Archives for April 2003
What's the time zone? (April 30, 2003) I know it's trivial, but there's a really nice new feature on Re:invigorate's free stats package that displays the time-zones that your readers come from by way of a pretty decently designed piece of simple mapping. Obviously it might not...
Emerging Fallout... (April 30, 2003) I'm back in the UK, and it's half-past midnight and I feel as fresh as a daisy despite only having slept for about half an hour in the last thirty-six... My mind still feels like it's got too much Emerging...
Infinite Jest... (April 30, 2003) In which four dorks go and commune with the mothership in the immediate post-Emerging Tech period:...
Apple on iPods... (April 28, 2003) The best commentary I can find on the Apple keynote about the iPods and the Apple music service is here. I'm going to talk more about this later, but in the meantime go and find out all the cool /...
You've got The SARS (April 28, 2003) A final night in San Francisco - we fly back tomorrow afternoon - spent with Matt Webb and Ben Hammersley. We meet up at Union Square outside Victoria Secrets and wander through a long tunnel to an off-beaten-track part of...
Alan Kay, Speaker... (April 27, 2003)
Lance Arthur's cat ate my foot... (April 26, 2003) So I was at a party and Lance Arthur was there, and I was really looking forward to seeing him and then he was wearing clothes that made him look ... different somehow and I didn't recognise him. That's so...
More Hydra Collaborative Annotations (April 25, 2003) I think when you're born you maybe get a discreet amount of mental storage and then maybe when you've used up that amount of storage then maybe it all seeps out of your ears or something. This is a really...
The Emotional History of the World... (April 25, 2003) The difference in atmosphere in the keynotes between the guy from Google and the guy from Microsoft is tangible. When the guy from Microsoft talks, there's scepticism - hostility even. There's a sense of outrage when he doesn't know what...
The motherships have landed... (April 25, 2003) Driving around Santa Clara is like being inside an episode of Stargate - it's like there's a flat desolate alien landscape all around us that's being used as a massive landing strip for these huge monstrous mother-ship style buildings. Each...
More Hydra transcripts... (April 25, 2003) It's like the Unkle track says, "We had access to too many, uh, too much money. Too much equipment, and little by little we went insane". Here are two more text-transcripts done collaboratively over Hydra from this afternoon's sessions: Meg...
"UpMyStreet Conversations: Mapping Cyber to Space" (April 24, 2003) So. A bit delayed. Sorry to all concerned. I'll post later about the experience of delivering a paper at Emerging Tech later, when I've had a chance to assimilate the whole experience, but if you're looking for the PowerPoint presentation...
Vignette from ETCon... (April 24, 2003) So I'm hiding in the Speaker's Room with Vee McMillan - trying to get my stuff printed out for my paper (T minus one hour, fifteen minutes) and this woman comes into the room saying that she thinks she really...
Hydra, Biological Computing and Eric Bonabeau (April 23, 2003) Right. I'm going to keep amending this post as I think of things to say and get other things done. I'm in the middle of a talk with Tim O'Reilly at the moment (how cool is my life), but I...
New Blogger & New Movable Type... (April 23, 2003) Ok. Finally it looks like Blogger is going to start catching up with the rest of the weblogging applications that have been developed or have been enhanced over the last couple of years. You can read all about Dano at...
Is industry evil? A response to Rheingold... (April 23, 2003) Howard Rheingold - who is speaking at this very moment on stage in Santa Clara - just said that companies would like the get us back into the role of "Consumers" rather than "Users". He says: "Consumers passively recieve what...
Emerging Tech 2003 (April 23, 2003) So on Thursday I'll be delivering a paper at O'Reilly Emerging Tech called "UpMyStreet Conversations: Mapping Cyber to Space". The paper, which I have co-written with Matt Webb and Stefan Magdalinski, will be mostly about the basics of how...
James Marsden is a wanker... (April 22, 2003) In the latest Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, which I swear to god I buy because of the pictures of the clothes, there's an interview with James Marsden. In it he is asked the question, "Based on your fan mail and...
Insane Link-frenzy... (April 22, 2003) One of my windows in Safari is full of tabs - so full of tabs that I can't actually find the stuff I want to work with without closing them. And Safari doesn't have a neat "Bookmark all tabs" option...
Baa, Baa - I'm a sheep... (April 21, 2003) I'm off to SC for O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference on Tuesday. I'm going against the grain this year by taking my iBook along, "blogging" in "realtime", and taking digital photos of people. If there's a box, I am out of...
Links for a future generation... (April 21, 2003) I've given this post a pretentious title because I can never think of what to call these semi-regular link-log updates and there's only so many ways you can use the phrase "Microcontent Vote" before someone tells you to get off...
Subtle signage in San Francisco... (April 21, 2003) The area we're staying in isn't the most salubrious. Even the cabbies talk about it as a 'bad area' (just before they ask me questions about the National Health Service). Today as we came back to our hotel, about eight...
Tiki Brilliance... (April 21, 2003) Ok. A certain substantial amount of fun was had in the Tonga Lounge last night. God knows whether I can remember enough about it to write anything of value, but in attendence were Mr Webb, Mr Hammersley, David Galbraith, Marc...
Embrace your Tiki Overlords... (April 19, 2003) So here's the plan (if you're in the mood and in San Francisco): Mr Webb and myself are going out for a night of Tiki Madness, surrounded by swimming pool, fake tropical storms, house band and cocktails - from around...
Microcontent Votes... (April 19, 2003) I'm frankly a bit exhausted today, so I'm taking the opportunity to have a sit down in the hotel and sort through everything that I need to get done before Thursday. This includes - of course - working through everything...
San Francisco is calling me ... home? (April 19, 2003) So the other day, Webb and I were having a conversation on top of Nob Hill about San Francisco. He has subsequently posted it to his website and Michael Sippey in turn has posted it to his (good post). While...
Brief notes on San Francisco... (April 19, 2003) Right. So there's no hope of me getting everything down as it happens, and I'm not sure I'd want to - there's a fine line between making an experience last by writing about it and eroding the memory by putting...
US TV is weird... (April 18, 2003) How can it be that I only watch American television and yet there is nothing on American television that I want to watch?! Last night (and this morning) I've been compelled to convert to Christianity, forced to ask my Mormon...
Voyage to San Francisco... (April 17, 2003) Ok. So Mr Webb and I have arrived in the States just as San Francisco's weather appears to be at its very nicest. We're (or I am) a bit bowled over by the nine-and-a-bit hour flight, so I'm going to...
Thinking about iChat... (April 16, 2003) I've been thinking a bit about instant messaging clients since I submitted my IM contacts to Buddyzoo. In order to upload my buddy lists I had to switch from iChat - my default messaging client - to AIM. For the...
Emerging Man... (April 14, 2003) As of this coming Thursday I'm heading to California (San Francisco first, then Santa Clara for Emerging Tech, before returning to SF) for a total of twelve days of intense West-Coast mind-expansion. I've not looked forward to anything quite this...
Alexa rankings vs site traffic... (April 14, 2003) There was a slightly weird article in the Guardian a few days ago about UpMyStreet & MyVillage that I don't really have an opinion about. But it inspired an interesting response from Tomski's weblog where he talks about several interesting...
Don't write off Conversations as a geek toy... (April 14, 2003) So there's an article in the Guardian today about UpMyStreet. The article is called Street Plight and aims to understand why the company is in administration. Now generally, it's a pretty flattering article - and a fairly accurate one -...
How to do Trackbacks like plasticbag.org (April 13, 2003) This is for a very narrow niche audience, but if you are one of the two or three people who have expressed an interest in how plasticbag.org embeds Trackback links at the end of each entry then here's how you...
One for the Mirror Project... (April 13, 2003) There's a road in the middle of London called Oxford Street. It's the main thoroughfare for shopping in the capital. One night on my way home I spotted an exotic advert - a actual pair of trousers apparently suspended in...
Register Refutations... (April 12, 2003) A week or so ago I wrote a little post called Oh Self-Correcting Blogosphere. It was about an article at The Register in which Andrew Orlowski managed to mix a few half-facts with some general paranoia to assemble the spectre...
Meta-kottke... (April 11, 2003) Because you turn around for a moment and he's gone and posted another dozen links (and because - if I'm honest - I'm seldom resistant to repurposing his work), I present "Meta-kottke: Reading the remaindered so you don't have to"...
On cheery things... (April 11, 2003) Let's end the working day as we began it - with a few lists of cheery links to help us wind down... Origins of woot! - good fun from Google Answers, with an infinity of online investigation that (in the...
The Wiki Biography project... (April 11, 2003) Ok. This is a bit of an experiment in how bored people can get on Friday afternoons as well as a bit of collaborative editing fun. It's also a way of avoiding having to do anything myself. Basically, I want...
It's Friday, it's 10.30am... (April 11, 2003) Time for another massive explosion of satisfying link-goo to get us through the last wheezing gasp of quite a difficult week: "War is over, if you want it..." - and we should all now be focused on the creative and...
Perspectives on UpMyStreet... (April 10, 2003) A few days on, here's what the media and webloggia thinks about UpMyStreet (where I have worked for the last eight months or so) going into administration: Bowblog "While I was running another.com, we thought the UMS guys were golden....
On America, Science and Fundamentalist Christianity... (April 10, 2003) Probably the one thing I understand least about America is its relationship with religion. American is a country that (i) is particularly known for not being hide-bound by convention in science or business and (ii) often demonstrates an astonishing (and...
In Internet Magazine... (April 8, 2003) The wonderful weirdness of print publishing schedules means that the latest issue of internet magazine contains a news story about Google buying Blogger - a full five weeks after the story broke online. It's got a few comments from me...
Excerpts: Baudrillard, "The Transparency of Evil" (April 8, 2003) A couple of interesting thoughts from Jean Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil (Verso 1990) And why does terrorism exist, if not as a violent form of abreaction in the social realm? The most stiking thing about events such as those...
Wotchadoin' World? (April 8, 2003) I've been making diagrams. Don't ask. I've been making diagrams. I'm in love with Omnigraffle and I don't have time to post about what I'm thinking about because I'm too busy making diagrams about it. Hopefully I'll hit some kind...
Hydra - a brief experiential review... (April 8, 2003) So Mr Webb and I have been playing with Hydra for a couple of days, trying to find uses for it and trying to get other people engaged in its use (with the hope that in the process we'll come...
On an unsettling dream... (April 6, 2003) I had a weird dream last night. In the dream, something apocalyptically odd had happened. Pollen from space, perhaps. Or a Tipping-Point style collapse where an idea or a chemical or a radio wave or something finally hit such a...
Remaindered Links (after Kottke)... (April 5, 2003) Ok. So I'm back in London and I'm struggling to get back up to speed with what's been going on in my absence. It's terrifying how much can happen in a week. It's terrifying how behind you can feel... Keeping...
An Artisan in Social Software... (April 5, 2003) I'm going to take the unusual approach of linking through to a comment I've made on someone else's site. The comment is flawed - it's full of typos and errors and gets a bit over-excited every so often - but...
Any minute now... (April 5, 2003) Any minute now I'm going to have to launch into a huge tract about social software - about the good things and the bad things, about the cult that's emerging around the term (with all it's requisite ecstasies and rites...
Oh Self-Correcting Blogosphere... (April 5, 2003) I'm going to be playing catch-up for a while here - picking up on things that I would have written about except I took a holiday (never again). First things first, let's have a gander at this article: Anti-war slogan...
On Paralepsis (Part Two) (April 5, 2003) One of my favourite words is paralepsis (I've even talked about it before). It's a word from the ancient study of rhetoric and it essentially means that you state loudly the subjects that you're not going to talk about -...
Wants: song by Denice Williams, featuring Jekyll and Hyde? (April 4, 2003) I'm back in London now, looking around me suspiciously and thinking about what to do next. But the first thing I want to do is resolve an issue that's been driving me insane for about three years now. When I...
From the Financial Times this morning... (April 4, 2003) From the Financial Times this morning: UpMyStreet.com in Administration "Upmystreet.com, one of the pioneers of the UK internet sector, yesterday followed many of its long-gone peers into administration as financial pressure led the company to file for protection as it...
Apposite but Innaccurate... (April 3, 2003) There's a quote going around the internet at the moment that's widely attributed to Julius Caesar - and it's tremendously rousing and potent and apposite. Unfortunately, I've seen no evidence whatsoever that it's not also total bunk. "Beware the leader...
Slashdot and Conversations (April 1, 2003) I'm a bit of an enforced holiday at the moment. Evidently I've been getting too crazed with work as last week my boss started passing me notes saying things like "You need a holiday" and "Get out of my company"....
