Categories
Categories
Cameras communicating with Cameras…
So here’s a dumb idea about digital cameras. Let’s imagine a world in which everyone has a camera – and they carry them with them all the time. Say – for example – that they’re built into mobile phones. Right. Now you add in a sensor to each camera that means that they can communicate with all cameras within a narrowly focused area that corresponds with the area about to be captured within the viewfinder. Right. Now every camera includes information about how the person who owns it “feels” about various uses of their images. They can say, “I don’t feel comfortable with you distributing this image to your friends” or “Don’t take pictures of me” or whatever. Maybe even “no close-ups”. This information is thrown out to any camera that tries to take a picture of you and this has an influence on how the picture can be easily used.
So – for example – if I were a private nervous person who didn’t want photos taken of me at all, then I could set my camera to a ‘leave me alone’ mode. If someone tried to take a picture of me on a “normal” setting, then they’d find that their camera simply wouldn’t work. They’d keep pressing the button, but would be presented with error beeps instead. They’d have to actually switch to a “rude” mode in order to be able to take a photo. And if you didn’t want it to be distributed, the phone would just stop you forwarding it to other people – again unless you were prepared to switch into a “rude” mode. Could be fun…
Categories
Helsinki at midnight…
Caption: Helsinki at midnight. Currently: Nervous about Aula Meeting of Minds 2003.
Categories
The Ten Commandments of Weblogging…
Being a feeble transcription of some things that seemed really funny once over lunch with Cal, and which we tried – and failed – to get Webb interested in.
The Ten Commandments of Weblogging
- I am the log of the web. You shall have no other blogs but me.
- You shall not make for yourself other weblogs on other content management systems and look at them and get all wistful and think about changing to them instead.
- You shall not mention dodgy weblog CMSs in the same breath as proper ones like Blogger and Moveable Type. Bloxsom is not a proper weblogging system. It’s a potato.
- Remember the Bloggie nomination day. For it is truly a holy day and if you don’t remember and self-nominate and vote for yourself lots of times and get your friends to do so too, then you’re probably screwed. But be careful, ‘cos if Choire finds out you’re in serious shit.
- Honor your blog-father and your blog-mother at blogtree.com – or get blog-smacked-around-the-head by Dave Winer.
- You shall not murder the English language (or whatever language it is you speak) just because you’re l33t. Particularly not if you’re a teenager. Especially not if you like Linkin Park.
- Thou shalt not commit weblog-adultery with other people’s hard-earned links unless you carefully mark them with a “via” credit. The same applies to their girlfriends, boyfriends and members of their immediate family.
- Thou shalt not steal your design (except from Kottke).
- Thou shalt not lie on your weblog (seriously, that’s bad).
- You shall not covet your neighbour’s domain; you shall not covet your neighbour’s html, nor his homemade CMS, nor his hosting arrangement, nor anything that is your neighbour’s. Except maybe his traffic.
Categories
On rapid constitutional change…
Beat this Americans… 1,400 years after the post was first created, the role of the Lord Chancellor in the UK has been abolished. And, for the first time in hundreds of years, the political establishment and the judiciary have been forcibly separated from one another. This – obviously – is a tremendous move and almost certainly a positive one. My only anxiety is the speed of the shift and the way it doesn’t really appear to have been the result of any public debate. We will soon have a supreme court. Who knew? [Thanks to Michael for the link]
Tony Blair revealed a renewed thirst for radical constitutional reform yesterday when he swept aside 1,400 years of history by abolishing the post of lord chancellor and setting up a new US-style supreme court in place of the law lords.
The prime minister will also set up an independent judicial appointments commission, a reform resisted until very recently by Derry Irvine, who quit the government yesterday after six years.
The reforms, the product of a long Whitehall battle, bring about the much-demanded separation of powers between the judiciary and politicians.
I’m really interested in a debate about this subject – is it a good thing or a bad thing? Is it being pushed through? Where’s the debate?
Categories
Burning the name of god…
So there’s a guy outside the back of my flat who has lit a bonfire against the back wall of my building. The flames are licking up the wall. There is a large empty courtyard behind him. But no – the bonfire obviously has to be lit on the building. I asked him what he was doing with the whole “lighting a big fire against my building” thing. He evidently thought I was reacting entirely strangely about his completely legitimate arson attempts because he looked quite surprised by my question. Maybe he’s been setting fire to things for about ten years and no one in England has felt able to comment before. “I’m sure he’ll go away eventually dear… Just grin and bear it, eh?”
So anyway, it turns out he’s trying to getting rid of paper “with the name of god on it” and didn’t want to be disrespectful by putting it in the bin. He thought he’d best light the bonfire against my building (flames licking up the wall) during the day, “because [he] didn’t think people would be at home”, so clearly it would be less inconvenient for them. Unless of course they got home and they didn’t – you know – have a flat any more. I was terribly polite. I asked him if he knew what he was doing, he asserted he did. I looked a bit uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to be rude. So I came back inside and left him to it. Funny old world.
Categories
Weblogging Links…
A few interesting links about weblogs that have emerged recently (including a few about new-favourite-subject: permalinks) – many of these links taken from Many to Many:
- Permalinks considered harmful
“So basically, we have a nice concept of weblogs, but one of the key elements, permalinks, is being treated like a necessary evil, and hidden away. Some companies even break the permalinks on occasion; not even providing proper redirection. Clearly, some better solution is needed.” - Permalinks considered harmful discussion
“Best thing I can come up with is a replacement of the permalink with an immediate ‘blog this’ embedded piece of javascript or something that rather than linking through to the post in question, triggers a posting window with the correct permanent link already filled in. But that doesn’t solve the problem of people wanting to throw entries around between themselves and their friends by e-mail…” - Blogs are not democratic
“Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes. The correct analogy is therefore the market place..” - Blog Post Analysis
“Blogs are different. They are made of blog-posts and not web-pages. So they have to be treated differently. The correct units when dealing with blogs are the blog-posts and their permalinks. Blog Post Analysis (BPA) is an attempt in building a platform for blog analytics by identifying and presenting the fundamental units of blogs, the blog-post.”
Categories
On Permalinks and Paradigms…
There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us – so seemingly obvious – that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here’s a case in point – the weblog post’s permalink. I mean – let’s think about it. The problem was that a weblog’s front page is by far its most visited page. This is the page where everyone actually sees your content (or at least it was until the creation of RSS feeds). But it’s not possible for someone to effectively bookmark or link to that particular entry on that page, because shortly it will scroll off the bottom. Added to that, bookmarks operate at the level of pages, not posts. So how do you handle that? How can you make it possible for people to link to something with a higher level of granularity than just the page? Moreover, how can you get them to link to something that’s not actually on the page you’re looking at?
I remember when permalinks were invented – or at least, I remember when the concept was applied to Blogger weblogs in roughly its current form. After some digging around, I’ve found Paul Bausch’s post on Blogger’s weblog from March 2000. In the post, he referred to them just as “permanent links” – I believe it was Matt Haughey who coined the term ‘permalink’, but I could be wrong. I’ve researched both their sites, but I’ve found little commentary about them…
When permalinks first emerged, I was highly dismissive of them. I felt really uncomfortable with how hacky they seemed. Late-1999 / early-2000 was quite a creative time for people making weblog-related toys and paraphenalia. The concept of the permalink had all the signs of being equally useless and badly thought-through. For a start, it required yet more clutter on the weblog-page. The designer in me railed against them. But more than that, they seemed to be a kind of weird abomination – a sin against what links were there to do. Clicking on a permalink didn’t take you anywhere, you just ended up roughly where you were before, only in a more stable form. Sometimes (assuming you were already inside a site’s archives) clicking on a permalink would even take you to the same place on the same page you were before. At the time I honestly didn’t believe that they’d take off – that anyone would use them. But of course they did…
But why did it take off? What was so important about the permalink? It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And – as a result – friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first – and most successful – attempt to build bridges between weblogs. It existed way before Trackback and I think it’s been more fundamental to our development as a culture than comments… Not only that, it added history to weblogs as well – before you’d link to a site’s front page if you wanted to reference something they were talking about – that link would become worthless within days, but that didn’t matter because your own content was equally disposable. The creation of the permalink built-in memory – links that worked and remained consistent over time, conversations that could be archived and retraced later. The permalink stopped all weblog conversations being like that guy in Memento…
And yet no one seems to remember much about their creation. At the time they were a tiny paradigm shift in a tiny community of committed web-weirdos. No one thought that they might be one of the fundamental structuring principles of half a million sites. And so no one’s really written about them. No one’s really researched their creation. And no one’s given Paul Bausch and the Blogger crew the mad props they deserve. It’s probably time we did something about that…
Categories
Butts, blackjack, broadcast and…
I’m not sure why I’m bothering collating this set of links, because you’ll all flick through the first article, click on the realplayer movie of rectal endoscopy, watch in awed silence, howl in terror and grossed-out intrigue at the end and then leave and never come back to my site. Nonetheless:
Categories
Five asides…
Five asides:
- Matt Jones on living in space
“How many of you, like me, had shelves full of books full of images of suburban life being enjoyed on the edge of plexiglass toroid in geostationery orbit?” I did! In fact I had the very book that his featured photo comes from. - Technorati Search
Nearly three years after Blogger’s internal search facility keeled over, we finally have a replacement – and one that will help you search 369,481 active sites. - Dark Side of the 80s
I want this album. I want this album lots. It’s got Eloise by The Damned on it. That’s got to rock. I think it’s probably time for someone to buy it for me. - Danny sucks at DUX 2003
In one of the funniest pieces of writing about professional life that I’ve read recently, Danny reveals precisely how badly he sucked on a panel discussion. Well worth a read. - Bumplist
An interesting model this – a mailing list that can only have fifty people on it at any one time. As someone signs up, someone else is booted off. I lasted about ten hours on the list before I was ejected. In that time I sent one message and received one in return. I wasn’t overly impressed. More interesting, perhaps, would have been a model where if someone doesn’t post for four days (long weekend), they get booted off, freeing up a space for someone new. Otherwise, it’s more of a thought-experiment than a useful project.
Bugger it, I’m adding another couple because they’re just too damn good: