About Tom Coates
All that follows is a bit of a mess, but I'll sort it out eventually...
Wow. I'm supposed to write something witty or something to tell you all about myself, I guess. My name is Tom. I'm in my early thirties. I'm gay. I am passionate about the internet and care a lot about social software, the coming trends towards mass amateurisation and democratisation, media distribution and network-enabled appliances. I currently work for a small US start-up called Yahoo, promoting social media and social software and trying to come up with innovative new applications and products. Before that, I ran a small R&D team at BBC Radio & Music Interactive, working to make BBC media navigable, addressableand explorable, and finding new models for engagement and annotation.
Before that, I worked with UpMyStreet.com developing the geo-coded online community called UpMyStreet Conversations. It's changed dramatically since we launched it originally, but you can read about its launch and see the PowerPoint presentation here: UpMyStreet Conversations - Mapping Cyber to Space.
I've also worked as Production Editor of TimeOut.com, developed online communities with the crew behind b3ta while working at emap, contributed film reviews to the BBC's films site and written for The Guardian. All kinds of stuff. Back in the mists of time I failed to complete a doctorate, which I think as more useful and important to me than I tend to let on. If you want to get in touch with me, you can e-mail tom@ the name of this website.
Outside Work
But, but, but... What else is there?
I guess outside work I'm pretty well known for this weblog, which has won me a number of awards, including a fair number of Bloggies. I'm not an enormous fan of awards, but the Bloggies are at least a product of the community itself. I also maintain a community at Barbelith.com based on software developed with Cal Henderson. It's kind of a subcultural community with over five thousand registered users that has a really interesting and backgrounded form of distributed moderation that we designed. I've got lots of ideas about how to extend it, but as yet - neither the time nor the money to do so. I also designed and built a site full of annotations for the work of Grant Morrison: The Bomb. There's lots of other stuff that I've contributed to or built in some way, but quite a lot of it is embarrassing: Secret Santa (with Cal and Denise), Slutcore, Noah Wyle: Man or Animal? are examples of this stuff from my shady past...
I must have blown up at some point in the past because there are bits of me all over the internet. One of my favourite things is this flash animation of me spinning around on a mountain, Julie Andrews-style. I'm also pretty keen on being a card in Web Trumps. That rocks. If you find me really fascinating you can watch what I'm doing on my Flickr Photostream and track what I'm listening to via my Audioscrobbler profile. You can even download a a font of my handwriting. Can you even imagine!? And if all of that isn't enough - if you really need more from me, then you could turn your money into actual objects that I could play with: buy me stuff from my Amazon wishlist.
What I'm listening to...
Each week, top ten charts courtesy of last.fm
