Mildly Diverting

A small inkling of a thought

2010-02-12T23:26:00.002Z

Buzz. There's a LOT of it, isn't there?

Anyway, I had to turn it off. Too many distractions in the wrong place. I suspect I'm getting old.

There was a huge chat in the office about it: mostly revolving around engineering culture at google, and how a monoculture can become dangerous. You'll have read the same thoughts on a hundred other blogs already, I'm sure.

One upshot of the whole storm in a teacup is that I think I may stop automatically blurting all of my twitter updates to facebook. I've noticed my twitter frequency creeping up past one a day, and on twitter that's fine: on facebook, not so much. Besides, facebook has things like people I was at school with, and people whose children I babysat when I was 13, and their expectations are very different from mine in these spaces. So. If you want cormorant reports, you'll have to look elsewhere. I think that might be a tiny venn diagram, though.

Anyway, the point of this wittering. Yes.

I was just poking through google reader. I've been harmlessly sharing things there for a while - very unobtrusive, you really had to go and look for the stuff. So sorry if suddenly my random bookmarks are being thrust upon you. Didn't we learn the problem of push back with windows98? It's no better when the people doing the pushing are marginal aquaintaces, rather than corporate marketing departments, unfortunately.

The thing I noticed, though, was this. There I was, very quickly skim-looking a 'most popular on ffffound' feed, when I noticed that a ffffound post had 23 likes within google reader.

So, love has come strongly to Google. They're trying to out-digg digg, by making a digg that suffuses the whole web (sidewiki, reader, etc) at an object level. They can look at the ffffound pages for the activity there, and supplement that with their own love metrics, all cut with their demographic data. It's another way of understanding what's valuable on the web.

Just like links, back in google's original model.

Which makes me wonder: is the link as a measure of value on the web now dead?

In short, are we in danger of SEOing google to death, and is buzz their response to this?

Shrug. Maybe.

I should probably apply for this, you know.

2010-02-04T21:49:00.003Z

I got forwarded a job advert earlier on today, that I had to read twice to understand. I thought I'd rewrite it, for fun. Really, I should just stick my CV on the end of this, and hit reply, but frankly life is to short.

If it sounds like your cup of tea, visit http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2010/01/digipedia.aspx

> JISC ITT: Strategic Content Alliance: Digipedia from Prototype to Pilot Service
> The JISC, on behalf of the Strategic Content Alliance, invites tenders
> to develop the moderated web resource named 'Digipedia' from prototype
> to pilot service.

We need someone to run our trial website properly.

> The Strategic Content Alliance commissioned a prototype moderated wiki
> named 'Digipedia' in early 2009. The prototype aimed to link
> authoritative information resources on the management of the digital
> content life-cycle and produce a plain English narrative which can be
> text mined and provide an innovative browse mechanism to enable
> resource discovery for a broad audience. The primary audience for
> 'Digipedia' is policy makers and practitioners involved in the
> creation of digital content in the public and not-for-profit sectors.

We set up a wiki as a test last year, but haven't shown it to anyone yet.

We want it to be easy to read, and easy for anyone to use when they need to find out the best way of making things for people to look at on computers.

We think our wiki will mostly be used by civil servants and people that work for charites, who need to know the best way to put stuff on the internet.

As anyone can add to the site, we need to check it regularly to make sure no-one's been messing things up for everyone else.

> The aims of the work are to:
>
> Develop 'Digipedia' from prototype to pilot service, providing the
> user with an easy to use, authorative, up-to-date and insightful view
> on the management of the digital content lifecycle.

> Build up a sustainable community of organisations and individuals
> working towards developing 'good practice' in digital content
> provision at a policy and operational level.

As we didn't show anyone our small test website, we'd like you to you turn it in to a proper website for people to try out. We hope that a lot of people (and companies!) will use it, and like using it.

The website needs to be full of really useful information, stay up to date, and not be full of mistakes. If you make sure it is, we think that people will get involved with it by sharing ideas to make their working lives easier; both when they're coming up with ideas, and making things.

> Develop an effective communications and dissemination plan in order to
> raise awareness, seek contributors to and use of 'Digipedia' amongst
> key stakeholders at a policy and practitioner level.

Once you're happy that the website is working properly, we'd like you to tell people about it, so they know about it and come and use it.

> Develop a business plan for sustainability in consultation with JISC
> and other Strategic Content Alliance partners.

We'd like you to think of ways we can make money from the website, once it's working properly, too. You'll need prove that your suggestions will work to some skeptical people, too.

> Total funding of between £75,000-£85,000 (including VAT, travel and
> subsistence) is available for this work.

We'll pay you quite a lot of money for this, and also pay some of your tax, pay for your travel to work, and for your lunch.

> The deadline for proposals is 12 noon UK time on 5 February 2010.

Please get back to us tomorrow.

> A full version of the ITT can be found below.

I Think That I attached a file to this email - can you find it?

Negroponte Switch

2010-01-24T12:20:00.002Z

One day, I'll fess up to myself that this site is dead, and move on and stop feeling guilty for having nothing to write about. Anyway.

I was thinking about the Negroponte switch earlier - the little homily that says something like 'everything that was wired, will be wireless, and everything that was wireless, will be wired'. So phones go from tethered to mobile, etc.

I wonder if there's a comparable rule operating around culture that says something like 'everything that was tangible will become intangible, and vice versa'.

So music - it came on discs of stuff. Now it comes from nowhere - magically into my devices. I'm old fashioned - I still buy CDs, because I rather like browsing in record shops, and hdd crashes have taught me it's nice to have a physical backup around. My livingroom is groaning under the weight of DVDs, CDs... I keep thinking about getting rid of them, but I have an issue with the *potential of not being able to replace the experience*. It's like giving potential knowledge away.

Films are going the same way, and much as it pains me to think it books seem to be next. (it pains me, incidentally, because I love books as objects a very great deal, and once considered a career as a bookbinder.) Cultural objects are evaporating in to the datasphere. Look, here's some art about it.

Relationships, too - the management of relationships at a distance used to be about gifts, letters, little tokens. Now it's about facebook.

The third version of this rule might be memory. Something like 'everything that was forgotten shall be remembered, and everything that was remembered shall be forgotten'.

So- I no longer remember dates, phonenumbers, vast swathes of real data (because it's there in my databases, at the poke of a google - the internet is one huge memory prosthesis come factmachine).

But what does get remembered now is the minutiae of people's lives, and people who would otherwise have drifted away in to the big 'I wonder what happened to..' are brought to mind every day by facebook. There is no ephemeral, any more.

I've been having some interesting discussions with people recently about what this means for grief and bereavement: not the least because of Leslie Harpold's legacy slowly disappearing from the web, but also because of a couple of cases of friends finding out about deaths of people mostly forgotten via facebook. I wonder what our carrying capacity is for our histories to remain present? Is it better that people do just disappear, are forgotten over time - are we giving ourselves an unnecessary burden in maintaining emotional ties?

Is there only so much one can bear in mind?

I'm not sure. Sometimes it feels that way to me (and I often feel as if I would like to quietly retire from facebook, that 'friends' there don't need to know that I'm having fishfingers for breakfast, etc). But I'm an inveterate forgetter of birthdays, and drifter away; I may be different.

Anyway.

Western Digital MyBook Studio failing to mount on OSX Leopard

2009-11-09T22:10:00.003Z

A very boring title, but this is miraculous.

I have a Western Digital 1TB MyBook Studio external hard drive, with a triple interface: USB, Firewire 800 and eSATA. It's lovely - quite, roomy, and previous WD drives have been very reliable. It's under a year old.

It has all of my last year's work archived on it. A LOT of work.

It suddenly failed to mount on my Mac.

The disk would spin up - I could hear it spinning the disk up (it's v. quiet, mind) - but the cylon lights on the front wouldn't light up, and it wouldn't mount to the desktop. Checking system profiler for Firewire devices only showed an Unknown Device, and a transfer speed of up to 800Mbps.

Disk utility completely failed to see it.

So - I'm sitting here thinking that I'd need to rip out the drive, find an enclosure, void my warranty... you name it.

And then I found this:
http://www.fixya.com/support/t394049-drive_listed_as_unknown_device_mac_os

Feb 14, 2008
- After posting my question, I got through to a Wd service manager who checked everything out with me and finally suggested I tap the drive sharply on the back since a power button would sometimes stick. I did that and the button must have released since the drive then became bootable, recognizeable and has been working since. Sorry to have been such a bother for so simple a solution; I had tried to work the button but I quess it needed a slap--maybe I do too!

Martin

So - I've just unplugged my drive, given it four hard taps with my knuckles on the casing at the back - and bingo. It works again. Yay!

So - how to solve a problem with a Western Digital MyStudio 1TB hard drive failing to mount on a Mac. Worked for me, deserves some google juice.

Wikiphage

2009-09-24T14:25:00.002+01:00

There comes a point in any project when you have the day when it all seems a bit too much, deadlines growl at you, things just... don't come together.

The only proper response is slight hysteria, and a brief burst of creative procrastination.

Here is today's.

mildlydiverting Idea - download wikipedia on to a microSD card, and EAT ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE as an art piece.

Of course, that goes to Facebook (sorry, I know republishing is crass, I just have different friends in different places).

And then I did the maths.

Kim Plowright Idea - download wikipedia on to a microSD card, and EAT ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE as an art piece.
3 hours ago via Twitter

Jen Bolton, Alison Breadon and Lee Warren Magician like this.

Brian Lok Olsen
can you fit wiki on just one microSD. Perhaps a layer cake with microSD's and cream

Kim Plowright
SO - you can get 16gb on a MicroSd.

From Wikipedia's statistics for the English version of wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

Content pages 3,040,693
Pages (All pages in the wiki, including talk pages, redirects, etc.) 18,062,483

So there are 21103176 pages, of which content makes up (we'll exclude pictures and multimedia for the sake of argument) apx 14.4%

The most recent complete compressed database dump is 2.8 Terabytes - 2867 Gb, as there are 1024 G to a T. 14.4% of that is about 412GB, requiring me to eat 16 microSD Cards. I need to do some research in to the components within an SD card: do they contain circuitboards? Would they break apart during digestion? Is there a dioxin or a mercury load involved, and would 16 cards be enough to significantly damage my health?

All of these questions remain moot.

However, that 2.8gb dump also includes all HTML, and ALL revisions on the pages. I'm only interested in eating the current state of human knowledge: I don't need pretty formatting, or edit wars about Richard Dawkins.

You can actually download a data dump (compressed) from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download that contains just current snapshots of page articles. This download is 5gb approximately....

So, we could just eat one micro SD card, with a substantial cost saving (£10.59 for 8gb rather than £34.95 for 16gb), and hopefully less long term health risks.

Next decision: how to document this process.

Right, back to steering the oil tanker with a toothpick, and herding the Schrodinger's Cats.

Rhonda Forever 2003-2009

2009-08-01T23:31:00.001+01:00

Rhonda Forever 2003-2009

This is the most lovely 3d drawing tool. The haptics of it are just fantstic. Makes me want to actually... DO for once.

Reading Dematerials

2009-06-23T14:41:00.002+01:00

My Library on Google Books

A few years ago I spent a good few hours scanning the barcodes of my (huge) collection of books, cds, dvds etc using a lovely little bit of software called Delicious Library. It's smart: it uses your built in webcam as a barcode reader, and grabs cover images from Amazon. It also told me interesting things - for instance, I own six books whose second hand value is currently over £100. Alas, even under current circumstances I think I could only bear to part with one of those.

The drawback of the software, however, is that it seems to be very much tied in to a desktop paradigm: something I've noticed is fairly common with Mac apps. The latest version has a 'publish to web' option which spits out rather over-designed HTML. It's a database: what I'd like is a way of syncing a list of identifiers with services that are already out there: listal, LibraryThing perhaps. Both of those sites got fed a long list of ISBNS, or a hacky XML file a while ago, and show a frozen snapshot of my library in time.

I wonder if Google Books 'My Library' might be impetus to get this sorted. Syncing a list of ISBNs shouldn't be too hard, and an API is out there already, and there are some lovely tools coming from the team that help dematerialise physical objects and spread them on the web.

I'd love an application that sat on my phone, let me add books to my local library with the phonecam, synced to my desktop application then updated the various sites where I've stored information over time. As more books go online within the Google Books site, suddenly I have a way of searching across the big, physical knowledge backup system I've been carting around and building upon since I was 5.

I don't think I could ever get to a point where I'm able to box up my books and leave them in storage: I'm too in love with them as physical objects; they're too totemic. But as physical authentication tokens for locked online data stores, they're also pretty interesting. If you could access a digital version of a text only through holding the physical object up for recognition... Hmn.

Untethered

2009-05-24T22:08:00.000+01:00

Ugly and neglected fragments (Phil Gyford’s website)

Just skim reading this post on the vernacular by Phil.

I was thinking, on the bus, the other day, about the history of the move from telephones being that of addressing a space, to addressing a person. A land line number connects you with a house or building, in which space the person you want to address may or may not be coincident. Mobiles untethered the phonenumber from a place, and associated it with an individual. You call someone's number, someone's phone, with no overlay of serendipity beyond can they hoik it out of their handbag in time.

I found myself wondering - will the history of the homepage be like this, too? A move from an addressable piece of web real-estate, that may contain the recent activity of an individual; towards a model where a person leaves data trails, a stream, that isn't bound to a certain digital location, or instatiation, but is remade wherever the reader happens to aggregate it. Will the layout of a homepage be superseded by a bunch of feeds - from twitter, flickr... wherever. Are we just a sum of activity rather than publishers?

Anyway, it was a half formed thought. I suspect I may just be talking about 'everyware'.

Lost?

2009-04-10T00:01:00.001+01:00

Lost?
Originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting

Things that are exciting

2009-02-20T12:35:00.001Z

1314-libreta3
Originally uploaded by Mikeyj_cox

I've been working on a really quite bonkers project - Routes for about 8 months now. We're slap in the middle of our live run, and the most amazing thing has just happened: one of our players has mostly figured out a code based on DNA codons within a couple of hours of the pictures going up on a 'police' website.

It's kind of magic to watch.

The best thing: he's posted a really lovely explaination of the science behind the code - and even used some of the same sites that helped us formulate the idea for the puzzle originally.

One Of The Reasons I Have Been Quiet

2009-01-26T20:45:00.003Z

I have been working really quite hard.

The little Breeder widget above is just one part of the huge bloody game I've been working on:

http://www.routesgame.com/

It's about genetics, and stuff. It's quite good. Try it out.

As serious as your life

2008-12-24T10:02:00.001Z

Morris Dancing is rad and awesome and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

(I also rather like the fact that this places Four Tet firmly in the tradition of English Folk Whimsy, running straight up from the Victorians via The Wicker Man. It's exactly the thing in his music I like so much. Yes.)

Life Drawing

2008-12-04T23:13:00.001Z

Life Drawing
Originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting

I finally have something to post about.

I went to a life class - my first for a good ten years.

I can still draw.

This is a very very happy thing.

Interesting storm in an internet marketing teacup

2008-07-16T23:01:00.000+01:00

kung fu grippe - The Loopt SMS Mess

I mean, it's another one of those 'web service behaves like a jerk, all of the right thinking folk on the internet get in a tizz and write blogposts ticking them off' kind of things. See also plaxo, back in the mists of time, and the more recent flickr/myxer brouhaha. It reminded me, however, of a little fauxpas I encountered on Facebook recently.

A friend of mine does various bits of ad-hoc PA work for individuals around the place; she's a virtual PA, and very good at what she does.

One of her clients is obviously setting up a new small business, and is offering free events to drum up business. All good so far, and perfectly sound marketing practice.

So, my friend let a group of us know, via facebook, that there was an opportunity to attend a free event. It wasn't my thing, so I didn't respond. Fair enough - this was contact between two friends.

The point it became problematic for me was the third group message that came in to my email, via facebook. Now, I obviously have an opt in relationship with Facebook, so the email is to be expected. And I have a friendly relationship with the person initiating the messages on facebook, which wouldn't be conventionally governed by direct marketing guidelines.

What happens, in short, when my friend starts using a personal distribution list, through a third-party service, to promote a commercial venture belonging to a client she is contracted to?

There are a few problems caused by this scenario. Firstly, it places strain on my friendship with the individual; it's only a minor social faux pas, of course, we've all made them, but nonetheless there is some social harm done there. Secondly, whilst the first message has a positive effect on the brand being (sincerely, I should add) promoted, the third message does enough damage to send the brand in to a kind of negative marketing equity. There's the damage this situation does to Facebook, too; it becomes 'that place that's full of poorly targeted but well meaning marketing messages sent out by people who don't know any better'. And finally, there are potential legal implications around Facebook's Terms and Conditions, Direct Marketing rules, and data protection issues. Yes, I can opt in to recieving info and messages from my friends, but what happens when those friends become amateur direct marketers?

Social marketing is about to enter a messy, painful adolesence.

Gizmodo v. the Truth

2008-06-23T16:12:00.000+01:00

Science: NASA Scientists Make Magnetic Fields Visible, Beautiful

This is an appalling write up from Gizmodo.

The film in question was made by an experimental art / animation duo on the ACE International Fellowship for Art and Space Science at UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab in June, 2005. Not, as Gizmodo says, by NASA scientists.

Here's the site of the animation duo, who are pretty fantastic. http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/.

The film - 'Magnetic Movie' - was co-commissioned by Channel 4 and the Arts Council, under the 'Animate! Projects' banner, that's consistently produced some of the most interesting animation in the UK over the last 15 years or so.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

They work, from what I understand, using the open source visualisation language, Processing, and have contributed to Casey Reas' book on Processing. Not bad, for artists, really. It's not all paint and gitaines, these days.

I'm most depressed by the peanut gallery in the comments who are distressed that it's 'fake'. Well, yes, but no more so than any other diagram or visualisation in any science text book, frankly. It's a way of making the invisible visible.

See more of Semiconductor's excellent work on their site.

Roots of Breakdance (Run DMC - It's Like That)

2008-06-22T12:13:00.002+01:00

(Edit - hmn, YouTube doesn't seem to be passing the notes around that blog post)

I've been rooting around on YouTube looking at dances, inspired by Tom's marvellous post about Belgian Jump Style. If he doesn't bash a talk together about the cultural hand-me-down chains in dance culture, I may have to.

It's something about everything old being new again, or maybe everything new being old again. It's satisfying, anyway.

Plenty more little gems on my YouTube playlist. Sadly a lot of stuff seems to have vanished. Must remember to download and preserve!

A Note About Email Validation

2008-06-19T10:29:00.000+01:00

Lurpak are running a compo to win a breadmaker. Whoop de do. Anyway, being the person who opened the new butter at work, I thought I'd enter the code on the site for a giggle.

Now, I like to be able to sort my email - I like to treat newsletters, lists and personal mail differently. It's a necessity when you get around a hundred emails a day. A really smart way of doing this is with labels in gmail - by using your.name+label@blah.com you can 'presort' mail in to the relevant label.

The format of that email address is absolutely in line with the RFC standards for email - see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696, for instance.

It's surprising how very few sites accept the + sign as a valid character, however. I'd estimate 1 in 20 on a good day, with the wind behind me.

I wouldn't mind so much, but it's useful to work out if company X has sold on your email address. If, when signing up for a service, you format your email address as your.name+servicename@blah.com. All mail sent to that address ends up in your main inbox, but premarked and filed as from sevicename Then, should spam start appearing addressed to that specific address, you can be fairly sure that servicename is the culprit.

Anway, I wish more people were aware of this tip, and that more developers implemented validation properly. That's all.

Reminder - Book your tickets for Open Tech 2008 - 5th July in London.

2008-06-10T10:38:00.000+01:00

Open Tech 2008 - 5th July in London.

I'm going to be talking about Rembrandt, P0rn and Robot Monkeys. I will also be shaking like a leaf with terror. Come and support me, or come and laugh at the comedy fat girl, it's all good.

Here's the detail:

Open Tech 2008
sponsored by BT Osmosoft

Saturday July 5th - ULU, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/

Open Tech 2008, from UKUUG and friends, is an informal
one-day conference about technology, society and low-
carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and
technologies that anyone can have a go at.

You can pre-register your ticket now at
www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/registration
to allow you to jump the queue and pay your fiver on the door.
The last two times we did this, we sold out in advance, so you
are strongly advised to pre-register.

With 3 concurrent sessions, The line-up features:
* Open Rights Group - 2 years, 344 days on
* mySociety - WhatDoTheyKnow.com launch, and other goodies
* Overthrowing Government on a Budget, Keeping Track of
the CIA's Rendition Flights, Tracking Arms Dealers
with Python and Bits of String
* Ben Laurie and friends on network security
* Danny O'Brien's Living on the Edge
* AMEE, and Open Source Solar Heating
* Saving money and reducing carbon through Green IT
* Getting people involved with online media

Totalling 60 talks across 3 sessions covering 9 hours, there's
plenty in the programme for everyone including Rembrandt, Pr0n and
Robot Monkeys, and all that's just in one session!

The full schedule is at
www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/schedule

You can pre-register your ticket now at
www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/registration
to allow you to jump the queue and pay your fiver on the door.
The last two times we did this, we sold out in advance, so you
are strongly advised to pre-register.

* Further information *

Sign up for your tickets online, and tick the box to hear from us, or
just send an email to join uf
opentech-info-subscribe@lists.ukuug.org

(your address will only be used to contact you about OpenTech and
will not be passed onto third parties).

- or you can email opentech@ukuug.org if you've any other questions.

We're also looking for volunteers to help out on the day.
In return for free early entry and our eternal gratitude,
we're in need of a few people to show up a bit earlier
and help us set the venue up. If you're interested, or
have random other questions, email us on opentech@ukuug.org

Open Tech 2008

Saturday July 5th - ULU, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/

Final programme may be subject to alteration. Thanks for reading!

Cheers
Ben, Etienne, Emily and Sam
your friendly OpenTech 2008 organisers

In which Orange need to get their acceptable use policy sorted.

2008-06-06T14:03:00.000+01:00

So earlier on today I sent round a glowing email about the World's first internet balloon race. I'm looking at widgets for my company at the moment, and I'm really interested in games that use the whole internet as a canvas. Here's (roughly) the text of the email I sent to my co-workers

Subject: Possibly the best use of widgets I've seen

It's an internet balloon race
http://www.playballoonacy.com/

Things that are good:

I found it because a site I visited had a tiny balloon bobbing in the bottom corner - the experience design is really delightful.

The 'add the widgets to your site' is seamless, and allows you to add to a huge number of sites without leaving the main area. It looks like they've outsourced some of that to a company that specialize in distribution and measurement of widgets: http://www.gigya.com/

The widget acts as a way for you to track your participation - so it's your interface to the game, but also displays your participation to others.

There are two parts to the participation element - so you can race a balloon, and add it to your blog etc, but you can also sign up your site to 'host' balloons for the race. I'm imagining this involves nice flash overlays of floating balloons like the one that led me to the site

So the widgets connect each player to their balloon, which could be anywhere across loads of signed up sites - driving traffic across partner sites. It's fun for the players, useful for the hosts, and spreads the message for orange.

This is only the third thing I've seen (other than MOO's Treasure Hunt) that uses the 'whole web as a canvas' - the other is PMOG http://pmog.com/ , which requires the download of browser plugins.

Also, balloons! on the internet! Brilliant!

Bad things - the whole of the sign up site is build in flash. Why? Why?

And now I have another bad thing to add to my list. Here's an email from Orange:

Hi Kim,

We've taken a look at your balloon and we're sorry but we can't let it take part in the race.

It may be because the name or message contains some naughtiness.

To win a luxury holiday for you and your mates in Ibiza you can create another balloon at http://www.playballoonacy.com/

The wording on my balloon that they have rejected is this:

"Hello, I'm Antonin. I might be a corporate shill for a dull mobile phone behemoth, but look, I am also a balloon. A Balloon. On the Internet. That's great!"

This is a fairly close representation of how I feel about the site. It's advertising, and I'm not a huge fan of advertising. It's potentially a little intrusive if you suddenly find your regular spots on the internet are being 'flash mobbed' by balloons. But, the thing is, it's such a good and original idea that I actually signed up, and embedded a widget over yonder, and on my Facebook page. I add very very few applications on facebook, so this should be a major triumph for their marketing department - they've involved a hard-to-reach demographic right off.

So.

The instructions about naming the balloon say

'Write a nice message to get spectators to cheer you on'.

And then underneath the text field, they say 'We'll need to check your message before we put it up on the site, so nothing rude.'

There aren't any terms in the Ts&Cs that I can see which refer to what Orange may consider to be acceptable content, other than 'All Entry instructions form part of the terms and conditions' There's isn't anything to say 'Orange may reject your entry, and you won't be able to re-enter.' It's just 'we need to check it'.

And there's no definition of rude. My message certainly isn't obscene. It's possibly a little cheeky, but really, is pointing out that the balloon is advertising for a brand that offensive?

At the very least, they need to clarify their community/acceptable use guidelines, and include some wording along the lines of 'messages that we feel might in any way damage our brand will be rejected. And if we do reject them, there will be NO obvious way to go back and edit the offending message, so you've blown your chance to enter.'

I think Orange may need to have a think about their approach to user involvement with their brand. If you give your brand to people in a game situation, they will play with it. They will sometimes play with it in ways that don't quite tally with your expectations. You need to allow them to do this, or you will loose the good will they build up through play.

For reference - my previous relationship with the brand: I was with Orange for around 9 years, and gave them up last year because they had no decent roaming data plans, and I'd won an N95.

This is what you want, not what you'll get.

2008-06-06T11:48:00.000+01:00

AA Driving School: Learn to drive - Get prices and book lessons - The AA

I've just stumbled across the most comical piece of usability fail on the AA site. They have a question on their 'get a quote' page that's designed, obviously, to measure the success of their various forms of advertising. The idea is simple - joe-learner-driver comes along, selects where they heard about the AA from, and the marketing department get some useful metrics.

Except, the marketing department has supplied a list of their internal categories of advertising, broken down to a minutely detailed level. It's the information they want out of the form, of course, but it's not a list that makes sense to have on the site.

It's very very long indeed, and really, how am I as a customer meant to know about whether I saw their 'Latest Mailer', or their 'October 07 Mailer' - version one, or the second version, labeled exactly the same way two pops lower down the list?

I can't imagine that they're getting any useful information out of this form at all. I suggest their client side coders go round to their marketing team, and point and laugh.

Here, for posterities sake, is the list. I wonder what a 'DIT advert NE' is?

How did you hear about the AA?
NovADIad
BOGOF offer
AA Member
AA Staff
Adi News
Self sourced pupil
Internet - www.AAdrivingschool.co.uk site
Affinity Partner
Internet - www.AA-Attitude.co.uk
Seen car
Saw car in the area
Complaint
Driving Instructor Magazine
Driving Magazine
Email campaign
Friends and family
Franchise Sales
Internet Advert
IAM Magazine
IGI Scheme
Intuition
Leaflet
Papers/magazines
Magazine Advert
Direct Mail
Latest Mailer
MSA Magazine
Newspaper Advert
Student offer
Other
Poster/flyer
Returning Franchise
Recommendation
ADI recommendation
Recommended (Not IGI)
Roadshow
Roadshow lead
School/College Uni visit
Search engine
Voucher
Recruitment website
Internet Enquiry
Yellow Pages.
Signature Leads
Preregistration Outbound
Daily Mirror Jun 07
Franchise Sales Jun 06
Franchise Sales Jun 06
September 07 Mailer
AAdvance Leads
Outbound Directory
September 07 Mailer
October 07 Mailer
Freshers Fair
October 07 Mailer
DIT advert BEP
DIT advert NEP
DIT advert LM
DIT advert CEN
DIT advert YEP
DIT advert SE
DIT advert BT
DIT advert NE
DIT advert SE
DIR advert ES
DIT advert SWE
DIT advert EDP
DIT advert METRO
DIT advert POLICE
DIT advert EEN
DIT advert MET
LMR VOU
TIC 08

TLA Variants

2008-06-03T14:17:00.000+01:00

Chat Slang and Acronyms used in chat rooms, IM, and email

Public Service Announcement to three of my email contacts (one of whom is my Mother):

LOL does not stand for 'Lots of Love'. It stands for 'Laughing Out Loud'.

It looks really strange when you sign off your emails with LOL (name). Why are you laughing? Are you not taking the email seriously? Do you find me funny, like a clown?

Understand that you may inadvertently upset someone by using the acronym to stand for Lots of Love; they may not read it in the same way you do.

Sidenote: I wonder if this is a common change in usage for people who are relative newcomers to the internet? eg, if you're a pre-2000 denizen, it will always be Laugh, but post 2000, Love is the more common interpretation.

In which a lifetime of License Fees are accounted for in 30 minutes

2008-06-01T23:29:00.002+01:00

ArtWorks Scotland - Alison Watt: A Painter's Eye

I'm sold on the iPlayer, to the point of having tears in my eyes.

Clicking around (and what a terrible interface it is for browsing) I noticed an arts programme destined for broadcast only in Scotland. Except, there it was on iPlayer, too - 30 minutes of television about my absolute favourite painter, Alison Watt.

I saw her work for the first time when I found a catalogue to one of her early shows in a second hand book-shop. She's a figurative painter, mostly, although tending towards abstraction of a kind these days. The work I fell for was portraits of women; drawn from art history, a little Ingres, really; very still, very beautiful, chalky and calm. I still love them, and would give anything to own one, to be able to look at it every day as the light changed, to live with it as it unfolded.

And here, here is 30 minutes of Proper Arts Television; just long, still shots of the paintings, and then the artist herself - her, there, talking - I'd never seen her before. She's so engaged with her work, she talks passionately about painting, about how it involves you, how you fall for images. The pacing reminds me of the old Modern Times documentaries; there's breathing space for the viewer to take in the pictures here.

I'm so happy to have found this; to have been reminded why I love images, and why I love television, and why I love the internet; to be reminded of why my career has travelled the odd direction it has.

Thank you, BBC Scotland, and thank you Alison Watt. There is so much happiness and beauty here.

My Other First Conference

2008-05-22T22:50:00.000+01:00

russell davies: an incomplete list of interesting speakers

As Russell points out, I'm not giving my Art / Robots / HCI /Porn and stuff talk at Interesting. Instead, at the moment (and it may change if I have a little panic about the subject) I am going to be delivering the following little chat:

"This Talk May Suck: The Cultural History of the Vacuum Cleaner"

It is more interesting than it appears.

Statistically Comparative Fight Club

2008-05-22T22:20:00.001+01:00

How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?

In my case, 28. The same number as Alice.

Tom can only take 18. Cherie managed 26.

Now, taking children as a baseline, theoretically, what we thus have is a measure of likelihood of each of us beating the other in a fight. Alice and I are an even match, obviously - her high kicks would be countered by my naturally low centre of gravity, I presume.

Tom and I would be closer to a foregone conclusion. What would the maths be? If we fought 28+18 rounds, would I win 28 and he 18? That would mean I'd have a 28/(28+18)*100 percent chance of winning - or 60.869%. 3:2 odds, isn't that? My ability to use small children as a weapon would be an advantage here, I think.

I'd have a very slim advantage over Cherie - 51.852% - fairly even odds, I think. I'm not sure about that, actually, as I think she'd kick my 'ass' - permissable due to her being American. Only an Englishman would kick my arse, of course.

Back to the drawing board on the calculations, then.

The Thing I've Kind of Made

2008-05-19T17:18:00.002+01:00

Greeting Cards £12.99
Buy this on MOO.com

We launched a new bit of work on MOO last week: a huge expansion of the 'Ready Made' pack area of the site. Ready Made lets you buy a pack of MOO Products without having to upload your own images. You get a really lovely variety of designs by our MOO designers - there's some amazing stuff in there. The Rujirushi cards above are by a Japanese animator, and are the most lovely green imaginable.

The cool thing - and I can't really take credit for it as my idea - is that if you buy a pack of cards, and photograph them, when you upload them to flickr you can grab a special MOO tag that will make your photo automagically appear on the right page on MOO.

It's cute. Try it.

Props to memespring, c0ntax and symphonicknot who actually did all the work. And to my awesome designers. (UPDATE: Shit! Forgot pixellent, because she sits behind me! Bad! Sorry!)

BBC profanity lists - WhatDoTheyKnow

2008-05-19T16:39:00.000+01:00

BBC profanity lists - WhatDoTheyKnow

Sadly, my friend Richard's FOI attempt to get the BBC to release a canonical list of naughty words has hit a glitch 'because the BBC and the other public service
broadcasters are covered by the Act only in respect of information held for purposes “other than
those of journalism, art or literature” '.

Boo.

Also, it's really rather rude to add (sic) after the mis-spellings of the original correspondant, don't you think?

Speaking in Tongues

2008-05-14T10:22:00.000+01:00

Free English Esperanto web translation

M'estimable chum Anno pointed me at this. M'other estimable chum Roo pointed out that Lojban was surely meant to be the internet equivalent.

But no, of course: the internet equivalent is LOLCat, having taken over from Klingon sometime last year.

Which makes me wonder...

Has anyone written a Klingon to LOLCat translator yet?

My First Conference

2008-05-08T11:31:00.001+01:00

Open Tech 2008 - 5th July in London.

I'm giving a talk at this year's OpenTech 2008, on July 5th, in London's sunny London. It's the first time I've ever stuck my head over the parapet of the conference circuit, and I'm both excited and utterly terrifying. (Edit: uh, I mean terrified. Although, uh, yes, both.)

I'll be talking about art history - the starting point for the talk is a painting by Rembrandt, and going on to talk about technology and embodiment: how our physical bodies relate to our machines, tools and the internet. I'm going to look particularly silly, as I'm on at 10.30am, a time of the morning when my brain doesn't work, and also sharing a bill with UBER BRAIN and offical world's cleverest person, Matt Webb.

The synopsis of my talk is roughly this:

* Who was Dr Von Tulp, and what can Rembrandt’s painting of him tell us about human-computer interaction?
* How is a week without the internet like loosing a leg?
* Why are the heady rushes of computer games and pornography the most compelling things on the internet?

We’re beginning to use machines as bodily prostheses almost without noticing. Touch interfaces, motion control, virtual worlds, mobile connectivity – all give us a delicious illusion of power over the physical.

We all know the man-machine stereotypes from countless Hollywood movies, but what should we geeks, tinkerers and creative technologists remember about the way our real-world bodies intersect with the imaginary spaces of computing and the internet as we shape the future of embodied interaction?

All these questions – and more! - glossed over as I attempt to draw lessons from art history, robotics and interface design in to one quick presentation – and all without sounding like a mad early 90s technohippy.

Register to hear me make a tit of myself at http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2008/

If you're interested in the subject matter, my research links are appearing at http://del.icio.us/mildlydiverting/embodiment

Behance Explained

2008-05-01T15:05:00.000+01:00

enough_words.gif (GIF Image, 967x1535 pixels)

I thought this worth linking to.

The Behance network explains their service first in words, and then as a diagram. It's a really elegant way of explaining a site's value proposition to a potential user - especially when that potential user is a designer or artist.

Mind you, not very googlable, but there you go.

50 years of the Radiophonic Workshop.

2008-04-30T10:56:00.000+01:00

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | BBC old masters of new sounds

A brilliant little piece revisiting the Maida Vale studios, with Mark Ayres - a man who rescued a huge quantity of Radiophonic tapes from being skipped by the BBC when the unit was disbanded.

Mark has probably done more for preserving the history of electronic music in the UK than anyone else, and he deserves all credit for that.

Also, he let me have a go in his Dalek when I was five.

Evil Thoughts about Anti SEO

2008-04-26T09:36:00.000+01:00

I'm very bored of SEO spam friendings on Twitter, such as this Ass Hat.

Which got me thinking - I'd like to set up a spam blog somwhere that took the links from these SEO feeds, and republished them using keywords like 'shit' 'illegal' 'very poor service' 'rubbish' and for that matter, 'ass hat'.

I'd find that really really satisfying.

RSS aggregation as a friend filter

2008-04-09T23:45:00.002+01:00

Just a quick thought before I forget it.

So - a lot of services allow you to grab all of your RSS feeds from all over the shop, and republish them in a central aggregated feed.

The resultant feed - of bookmarks, tweets, flickr pics, LastFM music, blogposts, yada yada - is noisy. REALLY noisy. In fact, unless you know someone really well, it's just too much information and you drown in it.

But there are some people for whom that much information is good, and comforting. I'd keep an eye on everything my other half was up to, for instance - not for stalking reasons, or because I want to surveil him, but because it's nice to know whats going through his head - it's his presence when he's not around - as Leisa would say, it's Ambient Intimacy.

But other people - no, I really don't want to know their every move - I'd like perhaps a once a month update of key items.

So a social aggregator with degree-of-intimacy - where you can pick and choose elements of a person's behaviour to subscribe to. This should couple with a few smart bits at the back which would desubscribe or deemphasise sections of a person's feed according to your consumption behaviour. Not reading all of Friend X's long screeds, but most of their tweets? Eventually the long screeds will drop off your updates.

Facebook maybe goes part way towards this, but it really doesn't understand the shades of grey and changeability of social ties.

Fluidity, and smartness, and the understanding that friendship ebbs and flows.

@frequency

2008-03-18T15:22:00.003Z

An idle thought

I've noticed in the last few days that the frequency of @replies on twitter amongst my small circle of friends has increased dramatically.

@replies were always interesting as they grew out of the natural behaviour of the community, and were only later included as a full feature of the system.

I'm wondering if the high crossover between friends and use of twitter as SXSW as an organising tool might be due to this. It would be an interesting stat to track - changes in the 'flocculence' of the site as replies cluster around events with large groups of active users. It might be an interesting visualisation exercise, particularly if it were possible to map cel location to incidences of flocculence.

Were I able to write scripts to extract the data, and map it against dopplr co-incidences, I would.

But I can't, so someone else is welcome to the idea.

Nitrate Pirate

2008-03-09T14:04:00.002Z

Nitrate Pirate
Originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting

I've just found the negatives to my favourite pictures of my grandmother.

They're Nitrate, and badly damaged.

Does anyone know a Nitrate film preservation expert?

Keep Calm and Carry On

2008-03-06T11:39:00.001Z

Keep Calm and Carry On
Originally uploaded by I like

I have a copy of the iconic 'Keep Calm and Carry On' poster framed on my wall at home. I found it via a post on flickr, and bought it over the internet from Barter Books Gift Shop a couple of years ago.

I find it slightly sad that other places are now taking much of the credit (and presumably the income) for its rediscovery. You can't stop things going viral, I suppose. At least Barter books link to some proper contextual academic information.

Can I suggest buying from Barter Books, and thus support 'the British Library of second hand bookshops'? I'd also point out that a poster from Barter Books is a LOT cheaper than some of the other options...

World of WarCraftCraft

2008-03-04T13:45:00.001Z

Checking my personal email this morning, I found a thread from my Warcraft chums in our guild, about the appeal of the game. I will paraphrase here, this being a good starting point for the complete waste of time that follows.

Hactar: So, an idle question: When you hit lvl 70, do you keep earning XP?

Tikker: and, do you keep doing quests? what do you do after 70?

Jonalock: You don't earn any more XP, no, but the XP you would earn from completing quests gets turned into extra gold instead. You'll have a bunch of solo quests to keep doing when you hit 70, for which you get more money and sometimes better equipment as quest rewards. Further progression comes from doing instances to get better equipment which then lets you do harder instances to get better equipment which lets you do raids (instances for more than 5 people, typically 10 or 25) to get better equipment which lets you do harder raids to get better equipment which lets you ... And there goes your life.

Tikker: when you put it like that it sounds so.....futile....

Jonalock: On the plus side there'll be an expansion out soonish raising the level cap to 80 and with a huge number of new solo quests and the like .. (and which will also overnight make all your hard-won uber-gear entirely useless - green is the new purple!)

Kieth: you see this is the point I lose the will to live...why are we playing this again?

Tikker: cos it releases crack from a keyboard while you play as a reward.

Kieth: finger ingested rock...that's it, I forgot

Crystaltips: I feel like framing this thread.

Now, I have this ongoing problem with Alice (Crystaltips) telling me to do things: I just unthinkingly obey. Dunno why, I just do. She used to use it to get me to bring her Lattes in meetings, the cow.

So, the framing the thread comment kicked me in to action. How do you frame a thread and make it nice to look at? And specifically, how do you do it for someone like Alice, whose favourite thing is slightly rubbish game-based crafts?

You turn it in to cross-stitch, obviously.

So - first, let's find some imagery. I wanted something Horde-y, obviously, so I checked out the official Blizzard fan site kit.

World of Warcraft Europe -> Fan Site Kit

Lovely avatars, but not quite what I was after. So, copyright infringement time! What happens if you type 'Horde' in to Google Image Search?

Aha, that will do nicely. Many thanks to the Horde Army guild site, from whom I've ripped this off (sorry guys!). Incidentally, that's one of the best put-together guild sites I've seen - they even have their own resources database. Go Horde Army!

Next step: some kind of slogan. I love antique samplers, with their folk-artsy cross-stitch writing, and I don't see why a Horde embroidery should be any different. I think a simple guild name - in angle brackets, of course - with a quote from the discussion should do. And what's that on my hard drive? A copy of Fritz Quadrata, the Warcraft tooltip font? How did that get there? Surely that's in violation of lots of copyright rules?*

To Photoshop, comrades!

Nice design, eh?

The next thing is to convert it in to a sewing pattern. I've found a few sites that offer image to embroidery pattern conversion in my web-peregrinations, and the two best are coincidentally, free to use online.

MicroRevolt are an excellent organisation that protest at the use of sweatshop labour by making protest quilts to send to the CEO of Nike. They deserve your support.

They also have an excellent little tool for converting pictures to patterns on their site, called KnitPro. It produces simple-looking patterns, but doesn't reduce the number of colours in the image.

Running our design (and a brightened up version) through Knit Pro gives us our first four patterns

Cross-Stitch Pattern 1 - no guild name on this one, dark colours, 120w x160h, 19,200 stitches

Cross-Stitch Pattern 2 - guild name, dark colours, 96w x 120h, 11,520 stitches

Cross-Stitch Pattern 3 - guild name, brighter colours, 96w x 120h, 11,520 stitches

Cross-Stitch Pattern 4 - guild name, brighter colours, 120w x160h, 19,200 stitches

A good alternative to KnitPro is Pic2Point.com: it spits out more complex-looking patterns, but reduces the colours in the image for you to simplify it, gives you a chart of yarns on the front, and makes the pattern easier to follow. I don't think it sends blankets to corporations with questionable ethical records, though.

Cross-Stitch Pattern 5 - guild name, dark colours, stitch count 18, 8 inches wide, 12 colours, 27,000 stitches apx.

Cross-Stitch Pattern 6 - guild name, bright colours, stitch count 18, 8 inches wide, 13 colours, 27,000 stitches apx.

So, there you go. Horde Guild Quote embroidery patterns.

Things I discovered during this process:

Running dull colours through either of the pattern makers above will make them muddier. Work with your image first to brighten it up a lot.

With KnitPro, as it doesn't do colour reduction, you might want to save your design as a gif or a png with a reduced colour palette. If you're really clever, you can use the 'Save for Web/Devices' option in photoshop to select a good palette of colours for your thread.

Using a tool like 'posterise' in photoshop to simplify the image doesn't seem to help with the output much.
KnitPro barfs on some png files, and renders white as black. I think this is something to do with differences between the way png8 and png24 handle transparency, but I may be wrong.

None of the pattern makers I tried handled the text well: even with antialiasing and at a larger pixel size (stitch-pitch?) it looks a bit rubbish. You can live with that, and keep the font recognizable as the WoW font, or you could use a tool like Crossstich.com's Caption Maker or the Subversive Cross-stitch Magic Robot.

If you want to know how to actually do the embroidery - and I'm not going to, because 27,000 stitches would play merry hell with my RSI, there's an excellent primer on game related embroidery at Kotaku by Maggie Greene, that takes you through the process step by step.

To finish, a couple of interesting bits:

Radical Cross Stitch
Subversive Cross Stitch Kits

And some context: information from the Brooklyn Museum Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art that goes part way to explaining why alt-crafting is a political act.

* NB: I actually care a lot about copyright violation, and feel tremendously guilty about the unlicensed fonts I own. In particular, I *really* *really* want to buy a copy of House Industry's Neutraface, because it is beautiful, but really, $249? For something I will use maybe twice in personal projects, and maybe on a weblog? If you price your content out of your market, you're just encouraging piracy. See also: legal copies of Photoshop.

Charlie's Diary: Youth of today

2008-02-03T11:27:00.000Z

Charlie's Diary: Youth of today

This is worth reading. I was going to post a comment, but realised it was a bit on the long side, so I should probably spin it off here.

I think Charlie Stross' gedankenexperiment really illustrates the speed of change of technology in our society, and the fact that post 30s, we tend to settle in to some kind of happy equilibrium, just keeping up with the essentials. I wonder if that's something to do with the average age of parenthood? Anyway.

I wanted to offer back a long view on this - that it's not just the change for the youth, it's the change in the span of a single human life that is now quite incredible.

When I was little - around 7 or 8 - I had a recording of Bach on a cassette. My grandfather was babysitting me one evening, and my player (a flat one with buttons along the front and a flip up lid) chewed up the tape. (Recorded Music playing with moving parts - how quaint!)

My grandfather came to find out why i was crying, and himself cried because he couldn't help; he just didn't understand the problem, or how to fix it.

Now, he was born in 1896, and died in 1986. So, in his lifetime, he saw
The Motor Car become comoditised
Powered human flight
Mechanised Warfare
Recorded music as a comodity
Radio
Commoditised photography
Comodditised Paperbacks
The Supermarket
Cinema in every town
The Telephone
Television
Transatlantic voice communication
Satellites
Rocketry
Space Flight, man on the moon
The NHS
The Welfare State
Nuclear Weapons
The computer
The home computer
Home Video
Car Phones
Credit Cards
ATM Machines

It's quite a list. Is change going to be so palpable to this generation? Is change accelerating? Is it just the C20th that will see such a radical shift, or was this accelerating speed of change set in train from the moment of the industrial revolution? How will society adapt to this speed of change? What will it do to people? Is there an upper limit on the human capacity to assimilate change?

I don't have answers to this, but I think it bears thinking about.

Employee Benefits for Peer to Peer businesses?

2008-01-31T10:21:00.000Z

Etsy's First Five Years

Etsy just raised a startling ammount of investment, which makes me very happy. They do so much right.

There's a very interesting post on their site about what their intentions are. This in particular caught my eye

It is immensely important to me that all Etsy workers are paid a good salary, provided with full benefits (medical, dental, vision) by the company. Many companies, far too many companies, underpay their employees, don't make workers employees at all ("permalancers" and "permatemp" are the new words for this), and provide few if any benefits. (We also know that many of the sellers on Etsy lack access to such benefits as health insurance, and we want to work to change this.)

Emphasis mine, there.

That's a game changer. A community marketplace that also acts as a kind of international, distributed trade union come employee benefit scheme? Visionary stuff.

Epigrams through the Ether

2008-01-16T01:06:00.001Z

/blows dust off the top of her blog, and waits for the valves to warm up

Twitter / oscarwilde

The other day, I was sitting in Monmouth Coffee in Borough Market. They do very fine 'macaroons' - actually, coconut pyramids.

They also do a startling line in braying middle class idiots, like what I am.

Anyway, a conversation between two actresses was so tooth-grindingly comic, I twittered it. It set me off thinking about the uses of twitter, and why I prefer the mundane, silly and epigrammatic posts over the 'I've updated my blog, here's the URL' or the '@someblokewhoknowsaboutmacs yes, saint steves shiny robot turds are amazing' tweets that pop up from my contacts. One of my favourite people there is David, who posts rarely, but beautifully.

To cut a long story short, it got me thinking, and inspired partly by Matt's Presence Machine, I have decided to give Oscar Wilde a life on twitter. Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young is the perfect work to consume via twitter - it's shallow, vain and a tiny bit self obsessed. Also, it comes in nice short lines, which are (I hope) mostly under 140 characters.

Twitter Updates

That's all, really...

Twitter / AEguy27

2007-11-16T10:45:00.000Z

Twitter / AEguy27: "About
* Name AEguy27
* Location Costa Mesa, CA
* Web http://sportshut....
* Bio I am 21, Live in southern California, and go to the Art Institute as an Advertising major! Stats
* Following 4,783
* Followers 339
* Favorites 2
* Updates 158"

I'm not sure that they're teaching their students the right things on the Advertising Course at ~~CalArts.~~ an Art Institute in southern California.

Advice to Mr AEguy27: friending everyone in twitter makes you look like a cunt. Stop it.

Quiet Round Here

2007-10-08T10:01:00.001+01:00

06-10-2007 trainer. Big. Small.
Originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting

Hello, it's quiet round here at the moment.

I'm not entirely sure why - I'm busy, yes, but also I don't feel like I have anything particularly interesting to add at the moment. Maybe that will change.

In the meantime, I leave you with a photograph of a shop window in Tooting, that featured the largest trainer I have ever seen. It's a godd 18-20 inches long.

Uni the Hedgehog!

2007-09-05T14:35:00.001+01:00

Oh, god, laughing so much I have tears in my eyes. The *cutest* little legs.

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

2007-09-03T14:40:00.000+01:00

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

I am dumbfounded by their choices of navigation of their site.

Even the list view - 'Explore the Collection Directory to view the maps by categories - starts listing things by 'What' first - so you get 'County Atlases' before any mention of a placename.

How inexplicable.

Web game provides breakthrough in predicting spread of epidemics | Science Blog

2007-08-23T18:36:00.000+01:00

No, not the usual 'web' game I talk about. Another one.

I got a bit irritated by the article on Today (I'd link to it, but I think it was Tuesday, and the page is 404ing, and natch, their naming scheme is rubbish, see posts passim) talking about the Corrupted Blood episode in Warcraft being a viable way of studying disease vectors. This was partly because the incident they were talking about happened nearly two years ago.

It turns out there's a little write up on BBC News, with some quotes from the researcher, Professor Nina Fefferman whose article has just been published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Alas, aside from being 2 years late to the party in warcraft terms, it's not a particularly original piece of thinking. Dirk Brockman and Lars Hufnagel studied a realworld/online phenomenon of tracking dollar bills to much the same effect.

Web game provides breakthrough in predicting spread of epidemics | Science Blog

Not really news, was it? I suspect it's just the sexy 'virtual worlds' tag that bought it to editors attention.

Wikipedia Edit Monitoring

2007-08-15T22:44:00.000+01:00

Threat Level - Wired Blogs

Hands up, it was me. I was one of the people who anonymously spun edits in Wikipedia from within the BBC. I wrote the Wikipedia entries for Marguerite Patten, and for Queen of Puddings, in fact. This was part of a terrible, hideous, covert, evil attempt by the BBC to skew the history of home cookery, and I was working under the direct command of the DG, Delia Smith, Keith Floyd and Fanny Craddock. Obviously. Would I lie to you?

I think I've written before about 'BBC' edits in wikipedia - partly because a friend I worked with got a roasting from the Wikipedia community for making a playful edit he probably shouldn't have done, if he'd thought about it a bit more and not been wasting an idle five minutes playing around in the office.

This is the thing. You can look at these huge lists of anonymous edits from inside a company, and not know if they were the work of one evil genius in the press department, or of a thousand bored junior office clerks who were surfing the web rather than filling in that deadly dull spreadsheet on a quiet tuesday. They'll all come from that one blanket IP address.

That second scenario is precisely where wikipedia derives its strength - from being editable by anyone, from anywhere, according to whim or expertise (well, preferably both).

It would be a loss to wikipedia if large organisations prevented their employees contributing to the project, in order to control the random enthusiasms that could backfire on their PR department.

Great Practical Jokes, no 28741

2007-08-15T10:01:00.000+01:00

Twitter / Yoz: Wreaking revenge on a colle...

Heh. Klingon.

The USPS willfully ignores a customer's questions.

2007-07-27T14:54:00.000+01:00

Oh, I do love stock responses that *completely ignore* the question asked. Viz:

--------------------------------------------
Customer (KIM PLOWRIGHT) - 07/27/2007 04:27 AM

Hello

[tracking number] - this packet is showing as having attempted delivery at 12am on July 25, 2007.

That's midnight...

Could you confirm if USPS uses Royal Mail in the UK to attempt delivery? In this case, is Midnight the time at which the package left USPS and was handed to the Royal Mail?

I have had no confirmation through my letterbox to say any delivery was attempted, and I don't know how to track this package or ring to arrange a time when I'm going to be in... and not asleep!

Kim

--------------------------------------------
Response (Angelique M) - 07/27/2007 07:43 AM
Dear KIM PLOWRIGHT,

Thank you for contacting us about item number, [tracking number].

We attempted to deliver your item in GREAT BRITAIN at 12:00 AM on July 25, 2007.

For further assistance regarding this item, the United States sender must call 1-800-222-1811:

Monday through Friday -- 8:00 AM to 9:30 PM Eastern Time
Saturday -- 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM Eastern Time
Sundays & Major Holidays – Closed

If I can be of assistance to you in the future, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Thank you for choosing the United States Postal Service®.

Regards,

Angelique

As our customer, your privacy is important to us. Please see our privacy policy at www.usps.com
-[---001:001238:46443---]

Chore Wars :: Latest News from ChoreQuest!

2007-07-19T13:18:00.000+01:00

Chore Wars :: Latest News from ChoreQuest!

Bugger. Jen and I were just discussing the other day that we should invent a Household Tasks MMORPG so that we could gently encourage our other halves (and ourselves, occasionally) to do more housework, chores etc.

Someone's gone and done it already. Awesomes!

Stickers

2007-07-19T10:03:00.002+01:00

IMG_6687.jpg
Originally uploaded by smagdali

Look, here they are!

Moo Stickers

2007-07-19T10:03:00.000+01:00

MOO | Stickers - Print stickers using your images

So, you can now buy Moo Stickers. They're great. Really. You can put your own pictures on them, or buy one of our new ReadyMade packs if you don't think your pictures are up to the job.

You'll notice I said 'Our' there.

About a month ago, I was chatting to Roo Reynolds, who said 'I keep reading your site expecting you to make the big announcement, but you never do. What's with that?'. Except he probably didn't say 'What's with that?' because he's not Californian. But, he had a point.

So, I left the BBC. In May. I now work for Moo, as a product manager. Doing nice things. Yes. I'd spent eight and a half years at the Beeb, doing all kind of things, from Cult and Doctor Who, to the bbc.co.uk2.0 project looking at the way the site needs to change to keep up with the rest of the internets. But a girl gets tired, and needs a change.

Moo is a challenge. It's a small company - we're all in one room! It's fast moving. I get to make suggestions that get acted on in hours, not years. I'm working with lovely people like Denise, Dan, Stef and Richard. It's a good change, and a challenge, and we make cute things. The project I'm working on is interesting, and brings me back closer to an old love - design.

I'm pretty happy.

The Ukulele Orchestra - Wuthering Heights

2007-07-12T22:20:00.001+01:00

Good yes.

Facebook | AGA (Anti Gay Alliance)

2007-07-11T16:43:00.000+01:00

The Google Cache - and indeed, the internet - has a very long memory. Once you post something to the internet, it becomes very hard to remove it. Things you post when you're 18 have a habit of sticking around until you're, say, 33. I know this, as my old posts still float around in old archives.

In particular, these three young gentlemen should be aware that any future employer will be able to Google their names for a very long time to come.

* Garren Salibian (Acton- Boxborough Regional High) (creator)
* Harout Yogurtian (Belmont High School)
* Garin Parseghian (Belmont High School)

They are the founder members and admins of the Facebook group, The Anti Gay Alliance.

Facebook | AGA (Anti Gay Alliance)

It is 'Dedicated to preserving straightness throughout the world.'

The people who have commented on the site should also be aware that their comments are now indexed and searchable, as follows:

Lee Campell (St. Cloud, MN) wrote
at 11:28pm on July 7th, 2007
those mother fucking fags wow they should all be shot. and for anybody that sickes up for them should be beatin also. goldam shit packers .and oh yeah GOD hates fags

Richard Wohlbier (Wisconsin Colleges) wrote
at 11:14pm on July 7th, 2007
For every deer that we shoot, we should shoot a fag.

Scott Campbell (Chippewa Falls High) wrote
at 3:57am on July 6th, 2007
I say all fags or fag lovers who talk shit on this group should get the fuck out and run into a middle of an intersection

The group Facebook | AGA (Anti Gay Alliance) has 32 members at 4:38pm BST on 11 July, 2007.
Those members are:

Name:
Brennan Heath
Network:
Arkansas State '09

Name:
Jordan NAve
Network:
Marshall High School '10

Name:
David Arshakyan
Networks:
Watertown High School '09
Boston, MA

Name:
Paul Derderian
Networks:
Rye High School '09
Westchester, NY

Name:
Matt Fitzpatrick
Network:
Lloydminster Comprehensive '08

Name:
Teddy Lucas-rowe
Network:
Sherborne School '07

Name:
Michael Hill
Network:
Australia

Name:
Mitch Larson
Network:
Eau Claire, WI

Name:
Ani Israelyan
Network:
Watertown High School '07

Name:
Richard Wohlbier
Network:
Wisconsin Colleges

Name:
Samuel Volk
Network:
Raleigh / Durham, NC

Name:
Mike Griffioen
Network:
Central Mich. '11

Name:
Scott Campbell
Network:
Chippewa Falls High '07

Name:
Oscar Derderian
Network:
Belmont High School '09

Name:
Rob Karasiewicz
Network:
Lowell High School '07

Name:
Bosah Hlwah
Networks:
None

Name:
Matt Barber
Network:
Falmouth High School '11

Name:
Anita Tomasian
Networks:
None

Name:
Meroujan Bagdasarian
Network:
Watertown High School '07

Name:
Lee Campell
Network:
St. Cloud, MN

Caleb Merrick
Network:
Thorold Secondary School '07

Name:
Danielle Cormier
Network:
Royal Valley High '08

Name:
Harout Yogurtian
Networks:
Belmont High School '07
Boston, MA
Officer Title:
Vice President

Name:
Garren Salibian
Network:
Acton- Boxborough Regional High '09
Officer Title:
President

Name:
Will Truax
Networks:
Acton- Boxborough Regional High '09
Boston, MA

Name:
Allen Papazian
Network:
Belmont High School '09

Name:
Greg Torosian
Network:
Belmont High School '08

Name:
Eric Grigorian
Networks:
Belmont High School '10
Boston, MA

Name:
Garin Parseghian
Network:
Belmont High School '10
Officer Title:
Vice President

Name:
Chris Wood
Network:
Red Bank High School '07

Name:
Christopher Seifel
Network:
St. John's '09

Name:
Brady Lee
Networks:
Chippewa Falls High '07
Wisc Stout '07
Eau Claire, WI

Name:
Garren Salibian
Network:
Acton- Boxborough Regional High '09
Officer Title:
President

Name:
Garin Parseghian
Network:
Belmont High School '10
Officer Title:
Vice President

That is all.

Green and Pleasant LAN

2007-07-11T14:07:00.000+01:00

Terra Nova: Our avatars, ourselves

I love the kicker at the end of this article. Spending two years in Warcraft, and having seen the world, I've often found myself thinking 'If I could live in one of these zones, which would I choose?'. Until recently, it was Arathi Highlands; nice rolling grass, occasional pleasing rocky outcrops, good mountains. Ashzara came close, too, but I'm less of an autumn fan. These days, I'd be living in Nagrand.

I wonder, actually, what the spectrum mix of light coming from a monitor would be, when questing in one of WoW's green areas. Is it the nearest approximation of full-spectrum summer sun? Is it just hitting our pineal gland's sweet spot? Has anyone tested melanin levels of regular hardcore gamers? Could this explain the late nights we all pull, given the opportunity?

Hmn.

Too old for Facebook? « Scobleizer

2007-07-08T22:26:00.000+01:00

Too old for Facebook? « Scobleizer

What goes around comes around. I was upstairs, playing Warcraft for most of today; my first good five-hour session in a long time. As I ripped through a metric buttload of Ogres, grinding my way through level 68, I was thinking about the time I've spent on the game, and how my media habits have changed over the last few years.

I've started watching television a bit more, recently; rarely live (unless it's a half eye on the sport that Ian has on), usually documentaries from the PVR, or catching up with Doctor Who. The set rarely moves from UKTV History or BBC Four, to be honest. This evening, as I tore myself away from Azeroth, I came down to find Ian watching a best of Clive James' Chat shows programme.

The line-up - admittedly, a best of, so they had a lot to choose from - but the line-up of guests was amazing. Peter Cook and Barry Humphries together. Germaine Greer and Alan Coren. David Attenborough and Howard Jacobson. Melvyn Bragg, Jonathan Miller, Joanna Lumley, Katherine Hepburn...

There used to be clever people on television, with opinions, whom you learnt from. They cling on in Radio 4, but TV is the realm of the makeover, the WAG. It makes me feel old and irrelevant, and it’s oddly unsatisfying, like a diet of takeaway food.

Which brings me to Robert Scoble's comment about the drop in blog traffic. I'm so behind on my feed reading at the moment, it's not true. I'm not (book) reading much, but I'm listening to more music and watching more TV than usual. I'm fiddling on Flickr, and a bit on facebook, but neglecting Twitter, and Jaiku.

I'm fickle, and only have so much attention to pay to things. If one thing takes my time and energy, other things must be neglected.

It amuses me that I've been in so many meetings with people going 'games and the internet will take eyeballs and time away from telly!' and now I'm hearing bloggers going 'Social Networks are taking attention away from blogs!'. Admittedly, in the case of telly their idea of attention is a bit warped; it’s been long known that those viewing figures aren’t a guarantee that anyone was actually taking in your programme’s content, just an indication that the telly was burbling in the corner of the room whilst domestic life ebbed and flowed around it.

I’m getting to a point where I feel permanently un-satiated by my media. None of the experiences seem… significant enough, in the way that watching the Late Show in the early 90s made me set the course of my life away from science and towards art. Even the excellent Andrew Marr histories felt too… shiny and slick to really be meaningful. The images are empty. My to-read pile of books is growing inexorably – thanks to Amazon and the ease of finding things that look interesting, I’m buying faster than I read now.

How many hours in the day do you need to keep up with the onslaught of information? When was the last time you engaged really deeply with a pop culture artifact? These are all transient things.

I just wish those transient unsatisfying things didn't distract me from getting round to that slow, tangible drawing project I've been thinking about for weeks.

The Powerpoint definition of Irony

2007-06-26T15:33:00.000+01:00

slideshow4 » SlideShare

Practice what you preach, sir, practice what you preach.

Not much going on around here recently, sorry. I'm having a fallow posting period, as my energies are elsewhere.

Roo, the big post you're expecting will be along... sometime soon.

Google Homepage Gadget

2007-06-14T12:15:00.000+01:00

BBC Pres Clock Google Gadget

I made a gadget. It shows the flash files of the old BBC clocks from the cult site. You can put it on your google homepage.

To make it work:
- Sign in to your google personal homepage
- hit the 'add stuff' link on the left just above the content panel
- hit 'add by URL' next to the search homepage content button
- put this url http://www.mildlydiverting.com/bbcpresclock.xml in the box
- confirm
- go back to your homepage and marvel at my leet coding skillz. :)

It may stop working when the BBC archives my old cult site. /wipes away tear

FlashFlavor » photographing a beach ceremony at night with no available light

2007-06-09T15:10:00.000+01:00

FlashFlavor » photographing a beach ceremony at night with no available light

Does what it says on the tin, in spades. Sigh, wish I were better at photography.

Favourite New Concept: Schrodinger's Celebrity

2007-06-09T10:08:00.000+01:00

Glitter For Brains: "The most annoying thing about her is she's Schrodinger's Celebrity - she only exists because we look at her. So all this vitriol and hate I've just poured over my keyboard (and a small amount of Bloody Mary, but someone nudged my arm while I was having breakfast) is fuelling her time in the spotlight."

Lovely Lee on Paris Hilton. The most perfect way of describing the new breed of celebretard that's doing the rounds; only famous because we keep supplying the oxygen of publicity...

..and Lemons

2007-06-05T17:37:00.000+01:00

newswireless.net .:. News .:. Orange "doesn't think it's a problem" ...

Interesting little article about Orange's data policy. £8 for 30Mb. As opposed to the 1Gb cap on T-Mobile. Hah.

I've been meaning to upgrade my mobile for ever. I was using a Nokia 8310 until about a fortnight ago, and it was slowly dying. A great shame, as it's a lovely phone, with the last of the great black and white operating systems; really elegant and quick if you use your phone for calls and texts and nothing else.

The decision was taken out of my hands by a lucky name-from-a-hat moment at Jaiku; I took a marketing survey and was - frankly - shocked to win a Nokia N95 a few weeks later. I had of course completely forgotten about the survey in the meantime.

So - there I was, shiny new dataphone, old one-to-one pricematch tarrif with Orange, plus a moment in a phone shop when the assistant laughed in my face when I asked about upgrades.

I'm now with T-Mobile. It's all good.

Although, N95 appears to have a funny bug where, if left idle for a while on charge the microphone doesn't work when I go to answer a call. Anyone else having similar trouble?

Verka Serduchka - Gop, gop! - Jump, jump!

2007-05-22T23:46:00.003+01:00

Look, how can you NOT like it? Really? It's all bouncy and oompah!

Ukrainian Gay Power Polka

2007-05-22T23:46:00.001+01:00

Look, this is the single most brilliant song of the last five years. I don't care if you think otherwise; you are wrong. Look at it. It has a man pretending to be a lady, a glitterball, glasses that make everyone naked, a completely awesome keychange, and ACCORDIONS. It's a work of genius, and there isn't enough gay accordion-based space disco polka in the world. Ever.

My carbon footprint expands massively

2007-05-22T16:25:00.000+01:00

UPS: Tracking Information

So, I'm waiting on a parcel from the US - a Goldtouch keyboard, which was a birthday present from my Mum. Incidentally, they're amazing things if you have RSI, I recommend them thoroughly.

Anyway, I thought I'd have a look see to find out where it was; it's been several days, and it was moving on from Newark last time I looked.

Well - it came in to Stanstead, then was *flown to the East Midlands and back to Heathrow*.

Wow. I mean, that's like the next town if you're in the middle of the US. But on this side of the pond...

Look, here's a cunning line on a map to show you quite how bonkers that was. It makes the cheerful assumption that the package will get to my house from Feltham, by the way, and not be rerouted via Edinburgh, frinstance.

Jaiku Eurovision Backchannel

2007-05-12T22:03:00.000+01:00

Jaiku | Space transvestite turbo folk is the music of the future. You can tell because they wear silver. They came from the future to sing here.

Awesomes. Ukraine FTW!

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

2007-05-06T22:39:00.000+01:00

Epicenter - Wired Blogs

An interview of Cory Doctorow by David Weinberger. Fascinating stuff about metadata, and the differences between implicit and explicit data, along with the political-cultural constructs in play around classification systems.

I wonder, sometimes, about going off and getting a librarianship or curatorial qualification. I am most certainly one of those people who likes sorting - systematising, tidying, classifying and arranging is something I find incredibly soothing. I have a feeling it's incredily hardwired in to me; back in my wild art student days there was a wonderful incident with some hallucinogens and waking up to discover my room ordered to the Nth degree - even my cupboard shelf contents were tidied, rectinlinearly stacked in size order. Others get messy on drugs, I get tidy. But I digress.

I've written bits and bobs about tax- and folks- onomies before here; I don't have the energy for a retread this evening; frankly, reading the transcript of the interview will tell you everything I've said and more, with greater clarity and intellectual rigour. It's worth reading or listening to.

One interesting point made is about flickr, and the huge mass of CC-licensed photos available on the web:-

If you're a stock photographer trying to sell photos of Capri, even if it can be found, you're probably screwed at Flickr because there's 100, 000 of them there available for free--unlicensed, actually, Creative Commons licensed--yours is going to have to be pretty darn good for somebody to actually shell out money for it.

The interview goes on to talk about copyright, and elision of cultural and commercial constraints in copyright law. The ususal.

But... what does it really mean that there's so much available for free, now? Is the bespoke the final recourse of arts, now? If everyone can micro-produce and micro-sell, what happens to the 'great work' - does it become more valuable, have more of an aura?

In a fully described world, where the overlay of discussion and culture is captured in searchable, semi-machine readable electronic forms, where the map and the territory are completely blurred... what does a creative person do? When there can be no 'underground', no hidden pockets of creative collaboration left to diversify in obscurity, away from the wider culture, do we end up with ... less creative speciation? Or radical, precambrian explosions of diversity?

Flickr is always a good example; it made me want to photograph more, initially, but now makes me not want to photograph at all, because anything I capture will be so like so many other pictures. Interestingness is rarely that; it's more frequently inoffensively pretty and technically pristine; a kind of mass idea of what a good photograph might be, smoothed out by the gentle erosion of traffic flow across the site. It feels a bit like Clement Greenberg's idea of kitsch; it seems to point out that originality is nearly impossible to achieve.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this thought. I think I'm interested to understand what it means to be trying to create something unique in a world where everything-there-is is instantly available and addressable, and any new creation is instantly contextualised by being indexed as 'a bit like this, and this other thing, and maybe 30% similarity to this other thing here'. What gets made? The things that spring to mind are the great renaissance works, painted for super-rich patrons, and elaborately personally codified; the language of art history becoming more obscure and arcane, and personalised to the patron. Commissioning something, collaborating, and encoding undisclosed ideas into the work becomes a way of opposing the same-ness of originality. Or does creativity become private again; something jealously held away from the systematizing gaze of the web? Or do objects become valuable purely because of personal significances - does taste die?

How do we preserve surprise, and grit, and significance? And are these valuable things, or am I pining for mirages?

Amazon.co.uk: Tarts: Best Kept Secrets of the Women's Institute: Books: Liz Herbert

2007-05-04T10:38:00.000+01:00

Amazon.co.uk: Tarts: Best Kept Secrets of the Women's Institute: Books: Liz Herbert

/me cries laughing

It's probably fair use, but...

2007-05-03T12:00:00.000+01:00

Second Life - Videos - KNBC

A friend just pointed me at this video that went out on US TV. I've tried three or four times to leave a comment on the actual page, but it doesn't seem to be working. Hence, I thought it worth reproducing here, because, well, someone should make a fuss when big media rip off other people's stuff against the specific license it's published under.

I've spent a LOT of my life over the last few years ensuring image use is all within the bounds of license agreements and copyright - even getting release forms for a five year old, once.

I suppose we don't have the benefit of that pesky 'fair use' under UK law.

Anway - the Yentob avatar was created by Siobhan, so she should take the credit.

Comment text would have been as below:-

Hello

I notice that you've used one of my screenshots in your piece. Whilst Alan Yentob's (a famous UK TV personality) avatar and the screenshot was created for a BBC TV documentary, I assume you've obtained the shot from my flickr stream.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mildlydiverting/309499776/

It's released there under a Creative Commons Deed - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

You don't appear to have Attributed me; the adverts at the front of your piece seem to suggests you're a commercial concern, and there's a clear copyright statement at the bottom of the page, suggesting you haven't 'shared alike'.

Just thought you might like to know for future reference, so you can consider complying with the licensing requirements.

Photosynth Technology Preview

2007-04-29T11:02:00.000+01:00

Photosynth Technology Preview

Gosh, it's come along a bit. I reccomend trying the flythrough button, too.

It's fascinating to think that tools like this will mean, in the long term, that there will be a digital 'skin' representation of the world overlying reality, like Borges' map that is as large as the country. Granted, some areas more detailed than others - you just need to look at the geographical distribution of images in flickr to understand that the future is very unevenly distributed - but it's a short leap to a fully - represented world, where GPS is no longer necessary to identify the location of a photograph, as it can just be intelligently slotted in to place through pattern matching.

Some thoughts, in no particular order

- It understands 'behind'. Poke around the artists' studio collection, particularly around the easel - you'll suddenly pop to the wall, presumably marrying up at the occluded edges in longshots...
- it seems to like manmade space much more than natural space. Perhaps the eye more easily 'fills in' in geometric spaces, and this isn't the fault of the software as much a s a preference of perception
- Might it understand Time? What would happen if you fed the system street scenes from 1930, and contemporary scenes in the same location? Could you create a forth dimension to the walkthrough?
- 80 megapixel images? BLIMEY.
- It needs a much more gestural interface; the ability to move with the mouse, and with arrow keys. The clicking feels incredibly artificial.
- Photosynth + Games + ?? = PROFIT!
- I bet it's not compatible with Google Earth. Bastards.

Yes, but what does it DO?

2007-04-28T14:02:00.000+01:00

Jeteye Firefox Extension:

"Jeteye
by Jeteye Technologies, Inc.
Jeteye is a unique Web-based application and service that is designed for the next generation of enterprise and consumer use of the Web. Jeteye changes how we interact with the web, in an era where communication and social computing are more...
Version 1.0.2.20070118114558 — January 18, 2007"

I'm looking through firefox extensions, and found a lovely example of marketing rhetoric completely failing to sell a product in the space available.

What does it DO? Really? Can you guess from that description? Answers on a postcard.

Google Toolbar

2007-04-27T13:46:00.000+01:00

Google Toolbar Features

I'm playing with the latest version of Google Toolbar on Firefox. I'm finding it the tiniest bit confusing - hitting the blogger icon now performs a blog search, and to get to the Blog This! Interface I have to hit the 'send to' dropdown. Wha?

I do hate it when designers change the functions and meanings of icons. It's like making the word 'milk' suddenly mean 'nagging headache' instead of, well, milk, really.

On the plus side - I now have a Google Scholar search button, a 'define:' seach button (the secret to being able to understand technical specification documents, frequently!) and some kind of magic wand. Haven't you always wanted one of those?

The interesting implications seem to be around search history. I've had google's search history feature running quietly in the background since October 05, and it has always been patchy - collecting some search queries and not others, and inconsistently remembering clicks and so on. I'm sure Ask! will be heartened to know that their sinister competitor's mad surveilance techiques (ha!) are a little flaky.

Signing in today, however, through the new toolbar, I see that much more has appeared - whole swathes of activity are back against my name. Combined with the Browser Sync addon (possibly the neatest way I have ever found of having a bunch of idle weekend smut surfing show up on your work machine... oops!), I have a pretty complete view of my browsing habits. Not quite as beautiful as those at https://vaults.root.net/ - which makes up for an inexplicable temporary loss of my data with some very, very nice graphs, but useful, nonetheless.

How valuable is that data, though? Well, if you wanted to blackmail me, or market things to me, pretty high, I'd imagine. It's a rich source of information, and I can see how mining it will let google serve ever more efficient and targeted adverts.But the availability of so much data - about who or what is using /reading what will, I'd hope, also mean that it will become much easier to find and buy goods and services that will be appropriate for me; I'll no longer need to laboriously 'teach' amazon that I like books on feminist literary theory, and don't like Miss Teen Cosmopolitain Makeup CD Roms (A genuine Amazon reccomendation from back in the day!) and just tell it to take a discrete look at my information history and work out that I'm more In Our Time than Take a Break. From there, you could weight reviews according to how attitudinally similar I am to a reviewer, strimming out that typical 'well, whoever gave that one star was obviously a dolt' thing you get sometimes.

I'm finding it very hard to get worried about the privacy implications of this ubiquitous behavioural information - after all, adverts are only intrusive if they're shouty and irrelevant, which google generally avoids. I'm slightly more worried about my new N95 with Jaiku! enabled on it (which I won in a random draw having completed a marketing survey for them, incidentally, and wouldn't have accepted if I thought there was any funny business going on there - although I have had a couple of casual interactions with the chaps behind the site). The main thing that worried me was the real-time location updating. The days of being a bit late in to the office in order to drop in to John Lewis are over, and I'll never be able to lie about my location again.

A Hack for Europe! (plasticbag.org)

2007-04-18T20:57:00.000+01:00

A Hack for Europe! (plasticbag.org)

Yay! Sign up!

I really want to go to this. But I don't think my leet baking, drawing and needlework skillz count as 'making' at this point. Which means I'm an obsessive business networker. Oh.

EDIT:

Mr Tom C is getting a bit worried that everyone is pointing to his post about this, and that the many other organisers aren't getting due credit. I know the people doing the organising at the BBC end too, and they have indeed all been working like dogs to sort this.

So credit to all where credit is due! http://hackday.org/ has all the details.

Twitter / zombieattack

2007-04-18T12:09:00.000+01:00

Twitter / zombieattack

Twitter fiction. Sweet.

Accordion Hero

2007-04-16T13:47:00.000+01:00

Gamasutra - Schadenfreudian Slips Postmortem - "A Tight Squeeze: The Making Of Accordion Hero"

I. Would. So. Buy. This. Game.

The Nohari Window - Describe mildlydiverting

2007-04-13T12:36:00.000+01:00

The Nohari Window - Describe mildlydiverting

I can't begin to describe how funny I find an entirely negative, vicious and unpleasant personality test. Take that, self-help book publishers!

Radio 4 to co-produce feature film | Radio | MediaGuardian.co.uk

2007-04-11T12:22:00.000+01:00

Radio 4 to co-produce feature film | Radio | MediaGuardian.co.uk: "When it is broadcast, Radio 4 will have a red button service for digital TV transmission enabling viewers to see the visual material, the first time the station has shown a feature-style film to accompany spoken material."

This is very cool - and I think I might now know why my old boss was so excited about Peter Ackroyd when I last saw her.

But - uh, radio with pictures. Convergence. Or as we in the trade like to call it, telly.

It's all good.

Dandelife.com : Story : "Lifecasting - Dandelife Streams", by Kelly Abbott

2007-04-11T12:17:00.000+01:00

Dandelife.com : Story : "Lifecasting - Dandelife Streams", by Kelly Abbott

Ross Mayfield's Weblog: LifeStreams as an attention aggregator

There's a lot of talk around at the moment about lifestreams, chronological behaviours, and new navigation and aggregation tropes. It's something to do with twitter, and jaiku, and all of these new microblogging/presence services that are getting so much attention.

I tried to comment on Jeremy Keith's site - but the sensible man has comments turned off, so I'll just hope this gets picked up by Technorati.

There's a very interesting book - The Aesthetics of Computing by David Gelernter, which covers the idea of using chronological streams to organise files in an OS, partly because it's a much more natural, human way of remembering information. This is kind of how I feel about tagging as an organisational structure; it's not elegant, or concise, but it's very useful for 'fuzzy recall' - finding things that were a bit like the other thing, that might have been about the time that you were doing that other thing there.

As search and indexing of files within systems and the web becomes more comprehensive and useful, there's little reason to keep the old directory strucure/file system metaphors visible at the consumer interface level. Lets make something that works the way people think, instead.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Joel Johnson Returns...to Spank Us All for Supporting Crap - Gizmodo

2007-04-10T17:30:00.000+01:00

The other week, I went in to an Orange shop to see about upgrading my phone.

I have an old Nokia - specifically, an 8310 that I have hung on to because it was the last, small phone with the old monochrome interface. It has the least number of button presses to let me make a phonecall, or send a text message. This is good. It is elegant, and does everything I need it to (appart, maybe, from taking photos - I quite like camera phones, and it doesn't let me manage my calendar easily. Those things I'd find useful).

I also have an old nokia on an old tarrif - a very good 'price match' deal to an old One-to-one tarrif, that they rapidly withdrew for being too good value to the customer, apparently. My line rental is about £11, and I ususally pay about £22 all in for my calls and texts; I make few phonecalls. I never use WAP as I'm rarely far from the internets, and my phone breaks whenever I do try and use it.

Anyway, said phone is at the end of its natural life - not holding a charge, generally falling appart. I love it, but it's not much longer for this world. So I went in to try and get an upgrade.

The man in the Orange shop on Oxford street, just west from Oxford Circus (on the southern side of the road) was called Keith. I explained that I quite fancied upgrading to a new, shiny phone, something N73, personal organiser ish. I wondered how much that might be. When he pulled up my details on his sytem, he looked up at me, and laughed directly at my face.

I'm going to move to T Mobile, I think.

Anway, I feel about new phones pretty much the way that Joel Johnson feels:

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Joel Johnson Returns...to Spank Us All for Supporting Crap - Gizmodo:

"You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

Then you had the audacity to complain about broken phones, half-assed firmware that bricked your gear, and winner-takes-nothing arms races between the companies whose gear your bought and the hackers who had nothing better to do than try to fix it. Do you realize how ridiculous that is? Programmers with free time did more to help you get quality products than you ever did by buying the broken gear in the first place.

Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. You don't need it. Wait a year until the reviews come out and the other suckers too addicted to having the very latest and greatest buy it, put up a review, and have moved on to something else. Stop buying broken products and then shrugging your shoulders when it doesn't do what it is upposed to. Stop buying products that serve any other master than you. Use older stuff that works. Make it yourself. Only buy new stuff from companies that have proven themselves good servants of their customers in the past. Complaining online about this stuff helps, but really, just stop buying it."

Bait and Switch

2007-04-09T23:23:00.000+01:00

Ages ago, I subscribed to a video podcast promoting Nacho Libre, the Jack Black film. Hey, I'd just got a video ipod, vodcasts were all new and shiny, and I have a kind of a thing about wrestlers (ssh!) - what's not to like?

Anyway, sorting through my iTunes library, I notice that the old podcast folder has changed name, and suddenly, I have a huge number of videos on my harddrive promoting Blades of Glory.

I can but presume that the feed has been... recycled somehow.

I'm not really liking the ethics of this move, if I'm honest. There's a qualitative difference between the two films if nothing else (Will Ferrel is not, no matter how hard he tries, Jack Black; Will Ferrel is not a lot of things, in my books). I assume some marketeer has thought this up as a way of introducing the film to a sympathetic audience - hey, they're both dumb comedies with men in spandex, right?

Wrong. Sorry, you've alienated me even further than the cheap homophobic jokes in the trailer already did.

Show some manners, marketeers. My eyeballs pay your wages; and in this case, so does my bandwith.

Make Lighthearted Comments, Descend to General Ennui

2007-04-08T10:40:00.000+01:00

New at Pentagram: Scenes From a Blog

This ammused me greatly. Sometimes, in my more bitter and cynical moments, I think that trolling, flame wars, the whole caboodle is an inevitable outcome of giving a bunch of socially inept computer geeks access to an incredibly powerful set of tools that over significate and immortalise trivial social interactions.

Fasten Blogging Goggles

2007-03-23T11:52:00.000Z

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

Blogging Goggles. Bloggles. Quick, market them instantly.

Ask Nicely

2007-03-19T23:18:00.000Z

INFORMATION REVOLUTION

Dear Ask.

Thanks for the invitation to your marketing party, dressed in it's 'hey! it's 1992 again!' lofi graphics. I worked out the invite was from you by the red blob on the poster - what is that, a bloody thumbprint? Cool!

Anyway, I just wanted to check what time your information revolution party kicks off. Your timekeeping seems a bit off. I merely mention this because I have been on the '15 year old internet' that you describe for... well, I've been on the *web* since 1994. And I started using the *internet* in about 1990. You do understand the difference, don't you?

I used to use your service. Then Google pissed all over it, and took a photo of it passed out at another party with a magic marker moustache - I think that that crazy Yahoo! might have drawn that one on. I used Bloglines too, until you bought it, and left it to rot. Guess whose RSS reader I use now? Hint: It starts in Google.

Your astroturfing campaign carries the unmistakable taint of last ditch desperation. You'll never make friends at a party if you're that fake.

So. Not. Cool.

In which the Internets perfom a miracle

2007-03-19T20:44:00.000Z

We've established, previously, that my Dad's 80th birthday featured, among other things, bouzouki music. Alas, it didn't feature quite the right bouzouki music, as I couldn't track down a copy of the right Manos Hadjidakis album in time.

Mildly Diverting: Lilacs out of the Dead Land

So - the internets have performed a miracle. A completely anonymous person posted a link in a comment on the original post about the album. It led to a download of the mp3s of the album, and just in time for Mothering Sunday.

Whoever you are, anonymous donor of Greek music, thank you so very much!

Runescape and Christianopedia

2007-03-08T11:37:00.000Z

Two things of interest on listen again - Thinking Allowed on 'Runescape', and the Today programme discussing percieved Bias in Wikipedia

Thinking Allowed

BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again

Incidentally - Radio4 website, your URLs are horrible. Particularly those for the Today archive. zwednesday_20070307.shtml ? I know exactly where that Z came from. They're bored of seeing hundreds of files starting wednesday in their (manually maintained) file structure. Dear Today website: I know that you're in the process of redesigning at the moment. Can I suggest that you put the date first, so your files all go in nice chronological order? The day of the week makes your historical URLS unguessable without cross-referencing a calendar unless you're the kind of idiot savant who can be told any day in history and instinctively know what day of the week it was.

Can I suggest:

/radio/programmes/today/20070307/

As possibly the best place for that day's archive? You can put more than one page in that folder, too!

Metaverse Creeps Closer

2007-03-08T10:48:00.000Z

GDC07 Clip: The PS3's Home - Kotaku

I've been curling my lip about the PS3. Too expensive, full of Blu-Ray (Sony's second stab at Betamax video...) and just... meh.

But now I have seen this video.

I got the feeling, back in the autumn, that Second Life was on to something. That there really was potential in this whole 3d inhabited space, but that somehow Second Life was... incunabular. Not quite there yet. Like the web back in 95, it was clunky, and counterintuitive, and full of really bad folk design.

So it looks like the PS3's Home is now the AOL to Second Life's open server. It'll be the service that takes these worlds mainstream, but possibly ultimately dies as it's (I'm guessing) a walled garden.

But this will be huge. Really, really huge.

I wonder if you need to pay for each bit of downloaded content, or if there will be creation facilities? Hmn...

Yakkety Sax

2007-02-24T22:00:00.000Z

There's pretty much nothing that isn't funnier when set to the Benny Hill music.

(Actually, this one is the best.)

YouTube - Le Grand Content

2007-02-13T13:57:00.000Z

A rather cute film, though surely it's 'inspired' by Indexed.

Anyway, loving this pithy little comeback from the comments.

YouTube - Le Grand Content: "11thsockpuppet (1 day ago)
I agree that the text really really sucked ass. Out of the millions stream of conciousness angst-laden monologues I've ever heard this was the most uninspired. Great graphics though... (apart from the faulty rotation of the cylinders)
(Reply)
StuPadazzo (23 hours ago)
Yet another angst-laden, uninspired review that we've all heard millions of times. Great grammar though... (apart from the faulty rotation of used teenaged euphemisms)."

YouTube - BBC Newsnight talks about Wii and PS3

2007-02-13T11:27:00.000Z

Caught Charlie Brooker's inspired rant about Video Games on 'Screenwipe' last night. He reserved a particularly fine chunk of bile for this little section on Newsnight Review dealing with the Wii and the PS3.

I suppose it's what you should expect from a high minded cultural review show. Not quite as laughable as the Today show talking about the bootleg scene this morning (nice one, chaps, only 5 years after 2manydjs successfully cleared and released an album, and a couple of years after the trend died...)

Gah. Mainstream news sources feel increacingly irrelevant to me today.

YouTube - BBC Newsnight talks about Wii and PS3

Visible Bits

2007-02-09T13:59:00.000Z

computer memory quicktime viz - data visualization & visual design - information aesthetics

This is really interesting - a core dump, tinkered with just enough to make quicktime read it as if it were a video file. There's a surprising ammount of order in it, and bits of the soundtrack are positively Shoenberg.

Here's a direct link to one of the videos.

Vital defensive skills for the gent about town

2007-02-07T20:26:00.000Z

JNC, Barton-Wright, Self Defence with a cane part 1: "Self-defence with a Walking-stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions (PartI)"

This is very possibly my new favourite thing on the internet, ever.

Save the Borough Market Area Petition

2007-02-05T11:11:00.000Z

I like trains. However, I like Borough Market, Georgian architecture and nice democratic planning appeal systems much better.

I think that the character of the Borough area has changed hugely since the orginal plans were drawn up in the late 80s. It's one of the nicest bits of London, and it would be a huge shame to damage the renaissance of a previously neglected bit of London by running a ruddy great viaduct through the middle of it.

Do please check out the Save Borough Market Area Campaign, and consider signing the Save the Borough Market Area Petition.

Playing with Panoramas

2007-01-31T11:50:00.001Z

The London Development Agency, in Soutwark; stitched from about 40 photographs using Hugin.

¿Hacia dónde va la blogosfera?

2007-01-29T13:45:00.000Z

La Petite Claudine: ¿Hacia dónde va la blogosfera?

New favourite words. No idea what it means.

I spent a lot of time this weekend saying 'Zapotera' in my head, in the voice of Bruce Willis' girlfriend in Pulp Fiction. It's the way she makes the 'ty-eh' noise with the sides of her tongue, in a slightly lispy-my-tongue-is-too-big way. I have no idea why this is stuck in my head, but it is.

Even humming the theme music from Terry and June isn't going to shift this earworm.

Writerly Bliss

2007-01-25T19:53:00.000Z

Scotsman.com Living - Books - Having a crack at comedy:

"Doctor Who might seem an easy, obvious source of material, but few comics at the Fringe this year who go down the Tardis route are as big an aficionado as Kennedy or, like her, are seriously intending to submit a script to the BBC for the next series.

She's hugely impressed by David Tennant's take on the Time Lord. 'I look at him and I think: 'You've got yards of that, haven't you? You could be terrifying children for ever!' It's those eyes of his. Also the fact he has no chin. How does he eat without a bottom jaw? Bless him.'

It feels like a long time since I was re-reading those articles about the unremitting bleakness of AL Kennedy because now she's speculating on what it might be like to kiss Tennant."

I can't imagine anything stranger nor more fantastic that a Doctor Who episode scripted by AL Kennedy. Please, please make this come true.

George

2007-01-25T19:36:00.000Z

But now I come to think of it, possibly Chopin lived with someone called George Sand, who was a woman, like George Eliot. (Unless George Eliot confusingly lived with a man called George Sand?)

A dear old friend of mine, it transpires, has a very similar problem with sorting out all of those creative Georges from a certain period of history. I laughed like a drain when I read this, as it's an almost perfect summary of the problems I have with getting that lot straight.

In fact, much of that romantic period creative output is, in my head, an odd mishmash of biopics and half remembered odds and sods, that have elided into something resembling a cross between a Hammer Horror picture, Poldark and a Caspar David Friederich painting; possibly with a rather overblown soundtrack. It will help if you think of this as rather like the early oevre of Ken Russel. Yes, you can leave the oiled men wrestling and the snake godesses in there; my head is an overexcitable place.

I should add that mine has dashes of extra confusion about all those whoopsy poets, fragments of bad historical fiction, and the occasional dash of Gertrude Stein in there too, who it took me a while to realise was in fact, early 20thC and hence of interest.

I suppose the best way to describe it would be sublime?

History is not my strong point.

SQUEEE!

2007-01-15T16:55:00.000Z

Your order #203-8168722-0295902 (received 31-May-2006)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ordered Title Price Dispatched Subtotal
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon.co.uk items (Sold by Amazon EU S.a.r.L.):

1 World of Warcraft: The Bur... £15.99 1 £15.99

Shipped via Royal Mail (estimated arrival date: 17-January-2007).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subtotal: £13.61
Delivery Charge: £1.69
Total tax: £2.68
Total: £17.98

This completes your order.

I am somewhat over-excited. However... 17th? Arg! A whole 24 hours delay! But I want to make a Blood Elf and get a Cockatrice and go to Outland and see all the new things and get to level 70 and get jewels and epics and oh oh oh oh /hyperventilates/ *bang*.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

Yoz Grahame Speaks Clever

2007-01-10T19:33:00.000Z

New Media Knowledge - Brief exposure: Yoz Grahame: "What do you think is the next big thing in digital media?
Social software that also works as a platform, so that the community can evolve it without waiting for the owners. The primary reason why Second Life is doing so well is that every day there are hundreds of new features, all of which have been created by residents using the built-in programming language. This is not a new concept; MOO has worked this way since 1990."

Which is, after all, essentially what the web was, too.

A Change of Personality (again)

2007-01-02T15:37:00.000Z

Myers-Briggs typology is interesting. It's a crude measure, at best, and part of me really thinks that it's little more than your standard mediaeval world system worked over in new clothes, and hence not much improved over astrology.

Every time I take a test, I come out as a slightly different personality type. Back in 2003 I was an ISTJ, then swung to ISTP a year or so later. It turns out the tests typically have a very low test-retest repeatability, which makes me even more suspicious of the system...

I've now gone ultra fluffy, and have tested as INFP.

Introverted	Intuitive	Feeling	Perceiving
Strength of the preferences %
44	25	12	22

Wow - so not like me. I must be having a lame pathetic day. However, it seems slighty more like my work style - I was given a Myers Briggs derived test at work recently, and came out triple-high showoff and handwaver, which was entertaining - in fact, good at everything except acting on stuff. Perhaps the triple high accounts for everything except the introvert, explaining the changeable results for the three tests.

On the other hand, it could just be a faulty, crude tool for understanding a person?

New Years Day Easter Egg

2007-01-01T17:30:00.000Z

How exciting! I've found my very own easter egg in a piece of software!

Librarian that I am, I'm busy cataloguing my library by scanning the barcodes in Delicious Library. Hey, don't knock it, it's fun.

I got to the more obscure end of my bookcases - in this case, Star Wars X-Wing for the IBM PC, an old Lucas Arts Game. The barcode refused to scan, so I entered the barcode number manually - 0 23272 20512 6 - and the computerised voice read out the title.

After a longish pause, a breathy male voice cut in with 'I am your father!'.

My god, what an obscure joke to embed deep in the code... but I now love the software even more.

Ligua Franca

2006-12-18T10:52:00.000Z

Loic Lemeur wrongly assumed that conference attendees would not object to Le Web 3 morphing into a platform for French pre-election chest-beating (with keynotes delivered in French, natch);

I slightly worry about an industry that turns out in force to a french organised conference in france, and expects english to be spoken. It seems just the tiniest bit arrogant.

Unfed

2006-12-17T20:11:00.000Z

So I'm trying to embed a list of things I find on YouTube in the sidebar over yonder.

YouTube doesn't seem to publish any feeds.

No RSS. No Atom.

Eh?

Madness.

Listal

2006-12-17T18:28:00.000Z

mildlydiverting on Listal

I've been trying on and off for a month or two to upload our records from delicious library on to listal. Not for any particular reason, just because it seems fun to have a list of my (Our! God, I've actually allowed the boyfriend to comingle his CDs and Books with mine, which explains the Prog and some of the History of Apple stuff...) huge physical media library up with the virtual library that places like last.fm and amazon generate.

Listal itself is fun, but a bit... pointless, so far. It doesn't seem to encourage sharing and loans, nor resale, nor easy discovery of reccomendations. It might just be that until this evening it hasn't known enough about me, so I'll withhold judgement for a bit. What I really need is a site that I can easily query from my mobile phone when I'm trying to remember if I actually own that particular discounted David Bowie advert, or a site that tracks my ownership behaviours and instantly improves my reccomendations on any given eCommerce site. I'd like a bit of promiscuity with my data, please.

What I will say is that the profile page that you're encouraged to use as your linking presence on the site doesn't feature your collection nearly prominently enough - it's well below the fold. Profiles on social networks are beginning to look so similar - here's the box with the picture and location, here's the favourite stuff box, blah blah - that getting the 'killer app' above the fold on the page that people are likely to enter at seems ever more important.

On a related note - actually, an entirely unrelated note - YouTube and Twitter, what's up with your error messages? They don't appear next to the submit button I've just clicked, but in a banner at the top of the page. They're sufficiently far in to my peripheral vision that I literally don't see them, and just sit there thinking 'Hmn, this doesn't work... I wonder what happened?'. I finally understand why my mother has problems remembering to check status bars. Please fix!

Back to listal. Other niggles are that there's no view that allows you to just see everything - it's always broken in to music, books, dvds... I'm too used to thinking in terms of streams of stuff these days, and, well, that seems artificial. I'm really confused by the Movies / TV / DVD categories too - are they assuming that they'll track download purchaces? Otherwise, how do I reclassify all my DVDs into movies or telly or other?

They provide the now ubiquitous tagging for organising your stuff, but really, with 400 odd books (and that's less than a third of my total library, at a guess) I simply don't have the ability to go through and usefully classify stuff. I could do with a batch processor, or a use of Amazon's classification system to broadly indicate the topics of my books. A cross between that and Amazon US's 'Statistically Improbable Phrases' would tell you a great ammount about the actual content in there, and be a good starting point for better organisation. Folksonomy is all very well, but only works contiguously - you need proper librarianship foo to retrospecively work through that ammount of data. Use the API's available to you! I can acutally see a multiple-select-drag and drop interface like flickr's organizr working well for that ammount of representation-of-things in this context. Some of the CD metadata is a bit borken too; more likely the fault of delicious monster, but perhaps its the time for a project like musicbrainz to take Amazon's dirty data on books and physical media instantiations and expose it publicly for community cleaning? I think the combining, cross referencing and curating of this kind of data is one of the most useful things to have come out of the open source wikipedia / freedb ethic of the last few years.

So, anyway; Listal useful in that it has let me get physical objects in to a virtual space. That's less impressive once you understand that I compiled the list by waving barcodes in front of the boyfriend's macbook, but it's another link in the chain of making my life networked, and finally becoming little more than a set of public data streams. Hmn.