2009-07-04
Ephemerality
Gavin Bell at OpenTech
What I want from the web in five years. Self documenting lives. Happy with the idea of throwing away information, like newspapers. Twitter and Flickr disagree- have archives including social data but not real time; Twitter don’t make available past 3500 messages.
Will I want fourteen years of data? Benefits of forgetting. Amusingly forgets the name of a book about someone who can remember years-old data but couldn’t summarise plots. Brains remember significant activities. Stuff that matters. What to forget?
Aggregation is key (meant here as grouping of items onto clusters, not my meaning). iPhoto events. Abstraction services- photos for upcoming, possibly in future grouped by friend. hAtom? Date based URLs. Favouriting etc. Social tools to prune networks and renewal of identity through new networks.
Finding significant enents. Overview of important events. “Abstracting it for you wholesale.” Favouriting and similar single-click methods of approval. Social bleedthrough- Friendfeed likes. Looking at the past. Twitter social atlas? Preserving context around content and favourites.
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2009-07-03
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CDEFGABC, 2008 - a short by Lernert Engelberts & Sander Plug:
Commit and dedicate yourself to even the most stupid ideas that come to mind. We ve built a glass harp and learned to play this 18th-century musical instrument. Instead of a classical piece we choose the classic 20th-century piece ‘No limit’ by 2unlimited — easily the worst song ever!
(via)
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Obvious, but worth restating. From Nokia’s N97 brings a clash of two cultures by Victor Keegan in the Guardian. (In fact, many phones still don’t come with unlimited data by default, it seems.)
(The bit about maps being broken is sadly what I’ve come to expect from Nokia, having failed to reinstall the map app repeatedly on candace’s N73. Still, having that happen on a new, review unit is pretty poor show, even given those low expectations.)
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Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer, bookmaker, and pilot whose focus is the environment and how contemporary American culture relates to it.
I thought I recognised the name: it’s the chap who produced 100 Suns and Full Moon, which would have pride of place on my coffee table if I was the sort of person who had one for display purposes.
The photo above appears to be entitled “Los Angeles 02.12.04, #12”, and not to be available in a book.
2009-07-02
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BBC Newsbeat - Traffic rockets to Twitter site.
On the grounds that popular == the suck, that explains a lot. Also, interesting (to me anyway) that this is on the Newsbeat site, not BBC News proper (unlike this story about being able to buy followers).
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Battle between ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro to be BBC4 comedy drama, reports the Guardian.
For anyone thinking there’s no drama in this story, or that the Spectrum and Model B weren’t rivals, here’s a story from Sinclair User in March 1985:
THE RIVALRY between Sir Clive Sinclair and former employee Chris Curry, now head of Acorn Computers, developed into open warfare over the Christmas period.
Having commissioned a survey on the reliability of micros which appeared to demonstrate the superiority of the BBC over the Spectrum, advertisements were placed in two national newspapers on behalf of Acorn, implying that Spectrums bought as Christmas presents would soon be taken back to the shops, and their owners would do better to buy BBC computers instead.
The advertisement so angered Sir Clive that he attacked Curry in the Baron of Beef, a Cambridge pub where both are regular customers. Sir Clive walked up to Curry and slapped him about the head, then argued with him about the advertisement. There was some shoving and jostling, and the two men later began fighting again in Shades, an upmarket Cambridge wine bar.
