By the way – if you looking for Dan Hill’s cityofsound weblog, then you should probably start looking at cityofsound.typepad.com instead, since he has – rather unceremoniously – moved. Dan is my boss at BBC Radio & Music Interactive, but can I make it clear that in no way did he force me to write this.
From a highly entertaining article on the Ten Commandments: “It’s obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones.”
Down the side of the sofa is the blue widget that connects my iBook to my phone. Since Vodafone or Sony Erickson or London’s weather or radioactive space emissions interfere so regularly with my ability to send picture messages, this blue widget is the only way I seem to be able to photos off my camera phone. Finding it down the side of the sofa, therefore, has suddenly unlocked my portable image stash.
For my thirty-first birthday, we hired a little chug boat from a place near my parent’s village. Rounding a corner we found ourselves looking directly at a wherry:
While I’m wandering around London, I often find myself taking snapshots of interesting bits of signage – bits of typography and design that trigger completely different reactions. It’s almost hard to believe that the stark and sombre marks on the Cenotaph were produced by the same frivolous elegant species that produced Art Nouveau. Here are five fragments of London signage:
And then there’s the pictures of people – oddly truncated, strangely cameo-shaped – like grunge passport photographs:
The only other thing that I really really feel is important to say about the Guardian article is that the photo they have decided to use alongside it makes me look – at best – like a total drooling inbred. It’s like they popped out into their country garden, got the largest, sweatiest tuber they could find, cut a few random shapes into it, poked it a few times with a ball-point pen and slapped my byline next to it! To compensate (and understanding of course that this in no way undermines my image of being a consumate professional) here are some happy pictures of me looking less gross:
So there’s an article in today’s Guardian Online supplement that I wrote about weblog culture. I’m pretty happy with it – I think I managed to say most of what I wanted to say. I’m not sure it’ll convince anyone who isn’t already convinced, but it might start pushing the debate in a slightly different direction – away from “dumb vs. not dumb” and more towards “well we’re stuck with them, what do we do now“. I had to edit it down by a couple of hundred words to get in under the word limit, so if I get time I’ll stick up a full version at some point in the next few days. In the meantime, here’s a quick quote from Second Sight:
A future weblogging culture should be able to find counterpoints to arguments, to identify experts quickly and easily, and it should help good commentary bubble up effectively from new or low-trafficked sites. Mechanisms that help us know who to read, who to trust and who to ignore should be permeating the entire community invisibly and pervasively.
Safari is close to mental collapse. I have far too many “must write about this” links hovering perpetually in my multi-tabbed browser. Safari is not perfect. It will throw a strop if I don’t take some of the strain away. So you’ll have to guess for yourself what kinds of penetrating commentary I would have otherwise given these following (less than fresh) links:
The Oxford English Dictionary’s draft definition of ‘weblog’ from March 2003: “A frequently updated web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary.”
Here are a couple of good (brief) quotes from Hal Hartley – who is one of my favourite directors. These quotes were found on Way Down Here:
There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things. If you make a chair, you want to make a nice chair. You want people to admire it. I think doing something well is a form of respect for humanity in general.
Depending on what’s happening in my life at a given time, I aspire towards solitude. Your stupidity quotient is obviously lower when you’re by yourself.
Can I just recommend The Devil’s Dictionary 2.0? There’s a particularly insightful definition of social software:
social software, noun
Any arbitrary collection of algorithms, protocols and metadata that allows friendless agoraphobics to pretend otherwise. “Iím having trouble deciding which node in my social software network Iím going to ask to the e-prom.”
Everybody has a space alien twin – who watches over us day and night: “For every human being on Earth, there appears to be an alien counterpart who takes care of them when times get tough, who shares the same thoughts and who bears a remarkable resemblance to them physically,” says respected cosmologist Dr. Thomas Coates. “This relationship appears to be the true cause of thousands of so-called abduction experiences — and perhaps every story we’ve ever heard about guardian angels.”
