Charlie's Diary: Youth of today

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?

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

/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

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

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!

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

David Rumsey Historical Map Collection

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

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

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

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

Heh. Klingon.

The USPS willfully ignores a customer's questions.

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!

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

IMG_6687.jpg
Originally uploaded by smagdali

Look, here they are!

Moo Stickers

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

Good yes.

Facebook | AGA (Anti Gay Alliance)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

Ukrainian Gay Power Polka

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

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

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.

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

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

/me cries laughing

It's probably fair use, but...

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

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?

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

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)

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

Twitter / zombieattack

Twitter fiction. Sweet.

Accordion Hero

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

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

The Nohari Window - Describe mildlydiverting

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

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

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?