Elvis is number one, and Paul has decided to listen to The King:
“Right now, we need to stop talking and start making cool stuff.”
STAND in the place where you live.
 The UK police, the secret service, and the tax man can find out where you’re surfing. In August, so will the Post Office. If a new rule passes Parliament, over |
You can go get the code for the banner ad above here. If you’re a designer/coder (I’m assuming the majority of people who come here are) – maybe you could contribute a banner ad design for the stand.org.uk team? Mail them with your efforts at stand@stand.org.uk
It’s not the same old show
On ma radio. The radio and music division of the BBC have come up with a lovely little HTML radioplayer app, which redistributes the BBC’s radio output as streams not solely by channel, but by genre. It’s mainly a outlet for the specialist music shows that the BBC produce, and there’s also some limited faceted classification applied to these to increase serendipitous discovery of previously hidden gems.
This from today’s Guardian:
“The simple addition of a list of shows based on musical genre will open up shows to people who would not normally listen to a particular station, believes Chris Kimber, head of BBC Radio Online. “Radio brands work both ways – they probably turn as many people off as they attract,” he says. “A lot of people still think that Radio 3 is wall-to-wall classical music, for example. But it’s changed beyond all recognition in the last couple of years. Using the player, someone who would never usually tune into Radio 3 might stumble across something they love on Mixing It or the Andy Kershaw show, which they wouldn’t otherwise have found.”
There’s also an interesting linkage mentioned in the Guardian article between interface choices and digital rights:
“The sticking point has been in agreeing terms with the record companies who control copyright restrictions on the music played. In a world where the music giants are paranoid about the threat posed by the internet to their industry, it was an arduous task to persuade them to allow shows that often contain records played months before their release to be archived. To mollify them, the BBC has agreed to archive shows for seven days only and to make them available only “as live”, and not for download on to a PC. You can skip through the shows in 15-minute chunks, but it is not possible to rewind them to listen to the same track again and again.”
If you don’t STAND for something…
…you’ll fall for anything.
“On Friday, the Home Office petitioned parliament to add a vast array of organisations to that list. If their passes, everyone from the DTI, any local authority, the Food Standards Agency, the Home Office themselves (of course), and staggeringly enough, Consignia.
The final entry in the list says that “A Universal Service Provider within the meaning of the Postal Services Act 2000” has the same power as the secret services to read your traffic data. There’s only one USP in Britain right now, and that’s the provider previously known as the Royal Mail.
If the idea that the fricking Post Office has access to your web logs (access which would cost a competitive company millions, and would probably get them investigated by the Data Protection people), let alone every minor apparatchik on the block, you might want to kick up a fuss about this. It’s due to appear before MPs on June 18th, and the Lords a little after.
I faxed my MP this morning. Felt good.
» Stand.org.uk: “Post Office To Steam Open Your History File”
“Library scientists!!!”
Jo has put up a collection of little videos of the talks from TakeItOutside/XCom2002 here:
» http://www.zooleika.org.uk/vids/xcom2002/
My favourite is Celia shouting at the assembled throng while talking about Bots, Semantic analysis and Google: “Library Scientists!!!!!”
» http://www.zooleika.org.uk/vids/xcom2002/are_they_library_scientists.mpg
IMHO, TakeItOutside/Xcom2002 was awesome – well done to everyone involved!
Report back from the plague-pits
I’m in a better mood today, and maybe regretting not going to the AIGA event with Steve Krug. However, the lazyweb [tm] lets me link to someone who did.
Lee (who I work with at the BBC) blogged it live using his Visor (Lee’s from the future)
From the sparse notes it doesn’t look like I missed much, apart from being a little infuriated. And drinking beer imagining with friends what The Empire’s powerpoint presentation templates would look like seems like a wise decision. So actually, no regrets.
The lazyweb [tm] even let’s me avoid ruminating further on the themes debated!! I heart the lazyweb [tm]. Lee is right-on it seems to me in his short-but-sweet summing-up:
“Innovation isn’t something you can incorporate in the design process, it’s a result you can notice afterwards.”
Yusssmate.
Tubeway army
Matt Webb’s playing with something potentially powerful. Leaving your “outboard brain” [cf. Cory’s O’Reilly piece] lying around in unreal-versions of real places [cf. Dan Hill’s take on NYCbloggers] as an “avatar” of sorts…
As I was describing the demo MattW gave me enthusiastically to someone last night, it occured to me to refer them to his earlier thinking on “The sameness of interfaces” so I’ll refer you all to it too… Interconnected, indeed…
Tighten-up
or don’t as the (upper or lower) case may be.
Make me think.
Victor proves the first rule of the lazy-web (“if you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about”) by writing about why I haven’t read boxesandarrows properly since it launched, I’m avoiding things like tonight’s AIGA event as if they’re plague-pits and I’ve been reading clay, webb, rael, cory, stolarz and udell more than iaslash and xblog; and why I’m having more fun than I’ve had in a long time.
Victor’s piece is nice, polite and constructive; just like the man himself. I’m not in as concilatory a mood. Personally I’m finding the discussion in the user-experience design community at the moment deeply stultifying. The distance between Baltimore and Santa Clara (let alone Camden for that matter) feels a lot more than 2442 miles.
As Victor says:
“It’s a little disconcerting, embarrasing even, that no IAs are at the forefront of these discussions. Isn’t that what we do, find interesting patterns in information and present them to people?”
Alex Wright, Peter Van Dijck and Eric Scheid have been writing interesting things about “what’s going on”[tm] (who else should I be reading?) – how the craft we’re struggling to refine, if too narrowly viewed, might be as redundant shortly as hot-metal typesetters.
» Noise Between Stations: “Library Science + Computer Science”
TakeItOutside
As mentioned earlier, Haddock are staging a complementary event to XCOM2002, where some more webspecific topics are going to be chewed on in an informal manner over a sunday afternoon pint at the pub opposite the main event.
There are 3 panels/topics:
- 12.30pm – 2.00pm Online Communities: The real world, only worse?
- 3.00pm – 4.30pm Chatbot++: Bot to the Future
- 5.00pm – 6.30pm Towards a Common-Place Web: online writing and social memory
We’ll have people from london.pm, Chump, Cory Doctorow, B3ta, various haddocks and of course heated debate from the (former) audience [tm].
Should be fun, wander across if you’re heading to XCOM2002 – full details can be found at the site below:
Petafloptimism 