plasticbag.org

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.

Review: Too much fluff and not enough bum? I’ll show you….

People post crap, when you’re a blogger
All sites look crappy, when you’re A-list
Chicks’ sites are boring, they are all flowery
Streets stay outside – where I never go…
When you blog….

Advice that other people may find amusing, but which today is really sticking in my head: How to ask someone out on a date.

So for some reason, after a tiring but basically successful day, I became totally and utterly consumed by self-doubt and a desire to hack myself into ribbons mentally, and so I did it and then I felt awful and crap and like I was the most useless person in the world, so I used my tactic of making sure that you play music which redirects your mood from passive to active – which made me angry (which was good), and then for a little bit I felt like everyone else was shit, which was a novel shift in perspective, and then I came home and now I want to complain at someone, but I probably shouldn’t because they’ll think I’m being self-indulgent. Which I probably am. It always worries me when I can’t tell. Like it worries me when I don’t know if I’m talking too much. Or when I feel conversations spiralling out of hand and I don’t know how to steady them out again or withdraw gracefully. Other people have those horrible moments when you don’t know how to make your laughs sound genuine, even though they are. Right?

I don’t know why I should feel the need to go through all this palaver. I normally keep my occasional brain-farts extremely private and controlled – and I don’t know why I should feel like such a bloody inadequate thirty-year old. Where did all this stuff come from? Is it because I was stuck in a room with people all day, and because I find talking to large groups of people so unbelievably terrifying. What the fuck has happened to me after a year of privacy that makes the outside world so overwhelming at times? And when did everyone get so confident that they were right? And where’s the thing in the world that I can be best at that would justify my existence?