February 2005 Archives
February 28, 2005
There are two kinds of blog
There are obviously more than two kinds of blog. I suppose I mean here are two kinds of blog. Anyway, there's the kind that's so stuffed with actionable nuggets, little (and big) things that you can actually try out and that make you go: “Oh shit. That's another thing I have to figure out (like I don't have enough things to figure out).” Ben Hammersley's is that kind of blog. There's nothing on this page that isn't interesting and worth a few minutes of your time (except maybe the skirt). Then there's the kind that represents a throughly engaging worldview and provides lots of entertaining evidence for its validity. Russell Davies' is that kind of blog.
February 25, 2005
Still rotting
A long time ago I ran a company called Webmedia. It was a web design firm and we earned the special distinction of 'going bust before the boom' (as one journalist pithily put it). Anyway, I've been thinking about it lately since I spent the weekend talking about business ethics in Switzerland. One incident in particular has been making me laugh. One of my managers (she ran the production department) came to me one day and asked if I'd mind if she gave me a business book she'd just read. She thought I might like it. "Sure. I said. Please do". A bit later on, and without comment, she left the book on my desk – it was called 'The Fish Rots From The Head'...
February 24, 2005
The last time we tried ID cards
Spot-on opener for the new series of Jonathan Freedland's The Long View on Radio 4. The programme's about the last time we tried ID cards in the UK and the court case that brought it all to an end in 1950. I could say something glib: 'important lesson', 'timely reminder', 'tinker with an Englishman's rights at your peril...' something like that... but you should probably just listen to it (I've got an MP3 if you find the programme's been overwritten by next week's).
Humour me
I'm blogging like mad over at Beth Krasna's Thinking Ethics. Pop over and have a read why don't you. Mind you, since I seem to be posting more-or-less on my own at the moment, I think I might start to feel a bit lonely soon. The blog is a companion to Beth's Thinking Ethics seminar last weekend in Geneva and should extend the value of the event nicely (if any of the other participants can find the time to join in).
New York & India
Rush out and buy these special issues before they disappear from the shelves at the end of the week: The Economist's terrific Survey of New York and New Scientist's comprehensive special on science in India. Both are outstanding – the best specialist journalism in Britain and lots of clever, exclusive content. Both mags are really on form, if you ask me.
The Economist's survey seems to be available for nothing at the web site and quite a lot of the New Scientist's special is also free online.
February 23, 2005
Brand not dead after all
On the way to the airport Friday I found a Swiss Army Knife at the bottom of my bag. Not much of a knife (and the little tooth pick was gone anyway) so I gave it up to the nice lady at the X-Ray machine.
On the flight I thought about the poor sods who make these things. I assumed they must have been wiped out by 9/11. Since about 75% (complete guess) of Swiss Army knives must be bought at airports and since you can no longer take them on aeroplanes I couldn't think of a viable survival strategy. Of course, I was totally wrong. Geneva airport is thick with Swiss Army Knife concessions. Giant, mechanical pen-knives open and close silently at every gate and in every souvenir store. They weren't wiped out at all. In fact, the business insight here is that even the nastiest existential shock might conceal an opportunity.
When you buy a Swiss Army Knife at an airport now, a nifty pre-paid envelope is produced and your new knife is posted back to your home. That's pretty neat but the leap forward here is that they now (obviously) capture your name and address in the sale and, with your permission, sign you up for the quarterly catalogue, special offers, ads for related products, whatever. 9/11 had the paradoxical effect, for the Swiss Army Knife people, of converting millions of customers from an undifferentiated horde of anonymous foreigners to a rather up-to-date International customer database. I hope they make good use of it.
February 22, 2005
Food's Hatfield
Risks to health from the Sudan 1 food dye are assessed to be 'very small' by the Food Standards Agency (you'd need to eat two or three wheelbarrows of Branston pickle to get close to a dangerous dose). The simple withdrawal of Sudan 1 from manufacturers' stock rooms would have been the appropriate response. Instead we have the insanity of a total purge of the food chain, costing tens of millions and producing its own new and unquantifiable risks, epic waste and serious economic damage to the whole chain, especially to smaller firms. The Food Standards Agency has been 'captured', to use the trendy term, by the infantile 'precautionary principle' and bounced into a Hatfield-scale overreaction – the only beneficiaries will, as usual, be the fear merchants in the pop press.
February 18, 2005
Being in Switzerland
My hyper-connected friend Azeem introduced me to Beth Krasna, an equally hyper-connected and hyperactive Swiss polyglot technocrat. Beth invited me to participate in a fascinating and more-than-slightly intimidating seminar on ethics in Geneva. So here I am, wrestling with a pointlessly expensive (and unusably faint) Swisscom Wi-Fi signal in my hotel room (actually, sitting on the floor in the corridor just outside my hotel room which is the only place I can get a usable signal), uploading some photos from the first afternoon.
The seminar is divided into themed strands and mine is called 'Ethics and Disobedience'. The brains in my session are contributed by an Imam, a Philosopher, the Dean of Geneva Cathedral and the Quakers' man at the UN. More tomorrow. Now I must rest my brain (I'll also be posting, along with other willing participants, on the Thinking Ethics blog).
February 16, 2005
Revolutionary love
Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book is a page turner. Loads of historically resonant words, including these handy phreaking tips:
“AT&T, like all public utilities, passes itself off as a service owned by the people, while in actuality nothing could be further from the truth. Only a small percentage of the public owns stock in these companies and a tiny elite clique makes all the policy decisions. Ripping-off the phone company is an act of revolutionary love, so help spread the word.”
“You can make a local 10 cent call for 2 cents by spitting on the pennies and dropping them in the nickel slot. As soon as they are about to hit the trigger mechanism, bang the coin-return button. Another way is to spin the pennies counter-clockwise into the nickel slot. Hold the penny in the slot with your finger and snap it spinning with a key or other flat object. Both systems take a certain knack, but once you've perfected the technique, you'll always have it in your survival kit.
If two cents is too much, how about a call for 1 penny? Cut a 1/4 strip off the telephone book cover. Insert the cardboard strip into the dime slot as far as it will go. Drop a penny in the nickel slot until it catches in the mechanism (spinning will help). Then slowly pull the strip out until you hear the dial tone.
A number 14 brass washer with a small piece of scotch tape over one side of the hole will not only get a free call, but works in about any vending machine that takes dimes. You can get a box of thousands for about a dollar at any hardware store. You should always have a box around for phones, laundromats, parking meters and drink machines.”
February 15, 2005
Stop the presses
It's National Chip Week. No, really. It is. So I thought I'd bring you these lovely facts:
“A portion of chips (175g) contain double the fibre, 75 times more folate and four times more vitamin C than an apple.”
“Kate Winslet loves chips. She recently said "the perfect Saturday night for me is to get the kids to bed, pour myself a glass of wine and send Sam for fish & chips."”
“A portion of chips (175g) also contains five times more vitamin C than a bunch of grapes (100g).”
Of course, you'll find even more unlikely chip facts at the National Chip Week web site.
Google's edgy brand
Will a Google takeover of Wikipedia be a good thing or a bad thing? Don't ask me. I'm more interested in what Google's offer says about the company's persistently geeky culture. I may be wrong but I'm about 90% sure that it hasn't occurred to anyone at Microsoft to host Wikipedia (this would be more their style). Wikipedia – and Wikis in general – are a good analogue for the net itself, an expression of its technically distributed and socially collaborative nature.
Wikipedia's intelligence lives, necessarily, at its edges. In fact it barely has a centre at all in the old-fashioned sense. Most businesses find that sort of thing pretty alien, which, presumably, explains why the poor, benighted (but still awesome) Encyclopaedia Britannica actually survived the net's first big attack only, by the look of it, to be completely broadsided by bottom-up knowledge sharing. Google's culture, though, evidently still thrives on funky, open, edgy phenomena like Wikipedia. Absorbing Wikipedia (which would, presumably cause barely a ripple in Google's Ocean of CPU and bandwidth) might be commercial nonsense but it shows that the brand is alive and well.
February 11, 2005
Xmas toys: good and bad. Number 5 – The Giants and The Joneses audiobook by Julia Donaldson
Julia Donaldson has written some of our favourite kids' books – The Gruffalo, The Snail and the Whale, Room on the Broom and loads more – all beautifully-written. The Giants and The Joneses is aimed at a slightly older age group than these but the brilliant (unabridged) CD audiobook, read by Helen Lederer, is one of the rare stories that will keep our 6 year-old boy and our 5 year-old girl happy at the same time (and it's over three hours long so it'll keep them amused for quite a long ride in the car).
I'll consider myself helped then
First of all, this wasn't supposed to happen. I didn't expect dozens of you to chip in with solutions to my HTML/CSS problems (well, 19 in all, including the emails). So now I either have to bankrupt myself shipping Champagne to every corner of the English speaking world... or draw lots. I think I'll draw lots. If you were one of the lovely people who helped me to sort out my three-column layout, watch the skies. I'll be in touch with one of you for an address (or perhaps I should just send it to Alex who seems to have prompted most of the responses. Thanks Alex!).
February 10, 2005
Book Review: file sharing and open source licensing (and 'a manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika')
Steal This File Sharing Book by Wallace Wang, Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing by Andrew M. St. Laurent (and Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman).
Starting with Steal This File Sharing Book. I would really like to tell you that this is a great book. Or that it cleverly updates Abbie Hoffman's yippie freeloader's bible, Steal This Book (Stealing it from amazon is going to present some problems, though, I guess). Or even that it'll help you understand file sharing. Sadly, I can't. I'll keep it around but it's tough to imagine a use for it beyond this review. I wish Wang had provided a history of file sharing technologies. I wish he'd thought more about the future (beyond version updates and law suits). I wish he'd found the time to discuss the ethical context and I wish he'd been a bit less morally ambivalent about file sharing. Where Hoffman is morally certain (thieving from dumb corporations and dumber Governments is a good thing), Wang worries the issue and leaves the reader frankly at sea. I'd also have liked some discussion of new rights models (GPL, Creative Commons and so on) and of new methods like BitTorrent. I wonder if file sharing is one of those topics that really doesn't warrant a book at all?
This is more like it. Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing is a small but perfectly formed 194 pages on every kind of software license you've ever heard of, including the non-free and nearly-free ones. Actual licenses, annotated and explained, are the body of the book with plenty of legal asides and some gentle (legally-phrased) criticism where necessary. I'm not about to release a software product but if I were I'd buy this unpretentious book and since software licensing seems to be the bleeding edge of the fast-changing rights landscape (can landscapes have bleeding edges?), where all the interesting work is being done, I think this book should interest a lot of non-techies too.
February 08, 2005
Help!
Right. This is your last chance to save bowblog's three-column layout. Most of you (the Explorer users, basically) don't even know this is a three-column web site because, for you, the third column displays somewhere down there (underneath the left-hand column). Some of Britain's finest minds have examined my CSS and HTML and no one seems able to fix it so that the right-hand column displays where it ought to over there on the right (although the esteemed Phil Gyford did improve things markedly). So (trying not to sound desperate), if you reckon you've got what it takes, why don't you sort it out for me and I'll send you a bottle of Champagne (own brand, natch). I guess you can just view source if you need the HTML and here's my stylesheet.
America on the radio
First: amazing story, this: Malcolm X's personal archive – correspondence, photographs, writings, the lot – wound up on eBay (or at least on eBay's posh cousin Bonnington's). Tony Phillips made a very personal programme about it for Radio 4.
Second: the US Government's own auditors say that $8.8 billion (including three palettes of hundred dollar bills weighing 14 tons for which someone forgot to fill in a deposit slip) have gone missing from the funds set aside for reconstruction in Iraq. Gerry Northam, in this File on 4 programme, notes that Capitol Hill has taken very little interest in the missing billions while putting the boot into the UN over Oil for Food.
Provided they haven't been overwritten you can listen to these programmes at these links: Selling Malcolm X and File on 4 on Iraq or download MP3s here: File on 4 and Malcolm X.
Misery at Ground Zero
Don't read this excellent review from the NYRB if you've been sort of distractedly assuming that the reconstruction of the twin towers in NYC was going to be one of those uplifting stories of human nobility, resilience and creativity in the face of brutal nihilism; vigorous American mercantilism overcoming poisonous cynicism and all that. It's not. It's a dispiriting mess. Very sad.
February 05, 2005
Watching Ofcomwatch
If you've been watching Ofcomwatch for a while you'll have seen it grow from a sort of scrappy... er... scrapbook on the new regulator to something really quite slick and useful. If you're watching Ofcom you'll need these guys – there are probably only a handful of people who understand the regulator's's Byzantine org chart like they do.
February 04, 2005
What's the story?
Reading about Microsoft's belated entry to grown-up web search the thing that struck me was actually how level the playing field is right now. According to Infoworld, search breaks down like this: Google: 34.7%. Yahoo: 31.9%. MSN: 16.3% and AOL (Time Warner): 9.4%. That leaves about 8% for the gaggle of 'others' (including the benighted Ask Jeeves). Hardly a one-horse race.
Azeem's babies
I'd like to mark (a bit late, as usual), the arrival of two babies. First, Salman, a son for Shen and Azeem, nine weeks early (impatient, like his Dad...) and, second, Rising Slowly – a weather blog and latest output from the UK's only proper nanopub business, Mink Media. Both lovely, of course. Welcome!
Tags again
So my tag thoughts lead me to fantasise tagging reality in some way. Could I use a GPS camphone to tag my environment? Find a nice restaurant, photograph and tag it there-and-then and it snaps into place on a useful, marked-up map of the City, complete with tags to aid retrieval. Other users could, of course, share my tags and places themselves could trigger a forest of tags as I pass (all on my heads-up display, I suppose).
Matt's links
Lots of good stuff over at Matt's place lately: the wonders of Amazon's new visual yellow pages, the Wikification of everything (and a very thought-provoking application of del.icio.us tags to BBC content) and links to some amazing Flickr art.
February 03, 2005
Tags thought
Once you've played with tags at Flickr and del.icio.us for a while you'll find you expect everything to work that way. Tags are very persuasive. Two really obvious applications for tags: Apple's iTunes and iPhoto. Adding keywords to iPhoto pictures is such a weird pain-in-the-neck, multi-step operation (compared with, say, adding tags to your Flickr pics – how can it possibly be easier to manipulate meta-data in a web-based application than in a desktop app?) and you can't tag iTunes tracks at all. Tagged tracks would really add a lot of value to the creation of Smart Playlists, for instance, especially if adding tags was really easy.
What's going on?
My friend Richard called from Australia. Richard is a futurologist (no, really, he is). He publishes the very groovy What's Next, which watches trends, and has a column in Fast Company Magazine. Anyway, presumably because he's a trend watcher, he asked me: "so what's going on in Britain then?" and I was basically stumped. "Er. Michael Howard Hypnotist Shylock thing. Gordon Brown. No. John Reid. Oh I know... er... no. I forgot." So I've been thinking about it since then. What is going on in Britain? If you were asked by a foreigner what was going on here right now, what would you say?
When voting really matters
The courage and optimism of the Iraqi people who voted on Sunday is obvious. We (all of us – pro- or anti-war) need to set aside our cynicism for a minute and acknowledge the significance of this vote. If it had turned out to be a phony exercise or just PR for the coalition it would have been different. It turns out that over 60% of the eligible population went out to vote. Do I need to remind you that that's a better turnout than most Western Nations see for general elections (and usually in the absence of any threat of beheading)?
Is that huge vote of confidence in the democratic process more than a two-fingers to the 'insurgents' and other nihilists who opposed the election all together? Yes. It's very hard to avoid the conclusion that this big, enthusiastic vote does more than refuse the insurgents their easy victory. Despite the complicated and uncomfortable circumstances – and the indecipherable proportional voting system – Iraqis have taken to the democratic process like the sophisticated political animals they obviously are.
Their enthusiasm for this election inevitably sends an uncomfortable message not only to the bombers and beheaders but also to the anti-war contingent (the Pilgers and Fisks and Galloways, the Daily Mirror, The Independent etc. etc.) and also to the ambivalent, the waverers, the worriers and the uncommitted (me, for instance). It seems there's a reasonable chance – against all the odds – that democracy has taken root in Iraq.
February 02, 2005
Spend your money here
Mind blowing sale at Christies: 'The Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking & Telecommunications'. Over 200 important documents from the history of computing, mathematics and calculation – some over 400 years old and valued at up to $70,000.
Best spam this week
From: "Richard" (qyield@yahoo.com.cn) Date: 28 January 2005 05:13:30 GMT To: steve@bowbrick.com Subject: tent Reply-To: sales@jxtrade.cn
To Whom It May Concern,
We have learned from the Internet that you are interested in tents...
Think I need a new lawyer
So Mark Lloyd, an otherwise respectable lawyer (and a bit of an expert on tech and Internet lawyering in general) calls me yesterday and asks how my blogging business is going. I tell him it's pretty cool but it's still early days and then I tell him, by way of industry background, that Sony just took a stake in Gawker's Lifehacker. Mark's reaction is, frankly, sniffy – as if to say: "is that the best you can do? I digested that particular nugget six hours ago. In fact anyone with a half-respectable RSS reader finished gossiping about that one before their second skinny latte this morning, you sad old git". I think this semantic web thing has a lot to answer for...