Category: Random

Online Community Report
Are you a community builder? Are you interested in the latest revenue models for online communities? Well ok, so tht’s a bit of a long-shot. I think it’s interesting…

The History of the BBC
It might not be the most astonishing looking site but for those less familiar with the mighty organ of the British media it’s an incredibly useful place to start getting informed. I did quite badly in the 1980s decade quiz.

I’m thinking about a new and completely unpleasant feature for plasticbag.org – based around the ‘meet’ functionality at hotornot.com. Basically I signed up for this ages ago and occasionally get an e-mail in saying that someone wants to meet me. It’s all very embarrassing. Anyway – it occurs to me that I could be completely unpleasant and simply link to every single person who expresses an interest in meeting me – thus revealing the true depths of my personal despair…

Ev interviewed: “Well, writing a weblog is, in essence, simply writing. So most of the rules of good writing apply — clarity, articulateness, conciseness. That doesn’t mean it can’t be casual, or quirky, or unconventional in style. But those who are either practiced writers or who at least take the time to edit a bit tend to be more readable. Also, not being afraid to add your own personality is important. A big part of what attracts people to blogs is their personal nature, as opposed to corporate media, but some people aren’t confortable enough to let themselves show, so they tend to be lest interesting than they could be.”

On Saturday I finished ‘Lord of the Rings’ for the first time. I started reading it almost exactly ten years ago and got about one sixth of the way through it before deciding to ‘have a bit of a break’. I’m doing better with it than I am with Ulysses though. The race continueth – after ten years Rachel’s still on page 34 while I have roared ahead to a remarkable page 46. I’m reading Emergence now. It’s quite an entertaining read. I’m not convinced that much of it is really about emergence and self-organisation, and a lot of it seems to be balanced on some fairly precarious conjecture, but it’s certainly good to think with.

The thing I’m most looking forward to reading about on the internet at the moment is Bart’s thoughts on London. It was very entertaining meeting him, although he looked a little shell-shocked most of the time. But I’m dying to hear what he thought of it all…

It’s probably quite poor quality behaviour to spend your two-minutes’ of silence frantically typing. But it was the only moment in the morning when I felt I had any time at all to get anything done. Does that make me a bad man? It was a very quiet keyboard!

It’s terrifying really – it’s terrifying that it could take as little as three weeks of sporadic updates to halve the traffic a site gets. Halve! You lightweights. You quitters. I don’t know why I bother writing all this guff for you sometimes. It’s like your heart’s not really in it.

You can view the absence of posts over today as shocked silence after having some mad bloke‘s statement that the Queen Mum liked Ali G hideously confirmed. Grotesque imagery. Oldest of all old beligerent crones liking the least pleasant, least funny and least tasteful privileged North London comedy slummer. This hideous collision is like imagining Hitler making macrame place mats or seeing Bernard Manning doing Atomic Kitten impersonations.

I’d just like to apologise to Russell of use.perl.org for posting his adaptation of ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’ on plasticbag.org without attributing it to him. I don’t know whether he’d be delighted or horrified to know that it had been circulated around at least two of the mailing lists I regularly contribute to (without its author being mentioned). Anyway – I hope this link makes up for it a bit. Apologies…