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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogging Goggles. Bloggles. Quick, market them instantly.

Ask Nicely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¿Hacia dónde va la blogosfera?

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

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

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!

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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.

Boing Boing: Airplane-Treadmill problem

Boing Boing: Airplane-Treadmill problem

Surely - and I may be wrong - planes derive their lift from the bernouille effect of air moving very fast over the aerofoil of their wings. As the plane would not be moving forward in space, there would be no airflow over the wings - the point of runways is to get sufficient speed of airflow to produce enough lift to let the plane take off.

What you have here, is a jet powered thing revolver?

Arresting

Sometimes, there are thoughts, that when you first encounter them are so very arresting that your world changes in a way that's initially imperceptible, but that you know will grow in to something extraordinary. They're literally dumbfounding; there's no response to them, and you feel a whole bunch of concepts slip into a new position as they settle in to your head. That is, provided your brain doesn't spit them out like so much conceptual ambergris.

I've just stumbled across one such though. What if, by 2010, there is no address window in your browser? What if a user never has to see another URL again, ever? What if the web chooses to put its skeleton on the inside?

My god, it's full of stars.

Designweenie: Weblog

Twitterati

russell davies: johnson v eno: "twitterati"

Today's Neologism. Nice.

Keeping things in Perspective

Google Trends: Second life, YouTube

An interesting little search terms graph.

I find it rather extraordinary that there are two talk events running in London this evening about Second Life and virtual worlds. One is more academic, about identity formation and sociability in worlds; the other appears to be about generating PR for the music industry. The Immersion / Augmentation split couldn't be better illustrated if you tried.

Also, last night, Steven Johnson and Brian Eno went off on to an agreeable little diversion about SL in their ICA talk about 'The Ghost Map'. It has given me an idea, a little like Jones the Wireframes', but with more bottoms. Of which, more anon.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Voluntary code for blogs 'needed'

BBC NEWS | Politics | Voluntary code for blogs 'needed':

"Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told.

Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin said he opposed government regulation of the internet, saying it should a place 'in which views bloom'.

But unless there was a voluntary code of conduct there would be no form of redress for people angered at content.

He spoke during a session on free speech at a London race conference."

Oh. Oh. Oh dear me.

/me giggles at the silly man who doesn't really understand.

Terra Nova: cyber-sexdaq

Terra Nova: cyber-sexdaq

Just a little follow up from the post about SL sex the other day. Ren Reynolds has a very interesting discussion of virtual prostitution rates being a good indicator of cross-world coin worth - like the economics 'mars bar' rate.

RPI goes from Retail price Index to... Role Play... something...

I made you a cookie... but I eated it on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I made you a cookie... but I eated it on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Just occasionally I hate my other half.

He took a terrible, terrible photo of me pulling a face with his shiny new cameraphoneblackberryofevil, and it is now the number two google result for 'I made you a cookie... but I eated it.'

Great. Welcome to posterity.

Alan Yentob watches Deathline in Second Life

Alan Yentob watches Deathline in Second Life,
originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting.

Alan Yentob Flies in Second life

Alan Yentob Flies in Second life,
originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting.

Imagine... herecomeseverybody.co.uk

BBC - Press Office - Network TV Programme Information Week 49 Tuesday 5 December 2006: Imagine... herecomeseverybody.co.uk, BBC One, 10:35pm

Over the last couple of months, I've been occasionally helping out Zoe Silver, a director from the BBC Arts department, as she's been working on the latest edition of the arts show, Imagine...

Skipping to the end first.... Zoe's put together a really excellent programme about the creative culture of the web. It's not hardcore geek - that wouldn't be right for the audience of the show - but it's a great overview of the way the MySpace generation are changing cultural consumption.

The list of heavy hitter interviewees should give you a good flavour of how right she's got it: Tim Berners Lee, David Weinberger, Clay Shirky, Jimmy Wales, Henry Jenkins, Chris Anderson... I hope you'll agree that's a good mix of people, all of whom have really sound insights into the way the web is permeating everyday life, and how media is getting democratised.

There are some real grassroots voices in there too - David Firth, creator of Salad Fingers, was reccomended by m'estimable colleague David Thair, and looks to be in the final cut. There's Dickon Edwards, Girl with a One Track Mind, and some modern beat combo called the Horrors, too.

I'm eagerly awaiting a preview DVD - at the moment I've just read an edit draft of the script.

I got involved with the project back in July; someone somewhere asked someone else if anyone knew about the internet and might be able to find a UK video blogger, and that someone asked someone else, yada yada, and that person put Zoe in touch with me. It turns out I don't know any videobloggers (at least, I didn't at the time) but what I do know about is stuff on the internet, generally.

We sat down a week or so later in the rubbish wine bar under my offices, and I proceeded to empty my head of the history of what, back in my day, we knew as cyberculture. Poor girl; two hours with me after a couple of glasses of wine, talking about the internet... I think I must have terrified her; I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Anyway; I've been acting as an informal 'web native' advisor - every so often being around when the production team has wanted to check the wording on the voiceover is right, or when they've wanted to set up a blog, or register a domain name.

I have to say, though, that the most enjoyable thing about the whole experience happened about a month ago after Alan Yentob, the presenter (and notionally my boss' boss, or possibly my boss' boss' boss), had a chance meeting with the DG in a lift.

According to rumour, they chatted briefly about the show, and as he left the lift, Mark Thompson said 'Oh, have you heard about Second Life?' The next day, I got a phonecall:

Zoe: Hello, me again. Now, do you know about Second Life?
Me: /laughs
Me: Yes, yes I do. I was wondering when you'd ask that.

So - Alan wanted an Avatar, and to visit the world for the show. My attempt was frankly rubbish, but Alan liked it enough to commission Kisa Naumova to create a proper version for him, and to manage the shoot in world. She did a fantastic job (I'm really proud of her!) - even getting K's new band Deathline to put on a gig for the film. Apparently, Kisa gets mentioned by name!

I'll pop a couple of screenshots up on Flickr, and link to them later. But for now, I urge you all to watch BBC One on 5th December at 10:35 pm.

And if you look really closely, you'll see 'me' in the background of one of the shots...

EDIT: 9 Dec

Natalie d'Arbeloff got in touch to point out I'd missed her off; so here she is. Stuart at Feeling Listless has gathered together all of the relevant links from the show in a stirling display of public service spirit, too.

Alan Yentob watches Deathline in Second Life,
originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting.

Alan Yentob Flies in Second life,
originally uploaded by MildlyDiverting.

BBC - Video Nation - Filming Skills - Recording Sound

BBC - Video Nation - Filming Skills - Recording Sound

Hey! Kids! Making video for YouTube?

Watch these useful guides from the BBC, on how to make your footage look better.

Musiccubes

BBC - Radio 1 - Musicubes - Constructor

M'estimable colleagues at Radio 1 are up to bonkersness again.

Super Public, Super Sexy

I'm making my Monday rounds of my RSS feeds, catching up on a few long-unread folders. David Hayward, at Functional Autonomy, is running a very interesting series of thoughts on privacy, and transparency, in a world where social networks and online behaviour destroy conventional notions of the public/private sphere.

His discussion of Danah Boyd's apophenia: super publics, and her throwaway comments about sexual privacy in a recent talk caught my attention.

I've recently become an 'expert' in Second Life. By expert, I mean someone who spends time there, actively thinks about the experience, and reads enough secondary literature around the subject (blogs!) to be able to contextualise it for busy media executives in a series of pithy soundbites. So, not especially expert by my own standards (I'd want some kind of PHD in the area to really consider myself approaching an expert in any field), but more than enough expert for the purposes of my job - moreso when you consider it to be an extension of the social aspects of living an internet-mediated life.

When I opened my Second Life account, I had the intention of keeping it very, very seperate from the rest of my online identity. After all, the fun of an alternate existence is playing with the boundaries of your behaviour, and exploring what it might feel like to be a different version of yourself.

Any internet identity used to be good for this kind of self-extension/obfuscation; Usenet of yore was full of nobody-knowing-you're-a-dog. I suspect the compressed, disembodied nature of online communication coupled with the being-someone-else-ness of the online space goes some way to explaining why heated arguments and griefing are more frequent in virtual commons than in real world public spaces. I should incidentally relate that someone-elseness to the disembodiment of the internet experience; the having your head in a different place to the rest of you.

Anyway; it turns out that the ideal position of keeping part of my online life seperate is untenable.

I shouldn't be surprised, really; I'm not noted for public discretion about what would be considered to be my private life*. Furthermore, I suspect that the more 'real' an avatar or alternate identity feels - and that's strongly related to the (visual, rendered, realised, identified) tangibility of the representation - the harder it is to partition off the existence of that self-shard. I think that Danah Boyd probably reached that conclusion well before I did.

Ishi - my current otherself - got off to a wobbly start in the seperation stakes. A comedy misunderstanding between myself and Alice meant my real name got attached to a Second Life product. Picofame followed, and I met a few people in Second Life who understood where my other Mildly Diverting internet identity lived. A friend who only knew me in world* could attach my real name to my avatar after seeing BoingBoing, and use google to find me elsewhere. My notoriety at work as being 'girl who knows about the internet' led to helping out on a machinima shoot for a fairly well known arts presenter, and more admissions to in-world friends about my out-world life.

But why seperate? Well, basically, sex. I'm fascinated by smut; those who know me well** know this. As I started spending time in Second Life whilst on holiday (both literally away from home, and on holiday from the work-play and social work-play of Warcraft) I had the time to investigate (indluge in?) the seedier aspects of the world. It's nothing unusual for me; I've investigated (indluged in!) some of the seedier aspects of first life too; luckily there are few permanent digital records of this though.***

David Hayman is perceptive around the intersection between shame and privacy:

If there?s anything in my life I?m really, actually ashamed of, it usually indicates that I don?t understand it well enough. Subsequent investigation shifts myself around that thing, either eradicating it from me or giving me a more confident foundation in that aspect of myself.

Whilst most aspects of my sexuality have shifted myself around them over time - I'm most of the way through adjusting to being post-gay (or, if you like, have come out and gone back in again) at the moment - there are still some aspects that I feel not exactly shame, but more... insecurity about. These are precisely the areas of self-formation that become attractive loci of exploration in a safe, alternate identity-space; playing with the thing that frightens you renders it powerless. When you couple that with the colourful group of people I hang out with, some of whom are much more concerned with privacy and seperation than I am and trust me not to violate their boundaries, then also consider that I am being asked to expose my online identity in a professional context, it becomes more of a tricky course to negotiate.

It does revolve around trust.

Giving a presentation over the summer, I was asked to demonstrate embedding a youtube video in a blog. I did; this blog sat on the projector behind me. Someone made a casual joke about my self description in the sidebar. Not about liking girls, but about being too serious. Does that person now have significant information about me that might affect my future career? It depends how prejudiced she is against serious people, I suppose; I do not have enough one-to-one experience of the way she thinks (either through talking to her, or through her online presence) to make a decision about the amount I trust her. Ages ago, I demoed Bittorrent to a producer here; my dowload list was rife with smut; embarrasing, but I trusted him just enough to make a nervous joke of it. I gave an adhoc demo of Bloglines to another group of people; they probably noticed the folder of feeds labelled 'smut', but in this case I trusted them all enough that I didn't compulsively make a joke of it. I've joined a few networking groups in SL that might impact on my professional life; I wonder, occaionally, if anyone might raise an eyebrow at the other groups I belong to. Which one do I worry about? The one whose honest reaction I can't judge.


The moments of flustered embarrassed panic I have each time this happens boil down to:-

• having exposed something that transgresses a perceived societal taboo (etiquette breaches)


• the potential this exposure might be used against me professionally


• in ways I might not be aware of in a system where reputation is hidden


• do I thus trust these people enough not to weild that power over my professional reputation I have just inadvertantly given them in ways that might negatively impact me?

Then, last week, I was asked to demo Second Life to a producer, and also to make a few clips to illustrate another talk. I made an alt, fresh and clean and innocent. But I didn't use her.

Why? Practically, because it was too much fuss to send through money and objects and yada yada. But also because I realised that, you know, Ishi is me now. That's me; the more salacious things I get up to online are probably more fun for being a bit secret and furtive, but shame is probably not a healthy reaction to the situation. It's not to everyone's taste, admittedly, but each to their own. The fact I'm out there enjoying these spaces and playing at the edges means my colleagues don't have to; in a funny way, it's valuable experience. It makes my presence in Second Life authentic. I hope, in some way, that my willingness to expose vulnerability there renders a reciprocal trust dynamic.

More from Danah Boyd:

A reporter recently asked me why kids today have no shame. I told her it was her fault. Media is obsessed with revealing the backstage of people in the public eye - celebrities, politicians, etc. More recently, they've created a public eye to put people into - Survivor, Real World, etc. Open digital expression systems coupled with global networks took it one step farther by saying that anyone could operate as media and expose anyone else. What's juicy is what people want to hide and thus, the media (all media) goes after this like hawks. Add the post-9/11 attitude that if you hide something, you are clearly a terrorist. Should it surprise anyone that teenagers have responded by exposing everything with pride? What better way to react to a super public where everyone is working as paparazzi? There's nothing juicy about exposing what?s already exposed. Do it yourself and you have nothing to worry about. These are the kinds of things that are emerging as people face life in super publics.

I'm not deliberately foregrounding my sexuality in these professional situations, you understand; it's incidental. It's just one aspect of the cloud of data on me, my tastes, my behaviours that is now present for all time on the internet. In that stew of data on me, my sexual life is as weighted as my musical tastes, or my reading materials; it's all noise, just data points and only relevant if you want to make it so. Added together, though, it will probably tell you if I am someone you'd find entertaining to have a chat with in the pub.


It's just crystalised gossip. How terribly, terribly significant.



* Much to my Mother's disgust, and I suspect my father's amusement. Hi Dad!
* I suspect findable on Google due to an unusual nickname, but trying would invade her privacy; this is about my relationship with my otherlives. It's all about me. Me me me.
** And in some cases, for values of well approaching 'met me whilst a little too drunk once, and heard it all anyway'
*** My ex was less lucky. I'm not doing *that* google search in the office though.

Call for Papers: Women in Games from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog

Call for Papers: Women in Games from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog

I would really, really like to prepare a paper for this on gender performance / perfomative gender and virtual worlds.

It's a shame my academic knowledge is ten years out of date.

Honest in a Second Life Article

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Magazine - Get a (second) life: "Given the camaraderie that had developed between us and my looming deadline, I decided to ask if either of them wanted to have sex with me. Laura immediately offered to ?give me the full works? in return for L$1,200 upfront - about $5 in real money. Things quickly came unstuck. For one thing, I had neglected to buy any virtual genitalia, which came as a disappointment to Laura when I took off my pants."

From an article in the FT - quite a nice, honest view of the world that doesn't shy away from mentioning that yes, a lot of it is about sex. I think this is one of the only mentions of the more adult aspects of the world I've seen in big media...

Are You an Average YouTube User? - Mashable!

Are You an Average YouTube User? - Mashable!

An interesting - and cleverly done - study of user behaviour on YouTube.

The foregrounding and public nature of social networking sites should, theoretically, make this kind of information much easier to come across.

I particularly like the fact that these average active users spend about an hour a day watching clips.

Crystalising a line's walk

Sketch Furniture by FRONT

This is extraordinary. I love the looseness of the lines they make (which, of course, are invisible to them) and the way the slightly tentative shapes still feel wobbly in the plastic furniture produced.

God, we live in interesting times.

More Cats

More Cats

This is an important public service, you know. Particularly this one.

http://www.knitemare.org/cats/270916538_37c1904290.jpg

A week later and this is still funny

CATS!

'Im in ur survr, steelin ur dataz'.

This kept me awake giggling at 1am this morning. Damn cats. What is it that makes today's memes so sticky, so appealing?

Book Lust pt. 2

Hill House, Publishers: Books by Neal Stephenson

Damn you, Matthew Sommerville. Damn your eyes and the £317 Pounds, shillings and ounces that I now want to spend on books.

3D Weather Data Visualization in Second Life - Second Life Insider

3D Weather Data Visualization in Second Life - Second Life Insider

Oh. My. God.

SecondLife mashups are where its at.

Box Box Box Box; Drive Drive Drive Drive; Liiiiiiiiiiift! Liiiiiiiiiiiiift!

Via Rodcorp:

A Rebel in Defense of Tradition - on Steve Reich at 70
"Reich moved back to New York, where he got to know Philip Glass. At one point they had a moving company together; Glass also worked as a plumber while Reich drove a cab." - you wonder what they hummed as they moved boxes.

Mr. Rodcorp has just made me blow coffee out of my nose laughing.

Book Lust

Penguin Designer Classics - Penguin Books Ltd.

A Sam Taylor Wood designed limited edition of F Scott Fitzgerald.

Oh, god, it's so very pretty. And a hundred pounds. But I want it so very much.

It's just outside the upper boundary of could conscionably spend on one lovely, lovely thing that will appreciate in value over time limit. Bugger.

Interesting usability error

Blogmusik | Free Internet virtual ipod for Music Albums playlist Mp3 (BETA VERSION)

Now, I have issues with flash. I really don't mind it being used appropriately, but man, it can go SO badly wrong in really subtle ways.

Here's a good example - Tae in the office just sent me this site. I went to register, and had to type in my email address. So I hit the @ sign, which is shift-' on my keyboard, just up and to the right of the full stop and slash keys.

Except it came out as ".

After a few moments of total confusion, and believing that my fingers were at fault, I thought to try my normal " key - shift-2 in this case.

Lo and behold, an @ sign appears.

The designers must work on macs, and have no idea that they've managed to hard code both mac specific, and presumably regional data into their application (I'm assuming that there are regional european differences in keyboard layout, from a brief and very confusing attempt to use WindowsXP-French Edition - which sadly is not known as Microsoft FenetreXP, boo).

Anyway, flash. Sometimes it sucks donkey balls, to coin a phrase.

Selling my Skin

SLurl: Location-Based Linking in Second Life

Hmn, not quite like that. The anatomical skin I made is finally available for sale; I'm hoping to cut a deal with a big store, but for the meantime, visit my baby parcel of land and help pay for the endless texture uploads it took to make it!

Chinhae 212, 5, 32 will get you there. And sorry about the shouting, there's nothing I can do about it...

Think Global, Act Local

outside.in

I heart Steven Johnson; he's a good and interesting writer.

His latest book, The Ghost Map, is about the Broad Street cholera outbreak, which is one of my favourite London stories, always retold to friends in the John Snow, or as I walk past the pump.

Anyway; he's launched an interesting fuzzy geolocation service, outside.in.

Lovely, but it hasn't heard of Clapham, or SW8 3JF.

Come along now, the internet is not just for 'mericans.

The Peckham Experiment

Guardian Unlimited Arts | Arts news | The truth about those iconic buildings: the roofs leak, they're dingy and too hot

I used to live in Peckham; I loved it in that part of town. There's a lovely mix of grass roots art activity, gentrification, proper pubs, african groceries and cheap poundshops that I really liked. And I only saw one shooting in two years, too.

I used Peckham library whilst I lived there. It's an incredible building to look at; an inverted L, with bright panels and real presence, hidden behind a set of older buildings and some open public space with a giant canopy over it; host to the Peckham farmer's market and a variety of Gospel Choir ministries on non market days.

As beautiful as this regenerated area was; as carefully designed, conceptually rigorous, etc etc... it was also anti human.

That sounds odd. But I'll give you a couple of stories to illustrate it.

Back in the days of building new towns, the planners laid out footpaths in Milton Keynes. These were to connect residential areas with shopping areas, and they ran through scenic parkland strips, curving, organic,paths; lovely and human, and leafy, and pastoral; the kind of paths to warm the heart of any urban pedestrian.

Except, of course, the meandering routes were not direct, so people cut across in a straight line to cut their journey times. And the trees screened the paths, so women didn't feel safe. So the layout, for all of its intentions, wasn't good in use.

Then there's Vauxhall Bus Station, by Arup Associates. It's beautiful; a cross between a club flyer logo and a 1950s airstream trailer.

Except that

• it doesn't provide any shelter from wind, because the glass enclosures are open on two sides;


• the seats are on the outside of the shelters;


• the angular plains of the roof mean you get rained on as you walk around the wall to get to the stairs down to the tube;


• one of the shelter areas has been boarded up for six months because (I assume) a bus drove in to one of the supports and ruined the aluminium cladding which has proved difficult/too expensive too replace (I assume);


• panes of glass regularly shatter, particularly where the bus maps are mounted on frames drilled through the glass;


• the roof is so high that it provides no shelter from the rain, which blows in at an angle;


• the lift doesn't work;


• the toilets don't work




On the plus side, it has an LUL roundel that glows and changes colour.

And so to Peckham Library; a fantastic but not hugely functional building. The inside was covered with the usual flurry of photocopied a4 community notices that are a feature of any and all libraries; considering this, did the architects not take account of that in their plan? Walking to the entrance is intimidating; yet another windblown, semi sheltered imposing blank space to cross, rather than a lively, human, inhabited pavement. You're not *in* the space as soon as you enter; there are lifts and floors to negotiate, and it feels like visiting an unfriendly office. The furniture was looking tatty (not pleasantly worn, you'll note) when I visited, but most of all, the selection of books was really, really poor.

Perhaps I was expecting too much; but Putney, Westminster and Battersear/Clapham libraries have been wonderful. Perhaps, then, it's an artefact of the different demographic needs in Peckham. Perhaps its an artefact of the spend on the building negatively impacting on the spend for the contents of the building.

It makes me sad. Perhaps because I spend a lot of my time thinking about the lived experience within virtual architectures on the web, and making sure the design fits the purpose as much as possible.

It also makes me want to retrain as an architect, in order to do better.

Accidental Poetry

List of battleships of France - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Foudroyante"

I just came across this set of names of French Ironclad battleships.

It is rather poetic.

Skin / NoSkin

Update: The Skins are now available at Chinhae 212, 5, 32 - my little parcel of land.

I've been messing around in Second Life recently; along with half of the rest of the world, it seems. There's a constant stream of wobbly-legged newbies wandering around wondering what there is 'to do'. The last week has been eventful; I made my first thousand Linden Dollars, got randomly shot at in the American Apparel shop, and bought some very pretty shoes. Aaah, shoes.

I've been in for a month or so already, and... it's interesting. It reminds me of the web back in 1996; all flashy banner ads and people making stuff just for the sake of it, because it's fun.

At the moment, I don't want to link my two selves together; my regular old internet identity and my second life. My avatar felt very strongly embodied very quickly; much more so than Kuya, my Warcraft alt. I'm slightly alarmed at the fact that, given control over my appearance, I have given myself a very tall, very thin body; no surprises about the body issues there, then. On the plus side, I can wear heels without the attendant agony, and even walk in them, so swings and roundabouts. I didn't really want to post about SecondLife here, but Alice persuaded me.

The physicality of controlling an avatar is interesting. Ages ago I did a lot of academic research into the way that medical programmes create interesting psychological relationships to the physical body. If you're at all interested in reading ten thousand odd words of impenetrable post modern theorising, I've popped my old dissertation on my site: New Romances of the Body: Television and the Somatics of Technology. Frankly, I can't quite be bothered to go back and read it myself; the essential argument was that representations of the body on screen lead to an odd state where we idealise and fetishise the body, whilst never quite being able to get away from the fact it is little more than a puny bag of fallible flesh.

There is an argument to be made about the popularity of cybersex in Second Life being a reflection of the desire to be physically embodied in the world. By sitting at your computer screen and engaging your virtual self in mutually improvised pornography, you produce real physical effect in your body. (Look, I'm so not going in to detail here. You're grown ups. Use your imagination.) It's more or less the only way to get real physical sensation from a virtual existence.

So, you should have some idea by now that actually I'm a body theory geek. I was lucky enough to study gross anatomy as part of my art degree (yes - with real dead bodies. I'll post my drawings some time); I made a short documentary about art and anatomy that I really must get round to posting on YouTube one day. And now, my first SecondLife build is an Ecorché - a flayed skin, designed to present the gross musculature of the human body. Interestingly, there's no good mention of the Ecorché in its art historical context on Wikipedia; I must get to work.

I'm in discussion at the moment to make the skins available for sale; I'll post again with an SLURL as soon as the deal is finalised. If you're interested in a copy, do leave a comment; I'll get in touch.







The skin was entirely hand drawn in Photoshop, based on my old anatomy sketchbook; i used Chip Midnight's reference PSDs to help with the allignments.

Oh; I made that garden, too, if you're in the market for a bit of Inigo Jones...

(edit: BoingBoinged! Thanks Cory!)

Lilacs out of the Dead Land

My mother and I are planning my father's 80th Birthday party

Mum: What about Music? We need music?
Me: I can sort that, that's fine. What do you want?
Mum: Oh, well, I don't know...
Me: Well, what about Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald...umm, I have some Julie London, and some Doris Day...
Mum: Oh, nobody likes that, do they? Jeannie and Laurence like... what is it...
Me: Elvis?
Mum: Coutry and Western!
Me: Oh, I have some Dolly Parton.
Mum: What about that album that we love? Manos Hadjidakis, he's called. Lilacs out of the Dead Land. It's all in greek on the back... it's on record here, we could put it on the computer? Everyone I've played it to has said how lovely it is.

I love my parents, and actually, I think it's entirely fitting that my Dad's 80th birthday celebrations will take place to a soundtrack of Balalaika Music inspired by a TS Elliot poem.

They made me who I am, and I will never, ever be sorry about that.

Magic Hour

Years ago I read a book; the images that the book created in my head are still with me.

The book in question; called 'Magic Hour' is the biography of Jack Cardiff, a cinematographer, and incidentally the first trained technicolour cameraman in the UK.

He got the job - against stiff competition - because the other camera men went in and talked about physics, and lenses, and technical issues. He went in and talked about Rembrandt.

He worked with Powell and Pressburger, shot the African Queen, produced travel documentaries, and writes eloquently about the time of day as the sun sinks, and the world turns a mysterious shade of dark blue. The hours around twilight do something magical with film; turn it into a place where the world seems somehow unreal, and precise, and sad, all at once.

Images sometimes hit me like that; either the strong mental images from good writing, or glimpsed images in books, on posters, in the street. They catch you, and niggle at you, until you pay them attention, look at them more, let themselves print themselves on you.

A few weeks ago I wandered through a bookshop, and saw a beautiful art book, with a cover that looked like a film still - a woman walking away from a spun-out, steaming car, at twilight. The image hasn't left my head since - it reminds me of William Eggleston, or Cindy Sherman, or... something from a forgotten movie. Something shot by Jack Cardiff.

It turns out it is by a photographer called
Gregory Crewdson; thanks to Dan I've just found out that his work is in an exhibition at the V&A called 'Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour.

And I now know what I'm doing this weekend.

Waiting for Taxis

It's five to one. I'm still at work. I'm really quite tired; with another late one tomorrow. I hope it's worth it.

There's a taxi on the way, but meantime, this.

Amateur astronomer photographs sun with digital camera, for fun.

Notices sunspot

Looks closer.

Realises it's the space station and the shuttle.

Nice.

iss_shuttle.jpg (JPEG Image, 2850x2850 pixels)

Your Name Deciphered: Kim

The Weekly / Your Name Here / Your Name Deciphered:

KIM

Literal meaning

'Christ, get that thing away from me.'


History

Celebrated as the first word written with the first pencil invented in 1222 AD, the name Kim was originally used by nuns to refer to warriors who died during drill practice, before being pulled from a fire that killed its variants and diminutives.


Famous Kims

1. Kim du Marl-Proms, who discovered Sock 'n' Roll;
2. Inspector Kim Quoits, haunted by an image of the nightmare cupboard;
3. Kim Millington-Ach, co-writer of INDIANA JONES AND THE MECHANICAL PONTIFF;
4. Kim Happenstance, aroused by between nine and fifteen scientific principles; ghost-writer of Thora Hird's anarchist's handbook and autobiography, DOCTOR! THE FORCEPS!;
5. Brigadier-General Kim Dindymene ('The Uncanny'), named in court as holding compromising material concerning the world's most attractive bucket;
6. Kim T O'Lilly Li, who lost a fortune on the self-aware cartoon strip; ghost-writer of Peter Lawford's compelling autobiography, I WAS KILLED IN THE WAR;
7. Kim A Thews ('The Nervous'), indifferent to the Bakelite Diet;
8. 'Terrible' Kim Chinly ('The Thing'), who owes everything to Tramp Drink;
9. Kim H Tidecatcher, MD, fascinated to death by Explode-O, the wonder bang dismantler; ghost-writer of Yootha Joyce's cousin's autobiography, SEE YOU IN HELL;
10. Kim Trabmaw, champion of the right to use thirty-one entirely new ways to kneel.


Typical Kim motto

"Let us emulate the wily Prussian."

And Lo! I am become walking cliche! Phear Me!

Two people more senior than me at work have reccomended the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain to me; within a couple of days of each other, at that.

But anyway, I can't help but think this means that Ukes are now SO OVER, and I hereby declare 2006 to be the autumn of the harmonica quartet.

YouTube - Borrah Minevitch & his Harmonica Rascals - Boxcar Rhapsody



Spring 2007 will of course be the season of the Balalaika.

Tom Coates get Pwned

I'm demonstrating You Tube again. This one was a particularly good find...

Buzz and Predictions

Buzz Game: Home

Reading a post on the O'Reilly website about games, AI and captchas, I noticed there was a rated list of RSS readers in the left hand navigation, attached to 'stock market' data. It turns out to be an embed from the Yahoo! Buzz game; essentially, Celebdaq for search terms. It's not new, of course, you'll have been aware of it for a while.

I noticed, however, that it was part of Yahoo! Research; it makes sense, as a stock market game about technology trends is a good area to attract an audience to the game. But then I though... what data could Yahoo! be deriving from the players?

Watching buying trends of technology related search terms would be an invaluable guide to investing in key products and technologies, and could give quick before-the-fact tipoffs to emerging players.

Interesting.

Adobe Photoshop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Adobe Photoshop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I have been using Photoshop for over ten years.

Cripes.

Building A Guitar in Nowhere

As I've been on holiday this week, I decided to take a virtual holiday too; I moved multiverses from Warcraft to Second Life.

Man, does that interface blow...

I think there will be a longer post about SL sometime soon, but for now I'd just like to point at this extraordinary video of a chap using the in-game modelling tools to build a guitar for Suzanne Vega. It's breathtakingly accomplished, considering the tools used.

I know it isn't anywhere close to what the highend CGI tools can do, but at the same time, the last time I did any serious 3D modelling was on the Acorn Archimedes, and you had to use a scripting language to place all of the objects, then leave it for hours to render your animation. I genuinely can't concieve of what virtual space manipulation tools might be in another 20 years...

Second Life | Showcase

Best Thing Ever

If George Formby did the Ace of Spades

Uniforms! George Formby! Ukeleles! Rock! Yes! My life, as they say, is complete.

Schwaaaaag!

J!NX - Blizzard - World of Warcraft T-Shirts, Sweatshirts, Hats, Stickers, Pins, Patches - WoW Tees, Shirts, Buttons

I'm particularly loving the 'Camp Taurajo: Welcome to Kodo Country' T shirt.

The BBC License Fee Reclassified as a Tax?

One of the speakers has just raised the fact that the 'BBc License Fee has been reclassified as a tax, so why can't we access everything it does in an open way, seeing as we've already paid for it?'

Hmn. Here's what the House of Lords had to say about it:

The licence fee as a tax

22. Since our last report there has been a significant change in the position of the licence fee. In January 2006 the Office of National Statistics re-classified the licence fee as a tax. Previously, this payment had been classified in the National Accounts as a service charge. Explaining the change the Office of National Statistics (ONS) says "in line with the definition of a tax, the licence fee is a compulsory payment which is not paid solely for access to BBC services? A licence is required to receive ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, satellite, cable". [6]

23. We are not convinced by this argument not least because it has been the case that a licence has been required to view any television channel in the UK for many decades. Nevertheless the decision means that from now on the licence fee will be recognised as a form of hypothecated taxation.

24. Reclassification of the licence fee as a tax also has the consequence that the BBC is reclassified from the public non-financial corporations sub-sector to the central government sector.[7] The status of the BBC is thus also affected by this decision and it becomes a central government body. This change also affects the Welsh broadcaster S4C.

25. When announcing its decision the ONS tried to offer some reassurance that "These classifications are solely for the purpose of producing National Accounts and the statistical products based on them. This has no implication for the independence of these broadcasters".

26. In spite of this we are concerned about the consequences of the ONS' decision. The reclassification of the BBC as a central government body could have serious implications for its independence. There are various subgroups of public body that come under the title central government body. The only existing one that the BBC could conceivable fall into is the category of a non-departmental public body.

27. The Cabinet Office guidance on non-departmental public bodies shows that the sponsoring department of such a body has significant powers over it. For example the sponsoring department has a role in designating who the body's accounting officer will be, in approving the form of the annual report and accounts, in determining audit arrangements, in reviews on the grading and loading of posts and in setting pay remits.[8] The reclassification of the licence fee as a tax, and of the BBC as a central government body, could therefore have significant implications for the BBC's independence. We urge the Department of Culture, Media and Sport first to spell out the implications of these changes and second to explain how the BBC's independence will be safeguarded in light of them.

28. The licence fee is now classified as a tax and we note that for the first time the Government have started to use it as such. They are using it to cover costs that should be covered by general taxation, in particular the costs of providing targeted help with digital switchover. As we will discuss in the next chapter, over 75s are currently given a free television licence funded from general taxation as part of the Government's social policy. By proposing to fund targeted help with digital switchover through the licence fee, the Government have introduced a type of "top-slicing" for the first time. This is a profound change to the constitutional position of the BBC. By doing this the Government can raise taxation without being seen to do so.

29. As long as the licence fee is being recognised as, and treated as, a tax then our argument that Parliament should have a chance to properly scrutinise it becomes even stronger.

So - firstly, a Government department has pointed out that the license fee doesn't just pay for a BBC service - it is a payment for access to all broadcasters. No change there.

It also means that 'The BBC ... becomes a central government body.'

Which has implications for the BBC's independence.

Mind you, the chap who pointed that out as a rallying call to getting access to BBC data, rather than a blow to journalistic independence, has just shown a C64 emulator running in flash. Which redeems him.

If you're interested, here is a report comissioned by ITV about the license fee, and here is the ONS document about the reclassification.

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Snipperroo

Snipperoo

Oh, look, a homepage made almost entirely out of jpegs. Good oh.

Quite a lot of double letters to remember in that URL too...

d.construct 2006

So, I'm down in Brighton for d.construct 2006 - alas, I'd already bought my own ticket by the time that the backstage.bbc.co.uk freebies went round. There's something rather deliciously ironic about being given a schwag bag with a tshirt from your own employer in it - not least a sudden pang of guild about LFP's money... although we'll draw a discrete veil over that one, as I don't think I've yet to comply with big aunties employee blog guidelines. Cough.

We've been through three sessions so far, and I've met a few of the usual suspects, and a couple of folk I know online but not in the flesh. It's a very male audience, but that's not unpleasant as it means queues for the loos are small during breaks. Ah, Dave Winer, eat your heart out.

First up was Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Services. To be honest, it felt like a very shiny hour long sales pitch; there was little information there that I hadn't picked up from generally reading stuff on the internet (appart from some of the technical gubbins, which made a lovely X-wingy noise as it flew over my head). Best Slide: the ten thousand mechanical turk sheep were extremely fine, and it's always useful to get usage figures for big sites:

59 million active customers (logged in and purchased something in the last year)
25TB of business and historical data in warehouse
1,080,000 active seller accounts
180,000 software developers registered over 4 years on AWS.
Alexa web services have 3 100Tb web crawler indices, containing 10 billion pages, that roll over every 2 months

(Oh god, two men are sitting next to me talking about 'how widgets for your blog are the bumper stickers of the internet, and how all they need is to get a VC interested... also, there are people with a stall and matching tshirts and some kind of soft toy cows advertising some sort of JavaScript Application platform.. truly truly it is bubble2.0)

The cheerful travelling pantechnicon of Messrs. Hammond and Willison, purveyors of fine APIs to the masses were up next. They were funny, and mentioned the Yahoo Monkey. they didn't sing the song, though, which was a loss. Their facts and figures

1/2billioon users/month for Yahoo worldwide
200,000,000 have yahooid - active users
Yahoo itself is a coallition of 40 smaller product groups

Best Slide: they have one of the biggest problems with hackers in the world - they are the worlds' most hacked website. They illustrated this with a picture of a radical haxxor with his laptop, sitting on a streetcorner. The face was pixellated, yet he looked strangely familiar...

They talked about the internal benefits of a web services framework within a big company; not just the fact that the developer community love you and build stuff, but that actually it frees up innovation within a company - you can prototype stuff fast, without having to ask permission and build on something produced by another business unit. It gives you agility in your innovation and development, and makes testing ideas a quick, easy and creative process. You encourage an internal mashup culture; it allows large organisations to build new products faster, and with lower 'communication overheads'. This is an appealing thing, particularly within the BBC where we're just begining to crack open our systems internally. Nicest thing they showed was the potential to use a flash API (gasp!) for a mapping service, demonstrated by Justin Everett-Church's Pirate and Radar maps. Their key message was 'Find a way to contribute back to the ecosystem' - and that the improvements on international mapping for Yahoo maps were coming soon - in the order of months, rather than years. The most compelling argument for external APIs from a business case was that unless you unlock your data, you offer a market opportunity - and potentially market share - to your competitors. Ordinance Survey take note...

(ooh, apparently the Widget men know someone who 'did fucking insane things when the BBC were going fucking mental setting up their ISP which was madness and there was this Monkey called Babbage as the Icons... all you do is go round your mates in big corporations and bamboozle them with new tech...'. Gosh, I do hope they get the money they want from MySpace.)

An interesting point was raised in their questions; How does one ensure that web APIs remain available in the future? By comitting to build on someone else's platform, and create a business relying on that data, where do you have a long term guarantee that that source will remain there. There isn't an answer to that, but it raises interesting issues about the mayfly existence of web sites (and web2.0 ideas, perhaps). I found myself wondering if Brewster Kahle and the internet archive should start capturing back end server architecture so creative sites could be accessed in twenty, fifty, a hundred years time. Something like flickr could become the Doomesday laserdisc project of the next twenty years unless someone starts capturing script and code and server 'snapshots' going forward. I often wonder what happened to flickr's real time picture IM service...

Next up was Jeremy Keith, on the Joy of API. His talk - from the point of view of the lone developer learning to make products around others' APIs - was excellent. he made an interesting point that his joy reactions to sites over the years have been emotional reactions to the story possibilities therein - when design follows the story, and story flows from design. best slide - a ZX81. His comments on MicroFormats and classes such as hCard and hCalendar turning the whole web into an API were... inspiring. I need to do more research here, though.

So, now it's lunchtime. I'm guarding Yoz's laptop whilst we steal hot 'lectric juice to power our lightup thinking books. More later on this afternoon's sessions if the RSI holds out. And I can get the wifi to work properly on the laptop.

There is, incidentally, a horrible rising queasiness about sitting in a room full of alpha geeks, and realising that you shouldn't have brought the boyfriend's MacBookPro instead of the tablet PC - you might be getting an additional 2 hours battery life, but you'll feel like a complete twat when the rows behind you watch you struggle to work out how to make it connect to the free wifi. Thank god Yoz was there to inform me it was DHCP playing silly buggers, and not just onrushing senility...

del.icio.us Tags:
dconstruct06 api conference

Queen of Puddings - History - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Queen of Puddings - History - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I wonder if that's *the* Dave Gorman who edited my contribution to the Wikipedia?

If it is... he plays Warcraft, and edits his own entry.

"I haven't been up to much these days." - Except, We Presume, Partying.

A colleague just sent me a very sweet piece of live email address phishing spam; an email inviting you to add your names to the guest list of exclusive clubnights.

From: Zoe [mailto:zoe.neslen@hotmail.co.uk]
Sent: 15 August 2006 12:47
To: Ann
Subject: Weekly Parties




Here is a list of our weekly guest list only clubs:


This weeks parties:


Wed: Movida


Wed: Pangaea


Thurs: Umbaba


Thurs: Aura


Fri: Roof Gardens


Fri: The Penthouse


Sat: Playrooms


Sat: ISIS


Sat: Roof Gardens


Please email guest lists with full names and emails by 6pm on the night of the party.


Note: All our parties are GUEST LIST ONLY.


Zoe Neslen

I think it's more grist to the mill around the Spam-achieving-sentience meme; first it has a very down week, then it decides to set up a club night and invite all its friends over to parrtay.


I also love the idea of a club called Pangea. Presumably your experience fragments as the night wears on.


Re-reading the sad Becketlike singing of loneliness, It occurred to me that you could track the spambots progress using the common phrase in the comments:



"I haven't been up to much these days." - Google Search



Over 60,000 positive hits; and some on blogs.msdn.com - nice to know that Microsoft has the same problems as the little guy when they play in our sphere...

Ruining the Whole Racket

I read a biography of Anita Loos when I was in my teens; long before I'd seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I suspect that I picked the book up in the library based on the photo of the interesting looking woman on the cover; in short, I quite fancied her. In retrospect she looked oddly like my ex. Judging books by their cover has stood me in good stead over the years; I've read all kinds of things I wouldn't have done just from relying on reviews, or reccomendations.

Anyway, I've just spent an inordinately long time - for me - on google, trying to track down a dimly remembered quote for a friend. It's rare I get stuck on searching for something; after diversions via Mae West and Tallulah Bankhead, I eventually got there with 'furious feminist quote' - it turned out that if I'd remembered it better, I would have used the much more charming term 'women's liberationinst'.

"I'm furious about the women's liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket."

Language over Time

I'm not sure about this as an interface. Maybe it isn't an interface, and is in fact an experience, and it's just me making a category error, believing it to be a way of gathering information, or performing operations on content.

TagLines

I think the thing that I'm struggling with is the fact that it is a very word heavy way of looking for pictures. I know that tags are lovely, in that they let you make semantically significant inferences about something that isn't machine readable... But still. What would happen if the background was significant pictures from the day, with a much slower turnover, and the description - the words - were slightly less busy, less demanding? Is it really that significant reading the words, rather than taking in the much more information dense pictures?

It is fascinating, though, to see how the significant words change over time on flickr. Right at the start the tags are tiny, almost illegible; presumably because so few users were tagging so few pictures in relation to today's torrent of snaps. Over time the subject matter of the pictures gets less geeky - fewer tech conferences appear, the tags get more inexplicable as the softer, less librarianlike secondary adopters flood into flickr.

But there is one thing that seems sad; the names disappear. I had a moment, watching the words drift by at first, when I wondered if it was something that an acquaintance had been involved in making - there was a philgyford and a foeromeo and a tomcoateshatsproject in there. After a moment of puzzling about it, I realised that the totality of flickr is now bigger than any one individuals' significant event. I'm still seeing FathersDay and prideparade - gatherings of lots of people, all documenting the same event, but the individual voices are lost now.

How *do* you keep the massive sea of data personal?

Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth

Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth

There are moments when you get a kind of vertigo, looking right over the edge of technology, and in to the future.

Google's addition of SketchUp to Google Earth was one of them - as was the first play with Google Earth itself. I've had a few moments in internal presentations too - where I've seen researchers presenting locative technology, or image recognition.

But blimey, this little site from Microsoft has fried my noodle. It's the most extraordinary piece of research around image recognition and spatial reconstruction I've ever seen.

I can't help linking it up in my head - a ubiquitous, photographed earth living collaboratively across each machine attached to the web. Second Life eat your heart out.

Mind you... where would the unmapped areas be? I'd suggest they might look a little like the darker patches in the earth at night...

The Ghost Map

stevenberlinjohnson.com: The Ghost Map

So, Stephen Johnson has announced his new book - and I'm both fantastically over excited about it, and slightly miffed. I've known about John Snow and the Cholera epidemic for years, and it is a fascinating thing.

But now *everyone* will know about that mysterious pump in Broad Street, and why the kerbstone is a different colour, and why you should always drink beer, and not water.

Boo. There goes one of my entertaining yet obscure pub facts out in to the mass of popular knowledge.

Mmm... girls are pretty and not like men and some of them blog, which is cool

Scripting News: 7/31/2006

Oh, good lord.

Dave Winer went to BlogHer, and thought it was full of hott Chixxor.

I'm speechless.

YouTube - Roy Smeck - Tiger Rag

OK, so yesterday's YouTube post (which I'm off to delete shortly) was part of a demo of t3h aw3some powaaar of teh internets to some people at work. They wanted the human beatbox.

How I wish I'd known about this fantastic Ukulele playing instead. The blowing over the soundhole is particular genius.

Last summer I bought myself a ukulele, intending to pick it up again - I could play the basics when I was eight or nine years old. But, alas, I discover that like the guitar, bending my fingers around the fretboard brings on my RSI something terrible, and after five minutes I'm in pain that lasts for a day or two. I wish I'd known that using an orbital sander so intensely one summer more than ten years ago was going to permanently affect my life.

Let this be a salutory lesson to you all.

A Lovely YouTube Demo

Windows Live Local

Windows Live Local

A pretty remarkably good satellite shot, this.

You can actually see my kitchen window. Blimey.

Existentialist Spam

Comment spam to blogs is approaching crazy scales. I have a good few friends who are despairing of their MoveableType installs; having to spend hours daily strimming out crude adverts for get rich quick or pharmaceutical schemes.

Any open system is eventually going to get gamed, sadly; and the web's free-for-all nature makes it especially prone to exploitation.

It's not all bad though. The comment spam on
Kevin Wen's blog has reached a Beckett like nadir of lonliness - a thousand spambots telling the world that they did nothing, and their lives are empty.

Imagine a web made up of automated scripts, singing their boredom to each other quietly in the dark of thousand server farms. Poetic, n'est-ce-pas?

Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo

Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo

A placeholder post, reminding me to watch and talk about this.

What an extraordinary piece of history.

London Bikeathon - Simon's Supporters!

London Bikeathon - Simon's Supporters!

This is a worthy cause. Some work friends are taking part in a very, very long bikeride to raise money for Leukaemia research. Why? One of our work colleagues is currently undergoing treatment for Leukaemia.

If anyone out there is feeling generous, a few quid would really help.

Reccomended Reading

Amazon.co.uk: Listmania! - View List "New Media, Games and the Web"

So, I was searching for a book to reccomend it to a colleague. And I though, hmn, I wonder if that List will give me any helpful suggestions for alternative titles. And I scanned down it going 'Yep, read it, read it, read it, read it... yes, got, read... How odd, this is a weird coincidence, this many similar titles...'

And only at the foot of the page did I realise it was a list I'd made.