s strictly useful any more), SMS-messaging via Bluetooth phones, a map interface to Sherlock, AI-based spam filtering in the Mail app, an upgrade to Quartz to speed up rendering times. Plus – spring-loaded folders, graphics-tablet functionality, network software, Quicktime 6…. I’m drooling already…

Bank “Holiday” Weekend:
Saturday: Work in the office (4 hours), Movie (Panic Room), Drink (2 Mojitos), Meal (New World)
Sunday: Work in the office (4 hours), TV (West Wing, Strictly Ballroom, Empire Records), Sleep at 2.45am
Monday: Work in the office (3 hours), Lunch (Dim Sum at New World), Shopping (1 magazine), More Work in the office (4 1/2 hours)

Rolling Stone’s 50 uncoolest records that you should buy immediately: I am deeply ashamed that I don’t own any of them… I used to own Listen without Prejudice, but I gave it away to my best friend’s sister when I was seventeen. I maintain that Pet Shop Boys’ Actually is a really good record, even though my tape copy of it (which I bought cheap as a knock-off in Turkey when I was sixteen) wore out about a thousand years ago. And although I never had the Barenaked Ladies album, I think my friend Glyn did, and I seem to remember it being played when we drove around the south of England when I was nineteen, camping in fields and by the sides of roads. I do quite want the Weezer record though.

So, Mr Webb is off to San Francisco for the Emerging Tech Thing– and I’m putting out an appeal on his behalf – will someone look after him for us? He’s too valuable to the UK New Media elite to be damaged… Plus he knows all there is to know about Googlematic Aimbots…

If I wrote and edited technology stories for a living, I too would make every effort to flog my own weblog. Self-promotion in a tech-culture must be a lot about zeitgeist-surfing. As it is, I nearly have a career path again, suddenly. I’m a community-producer / expert with vast numbers of teeming models for distributed community welling up in my widdle mind.

Why is Kottke a good weblogger? We’ve all read The Tipping Point by now. He makes messages ‘sticky’ (I wonder how many other people could have thrown five hundred people at plasticbag.org in a day) – ‘permalink nipples’ is as close to the most-clickable-link-ever as you could hope to get for an audience of webloggers. He is a true information-gathering maven, operating within a medium that radically enhances his ability to act as a meme-disseminating connector / salesman. And contextually, he was one of the first to undertake the blogging experiment before the explosion of numbers – making him the logical ‘founding-father’ of the new wave of webloggers. Like it or not, everything Jason says on the internet carries more weight than even your site.

Permalink nipples? Oh that’s great. Just great. “Click on my permalink nipples, baby…” – “Move your hand over my permalink nipples…” – or perhaps the most disturbing, “Move your mouse over my permalink nipples…”

An interesting piece of research from the BBC suggests that New Labour have fulfilled 80% of their campaign promises since they came into power. Now, I think we’ve all felt disillusioned with the Labour party at some point during the last few years, but surely 80% is a pretty astonishingly high figure. Particularly for a country that increasingly believes that politicians don’t do anything of value. Unfortunately, such good news is rather undercut by the two seats won by the BNP in Burnley.