June 26, 2004
Ladies and Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to direct your attention towards the new Radio 3 website, which I (along with a great number of other people from every discipline and from all across the BBC) have been working on for the last few months. The teams that created the site have been among the best I've ever worked with and if started naming names I'd be here all week.
But what's so special about it, I hear you ask? Quite apart from the sterling design work from Paul Finn, we've been working with Radio 3's team to make the site one of the most genuinely web-native sites I've ever seen - designed to effectively reflect the station's programming online in a way that'll be better for the site's current users, for search engines and for anyone who would want to link to the site - including (but certainly not limited to) webloggers. Specifically the new site includes:
I could go on - I'm terribly proud of the work that everyone has done on the site and it's only going to get better over the next few weeks. But good work be damned! The most important thing is that I think it's going to serve the site's users better - both existing, and (perhaps) people who've never listened to Radio 3 before and can now be exposed to its wealth of programming over the web more effectively than ever before.
PS. Hello to Leigh, Justin, Andrew, Gregory from Radio 3, Paul and Sarah from the Technology and Design team and everyone else who worked on the project: Zillah, Rija, Tim, Mike, Matt B, Paul C, Manjit, Ian, Jason, Tony, Clare, Dan, Webb, Chris K, Simon N and anyone else I might have forgotten about. And a special personal wave to Margaret Hanley and Gavin Bell for being the best creative partners and co-conspirators a boy could wish for. You all rock!
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June 25, 2004
Weird day. Really good bits. Really tiring bits. Feel slightly washed out and exhausted. Can't tell if I'm a big drama queen or not. Met the new Director General of the BBC today. Launched a site and stuff. More on the important bits tomorrow. Question of the moment: Should you be stressed in stressful situations or should you be calm through them? Personal theory - stress gives you power and if corralled and put into your service is fairly useful. Not sure I'm correct. If I'm wrong, I'm going to have to restructure my belief system a lot. Other question: What do people do when they're not working?
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June 20, 2004
Guess what! Light at the end of the tunnel! Give me a few more days... Just a few more days... Then I can do stuff again! Like write things on my weblog, look after my community, take days off, have a haircut, clean up my flat, organise a holiday! Just had my first weekend in about two months where I don't feel under pressure or stressed, and it's practically over and I don't feel anywhere near calm or relaxed, but I feel a hell of a lot better than I did this time last week and I'm thinking that maybe it's the beginning of a less frantic period. I'm looking forward to being part of the world again.
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June 14, 2004
So anyway, I signed up for Gmail a while back and basically I don't really use it even though it's pretty well assembled and has some nice features and now I've been given three invitations but everyone who I know who wants an account already has one. I imagine the big craze for offering people enormous gifts and proposing amorous liasons in exchange for One Gigabyte of Full-On E-mail Pleasure has passed, but if you can think of a reason why I should invite you rather than just making three new accounts with funny names, then post a comment below or chuck me an e-mail to my fairly guessable normal e-mail address (hint: it starts tom@) and I'll see what I can do...
[Update: I'm afraid all three invitations have now gone. As soon as I get any others I will post them up and people can make a case for why they should get one. Sorry if I didn't send one to you. It's not personal...]
Second update: I got another five invitations this morning and have given away four of them to some of the other people who contacted me about them either on this post or by e-mail. That means I have one more left if anyone out there wants it. Yet again - make a good case and I'll give it to you. I'm adding one condition now - if you get an account and eventually get the ability to give out invitations, you have to give away at least one of those invitations to someone who says something funny on the internet. You can't give em all to friends. I have no way of enforcing this, of course, but I will consider you a person without honour if I found out you have wilfully ignored your obligations.
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June 12, 2004
That period before a launch is always stressful. This time is no exception. It's occupying my entire head almost 24/7 no matter whether I try and leave work on time or whether I'm there for twelve or fourteen hour days. It doesn't make any difference. It's just there in my head and it probably will be until a couple of weeks after it's finally launched. C'est la vie. It's the nature of the beast.
In real life, of course, people can sense when you're busy and don't feel particularly upset if you aren't able to give them the time that you would like to. They might not be thrilled about it of course, but they understand. But the signals that I can give off in public through my weblog are less clear. Has he just abandoned the thing? No. Why doesn't he have anything interesting to say anymore? Well, I do! Probably more than ever at the moment. I just can't find the headspace to work with to write them down. Why isn't he commenting on that thing that's so obviously one of his core interests? Well, it's because I'm not commenting on anything - the only creative thing I'm able to do outside work at the moment is doodle in Illustrator.
What I need is some way of actually ambiently reflecting my personal weather - without all that clunkiness of actively choosing states of mind. What I actually need is some way of representing that I'm just really really behind... A first suggestion - some way of representing the number of unread posts I have in NetNewsWire at any given moment (currently way over six hundred). Except that my path of posting tends to be more circuitous than that. NetNewsWire posts get opened in browser tabs if they look interesting, read thoroughly and then (if they're not something I want to follow-up upon) they get immediately closed. The number of open tabs reflects pretty much exactly the number of things I actively want to talk about at any given moment. If there are lots open, it probably means that I have a lot I want to write about and no time to do it in. Except that doesn't work either, because in addition to the six hundred things in NetNewsWire I haven't filtered and the fifty tabs I have open at the moment, I also have four folders in my bookmarks called "State of Play 1-4" that were the sum total of all the things I wanted to talk about and had open in Safari but then had to store quickly so that I could install a Max OSX update. That's another two hundred discussions I really want to get involved in - that I want to contribute to. And then there's the four or five little projects I have on the side that I've been trying to write up but have been incapable of doing so.
So six hundred unfiltered posts, fifty open tabs representing fifty filtered posts to talk about, two hundred bookmarks representing two hundred even more filtered conversations to get into, plus four or five multi-page documents (one around 6,000 words) that have been growing in the sidelines that I'm unable to push out into the world in any effective way. That is the index of how busy and behind I feel. That is the measure of my total absence of cerebral RAM. Do you now understand why I'm not posting that much?
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June 08, 2004
Well, anyway, since I'm up I may as well finish off my coverage of Sunday's NotCon. After the Geolocation panel (my notes), I joined the Hardware panel. Over the entire day I self-consciously avoided all the political panels because they just looked like they'd be incredibly frustrating, confrontational. Ironically I decided that I wouldn't find the Blogging panel quite as annoying, but more on that later in the day... The Hardware panel comprised of talks by James Larrson, Steven Goodwin, Matt Westcott, George Wright and Anil Madhavapeddy and was a really mixed bag of the sublime and ridiculous.
There's something uniquely nostalgic about British geeks - their fetishes for the computers of their youth (the BBC Micro and the Sinclair Spectrum in particular) seem to overwhelm their future-thinking impulses time and time again. I can't say that I'm convinced that this is a good thing - it makes me wonder about how British geekhood views its own chances of creating new technologies that actually can push things forward. Maybe they feel it's just not possible any more? Maybe they think no one will take them seriously...?
That's not to say that Matt Westcott's illustration of new hard and software trends on the Spectrum isn't impressive or entertaining. He illustrates connecting the tiny computer to hard disks and compact flash, talks about the demo scene and the "only project on sourceforge for the Sinclair Spectrum". He ends up with a streaming video version of the Chemical Brother's Let Forever Be video (directed by Michel Gondry). All good fun - I just can't help but feel that it's a little bit of a waste of a talented man's time.
James Larrson's piece was similarly random - but here at least the whole thing was clearly a bit tongue in cheek, and his presentational skills were so good that someone should really give him a TV-series of short introductions to crackpot inventors. He'd be awesome. The project he was talking about was based around using a BBC Model B from 1982 to measure the changes in state of the mayonnaise, bread and prawn components of a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich - and using that to tell the time. I'm not going to go into too much detail except to say that he's managed to get the accuracy so good that now the clock only loses/gains up to four hours in any given day.
I didn't get the name of the next guy - I think it was the Reverend Rat - but he was showing how you could radically extend the range of Bluetooth devices. Apparently by soldering it together with an antenna he's extended the range from ten metres to the rather more satisfyingly non-personal 35 miles (and more). His main planned use for this particular piece of tech seemed to be to stand on top of Centrepoint jacking into passer-by's phones. Or that could have been a joke. Funny chap. Cool though...
Then we got to the three talks that were actually about the way technology might evolve: Steven Goodwin's piece was on hacking around with your house and TV to allow you to control things long-distance (including recording TV on demand and stream it back to your computer via - I think - e-mail), which wasn't really particularly new in principle but nice to actually hear from someone who's doing it throughout their home. [If you're interested in this stuff, then the O'Reilly book Home Hacking Projects for Geeks could be a good read.]
Then George Wright talked about Interactive TV, why it wasn't the web and why that's a good thing (in his words). The language he used about the platform's restrictions (no return path in many cases, exhaustive centralised testing on the platform required before it any product can be rolled out, no literature to support development, completely limited to broadcast companies etc) doesn't fill me with hope for the future of iTV - particularly when compared to the possibilities of the future ever-present fat-piped non-broadcast-limited, massively flexible and responsive web - but he did make a good case for convergence not being the point. We're still talking around this stuff behind the scenes and I'll let you know if we come up with anything interesting.
And finally - and my particular favourite of the session - Anil Madhavapeddy talked about using camera phones as ubiquitous remote controls / mice. There were some lovely aspects to this - the 'ooh / aah' bit coming when he demoed applications with 'robust visual tags' that look a bit like the 2d bar codes that the camera phone could recognise and manipulate. So you'd come up to a some kind of public terminal, turn on the camera phone, arrange it so that you could see the control you wished to manipulate on the phone's screen, and then press the equivalent of a mouse button - at which point the control on screen could be moved around just as if your camera phone was a mouse (via Bluetooth or Wifi, I assume). It sounds over-complex from this introduction, but some of the immediate benefits were clear - the same tags could be used as static encoders of commands in paper interfaces that you just printed out, there's a built-in mechanism for manipulating money via a mobile phone that opens up lots of possibilities for exchanging or buying things, etc. etc. I'm going to be keeping an eye on this stuff, it was fascinating...
And that's pretty much all I have to say about the Hardware panel at the moment. I have to head off to a thing at the RAB on the "21st Century Radio Listener" for work. I'll talk about the next session on MP3s and Mash-Ups later in the day...
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6.30am: The Police call around and get me to open the front door. They knock on my neighbour's door and ring the doorbell a couple of dozen times. Looking out the back window, the entire block is surrounded by plain clothes policemen. My neighbour doesn't answer. This probably means that their son has beaten his girlfriend to a bloody pulp again.
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June 06, 2004
So the first panel of the day is over and we're not waiting in the over-crowded downstairs for the Matt Jones- hosted "Hardware" panel to get going.
My initial reactions to the Geocoding panel were extraordinarily positive - the first project that people talked about was called Biomapping and it was a fascinating concept. Basically the guy talked about using a galvanic skin response detector attached to a GPRS device to start plotting individual reactions to the environment around them. Totally fascinating. Then followed Nick West from Urban Tapestries (note based geo-annotation on mobile phones), Earle Martin from Open Guides (wiki-based open city guides) and a clump of people from Project Z, who seem to spend their lives creeping around in places where they shouldn't, taking photographs and leaving Indymedia logos. Pretty cool stuff.
I tried to ask a question during the event, but unfortunately was shut down by Chris Lightfoot. For those who are interested, I wanted to know whether or not any of the geo-annotation systems (including but not limited to the Open Guide wikis) were building in any protection against spamming at the architectural level. So many useful and potentially valuable projects in the past have ended up with fundamental problems with spamming (including e-mail and weblogs - and now wikis), the last thing we need is to have a standard of annotating the earth and all things around us that is going to be overwhelmed with adverts for prostitutes, scams, drugs and vouchers for Starbucks and McDonalds.
I'll try and post up the full SubEthaEdit notes from the first session later in the day. No promises though...
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About this weblog
This site - plasticbag.org - is a weblog by Tom Coates, who works in London on social software, weblogs and personal publishing on the web.
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Best of plasticbag.org
I've been going through the archives looking for posts with potentially lasting value or utility and categorising them.
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Linkloggery
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Webloggers2
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The Web
Regular linkage
→ Threadless
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What's on the stereo?
Currently playing: "Rain City" by Turin Brakes. This is from the album Ether Song. I have rated this song 5 stars out of a possible 5 and I have listened to it 13 times.
Before that I was listening to:
"Son of Three" by The Breeders. This is from the album Son of Three. I rated this song 5 stars out of a possible 5 and I have listened to it 6 times.
"My Dad's Gone Crazy" by Eminem. This is from the album The Eminem Show. I rated this song 5 stars out of a possible 5 and I have listened to it 0 times.
"I Don't Remember" by Peter Gabriel. This is from the album 3 (1980). I rated this song 4 stars out of a possible 5 and I have listened to it 1 times.
"First Of The Gang To Die" by Morrissey. This is from the album You Are The Quarry. I rated this song 4 stars out of a possible 5 and I have listened to it 2 times.
"Bell Jar" by The Bangles. This is from the album Everything. I rated this song 4 stars out of a possible 5 and I have listened to it 2 times.
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