December 2010
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“It’s right and proper that we commemorate the valour and bravery as well...”
– Ian Kershaw, responding to the question “Do Germans invoke their own Blitz spirit?”, in the BBC News article Did the Blitz really unify Britain?
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“Londoners describe how they use MP3 players shut the world out, to create...”
– Jen Paton at 3quarksdaily commenting on Miriam Simun’s research (PDF) on listening habits of Londoners whilst commuting.
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“Using the site, I find my /network/ view to be less than 100% useful, thanks to...”
– Matt Haughey’s Quick thoughts on Pinboard. I mentioned this as an aside a while ago, but it’s good to see someone spell it out (it seems like I’m bad at that) It’s also good to see Maciej Ceglowski’s reply, too.
One quick suggestion that I feel would help this...
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Photos and parties in London and SF
Matt Webb wrote an insightful comment on a photograph of the three principals of BERG at the end of the year, and it’s prompted me to hang some thoughts I’ve had about parties and photography since I arrived in San Francisco.
As Webb says,
we’re in an era of self-marketing, where everything is about the control and manipulation of personal image: dating, social networking, and...
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“Perhaps it’s just a trait of apps simplifying and requiring less of users to...”
– Ben Ward in a post entitled (ha) Non-Titular.
At some point, if I can excise enough venom for it to be publishable in polite company, I might write about Instagram. One of the things I need to note is precisely its lack of all sorts of metadata. Not only does it turn the title into an optional...
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It Wasn't Like Christmas
This year, Christmas hasn’t felt like Christmas.
It’s my first ever “holiday season” abroad. I’ve been to the US from Boxing Day into the New Year, and for Thanksgiving, but never between the two. It just doesn’t feel right.
It’s not the shopping, although I should probably be more like the locals, who rush out on Black Friday in an orgy of sales to...
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Flickr API Corners: ID to URL
If you have the URL of a Flickr photo, and want the URL of the page containing that photo, here are two ways, one on the website, and one using the API.
(Why would you want to do this? Well, people seem to be good at breaking the terms of service and not linking back to Flickr with a photo. Perhaps it’s been through ffffound or tumblr, or it’s been used on a blog. If that happens, but...
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Flickr API Corners: ID to URL
If you have the URL of a Flickr photo, and want the URL of the page containing that photo, here are two ways, one on the website, and one using the API.
(Why would you want to do this? Well, people seem to be good at breaking the terms of service and not linking back to Flickr with a photo. Perhaps it’s been through ffffound or tumblr, or it’s been used on a blog. If that happens, but...
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Flickr API Corners: flickr.photos.getAllContexts
noticings:
This is inspired by Matt Jones’ Hello Little Fella Flickr group. We wanted to do the scoring based on whether you’d added your photo to the group, but it turns out that Flickr doesn’t provide that information in the API very easily.
Actually, that’s not true: you can do one call per photo to gets every pool and set a photo is in. However, the name is arguably part of the...
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Flickr API Corners: flickr.photos.getAllContexts
noticings:
This is inspired by Matt Jones’ Hello Little Fella Flickr group. We wanted to do the scoring based on whether you’d added your photo to the group, but it turns out that Flickr doesn’t provide that information in the API very easily.
Actually, that’s not true: you can do one call per photo to gets every pool and set a photo is in. However, the name is arguably part of the...
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Photos and parties in London and SF
Matt Webb wrote an insightful comment on a photograph of the three principals of BERG at the end of the year, and it’s prompted me to hang some thoughts I’ve had about parties and photography since I arrived in San Francisco.
As Webb says,
we’re in an era of self-marketing, where everything is about the control and manipulation of personal image: dating, social networking, and...
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The Post-Delicious World
The fallout from the “sunset: Delicious” slide continues to echo around. Perhaps because bookmarks are a simple place to start, there are a few people beginning to host them locally; for example, here’s Jeremy Keith’s recent post (quoted approvingly at No More Sharecropping). Meanwhile, Phil Wilson said on Twitter that he
doesn’t really understand why people are...
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“A pre-flight checklist before you hit the “Tweet” button: … Contains a...”
– Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s “before you tweet” checklist (via intercourse with biscuits).
Oh dear. I mean, I know Twitter is many things to many people, and for a while it’s been more about distribution than ambient intimacy, but really- should people be advising that...
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“The snowpocalypse has hit Britain, again, and you’ve still not bought a...”
– … to buy a fucking shovel. And maybe some other stuff.
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“The airwaves ring to the tune of people demanding that somebody - the...”
– Alice Miles in an opinion piece in the New Statesman (via Joe Moran).
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“The Daily Express headlines its why-oh-why piece: “The Coldest Winter for...”
– The Economist’s Bagehot on cold weather and journalistic clichés. It’s very well written and quite amusing. (With a nod to the semi-secret source.)
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“The Wikileaks furore shows us that these institutions of power are slowly and...”
– Zeynep Tufekci in the Atlantic, in a comment piece entitled “Wikileaks Exposes Internet’s Dissent Tax, not Nerd Supremacy”. Well worth a read.
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“During one round of the game, Stephen Fry suggested that...”
– From the section on the Uxbridge English Dictionary in Wikipedia’s List of games on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.
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“Bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a...”
– Ricky Gervais- A Holiday Message: Why I’m An Atheist in the Wall Street Journal.
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“The postal affairs minister says he is “extremely confident” the...”
– Ed Davey ‘confident’ on retaining Queen’s head on stamp, at BBC News.
My first reaction: is that really the most important thing about selling off (yet another) part of British infrastructure: whether or not the hereditary head of state’s symbol is still on an increasingly...
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On My Radar
Most of the time, I hide the Radar widget on my dashboard. Three times today, though, I’ve clicked through. And three times, it’s been a reposting of a photo from Flickr.
I know it’s hardly an original observation that Tumblr is all about the reblogging, but really, come on. It’s not even as if those photos are obscure on Flickr, either- they tend to have plenty of faves,...
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On My Radar
Most of the time, I hide the Radar widget on my dashboard. Three times today, though, I’ve clicked through. And three times, it’s been a reposting of a photo from Flickr.
I know it’s hardly an original observation that Tumblr is all about the reblogging, but really, come on. It’s not even as if those photos are obscure on Flickr, either- they tend to have plenty of faves,...
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Sticking With Delicious
The leak of a Yahoo slide and a bunch of speculation has led to a burst of signups for Pinboard over the last few days. Despite that, I’m sticking with Delicious.
Personally, while I’ve always valued the site for its ability to store stuff, what’s always made Delicious most useful to me is its network pages in general, and mine in particular. It’s set up for one-key access...
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Thoughts On "Archive Fever"
Matthew Ogle’s Archive Fever is a great call to arms. He sums it up himself as:
“Using real-time services inadvertently creates rich personal life archives, but they’re currently hard to get at. Let’s fix it”
I’m glad to see such a well-thought-out post emerge, because I certainly couldn’t have written one that good. There are a couple of things I’d...
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