Category: Random

My mother rang up this morning – she’d seen a job for a Web Producer advertised in the Eastern Daily Press – Norfolk’s county newspaper (unlike the Evening News which is for dodgy left-wing city-types). The job paid badly and would have involved working at the BBC in Norwich. I couldn’t imagine anything worse.

The last few weeks – before getting this short stint at the BBC – I’ve been seriously considering leaving London. There’s very little here that really excites me, there’s little that would keep me here… Even now I’m unsure that I’ve got the patience and tolerance to deal with its griminess and greyness. But Norfolk… Perhaps that’s too scary even for me…

What the world needs is a Google of porn. Something that unbelievably simple… Pornfinder.

In about eight hours I start a three month contract with the BBC doing something extremely interesting that I don’t really want to go into detail about in a public place at the moment and which almost none of you will ever get to see anyway… I’m scared – to be honest. I know I can do it, but I don’t know if I will do it. Which is why I’m awake at 1am in the morning. Thinking.

I haven’t started a fucking meme in ages. It’s time for embarrasing online web confessions. Today I will confess to being the man who first created the alt.fan.noah-wyle newsgroup. I rule.

As we wander around the internet, and grab and download files to play with, our computers fill with the assorted detritus of a thousand tiny urges. While cleaning my computer I found a folder called ‘unfiled’ which contained images that I thought I might use two, three and even four years ago. Just odds and ends. Things that were funny, interesting or beautiful.

I’d love to put them all online for you to see, but perhaps they’ll make more sense as a collage – a scrapbook – a kind of stream-of-consciousness insight into bits of my head over the last couple of years…

There’s a much-linked article at the New York Times at the moment about the future of music-delivery and media – and it basically argues what I’ve been arguing for quite a while – that it’s the Value-Added aspects of music that will be interesting and people will pay for. I’ve suggested that video, lyrics etc. attached to audio files might be the most obvious, but the article suggests some areas I hadn’t thought of – all 20-tracks of a single song could be sold, or bespoke, non-replicatable, productions based upon the acoustics of your room…

Jason has linked to a very handy web presentation on simplicity which I can thoroughly recommend all web creatives to investigate.

Six Months That Changed A Year: “Julie Burchill: How I liberated Kandahar with the news that Tony Parsons is a bastard.” Terror Marches Backwards: “October 19th: Blair announces support for the US intention to bomb during Ramadan but confirms that out of respect for Islam, all food parcels dropped during this period will be empty.”

My first Exquisite Corpse has been posted. My slice is the third one. I was terrified when I sent it in that it would be embarrassingly bad, but it’s come together quite well. I feel quite self-satisfied, suddenly…

Daypop’s new Wishlist tracker is a genius idea, but also – presumably – quite a profitable one! It’s a shame that it seems restricted to Amazon.com customers, rather than the UK audience – but then again that does leave a space for someone in the UK to make some money… Additional features could include recently purchased items – and perhaps a way of grouping wishlists by types of products. Plus it would also be a nice touch to feature a cheap random product that you could buy off one of the wishlists in question. It seems unfair that Daypop should reap all the benefits of our greed!