Archives for Net Culture
On Andrew Keen... (September 5, 2007) Andrew Keen makes me furious but I don't write about him as a rule. Why not? Because you don't feed the trolls. And I don't think I've ever seen anyone so clearly acting like a troll. I mean, you only...
This is not a brothel... (August 28, 2007) As has probably become clear recently, I'm currently not particularly well-inclined towards people who work in public relations - particularly the particularly unscrupulous ones that spam me with press releases and work ardently to try and persuade me to talk...
The Vatican and the ethics of advertising... (August 25, 2007) I've discovered that in one territory at least I'm in perfect tune with The Vatican, or at least with the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. I confess, this was entirely unexpected. From their perspective perhaps it would reassure them that...
Terahertz waves vs. Alexaholics... (FOO '06) (September 7, 2006) Wrapping up my coverage of FOO sessions, I just thought I should probably mention the two last I attended, even though I don't have so much to directly say about them. I've got one more post to come though, so...
On things that aren't fun, and fun that is bad... (August 9, 2006) Last Friday - around ten in the evening - Pentheus, my main character in World of Warcraft, hit level sixty. Thinking back, I'm now not entirely sure where he was when this happened, although I believe it was in the...
On Carbonmade... (August 7, 2006) There's a site that I keep coming back to because it's so simple and well-constructed, and yet also represents so many of the visual and interface design principles of the current zeitgeist. It's a site that has design smarts massively...
Protect your bits with the Open Rights Group... (July 30, 2006) Tell you what - you go on holiday for a couple of weeks and the e-mail that piles up... Sheesh, I'll be ploughing through this lot for weeks. Earlier today I think I managed to get up to a rate...
Who's afraid of Ashley Highfield? (July 19, 2006) Today it was announced that the BBC's New Media operations are going to be restructured radically. At the moment most of the content creation parts of the organisation are kind of co-owned - for example, Simon Nelson who was the...
The RCA Summer Show 2006... (June 26, 2006) Once a year the RCA Summer Show opens its doors - showing over six weeks off all the incredible creative work that its students have created across all their disciplines. The show comes in four main parts, three of which...
What has been killing my server? (May 23, 2006) Today I was at work when Barbelith went down. MySQL errors everywhere, the community in uproar, IMs and e-mails. And it wasn't like I didn't have enough to do. So I explore in more depth. First step, see what's actually...
Cybermen are Human 2.0? (May 13, 2006) According to Doctor Who, the Cybermen are Humans 2.0 (or more specifically, Human Point Two, which... means... very little). But I protest! I'm not sure Human 2.0 means anything at all! It's just a stupid buzzword. Of course it...
On wanting to stop wanting 'World of Warcraft'... (May 2, 2006) There's a command in World of Warcraft that tells you exactly how long you've played with your active character and how long you've been playing at your current level. All you have to do is type /played into your...
What do we do with 'social media'? (March 31, 2006) I'm a nervous public speaker, and so when I was asked to talk at the Guardian Changing Media Summit, I started to scratch out some notes about specifically what I'd say about Social Media. When I'm talking, I never really...
An update from Nordrassil... (February 21, 2006) The weirdest thing about my weblog is that I rarely write about what I'm doing at work, and normally write about the stuff that's going on in the wider web and that I'm up to in my spare time. Except...
My 'Future of Web Apps' slides... (February 13, 2006) Right then. My slides. I've been trying to work out the best way to put these up in public and it's been more confusing than I thought it would be. Basically, the slides are so Keynote-dependent and full of transitions...
On the upcoming Carson Workshops summit... (January 6, 2006) Quick announcement - I'm going to be talking at the upcoing Carson Workshops summit on The Future of Web Apps on the 8th of February in London. It's a one-day conference for developers and web application builders that's going to...
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...
Old news: Firefox in the New York Times... (January 5, 2005) Final old news entry of the night, I think. It's 1.30am and frankly I'm not as young and spritely as I once was. So anyway a while back I linked to a hooji whereby you could get your name in...
Graf report published... (July 5, 2004) The Graf report - the independent review of BBC Online - has just been published. Despite the fact that I'm basically on holiday today, I am now going to start reading it in earnest. I'll probably knock out a summary...
Developing a URL structure for broadcast radio sites... (June 27, 2004) One of the most common questions I've had about the Radio 3 redesign work that we've been doing has been about the URL structures that we have used to identify individual episodes of individual programmes. I'm really keen to address...
From pirate dwarves to ninja elves... (March 15, 2004) I have always considered the profound distinction between ninjas and pirates to be an absolute one. One was either ninja or pirate - there were no inbetweens. One personality type was skilled and proficient, elegant and silent, contained and constrained,...
On e-mail as a means of exchange... (March 5, 2004) I've had lots of conversations over the last few years about ways in which rising marginal cost could deal with grotesque abuses of online services. There are probably a dozen posts in this blog about that subject alone. Now the...
On a difference between wonks and geeks... (March 1, 2004) Here's a suggested difference between geeks and policy wonks that might go some distance towards making the two groups get on with one another better. It is my contention that the two groups simply have radically different registers and types...
Tories would close BBC website... (August 26, 2003) I'm going to just report this without much in the way of comment while I try and work out what my professional relationship with the BBC means about my ability to give my personal opinion about things like this: Tories...
The internet is not shit... (July 6, 2003) I've been hearing the same sentiments by a lot of people over the last few months in different types of language. Some say The Internet is Shit. Some others say that Virtual Community has died. Without wanting to doubt the...
Can weblogs change politics? (July 6, 2003) Are you interested in the political implications of weblogs and social software? Then come to Can Weblogs Change Politics? - an event held in the House of Commons on July 14th. Here's an quick excerpt from the proposed topics of...
e-flight.biz - unethical spammers... (June 22, 2003) So yesterday I got a comment on an older entry of mine. The comment read, "This wonderful site is worth dropping a line in your guestbook to say thanks!" How nice, I thought to myself. How sweet to send me...
Discussion and Citation in the Blogosphere... (May 25, 2003) A few days ago a stunningly interesting article was published on Microdoc News called Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story which aimed to look at exactly how a story or discussion moved through weblog space. I've been thinking along similar lines...
Is the UK falling behind? (May 18, 2003) Everywhere I look at the moment there are people working in the same areas as me going to conferences and festivals. God I'm jealous. They're going to BlogTalk in Austria or they're going to Digital Genres in Chicago or they're...
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...
On Google's trademark... (February 26, 2003) Over on kottke.org at the moment there's a piece by Jason on Google's response to verbing. The story goes like this - there's an entry on Wordspy for a the verb to google. Google decided to respon to this entry...
Signing away your rights in perpetuity? (February 1, 2003) First things first, Creative Commons is a great idea that I thoroughly approve of and plan at some point to participate in. But I'm being a little more reserved about it than other people seem to be. And the reason?...
The history of woot, whoot and w00t... (December 14, 2002) Inspired (a long time ago) by a conversation with Matt Webb and Dive Into Mark's History of the tilde, I started researching the history of the exclamation w00t and it's two parallel analogues woot and whoot. Then I got hideously...
How micro-fame will make people undertake more tiny miracles... (December 4, 2002) Why would someone built a model of the Enterprise out of Lego? Or perhaps I should ask (because I spent most of my early teenage years building Lego models of TV and movie space-crafts and vehicles) why would anyone decide...
On the responsibility of linkage... (October 27, 2002) Ok. Right. This is where things start to get interesting. Firstly, a metaphor. Imagine if you will a solar system - let's make it a binary system with planets that fly around it. Watch the suns move around one another....
In praise of the sub-optimal solution... (October 8, 2002) Here's an interesting trend - an increased incidence of people praising the ill-designed. Firstly let's start with a post at new favourite weblog diveintomark.org. In a long post about RSS called In praise of evolvable formats, he states: "RSS 0.9x...
On B3ta, homophobia and teen suicide (September 13, 2002) The post below may be edited through the day. I have written it in a blaze of fury and irritation, and the language, grammar and spelling has suffered as a consequence. What the fuck is going on with B3ta? Each...
XCOM2002 and TAKING IT OUTSIDE (June 9, 2002) An attempt to write a huge piece on my experiences of XCOM and TAKING IT OUTSIDE, at which I sat on three panels and left very very tired.
Ten things to do... (April 24, 2002) Rather than call someone a wanker, why not...? 1) Have a long, slow, luxurious bath! Perhaps buy some expensive body lotions or bubble bath. Make sure it's nice and hot and just sink into it! 2) Why not get a...
Tied to the tracks of the Cluetrain... (April 16, 2002) In which at midnight after a long day at the office, Tom attempts to explain why the transformative effect of the internet on society is not necessarily immediately transferable to business or culture...
Matt: gninrom doog. Tom: ayeh... (April 13, 2002) Matt: gninrom doog. Tom: ayeh Matt: ?neht thgin tsal gnibbulc tuo og uoy did Tom: sey Matt: .keew gnol a neeb s'ti .derekcank gnikcuf .htimsremmah ot kcab tnew dna godtoh a tog i Tom: elihw a rof decnad dna zratspop...
Stolen images in the paper... (April 9, 2002) Well of course the big news of the day is that although I'm not actually one of the people in this advert, at least I know a fair share of them [found here! oops!]. According to the advert they're exactly...
In which everyone links to Starbucks... (March 25, 2002) It's KPMG-link time all over again. Only this time, we're talking about Starbucks. In a piece published at Backwash.com, it appears that a man who posted a link to the coffee company about how good Starbucks coffee was has been...
Is hyperlinking free? (December 3, 2001) Is hyperlinking free? Can you link to whomsoever you wish? According to KPMG, apparently not! Chris Raettig received this e-mail a couple of days ago, asking him to remove the link to their site as they didn't have a 'formal...
On Smart Tags... (November 15, 2001) Because of this thread on Barbelith, I've suddenly become extremely politicised on the whole "Smart Tags" debate. There's more information over at Glassdog and you'll notice that I've added a button to the right hand side of the page to...
On E-commerce, bacteria, viruses and memes... (January 30, 2001) Imagine, if you will, a healthy body. Now introduce two types of foreign elements - lets say bacteria and viruses. I'm now going to bastardise their life-cycles horribly. Bear with me. Viruses need to spread to other bodies before either...
A List Apart on the dot com crash... (January 19, 2001) A List Apart confronts the current 'crisis' in the web creative industry in the US. The effects of the recent down-turn in dot-com fortunes has yet to hit the UK with quite as much force as it has in the...
The History of Yahoo! (January 18, 2001) Inspired by a footnote in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web which reveals the secret name of Yahoo, I have undertaken a search on the site in question for information on its history. Here are a few facts that...
A Metafilter for London and the UK? (November 7, 2000) Reasons for Matt Haughey to assemble london.metafilter.com / gb.metafilter.com or uk.metafilter.com: [Regional Metafilters?] British webloggers are the single largest group of English language webloggers outside the US. British webloggers are unable to participate in the large blocks of American-specific content...
On PGP and Tom's file at the FBI... (July 17, 2000) When I survey the epic terrain of my web presence from a dispassionate stance what I see worries me. Not because I am particularly self-indulgent (which I can be, admittedly), not because I am particularly dull (although, god knows, I...
In which ICANN consider new TLDs... (June 27, 2000) So ICANN are considering new top-level domains for the web - to which we can only breathe a sigh of relief and pray to god that the new ones will be both functional and worthy of getting excited over. People...
On a web-based intermediary for hit-men... (June 21, 2000) Katy and I have just had a great idea for a new money-making venture targetting a completely underexploited section of the e-marketplace - professional hitmen and the criminally violent. The idea is just like that in Strangers on a Train,...
