Superfantastique! Keyword RSS of BBC News

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This is great – someone has hacked a service that generates a custom RSS feed based on a keyword search of BBC News.

So, for example, if I wanted to track the UK Labour government’s idiotic plans for ID cards, I just type in “ID Cards” and get a RSS feed to put in my news reader of choice.

It also works for the rest of the BBC website, so if I wanted to track any content on the band “Franz Ferdinand”, I just type it in and get a feed, which will return content the BBC have got on the hip scottish artrock combo.

UPDATE: Someone from the BBC has asked me to take this entry down, so as a compromise I have removed the links to the site outlined above.
David who posted from the BBC to ask to remove the reference has replied more fully to the comments below, and raised some good practical challenges to doing RSS and connecting to web-services on huge content sites like the BBC News. Many thanks to him for taking the time to clarify and explain some of the issues.

“By hook or by crook, we’ll get it!”

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Which is of course, about getting information, from The Prisoner, being shown again this summer on BBC Four.

Pat Kane quotes Wilson/Bey:

“…the more of this information you take in, the darker things get. I call it the “lite age” as opposed to the dark ages. A situation where you have all the information all the time — completely accessible — where in other words there are no secrets, or there’s a perception that there are no secrets, that there’s no information that we can’t get. This kind of false omnipotence, this superman of information.”

Victor steps outside to see if the shape of all this information makes more sense than the substance.

Which is always an alternative if you’re allowed.

“Be seeing you!”

Four

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This week marks four years of this weblog. I started in June 2000, while working still at Sapient’s London office, using blogger. The longest I have been in a job has been around 2 years, my architectural education was 5 years; so this weblog is one of the things I have stuck at the longest.

It’s been useful, it’s been fun, it’s given me opportunities and problems (sometimes at the same time) and for not much effort. It’s a testament to the tools that make such a rewarding format so low effort: I’ve progressed over the 4 years from Blogger, Greymatter, Moveabletype to Typepad.

While I’ve had a procession of tools, in review, I’ve come full circle from posting links and effectively establishing a commonplace for notes and bookmarks using Blogger, through writing more and more discursive and long-form stuff about design for technology, to publishing experiments like warchalking and back again now to mainly links, notes and social bookmark hoarding using del.icio.us.

It seems that the “outboard brain” model is the one I’m most comfortable with, and get most utility from, and now this memory prosthesis is becoming more mobile and less textual. I’ve been trialling Nokia Lifeblog for the last month or so, and along with del.icio.us I’m finding that it’s filling many of the roles of memory prosthesis that this blog used to.

So, the question is what to do here other than to write more self-indulgent bitkipple about design and social technology and comics and science and cities and games and most importantly, magic for another four years?

Wait a minute. I like doing that…

Renaissancemancer

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I’ve said it before, but I can’t recommend Radio 4’s “In our time” and the accompanying weekly newsletter by Melvyn Bragg highly enough:

“After the programme it was difficult to prise apart the guests. I think that what they had found was such a community of interest in what each other had to say, that they would have been very happy to have continued what I thought was a tremendous seminar for the rest of the morning. Perhaps they did. I had to push off and get on with dull work, ie: not talking about Renaissance magic and the association of the Cabbala, neo-Platonism and Hermes Trismegistus.”

» R4: In Our Time

» Wikipedia: Hermes Trismegistus

Scheduling and the modern flaneur

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Dan is trying out the new version of Urban Tapestries, but finding it hard to fit in some serious digital flaneur action:

“I haven’t been able to spend much time Urban Tapestrying … I haven’t wound it into my daily life of objects; I just haven’t had urge to use it much. I guess I’m struggling with the device’s mixture of latent utility and idle browsing pleasure. The ‘drift’ alluded to (presumably drawn from the Situationist notion of derive) generally doesn’t fit into a busy multitasked life as a plausible activity – the real drift is more of a side effect of activity than an activity in its own right. Given that we can’t all be Guy Debord. Thankfully.”

Reminds me a little of the quote Rodney Brooks made at Nextfest on what robots could be usefully relied on to do was anything that was a by-product of their semi-random movement through an environment.

Aside from actively annotating space, there are passive ways emerging such as Christian Nold’s Biomapping project; which use our biological robot reactions to paint a map of the city.

Touch diary

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Jan Chipchase asked me to create a visual diary of everything I touched for a day, much like this chap did.

Technical snafus meant that I only managed it from waking-up to going out of the door to get to work in the morning, but it still made me think more carefully about the qualities of the things I touch.

Perhaps you’d like to do the same thing, then trackback to this post…
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Alternative 3

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Alternative-3 was a hoax TV documentary broadcast in the late 1970s.

It maintained there was a conspiracy between the scientific, military and economic elites of the world to escape a forthcoming planetary catastrophy by colonising Mars…

It was parodied perhaps by Douglas Adams with his Golgafrincham telephone-sanitisers, and shown at one of the Strange Attractor events in London.

So far, I’ve only managed to find some bad quality realmedia exerpts online, which is why I’m asking Ben’s new project, the Culture Lazyweb if anyone has an better digital version anywhere on the net.

Eastern Standard Drive

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Andrew jams on itrip pirate-radio with Hill’s iPod projector photoshopware:

otwell_itunescar

Brings to life some of C. Doctorow’s Eastern-Standard Tribe


“I just don’t get it,” Fede said.

Art tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. “It’s simple,” he said. “It’s like a car radio with a fast-forward button. You drive around on the MassPike, and your car automatically peers with nearby vehicles. It grabs the current song on someone else’s stereo and streamloads it. You listen to it. If you don’t hit the fast-forward button, the car starts grabbing everything it can from the peer, all the music on the stereo, and cues it up for continued play. Once that pool is exhausted, it queries your peer for a list of its peers—the cars that it’s getting its music from—and sees if any of them are in range, and downloads from them. So, it’s like you’re exploring a taste-network, doing an automated, guided search through traffic for the car whose owner has collected the music you most want to listen to.”