Archives for June 2005
The Great Server Migration is complete... (June 30, 2005) And we're back in the room... Everything's done. The new server is up and running, Barbelith is all functional again and the old crew are busy descending on the place with a kind of weird desperate and scary relief. Sorry...
Move to the new server nearly complete... (June 30, 2005) Just a quick update for the Barbelites among you. As I mentioned very late last night, I'm moving all my various sites over to a new home - a home just for them, which they don't have to share with...
A little down-time while I move servers... (June 30, 2005) In case you're wondering why the comments functionality has been turned off and why I've got a little quiet, I'm currently orchestrating a switch to a new dedicated server for Barbelith and plasticbag.org and I want to make sure that...
Belaugh from the sky... (June 29, 2005) This may seem many months too late for other people to be interested, but I was roaming around Google Maps the other day and decided to try out their satellite imagery for the UK. Until a few days ago there...
Supernova '05: A round-up of Tuesday afternoon... (June 29, 2005) The talks that this post refers to occurred at Supernova 2005 on Tuesday 21st of June between midday and 4.30pm. In the first post I wrote about my experiences at Supernova I expressed this opinion about the conference as a...
Links for 2005-06-29 (June 29, 2005) Stewart Butterfield's weird mischievous side emerges on Flickr Funny chap. Short. Kind of ginger. You'd know him if you'd seen him around......
Supernova '05: Jeff Weiner from Yahoo! (June 29, 2005) The talk that this piece refers to took place at Supernova 2005 on Tuesday 21st of June around 11.30am. Now I think I can say with relative certainty that the Chris Anderson talk did not go down terribly well with...
Supernova '05: Chris Anderson on the Long Tail... (June 29, 2005) Quick apologies - my notes and write up of Supernova have been thrown out of whack by various unforeseeable pressures. I'm going to try and get through them very quickly now. This session was held last Tuesday at 11am. It's...
iTunes 4.9 is full of podcasts... (June 28, 2005) So iTunes 4.9 is out and includes all kinds of exciting support for podcasts. And with that support comes another way for you to get your greasy mitts on some of the stuff that the BBC has put out there...
Links for 2005-06-28 (June 28, 2005) "Television presenter and journalist Richard Whiteley has died just days after undergoing heart surgery" The way these things happen so quickly is really disturbing... London tube map traffic visualisation (guessed) by Rod McLaren I guess the data we'd need...
The letter from Traceline... (June 27, 2005) I'm back in London and after several hours of pottering around, I finally get the nerve to open the letter on my doorstep. I already knew the content of the letter, but nonetheless I've been circling it since lunch-time. Most...
Totally exhausted in San Francisco... (June 26, 2005) So I fly back from San Francisco today at the end of the weirdest holiday I've ever had in my life. I keep forgetting how many people I know out here. So enormous thanks to Leslie, Ben and Mena...
Links for 2005-06-26 (June 26, 2005) Behaviour : Using CSS selectors to apply Javascript behaviours Another geeky Ajax link - this one focused around keeping HTML nice and clean while still allowing rich javascript functionality del.icio.us direc.tor: Delivering A High-Performance AJAX Web Service Broker A...
Links for 2005-06-25 (June 25, 2005) "John Poisson focuses on how cameraphones could revolutionise photography and communication - if people would only start using them more" "As the leader of Sony Corporation's mobile media research and design groups in Tokyo, John Poisson spent two years...
In which Tom visits PARC... (June 24, 2005) In what is definitely a highlight of my weirdest holiday ever, today I got to travel to California Ave on the Caltrain and visit PARC to talk to them about my stuff around Social Software for Set-Top Boxes and the...
Supernova '05: "Apps. for a Mobile, Connected World" (June 23, 2005) Hm. So I spent a good forty-five minutes yesterday writing the next post in my series on Supernova '05, only to lose it catastrophically when Safari collapsed under the weight of 150 open tabs. So this will probably be a...
A quick apology to Barbelith users... (June 23, 2005) This is a bit of a heads-up and an apology to regular Barbelith users who are going to the site today and finding that it is completely unfunctioning. Barbelith has grown in scale enormously over the last six years to...
Links for 2005-06-23 (June 23, 2005) LA Times 'wikitorial' gives editors red faces At the end of a 1,000-word editorial about the war in Iraq, online readers were invited to "Click here to Wiki this morning's editorial". But by Sunday, readers were met with the...
Supernova '05: "Perspective: Jonathan Schwartz" (June 22, 2005) Since yesterday morning I've been hanging around at Supernova and I've been taking some fairly intensive notes, but I've not yet had the opportunity to write any of it up. Over the next hour or so, I hope to put...
Links for 2005-06-22 (June 22, 2005) Technorati relaunch with a shiny new front-end And very nice it is too. Suddenly appeared on my radar about ten minutes ago... The Very Model of a Modern Labour Minister This Flash video about the National Identity card is...
Three phone calls that form a loop... (June 21, 2005) So I'm standing in the bar after Cal's awesome event yesterday and my phone tells me that I have a voice mail. I find somewhere relatively quiet and try and listen to it - it's the people from Traceline ringing...
Links for 2005-06-21 (June 21, 2005) Microsoft to Create Competing BitTorrent Technology This kind of thing was pretty much inevitable as the larger software companies look to find effective ways of distributing big files without crippling people financially... Griffin Technology's iFill ".. streams mp3 files...
Cal Henderson on "How We Built Flickr"... (June 20, 2005) So Day Three of my weirdest ever holiday finds me at a one-day workshop called Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr. Right up front I should probably say that it's presented by my mate...
The Broadcasting House piece on Corporate Weblogs... (June 20, 2005) You might vaguely remember that about a week ago I was on the BBC Radio 4 series Broadcasting House. Well thanks to the miracle of computers, if you want to you can hear the whole feature on corporate weblogging over...
A month has passed with no news... (June 20, 2005) Almost exactly a month ago today I sent off a form to an organisation called Traceline to ask them to help me find my father. Three days later I wrote a little post about my uncertainty about what would happen...
On leaving and rejoining services online... (June 20, 2005) Ok, so I'm holed up at Lance Arthur's pad for a couple of hours and I'm taking the opportunity to plough through some of the stuff that I can't get written in London. First up, a post about FeedBurner and...
Links for 2005-06-20 (June 20, 2005) Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech I haven't listened to this yet, but by all accounts it's pretty inspiring. Tom Cruise engaged to Katie Holmes Godsmackingly weird - I mean what the hell is she doing? I mean, someone's clearly...
A message from Heathrow Airport... (June 18, 2005) Heathrow Airport. How I love thee. With thy little tax-free shops that are still too expensive, and the hidden power points by the columns that took me hours to find the first time I flew from here. I commend thy...
Links for 2005-06-18 (June 18, 2005) Flickr Album - an elegant bit of Flash using their API You have to grab the corner with your mouse and literally turn the page over for it to work. Nice implementation though....
On 'Batman Begins' and St. Pancras Station... (June 17, 2005) Last night - thanks to the intervention of my good friend Katy Lindemann - I was lucky enough to see a media screening of Batman Begins. I used to go to media screenings of things quite a lot when I...
On Beethoven at the BBC... (June 17, 2005) This is really more just an exercise in quoting than anything else. You'll remember a week or so ago I mentioned that the BBC was putting up every Beethoven symphony to download as an MP3 - well now the BBC...
On my upcoming trip to San Francisco... (June 16, 2005) So here's the plan - I'm flying to San Francisco on Saturday and I'll be hanging around until the 26th with all my geek hipster friends. But don't take that to mean that I'm busy all the time - I'm...
Links for 2005-06-16 (June 16, 2005) The Futurama Taglines Flash Slideshow includes every tagline from every episode in seasons one to four... You can't really go far wrong with Futurama. Except the taglines. Which were rarely funny. Better here than on TV. The Helvetica Meditations...
Links for 2005-06-15 (June 15, 2005) The pilot for the TV show of the "Global Frequency" comic book has found its way onto BitTorrent Apparently the show itself didn't get picked up by any networks, so this is all there is. No idea yet whether...
Links for 2005-06-14 (June 14, 2005) Blogging 101 explains how to do an interview for your weblog... Apparently I'm a low-grade Tom Cruise. Someone should tell Vanity Fair. Simpsons movie on its way Obviously I'm looking forward to a Simpsons movie, even though I don't...
Links for 2005-06-13 (June 13, 2005) The Technorati beta redesign is up and it's pretty fine. Classy work by Mr Derek Powazek as always It really does look like a quantum leap in apparent respectability and makes them look much more obviously professional. Nice logo...
Hello to 'Broadcasting House' listeners... (June 12, 2005) A brief welcome to everyone who listened to Broadcasting House this morning and find themselves on plasticbag.org for the first time. If you're looking for posts about weblogs then I can recommend the Personal Publishing archive. If you're unfamiliar with...
Links for 2005-06-12 (June 12, 2005) LukeW on AJAX Interface Design A couple of weeks old this one - but some useful tips for designers thinking of exploring AJAX Rands in Repose on the 'Holy Shit' moments that have defined his experience of computers and...
A quick sketch of what I've been up to... (June 11, 2005) God, I have so much I want to write about. I want to tell you guys all In the City Interactive and what apparently smart people were saying about convergence. I want to tell you all about the debate I...
Links for 2005-06-11 (June 11, 2005) Graphic Design on Logo Trends for 2005 "Discover new directions. But remember: With any trend, it is better to realize how you arrived than to know you have arrived." "We are holding the Dalek captive and in isolation. For...
Towards a picture of European weblogging... (June 10, 2005) Found via a referral and then a couple of moments later via Euan Semple, Loic Le Meur is attempting to put together a rough picture of The European Blogosphere on his wiki - with core questions about the country's main...
Links for 2005-06-10 (June 10, 2005) A picture of Stewart Butterfield wearing a suit He's also got a weird little Flickr Alien button glued to his belly. I wonder what that's about and where I can get one... Many of my American friends have no...
Links for 2005-06-07 (June 7, 2005) Potentially enormous spoilers on IMDB's Guest Appearances for "Doctor Who" (2005) Don't know if it's accurate or not - and please God don't blame me if it ruins the surprise - but IMDB's list of guest appearances does appear...
Every Beethoven Symphony to download... (June 6, 2005) In a move that genuinely astonishes and stuns me with it's awesomeness, my department at the BBC has just started a week in which every note of Beethoven's ouevre will be broadcast on the radio. And as if that wasn't...
Links for 2005-06-05 (June 5, 2005) In which I get attacked by a Crow at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005 Mmm. I have a big bucket of Coca-Cola. I could do with one of those right now. Nice shirt too. The rumour that's everywhere:...
Two cultures of fauxonomies collide... (June 4, 2005) There's been an enormous amount of good stuff around about tags and folksonomies recently, which I've not really had enough time to interrogate fully. One particularly interesting experiment has been the Cloudalicious service. Cloudalicious was apparently inspired by the Grafolicious...
The servers are on overdrive... (June 4, 2005) I'm getting a bit of an influx of people coming to plasticbag.org right now because they've just watched the (really rather good) Boom Town episode of Doctor Who and for the first time they've heard the words "Bad Wolf" uttered...
Links for 2005-06-04 (June 4, 2005) Mr Webb takes the Musical baton and writes a huge, epic, rambling and rather gorgeous post about books instead Typically contrarian and typically engaging - well worth a read... Microsoft adopts web file styles The company is to base...
The Gardeners of the Internet... (June 3, 2005) So a few days ago I wrote about my irritation at stumbling upon registration screens at the New York Times and how I wasn't going to bother reading things they wrote any more. Well, that turned out to be untrue...
Links for 2005-06-03 (June 3, 2005) The Record Effect, by Alex Ross "How technology has transformed the sound of music" A quick pass through the regulatory framework concerned with the distribution of Thorium I don't know why this interests me so much, but there's something...
Should Barbelith start a gaming forum? (June 2, 2005) Are there many decent online communities out there concerned with the thorough discussion of the aesthetic, narrative, psychological, theoretical, philosophical and economical implications of games and gaming (both online or offline)? Or are they all about asking questions about where...
On future developments in home media centres... (June 2, 2005) A couple of days ago I was e-mail interviewed by a guy writing an article on future developments in televisions and home media centres who was interested in the piece I wrote on Social Software for Set-Top Boxes. For what...
Links for 2005-06-02 (June 2, 2005) Enormously SPOILER-full thread about upcoming Doctor Who episode "Bad Wolf" seems to rather stomp all over my little theories Definitely don't read this unless you're okay with the idea that big chunks of the mystery might be dispelled for...
Links for 2005-06-01 (June 1, 2005) Awesome Doctor Who-inspired T-shirts for people who really want to creep out people on the bus Apparently if you're interested, then you e-mail "gasmaskshirt" at the domain address "comicfestival.co.uk" Some book pages on Amazon have Flickr-style visualisations of top...
