Archives for September 2005
On Cillit Bang and a new low for marketers... (September 30, 2005) Right. Okay. Got one for ya. You'll like this. Earlier today I wrote a post about my father, who I haven't had any contact with for almost thirty years. It was a difficult post to write - it had taken...
The first contact with my father in 28 years... (September 30, 2005) Deep breath. Breathe in. Breathe out. Where to start? Um. Probably I should start with the standard preamble. The story so far. Right. It's pretty much all contained within the Family category of this site, but for those of you...
A minor change to the design... (September 30, 2005) I'm kind of in the middle of another one of my random holidays where I feel continually oppressed by not having got anything sufficiently significant done. I really really need to learn how to take time off from all this...
Links for 2005-09-29 (September 29, 2005) Societies 'worse off when they have God on their side' “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and...
Links for 2005-09-27 (September 27, 2005) Words 'can change what we smell' - A rose by any other name might not smell as sweet, UK research suggests. Yet more evidence, if you ask me, that the entire sense is made up (but more interestingly, it...
Links for 2005-09-26 (September 26, 2005) Wow. Pretty bloody astonishing episode of Battlestar Galactica. Reboot of an old classic. Lloyd Bridges has changed a bit... Don't look if you don't want to be spoiled for episode ten of season two. Is all I'm saying. Is...
Links for 2005-09-25 (September 25, 2005) BBC News presents a multiple choice maths quiz so you can see if you've got any brains left Turns out there are some things I don't remember from school maths, but not that much... Insight into the Google master-plan...
A weblog in negative space... (September 24, 2005) When I first started keeping a link log, I ran out of things to talk about. I'd got so used to relying on writing brief things about other people's sites - and then occasionally writing longer pieces when I got...
Links for 2005-09-24 (September 24, 2005) Sony's new MP3 player actually has some elements that bear comparison to the iPod One element in particular appeals to me - various forms of shuffle including 'Time Machine Shuffle' and 'Favourites Shuffle' The well-known and well-respected English Cut...
Links for 2005-09-23 (September 23, 2005) Frequently Asked Questions about the ISAN version identifier for audiovisual works "The first 16 hexadecimal digits of the ISAN relate to the audiovisual work. This work segment is further sub-divided into two parts: a 12-digit root segment followed by...
A response to the rhetoric of weblog marketing... (September 22, 2005) The story so far... Ben Metcalfe takes a vague swipe at the Stormhoek wine that Hugh MacLeod is marketing through the blogosphere. The approach Hugh is taking is to offer free bottles of the wine to webloggers on the understanding...
A moment of resignation... (September 22, 2005) Lots of things going on in blogland that are worth talking about. Sometimes though I wonder whether it's just better to stand back and be quiet. Familiar fights, old arguments, new people to have them with. Old battles still worth...
Links for 2005-09-22 (September 22, 2005) How To Turn Your Hamster into a Fighting Machine! Really helpful. Lots of spelling mistakes. But at least now I know where I went wrong in strapping the spade to poor little Fidgit... HTMLstamps - intriguing and slightly random...
Links for 2005-09-21 (September 21, 2005) ce matin un lapin So I never have to search for it again - a classic flash cartoon from the depths of internet history! Ja Da Another one from the archive - and classic late-Friday afternoon UpMyStreet fodder too,...
Links for 2005-09-20 (September 20, 2005) I can't quite believe I didn't recommend this at the time: Pandora Music Recommendations engine I'm talking to a lot of people at the moment who think that one (folksonomic) way of navigating data is going to win over...
Links for 2005-09-19 (September 19, 2005) Global Warming 'past the point of no return' "You're essentially changing land into ocean and the creation of a huge area of open ocean where there was once land will have a very big impact on other climate parameters"...
Links for 2005-09-18 (September 18, 2005) Yahoo! Movies hosts the trailers for Brokeback Mountain What can I say - it looks moving, interesting, depressing and er... kinda hot. Um. The Question: Is it OK for a public figure to say arse ? "What happens with...
Help me decide what to write about... (September 17, 2005) I have an almost impossible amount of stuff to do this weekend, and a good block of them involve writing things for this site, and it's already eight o'clock on Saturday evening. I don't know where the time goes. I...
Links for 2005-09-15 (September 15, 2005) Critics savage Ritchie's new film The ads have looked good(ish) but the reviewers aren't so keen. Interested to see what it's like... Privacy Enhanced Computer Display A lovely bit of tech this one that makes what's on your monitor...
In which Google launches blog search... (September 14, 2005) Okay, so the big weblog news of the day is that Google have launched their Blog Search. First impressions are that it doesn't feel right, that quite a lot of the spririt of the weblogs and the faces of the...
Links for 2005-09-14 (September 14, 2005) Top 8 Reasons HCI is in its Stone Age This piece really reminds me of my old boss Stefan Magdalinski, except without the slightly crazed look, bead of sweat and slathering... Xenu - "In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a...
On redesigning icons, Superman and politics... (September 12, 2005) So it's a rare week that sees me talking about the redesign of two icons - but with both Superman and The Guardian fighting for the little guy in brand new outfits, I couldn't really not comment. My first reactions...
Links for 2005-09-12 (September 12, 2005) Some page scans from the first issue of the new Grant Morrison / Frank Quitely "All Star Superman" It's kind of nice to see a good old-fashioned super-intelligent super-villain again. Missed those... An animated short film about trusted computing...
On Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science"... (September 12, 2005) While I'm talking about the Guardian (reports from friends within the printing presses are that it's looks beautiful), i thought I should probably mention an article that I read on Thursday last week which I thought was one of the...
Looking forward to the new Guardian... (September 12, 2005) So the big typographic / design story of the moment should be the redesign and resizing of The Guardian. But, I have to be honest, most of the design sites I normally visit don't seem to be talking about it...
Links for 2005-09-11 (September 11, 2005) Rebecca Blood interviews Heather Armstrong as part of her series getting webloggers to talk about weblogging Interesting, rewarding stuff that all new webloggers should be reading, but very few will... While I was talking at Our Social World yesterday,...
In which it all starts to become real... (September 10, 2005) On May 17th this year, I took a very small step towards trying to find my biological father who I haven't seen since I was about five, twenty-eight years ago. I rang up Traceline and the Salvation Army and started...
Links for 2005-09-09 (September 9, 2005) Mint: A fascinating and kind of beautiful web stats package that's getting a bit of buzz It certainly looks great - but I'm certainly not paying $30 to see if it's any good. Anyone else? ProgrammableWeb: Web 2.0 API...
Links for 2005-09-08 (September 8, 2005) exbiblio - a company doing interesting things with paper I met these guys at FooCamp and wait to see what they're up to with great curiosity "Germans hail Berners-Lee 'second-greatest' scientist" - not because of the science, interestingly, but...
Links for 2005-09-07 (September 7, 2005) Antony and the Johnsons have won the Mercury Music Prize And frankly I'm well pleased about that. Some stunning and emotional music. Very bloody good - and familiar hopefully to the few on my Popcasting feed......
Links for 2005-09-06 (September 6, 2005) Our Social World - a conference in Cambridge at the end of this week on weblogs, wikis and social software I'll be talking at this event along with lots of other UK and US experts, so register now if...
Type Challenge: Redesign the Superman logo... (September 5, 2005) I have more folksonomy-related posts coming, I'm afraid, but in the meantime I thought I'd point people in a completely different direction that's almost nerdier if you can imagine such a thing - towards Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's upcoming...
Links for 2005-09-03 (September 3, 2005) The Onion Magazine - America's Homeless: Still the best in the world? I'm sure that's the same title face as the Sunday Telegraph Magazine that my parents read... Almost as funny too! Flickr fans have Yahoo fear eased That...
How to build on bubble-up folksonomies... (September 2, 2005) [This post takes up some of the themes that Matt Webb, Paul Hammond, Matt Biddulph and I talked about in our paper at ETech 2005 on Reinventing Radio: Enhancing One-to-Many with Many-to-Many. A podcast of that talk is available.] A...
Links for 2005-09-02 (September 2, 2005) Get your Flickr books and posters printed out for you by QOOP (?) I saw some of these in the Flickr offices a while back and they looked really good, although I suspect they wouldn't look so good for...
Science (and evolution) is not a matter of faith... (September 1, 2005) You know what the real problem is with Intelligent Design? You know why it seems impossible to make it clear to people why it is such total bunk? It's because the battle was conceded years ago in a parallel argument....
Call for Participation: ETech 2006... (September 1, 2005) Ladies and Gentlemen, the Call for Participation for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2006 has been posted, and I recommend you all go and read it, come up with good ideas and then submit them. I've been to the last...
Links for 2005-09-01 (September 1, 2005) An awesomely useful web page that allows you to see how fast your current internet connection is... As of this moment this occupies spot #2 on my browser quick-links bar, next to my cache of things I have to...
