Archives for November 2002

Found images... One for the geeks... (November 30, 2002) The first in a series of found images - stumbled upon without significant context... This one being for the geeks in the audience......

What was said... And what was meant? (November 29, 2002) I met someone for lunch today. And he said I wasn't like he was expecting at all. He said I seemed more naive than he'd thought I'd be... Which I think was a compliment, but I'm not quite sure... He...

Oh the humanity... (November 28, 2002) I work with this guy. He's wearing a jelly ring on his nose. It's got "Lord of the Rings" branding on it. Earlier today I tried to draw a little red patch on his hair with a white-board marker when...

You don't know... (November 28, 2002) Matt Webb has been away on holiday for almost a week. But you couldn't tell, could you? His alien tentacles have created tiny robot typing minions to write content for him while he's away. He's also assembled this other device...

Two Lord of the Rings links before bed... (November 28, 2002) Right-ho. I'm off to bed in a minute, but before I go I thought a couple of nice Lord of the Rings links might compensate for all the obsessively technical stuff I've been forcing down your throats recently. So let's...

On the differences between syndication and publishing... (November 27, 2002) I'm partly linking to Mark's article about the differences between syndication and publishing on my site so that I don't forget to read it tomorrow when I'm more conscious....

On Flash navigation systems... (November 27, 2002) I don't really approve of sites that use Flash for primary navigation, but if you're going to do it then make it as classy as this. And while you're there you can read the article on Mobile Weblogging which isn't...

Another response from Cory Doctorow... (November 27, 2002) Ok. I've had a response from Cory Doctorow about what I wrote earlier today and in the spirit of adequate redress (so it doesn't look like I'm controlling the media where we're debating), I'm just going to post it in...

Matt Haughey on Digital Restrictions Management.. (November 27, 2002) If you enjoyed (or hated) my piece on Apple and the Pirate Everyman, then you might find Matt Haughey's piece on Digital Rights Restrictions Management interesting: Whatever replaces Windows XP will be forever married to this type of technology. Sure,...

By way of response to Cory Doctorow.... (November 27, 2002) I don't have comments on my site - or at least I do have comments on my site but not on my daily ramblings because I don't want the responsibility of maintaining them. I'm not always going to have the...

Bringing the scale back... (November 25, 2002) Here's something I've been thinking about that that ties into Joel's idea that an e-mail service that charged one cent per e-mail would help counteract spammers. I've been thinking about the scalability of user-functionality online. From the position of a...

Hideous Apple Security Breach... (November 25, 2002) Righto. This isn't going to do my campaign for Apple to give me an iBook gratis any good at all. Still - never mind. It has to be done. So I'm wandering cheerfully through my referrer logs and I find...

Winston Churchill is the Greatest Briton... (November 24, 2002) According to slightly dumb BBC TV programme and the voting whims of a country of BBC TV watchers, Winston Churchill is the Greatest Briton ever. The case for his superiority was put by the ever charming and smart Mo Mowlam....

On bits of train stations... (November 24, 2002) A trip from London to Cardiff and back - and just think of all the things that I could have experienced! And what did I experience? Almost bloody nothing. Train to Cardiff. Cab to BBC Cardiff. Talk for a couple...

The favourite films of the Celebrity Big Brother Contestants... (November 24, 2002) Ok, I don't want to be scathing. I really don't. But on the site for Celebrity Big Brother you can find out the favourite films of the various contestants. Some of them aren't particularly surprising - Anne Diamond likes Some...

A few things that are interesting me at the moment... (November 24, 2002) Manifestos, Disclaimers, Bills of Rights, Constitutions, Codes of Practice (voluntary or otherwise). A lot of these things are filtering through my mind at the moment. Here are some examples: A Blogger's Disclaimer The Internet Manifesto The Hackers' Manifesto An Internet...

Why are there less overtly political left-wing or centrist weblogs? (November 24, 2002) Are there less left-wing or centrist political weblogs than right-wing weblogs? And if so... Why? It's a sentiment I've heard a lot in recent months, particularly in relation to the warblogging phenomenon. If it is true, I have some theories...

On traffic... (November 23, 2002) So three times in recent memory, plasticbag.org has experienced fairly substantial increases in traffic. The first time was when a conflagration of warbloggers decided to take me to task about something I'd written about the power of the inbound link....

Today on Barbelith: Autopsy - Spectacle or Science? (November 23, 2002) Today on Barbelith: The Autopsy: Spectacle or Science?: The first public autopsy in Britain for 170 years was greeted with reactions almost as predictable as the process of the postmortem itself. But why have the medical establishment and the media...

What I want to get myself for Christmas... (November 22, 2002) If I thought for one minute that I would be able to get any credit from anyone (knowing as I do how inexplicably dodgy my credit rating appears to be, I would sign up for this in a moment. Particularly...

Six hours of buses, trains, walking and waiting... (November 21, 2002) 3.30am Finally go to bed. Have been working for fourteen hours with only an hour break for Celebrity Big Brother. Autopsies have gone on in the background. 6.45am Alarm goes off. Get up, shower, shove loads of files online, check...

Oxford Street between Oxford Circus and Bond Street tubes... (November 20, 2002)

Further to my post about Apple and piracy... (November 19, 2002) Further to my post earlier today, I've decided to release an only mostly-finished article I've been writing about the ways in which Apple computers seem to me to be almost facilitating piracy - and in my opinion rightly so... Please...

On two articles pertaining to the entertainment industry and piracy... (November 19, 2002) I've read two articles today about the ways in which the entertainment industry is interacting with computing and the internet - and unsurprisingly both touch on issues of piracy. The first article (Fox Exec wants help ending piracy) is about...

The future is fridge magnets... (November 19, 2002) Never let it be said that Bill Gates has lost his touch. I mean certainly the man responsible for Windows and Office can't really be blamed for the fact that everyone hates his company. Nor is he directly responsible for...

Being one of my favourite rhetorical tropes.... (November 18, 2002) I knew it had a name - and I've been trying to remember what that name was for years. I've asked friends, family, professionals, experts - but evidently my friends and family weren't studying rhetoric and the experts and professionals...

We raise our hands to the strange phenomena.... (November 18, 2002) So I'm wandering through my referrers and I come across an exact replica of all the content of my site only on livejournal. And I think to myself - why that's a little strange. And it has comments, which my...

Apple and the Pirate Everyman (November 17, 2002) "Don't Steal Music" says the sticker on every new iPod. But is Apple being disingenuous? Because no other platform in recent history has done as much to help information (and entertainment media) to be easy to create, copy or disseminate...

From the book of Internet Revelations... (November 16, 2002) This might come as a bit of a shock to some of you, so sit yourselves down. From the book of Internet Revelations: "It is possible for a website to have a function to users above and beyond the making...

Let's play movie catch-up with your host... Tom Coates... (November 16, 2002) Three comments about films... So I went to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets with Cal a couple of days ago. It's kind of a complicated story as to how that ended up happening. It certainly wasn't planned....

Where's the urge to change the world gone? Where's the idealism? Where's the naîvety? (November 15, 2002) Over my life I've found myself motivated by music more than almost anything else. That push that the right song can give you more often than not is the thing that shoves my mood or sensibility forward. It's a spiritual...

So it's fast approaching "that time of the year" again... (November 15, 2002) Well it's swiftly approaching that time of the year again - and that means it's time for Cal, Denise and I to throw open the doors of Secret Santa 2002! "The idea of Secret Santa is very simple - you...

Why do I waste my time with this shit when I could... (November 15, 2002) I think there must be nothing I'd rather do at the moment than pop over and spend a couple of nights in Paris with Jason and Meg. Money and time are stupid things and annoyingly scarce....

Another image sent to me from Davo... (November 14, 2002) So again - I don't know if this image is accurate or whether it's a piss-take, and I can't tell whether it's offensive or incredibly funny. It's probably doing the rounds of e-mail at the moment so I'll apologise straight-off...

On Tom's Ten Tip Top Tunes... (November 14, 2002) Ten Tip Top Tunes for Tom: Being a list of songs that I'm listening to over and over again at the moment and which if you had less conscience and were prepared to (immorally) steal music through some kind of...

On writer's block... (November 13, 2002) You'd never know it to look at the amount of writing I'm currently pumping through plasticbag.org at the moment, but I'm currently experiencing a fairly alarming creative block. I have three pieces of longer writing on the go at the...

Being a short post to compensate for the really long one - with the express purpose of giving Cal something to read, since I know he gets bored easy.. (November 13, 2002) I finished reading Elements of Typographic Style a couple of weeks ago now, and I've not stopped raving about it since. It's truly a stunning book - a bible of technique - that encompasses the whole range of typographical behaviours...

In which I respond to a huge post about social software with a huge post about social software... (November 13, 2002) Must-read interaction/community techblog of the moment is City of Sound, a site that I found initially via the Slipknot be-hoodied Matt Jones. Our two otherwise independent vectors of interest have recently collided quite heavily around MP3s, list-making and social software,...

Do you wear clothes? (November 13, 2002) This was pointed out by a friend of mine. It seems now that Amazon is so worried about offending it's naturist clientele that it refuses to even imply that all its customers might be wearing clothes. More worrying is the...

Web design masterclass... (November 12, 2002) So I've been being all creative recently. First I redesigned Venusberg.org for Dan, and then Phil and I helped out Mr Webb with his CSS. Designing Dan's site was particularly interesting for me - it's my first design that's based...

Being drier than the driest thing ever... (On Gore Vidal)... (November 12, 2002) This relates to my earlier post today, particularly with reference to the Gore Vidal article which a friend and colleague was reading out loud to me. The friend concerned finished reading out a particularly horrifying bit and then said, "And...

The Gore Vidal Observer Article in full... (November 12, 2002) I'm posting a link to the Gore Vidal Observer article that was published a few weeks ago. At this point I'm going to take the cowardly option and declare up front that I'm not posting it because I either agree...

On iBlog and the potential of an Apple-designed desktop weblogging iApp called "iJournal"... (November 10, 2002) I don't know whether to be delighted or grumpy about iBlog - the new weblogging software package for Mac OSX. I'm delighted because I've been thinking about how you might develop something very much like it. And I'm grumpy because...

God Bless You, Mr Vonnegut... (November 10, 2002) One of my favourite authors is Kurt Vonnegut. One of his favourite authors is Kilgore Trout. Kilgore Trout is what Kurt Vonnegut would be if life was a ludicrous joke and reality was one of Kurt Vonnegut books. Kilgore Trout...

Absolute Bottom 50 Urban Legends... (November 10, 2002) The Absolute Bottom 50 Urban Legends (number 17): "This buddy of mine who works in San Francisco - he knows this guy who worked for a DotCom company that wrote a business plan, broke even, cut costs, and is on...

The history of one of the main UK weblogging communities... (November 9, 2002) I've just stumbled upon a fascinating piece by Dan Hon which goes into considerable detail about the way in which the UK weblogging scene evolved a community of sorts - a community that not every UK weblogger is a part...

On the simple joys of designing favicons... (November 9, 2002) There's no need for favicons. No need at all. They're normally badly designed, they extend page design into the application itself (which I think is probably wrong) and they make your favourites menus all messy. Nonetheless, they are extraordinarily good...

Suggestions for an application to auto ID3 things... (November 9, 2002) You know what would be incredibly useful? A little application that you could run on a whole batch of MP3s that tried to work out what they are based on length and any text that was in the ID3 tags....

For the love of God, won't someone listen to... (November 8, 2002) If you're looking for the intelligent post, you need to skip straight past this one, because I'm only mucking around in it. Okay? Anyway... I know I'm a big whore when it comes to getting stuff through my sites. It's...

The Awesome Clay Shirky... (November 8, 2002) So Matt Webb and I went to a talk-followed-by-panel held by the iSociety people today. The feature performance was the awesome Clay Shirky, with support from a variety of charming panelists, including weblogging's own Matt Jones. The panel was essentially...

Some of my favourite UpMyStreet Conversations (November 8, 2002) UpMyStreet Conversations is starting to pick up now, which means that I can start directing people to some of the best and most useful threads that I'm finding on it... Congestion Charges Does anyone know when these are due to...

On Americans and America... (November 7, 2002) So we wake up to a world in which G.W. Bush has more power than ever, which is not a world that feels any safer to me. Across the world the rather resigned expectation is that the USA will be...

Apple news, oh Apple news, oh sweet sexy Apple news... (November 7, 2002) I've been thinking of buying an iBook for well over a year now. Well over. Maybe like two years or something. And now Apple have announced that they're dropping the prices (substantially) and upping the specs a bit. And the...

Introducing... UpMyStreet Conversations... (November 6, 2002) So I can finally tell the world what I've been working on for the last few months - and in fact, more to the point, I can finally try and get some of you people to try it out. UpMyStreet...

On Barbelith, cameras and going to Norfolk... (November 6, 2002) More observant plasticbag.org punters may have noticed that there's been a new addition to the gallery: A weekend in Norfolk. Some of you might be wondering how this happened... "How did Tom," you might ask, "take all these lovely photographs...

On Weblogs and Journalism (Part One) (November 5, 2002) I've been asked to participate in a survey about weblogs and journalism and, since it's quite a detailed survey inviting lengthy responses, I've decided to put my replies online as a series of micro-articles. The first one goes up today,...

Weblogs and Journalism (Part One) (November 5, 2002) In which Tom publishes his responses to an e-mail survey about the relationship between weblog publishing and online journalism. Part one is about my personal experience of weblogging and my motivations for writing...

On the third birthday of plasticbag.org... (November 4, 2002) On Friday morning, plasticbag.org reached the age of three years old. It seems like a fairly major milestone to me - maybe three years is the time when you begin to think to yourself, "Is this actually something I'm going...

A weekend in Norfolk... (November 4, 2002) A weekend away from London is one thing - a weekend with the family is quite another. You never know whether it'll be pleasant or nightmarish. Will it end with smiles or scowls? It was nearly a disaster before I...