Blogging/social software Archives
November 28, 2006
Honk if you don't blog
There are still a few non-bloggers left in the world. I'd like to hear from them.
I'm writing a piece for a DCMS web site called Projects Etc. Working title: 'Autobiography is the new rock 'n' roll'. Thesis: 'self telling', autobiographical writing, journalising, blogging, diary keeping, confessional media etc. are taking over. We're obsessed. We can't get beyond ourselves. We're technology-mediated egomaniacs.
So, in writing about the developed world's obsession with autobiography, I'd like to talk to people who don't participate, people who don't blog, don't keep a MySpace page, don't obsessively update their flickr photostream. If that's you I'd really like to hear from you. I'd like to understand why you don't blog and what you think of your mates who do. If you'd like to help, drop me a line. I'll come back to you with some questions in an email and I'll credit you if I use your material. Thank you!
July 25, 2005
Fun
STAMPSTER - STAMP FUN ON YOUR PHONE |
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John Risby has brought to my attention his clever new service Stampster, which allows you to do... well... the kind of thing I've just done to my picture at the top of the page and here in this entry (you can also send them to your mobile phone, of course, which is where I guess they're going to make their money). I think all that heavy copyright stuff and the big 'preview' watermark might cool people's interest in the idea a bit, though. A bolder, more open approach to promoting this idea might do the trick, I think.
June 30, 2005
Blog event blogged
Rafael Behr wrote up the NMK blogging conference I've been going on about for The Observer's blog. I enjoyed the presentations, learnt quite a lot, met some interesting people and managed to keep the whole thing on schedule (you can call me 'The Chair'). I also took some pictures. Lloyd Davis has put up recordings of the sessions and other useful stuff here.
June 26, 2005
What I hate
I hate the way NTL's proxy servers hijack my web site. When I post a new entry to this blog it can take my own ISP (NTL) up to 48 hours to allow me to see it. They have hardware proxy servers in their network which hold an old copy of the site and won't allow me to see a newer copy until they're good and ready. This saves them money but means their customers can never be sure of getting the latest version of the sites they visit. If you're an NTL customer you're already experiencing this, whether you know it or not. If you've ever wondered why favourite web sites don't appear to change even when you're sure they should have done, you're experiencing the malign effect of NTL's proxy servers. I suggest you call them and complain.
June 23, 2005
What are you doing next Tuesday afternoon?
So I'm looking over your shoulder as you finish off this morning's third vanilla latte and fill out next week's diary. I can see that it's all coming together nicely: lots of cleverly interlocking meetings with top industry figures, up-and-coming talent and nicely-placed suppliers (plus that appointment with your probation officer)
But... hold on... is that a huge gap? An entire afternoon in the West End with nothing to do? Tuesday 28th June? Surely not! But don't worry. Remedy this catastrophic calendar oversight by slotting in a stimulating afternoon of blogging wisdom from the nice people at New Media Knowledge.
60 quid buys you privileged access to Mink Media's Sabrina Dent, The Observer's Online Editor, Rafael Behr, Fjord Media's Mike Beeston, blog consultant Suw Charman, interesting marketing type Johnnie Moore and Adriana Cronin-Lukas from The Big Blog Company (plus me, chairing – and maybe a cup of coffee). Read more about it and reserve a place here (or I suppose you could just sit in Soho Square and drink cider with all the other new media types).
June 09, 2005
Lawyers and tailors
My undeniably sharp-suited lawyer Mark Lloyd is finally blogging properly. He writes nicely and his entries are varied. I only mention his dress sense because he links to this really compelling new blog from Saville Row tailor Thomas Mahon. If Mark is right and Mahon is really winning lots of new business through his blog it goes to prove something I've been saying for ages: blogs are going to be good for marketing distinctive and expensive consumer goods but not FMCG or commodity stuff. A bespoke suit has to the perfect item for blog marketing: expensive and unique and hand-made. A Saville Row suit always has a back-story, a narrative – and the maker is important – he's part of the product. Can't think of a better way of telling the tailor's story than a blog.
June 07, 2005
Looking for a simple survey tool
I'd like to be able to run the odd survey here for my esteemed sponsors so I'm looking for a free (preferably) survey tool that could be installed by a technical wizard (that would be Robin) and used by a technical pygmy (that would be me). I suppose a plugin for MT might be handy but anything reasonably easy to use that will install on Robin's Linux/Apache server would be cool. Any ideas?
May 24, 2005
A blogging mini-conference in June
Listen, if it's raining in the afternoon on Tuesday 28 June and you're in the West End, drop into this NMK blogging conference. I'm chairing the event, divided into two themed parts: 'Is nano-publishing a new communications paradigm?' and 'Are blogs the new voices of authority?' which would seem to bracket the blogging debate nicely. Bring 60 quid with you and you'll hear some prominent and interesting speakers and probably get a free cup of coffee.
March 24, 2005
Patronage
On 14th September I will be having dinner at The Ivy. I tell you this, of course, purely in the interests of the kind of accountability and transparency that we responsible bloggers keenly aspire to. I'm going to be there because I'm helping to judge the Guardian Student Media Awards this year. I think I've been chosen because I am now so far from being a student (about half way between graduation and interment I'd say) that I can bring some distance to bear on the topic. I'll be judging Best Student Web Site with Emily Bell who runs Guardian Unlimited.
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 24, 2005
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).
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.
February 02, 2005
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...
January 27, 2005
Not following nofollow
Ben Hammersley reckons Google's rel="nofollow" thingie is a bad thing and won't work anyway. I'm not sure I agree, at least not with the economics part. email spam is hard to discourage because it continues to produce the desired effect (clicks) in a cost-effective way despite pathetic response rates and increasingly effective filters. rel="nofollow" will kill comment spam (if widely adopted) because, in principle at least, there will be no point at all spamming blogs with links to your poker site once those links no longer boost Google pagerank.
Spammers may not be the kind of people you want in your hot tub but they are goal-oriented economic actors and they won't waste any time at all running comment scripts once they realise they are 100% useless. Having said that, I'm sympathetic to Ben's (and other people's) concerns about the potential damage to the semantic (and social) web that a new class of weighting for links might cause. We'll have to keep an eye on this one.
In the meantime, I'm sticking with a combination of MT-Blacklist, which works if you keep the blacklist up-to-date, and new kid MTCloseComments, which does something I've been whinging about for ages – it just closes comments once they're a certain age. Of course, MTCloseComments might also contain the seeds of the web's slow heat death but I can't imagine how – the only people who post comments to old entries here are spammers (except this one).
January 03, 2005
Congratulations, scumbags
Today, for the first time, I deleted over 1,000 spam comments from this weblog (about 1,200 in the last 24 hours, in fact). I am now officially overwhelmed (and so is poor Robin's server which now spends most of its time accepting and then deleting my comment spam) so we're going to have to try a different way of dumping the spam – probably something that requires commentors to type a random code or something. How boring.
December 15, 2004
Honourable Fiend
Still guestblogging over there for the time being, in case you're interested. Latest entry is about Michael Howard and ID cards.
December 01, 2004
Back in ten minutes...
I'm having fun guestblogging over there at the moment. Azeem tells me that Hon. Fiend is doing very well, even while its editor suns himself in Brazil. Blanket Blunkett is bringing in the punters at the moment, naturally.
November 24, 2004
Trying to keep up...
I'll tell you something, either I'm getting old or podcasting (a concept so new that Google is still trying to correct me when I search for it) is going mainstream waaaaay too fast. Last week I spent a boozy evening (boozy enough to fall asleep on the train home again – Hello Harpenden!) in a smoke-filled room above one of those Soho clubs (no, not those Soho clubs) talking with a bunch of top media execs about, among other things, torrents, podcasting, Creative Commons and blogging – blimey. This is obviously going to be a really important area and I'm going to start meeting VCs who are 'watching' podcasting (just like they were 'watching' RSS last year and 'watching' blogging the year before that).
A flurry of links: iTunes Applescript guru Doug is now Podcasting (and why wouldn't he?). Gigadial threatens to absorb the next six months of my life. At least I can pretend to be working while I'm listening (if you're as old as me you'll need this overview page). I think this clever thing allows you to publish torrents via your blog (and RSS, natch), which at least sounds useful. iPodder 1.1 is obviously worth a donation (I think I've finally found a reason to upgrade that Old Skool 5Gb iPod). I've just noticed that iPodder.org is run by Adam "Big Hair" Curry. Funny, cos Ivan was only asking about him the other day.
Meanwhile, Ben Hammersley, the man himself, a man for whom I'd like to buy a drink one of these days if he stood still for long enough – even if only to learn what it feels like to have an entry to yourself in Wikipedia – has come up with his own handy slug of server code which captures Real Streams, converts them to MP3s and then publishes them as an RSS feed (the rest is up to your local podcasting set-up). He also links to a tool for doing the local bit which sounds perfect – downloading now.
November 23, 2004
I think I've waited long enough...
I'm really thrilled to be able to say that I've been enjoying Azeem and Shen's new venture a lot (resisting the temptation to illustrate this entry with a wedding photo). Mink Media has entered into the Thin Media business with a rush and their first two titles are excellent and part of what looks like a really well-rounded commercial package. The Honourable Fiend (Westminster politics) is my favourite but I reckon Wanda Lust (travel) will grow on me too, once it finds its tone of voice (which is harder with PR-heavy travel material to work with, I reckon).
I'm enjoying Hon Fiend enough to urge the guys to switch comments on – I keep reaching for my quill pen – although I think I'll understand if they don't. Even this humble blog is now ploughing through 300-400 comment-spams per day and sorting out the real comments from the crap is getting more tiresome by the day. I think everyone acknowledges that blog media is still at best an each-way bet for the big time but ventures like this one are going to really help to nudge the form into the business mainstream. Good luck guys!
November 07, 2004
The only good idea in this entry is right down at the bottom
Today (Sunday) I've deleted about 130 spam comments from this weblog (with the aid of the redoubtable MT-Blacklist). Yesterday was about the same. Likewise Friday, Thursday and so on. I'm really fed up with it. In case you haven't got up to speed on blogspam yet, the thing to remember is that the spammers aren't interested in your opinion of their fascinating products or in your lovely readership or in a healthy debate... or anything really, apart from the boost to their Google pagerank that a link from your weblog might provide.
Blogspammers want to hijack the special treatment given to blogs by Google (and other search engines, these days). That's why blogspam is indiscriminate about placement – nobody needs to read the comment so sticking it in a two year-old blog entry will do just fine. That's also why you need to delete these bogus comments sharpish. In fact, the quicker you can delete your blogspam the better, since that will give Google fewer opportunities to index it. Sadly, although the blogspammers are clever enough to figure out which blogs to hit, they're not clever enough to figure out which bloggers are motivated to delete spam comments quickly and thus provide no boost to pagerank.
And, of course, it would make no difference if they could figure this out because the barmy economics of spam means that not spamming produces no benefit at all to the spammer, since each additional spam has an incremental cost of effectively zero. We're all wise enough these days to know that Google's algorithm (the mythically cool and sophisticated Google algorithm) is tweaked and tuned continuously to exclude scumbags and miscreants so I wonder if the next logical step is for Google to exclude blog comments from the index all together (pretty easy, I guess, since comments are marked up in a fairly predictable way).
This would be a bad thing – destructive to the information value of the index – but obviously, at the same time, a good thing, since it would kill blogspam overnight and remove a significant pollutant from the information stream. Once blogspam stops producing a boost to pagerank, the economics goes into reverse and the spammers will stop and since genuine blog commenters don't do it for the pagerank, there'll be no reason for them to stop commenting and no damage to the vibrancy and usefulness of the blogosphere.
Hold on. Thinking about it, a subtler approach would be for Google to automatically delay indexing blog comments for, say, 24 hours. That would give bloggers a chance to delete blogspam before it could make an impact on pagerank while preserving the long-term value of comments for the index. That's it. I think I've cracked it. Where do I collect my OBE?
November 06, 2004
I made a place!
Forums are places, I suppose. IRC channels, MUDs and chat rooms too. But blog entries? Not really. Here's an exception. Ages ago I blogged a special 'flowchart issue' of Mizz, the teen mag and, since then, my top search term has been 'mizz magazine'. Every day, dozens (sometimes hundreds) of teens find themselves – thanks to Google – looking at this entry. God knows what they make of it (many of them wonder aloud: 'what is this place?'). Anyway, the entry has become a kind of teen hangout. I don't do anything (just delete the odd Viagra comment-spam) but it's now more-or-less self-sustaining. I guess it might go on forever...
August 29, 2004
Explorer users, meet my right-hand nav bar...
The esteemed Phil Gyford took about five minutes to figure out why my weblog wasn't working properly in Explorer after about six months of pointless fiddling and winging on my part... Thanks Phil!
July 19, 2004
Dyson's networking needs
Esther Dyson must be the most demanding networker on the planet. It turns out she favours LinkedIn for her day-to-day people wrangling. She has some pretty specific requirements for her networking software. You probably wouldn't go too far wrong copying and pasting them into your own requirements statement if you're building yourself a networking app right now.
June 15, 2004
Social software in the real world?
I'm sort of interested in social software and I've signed up for every networking site since MIT's Firefly and Sixdegrees but I've always thought that it's all a bit academic until we start to see some second-order networking applications – sites whose primary function isn't just... well... networking... but something else, something more specific – like losing weight, for instance, or unloading the contents of your attic on eBay.
David Galbraith alerts me to a really quite nifty new chat application that he's been helping out with called Chatango and David MaCaney, CEO of Dublin-based Cafeslim, is connecting his customers – the slimmers – to help them get more from his weight loss programme. Chatango does IM-style presence detection without a download and that means your chat identity can be an ordinary http URL which – this is the neat bit – means you can paste it into your eBay or Craigslist listings and invite people to 'click to chat'. I've signed up for Chatango (but not for Cafeslim – which is probably the wrong way round) so you can now chat with me (provided I'm online) by clicking here: http://bowbrick.chatango.com.
June 08, 2004
Will the geeks break our democracy?
Geeks are purists. Or at least, most of them are. Pragmatism is tolerated but deprecated. (of course, some people think geeks are autistic but that's another story). Purists (and autistics) find much of the business of being human far too messy and random. This manifests itself in a generalised impatience with the inefficiencies and inequities of human societies, systems and institutions. Democracy is one of the geeks' big irritants. It's obviously a mess. No one would design a system like this – all friction and compromise. Nothing elegant about it. The geeks, consequently, would like to reengineer democracy to better reflect their worldview. To flush out the inefficiencies and replace them with shiny, end-to-end, 'open' methods for translating public opinion directly into legislation and for monitoring the process (keeping the legislators honest).
The latest in a string of very worthy geek interventions is called They Work For You, from the people who brought you FaxYourMP, Public Whip and Downing Street Says. TWFY does a simple thing beautifully. It turns Hansard – parliament's venerable contemporaneous record – into an accessible, searchable record of your representative's appearances in the Commons. Of course, it does a lot more than that, including allowing you to correct your MP's more egregious errors right there in the text, counting votes and marking interesting and important debates so they stand out from the rest.
So far so admirable. Surely no one would argue with making the work of legislators more accessible? I don't know. I find myself wondering whether the democratic institutions we rely on are robust enough to withstand the fire hose of transparency and accountability the democracy hackers are getting ready to turn on it. What the hackers are planning here (and with earlier initiatives) is a 'revolution from within' that could, whether they like it or not, rip up the democratic cobblestones to reveal an unknown and unknowable hyperdemocratic future below. I'm pretty sure that I'm just being neurotic here – more democracy must always be a good thing, right? But what if the system currently has just enough accountability in it to keep it moving. What if more accountability actually slowed it down, gummed it up. Turned it into a machine for producing accountability and not laws? What if the apparently entirely benign hacker plot to tidy up democracy for the common good turned out to be less Socratic dream and more nasty sci-fi fantasy (cue replicants).
June 07, 2004
Right you lot
According to my web site stats, at least 60% of you are viewing this site in one or other version of IE on a PC (85% if you add all those 'unknowns'). Take a look at the picture above (click for a bigger one). If Bowblog doesn't look like the screenshot (i.e. three columns, nicely centred on the page), please let me know and (here's your big test) if you know why it doesn't look right, please tell me. I can't figure it out but assume it's something to do with my stylesheet... There will be a lavish reward.
May 12, 2004
Passenger information
Paul complains that I don't provide a link to a timetable in my entry on The North London Line – so I've added one (although the Silverlink web site is a framed nightmare and Paul would certainly be better off using Matthew Somerville's excellent accessible version of the stupid National Rail timetable). Of course, since I wrote it, nearly two years ago, someone's added a long and interesting entry about The North London Line to Wikipedia, surely the most marvelous publication of any kind available anywhere?
Ad man blogs
Russell Davies used to be something important in online advertising – but that was before anyone had heard of online advertising. These days he's something important in advertising. He's keeping three (count them) weblogs and each is a jewel. I particularly like his two nicely differentiated homages to the greasy spoon, A Good Place for a Cup of Tea and a Think and Egg, Bacon, Chips and Beans. The latter is practically a work of art and should probably be lottery funded. While you're at, check out his 'ordinary' weblog, which is nicely written, clever and interesting. I think Russell is the kind of articulate, engaging bloke weblogs were invented for.
April 16, 2004
tramadol, codeine, acyclovir, propecia, fioricet, levitra, phentermine, adipex, ambien, vioxx, flexeril, wellbutrin, skelaxin, valium, diazepam, alprazolam, viagra, xanax
A small selection (just the prescription medicines, I think) of products advertised in the comment spam I've been deleting from my weblog every day for a couple of months now (just one of the many services I quietly perform on your behalf with no reward and little thanks). I do hope Robin can get that blacklist thingie installed soon!
March 30, 2004
Morton on Mars
I should have know that Oliver "Mapping Mars" Morton would have the edge on the mainstream media for the current blizzard of Mars news – and particularly for the breaking Methane story. Azeem directs me to Morton's incredibly well-informed weblog which is currently running between 48 hours and a week ahead of the broadsheets (add 24 hours for broadcast outlets because they get their stories from the broadsheets). This is a really good example of the power of the best weblog media. Morton is a Mars maniac and knows his planet (although his excellent book is weirdly out of print, according to Amazon, which doesn't seem right given the year we've had). More to the point, his insight is accessible, authoritative and accountable. A mainstream media outlet might be able to provide two from that set but certainly not all three.
March 08, 2004
Defy orthodoxy. Buy something from my new sponsor
You'll have noticed (if you can see my right-hand nav at all, which some of you apparently can't) that my weblog is now sponsored by an Apple dealer and an online liquor store. This seems quite appropriate, given my interests. The new addition, Arthur's Bar, is not your standard bottle shop either – principally, if you ask me, because of one extraordinary product – a blended whisky that costs nearly 150 quid per bottle. Classic Cask is the only 35 year-old blended whisky in the world and Arthur's Bar is the only place you can buy it (they blend it themselves, you see).
Any half-qualified alcoholic will tell you that nobody bothers to keep blended whiskies for more than about twelve years – the bottle of Classic Cask in my drinks cupboard was distilled in 1964 – the year of Coltrane's A Love Supreme and Harold Wilson's first Government. The extraordinary complexity and smoothness (that's the limit of my fancy booze reviewer language right there) of this whisky should be enough to persuade you to remortgage your house for a bottle of something so strange and so lovely. You'll have to take my word for it, though – they don't do free samples.
December 13, 2003
Being creative
Is it reasonable to assume that the net and cheaper, more accessible digital media tools are making us more creative? More to the point, would it be a good thing if we were? Would a more creative society be a better one – more generous (nothing more generous than sticking your neck out in the cause of art), better at problem solving, more enterprising? Pass. No idea. I do know that lots of organisations are investing money in boosting the creativity of their people, though.
They think a more creative workforce will produce better profits. If this is true, isn't it likely that an effort to make the wider population more creative might have a similar effect on the national economy? Could we effectively reduce expenditure on unemployment benefits, anti-depressants and incarceration if we gave more people the warm glow of making something, entertaining someone, expressing themselves? I wrote about the next generation of 'personal creativity tools' in The Guardian yesterday (I was filling in for the legendary Jack Schofield).
December 12, 2003
Pseudowhacking
Listen. Googlewhacking is stupid. Dumb non-phrases that occur only once precisely because they're useless in speech. Come on guys! Now this is more like it – a proper three-word phrase – used in a real sentence that actually means something – that occurs only once on the whole web. I'm going to call it pseudowhacking (if nobody minds, of course).
November 21, 2003
Like my new look?
Handsome, huh? I used Firda Beka's excellent Firdamatic to generate the stylesheet and basic templates and Paul drew the picture of me. I've got to finish detailing the stylesheet, reinstate some odds and ends (like search) and figure out why the new stylesheet seems to kill off my en-dashes – making lots of my entries totally incoherent (I mean more incoherent than usual) – but otherwise I'm pleased with it. Comments please.
November 12, 2003
Endless deferral
Voodoo Pad is one of those applications that promises to get me organised. Of course, I long ago resigned myself to never actually getting organised – in fact, downloading and trying organisers like this one is my substitute for actually getting organised. My Powerbook's hard drive is a graveyard for PIMs, contact trackers, unstructured databases, brainstorming tools, outliners and freeform doodlers – going all the way back, while I'm being honest, to Hypercard in about 1985. Each carried with it the tantalising promise of actually getting organised. None delivered.
The latest crop look like they might be going in the right direction, though (but I've said that before). 'Unstructured' seems to be the keyword these days. Simson Garfinkel's groovy NeXT-derived SBook (if it did Bluetooth I'd dump Apple's Address Book), Casady & Greene's evergreen iData Pro, the classic data shoebox for the Mac (used to be called InfoGenie for you old Macheads – and the admirable C&G just went bust, by the way), Creo's Six Degrees (now available in an IMAP version that'll turn your Mail.app mailboxes into a fast filing system) and now Voodoopad (all resident on my hard drive right now): they all promise to get out of my way and not try to impose any kind of nasty structure on my information.
The whole category plays to the very human desire (a real Freudian fantasy) to get a grip, be in control, impose structure on the increasingly dense and fugitive world of information and, as such, they really rely on the final impossibility of actually getting organised (it's the entropy, stupid). So, since satisfaction is, by definition, impossible, the category has unlimited potential, and Voodoopad's elegance and trendy Wiki structure will win it lots of Geek fans but I'm pretty sure it's just another stop on my endlessly delayed journey towards actually getting organised. Thanks to Azeem for showing me Voodoopad (he reckons he's actually getting organised).
October 22, 2003
Oblomovka Orlowski palaver
Danny's got some exasperated and nicely-phrased Orlowski bait over at Oblomovka. The thing about Orlowski is that he's not an aberration and he won't be going away any time soon. He's what you get when a self-consciously geeky underground phenomenon gets its head above the parapet and attempts to create meaning for a group larger than its creators.
He's an irritant and a bore but he's also quite brave (debunking trendy ideas is sometimes lonely work) and, one of these days, he'll say something really interesting or uncover some genuine elitism or a real plot. In the meantime, he's always an entertaining read.
October 07, 2003
Gibson's got a nifty kettle metaphor
William Gibson has stopped blogging to write a new book. He thinks the two activities are incompatible and has a metaphor that makes me feel a bit sick:“The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.”Obviously, I'm I'm now wondering if blogging is stopping me coming to the boil!
July 01, 2003
Azeem says crap
Appropriately fogey-ish response to blogging from Damian Whitworth in Britain's least wired broadsheet The Times. He's obviously intrigued but trying hard not to sound too keen in case the other fogeys at the paper send him to Coventry. Oh, and Azeem says 'crap'.
June 11, 2003
Blogging blokes at Blacks
Very privileged to have entertained some of the bloggerati at Blacks on Monday night. From left to right, Dan Gillmor, James Crabtree, some sardines on toast (I think they call it 'crostini'), Matt Jones, Vic Keegan (who doesn't keep a weblog but edits Guardian Online which is good enough for me), James Cronin (likewise, but has a hand in many things including STAND and Fax your MP), Simon Waldman, Azeem Azhar, Tom Loosemore and Tom Coates. Although, of course, my guests did all the entertaining and Azeem arranged it all. Click the small pics for bigger ones (the weird, green pics are using the camera's low light setting).
June 03, 2003
Cycling lawyer blogs...
Mark Lloyd has been my lawyer for years and is now keeping an interesting weblog – mostly about sporty things and cycling in particular – Mark's passion. Should be worth watching during the Tour De France. Speaking of the Tour, The Observer's excellent "cheat's guide" is a jaw dropping account of drug abuse, short cuts, bribery and sabotage going back 100 years.
April 21, 2003
Emerging Man
Comedian and geek Samuel Johnson Danny O'Brien has put together a happening of such perfect, involuted cleverness that it takes the breath away. It's basically a sleepover for people attending O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference (and you have to provide your own tent) but, if you get your skates on, you could find yourself singing campfire songs in Danny's garden with some of the top geeks of their generation.
It's meant to marry the social experimentation of Burning Man and the geek credibility of Emerging Tech – events of such sizzling contemporaneity that you'll probably actually burst into flames (appropriately) if you attend. I'd love to go myself except for the scheduled arrival of EmergingBaby in our house on May 1. (Oh, and it's a Wiki).
April 17, 2003
A temporal web?
The semantic web is a powerful thing but it's... well... semantic. Trying to imagine the net in the future, it becomes obvious that we're going to need a temporal web too. Living, as we do, in the first moments of the web's existence, we haven't needed to think much about time. It's as if everything that's taken place so far all happened in a single, cataclysmic moment.
Once the web's lifespan starts to stretch – across generations and centuries – we're going to need an accessible historic record. Something that's 'online' (as in 'not offline in a tape library') and preferably 'inline' (continuous with the current content). In this article for The Guardian I visualise this as a 'giant rewind knob for the web'.
My example is the war in Iraq. Imagine the benefits to humanity in the future of being able to rewind to any point in the rolling popular history we call blogging and take a snapshot of the state of the war and opinion about it. More to the point, with so much information, conversation and collaboration moving onto the net, imagine a future without it.
In the article I also wonder if we, in the UK, shouldn't be pressing the BBC to take on this task. Lots of people think the BBC's proper role on the net should be to boost connection and participation (and there is some ambitious work going on already). Perhaps, as well as promoting communication, the Beeb ought also to be promoting recollection.
(Maybe the techies out there can tell me if this kind of work is already going on. I'm pretty sure Kahle's Way Back Machine is going in the right direction but it's a long way from being fine-grained enough and it certainly can't present historic content 'inline')
April 11, 2003
Many good design-related links here...
About fifty good links on this page from the New Things weblog. I won't bother trying to highlight any. I suggest you just wade in (thanks to Sense for the link).
April 07, 2003
testing moblogging
Thanks to Robin I can now moblog properly! Pictures and words direct to this page from anywhere. Cool.
April 03, 2003
Blogger injured, cameraman killed
On Monday night I blogged BBC Producer Stuart Hughes' excellent Northern Iraq weblog. This is from the BBC the following day:
"A cameraman working for the BBC in northern Iraq has been killed after stepping on a landmine. BBC correspondent Jim Muir and producer Stuart Hughes, who were working with Kaveh Golestan, were also injured in the explosion. The incident happened when the three men and a local translator were driving near the town of Kifri."
His last post before the incident is scarily prescient. Matt sent me the story.
April 02, 2003
Hyper-real panorama
Hans Nyberg's latest 'QTVR of the day' is a suitably hyper-real spherical encounter with a public hearing of the 9-11 Commission in NYC, assembled by Jook Leung. These images are very unsettling. There's something about this totally immersive (and totally mute) imagery that can make even a snapshot of bureaucrats at work strange and enthralling.
(don't even try to load this page in Mozilla on OS X – your machine will lock!)
April 01, 2003
Google hacks
I blogged Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest's Google Hacks at the weekend and decided it was important enough to write up properly for 'Bowbrick at Large' at Guardian Unlimited.
Video phones and weblogging from a warzone
Stuart Hughes is a BBC journalist keeping a real weblog from somewhere in Northern Iraq. He's posting words, pictures and some audio and, amazingly, he has time to surf the web (how does he do that? Via his satphone? That's where my license fee is going, then...) so it's from Stuart that I got this link to a Slate article that answers my questions from the other day about these videophone gadgets. I learn, for instance, that they achieve the 128Kb necessary for a reasonable picture by lashing together two satphone lines.
March 25, 2003
Gawker on the war
What does a slick and frothy Manhattan gossip and media blog like Gawker do in times of war? It covers the war, naturally – and quite well, too.
March 22, 2003
A natural blogger
My friend Paul Murphy's blogging properly now and it's excellent. Just the right balance of the personal and the public. Self-conscious but not pompous. Ironic but not sarcastic. Textbook blogging and very entertaining – and loads of groovy pictures.
March 21, 2003
Blogrolled by DeLong
Brad DeLong is a Berkeley economist and a member of the blogging elite. He's a living (blogging) reminder that sometimes brevity sucks. One of these days I'm going to have to read the twenty yards or so of content here and here and figure out just what kind of economist he really is.
In the meantime I'll be satisfied with some very entertaining writing, titles like chapter heads from a Victorian textbook and about 200 entry categories. I'm inspired by all those categories – he's practically got one for every entry – and why not? Bowblog just showed up in Brad's blogroll which is cool.
March 07, 2003
Oh God, I'm a moonie
Dave Green has got my number. He's written a well-timed (but quite gentle) debunking of our collective blogging obsession and succeeded in making me feel distinctly uncomfortable about my twice-a-day habit, about the usefulness of the things I write and especially about the queasy comradeship of bloggers. We are, after all, cult members. Damn him! (and I can't even trackback to his article!)
March 02, 2003
Bowblog - like reading the Sunday papers on Monday
Couple of good articles from sections of The Observer I don't usually look at. I like the look af Matali Crasset's playful interior and product design in the colour magazine. Of course, you lose the pictures in the online version but there are some here. Some really good sports writing (like I know good sports writing from bad) from The Sports Monthly. LeBron James is the schoolboy basketball player said to be the greatest ever. Tickets for a recent inter-school game went for $2,000 and Nike and Adidas are now scrapping over the sports shoe contract – the kid is likely to pocket $7M once he makes up his mind.
February 26, 2003
Ouch
Bill Thompson comes back stoutly to my sarcastic response to his BBC article about Google and the Bloggers. Read the comments here. The thing is, I usually find it difficult to disagree with Bill on the big issues. It's just that this time I'm pretty sure he's wrong, particularly about blogging. Bill damns weblogs with faint praise when what thinkers and provokers like him ought to be doing is driving the medium forward, creating challenges to the established media and testing the limits of the form, not defending journalists and tired media standards (to the barricades!).
February 23, 2003
Blogger basher
Bill Thompson has flipped. According to this article for the BBC (and in no particular order): blogging is not journalism and will not effect mainstream journalists, link frequency and pagerank are 'just the rule of the mob', Google is storing your personal search data for sinister reasons and we need an 'Ofsearch' to police the search engines.
In fact, he obviously hasn't flipped but this is a good example of a fairly common response to new stuff in general. First, a natural and appropriate resistance to hyperbole and loss of perspective and, second, a defensive reflex that snaps in when something new threatens a hard won worldview. Bill is a genuine UK Internet old-timer and a true believer and I think the scale and pace of change of the blogosphere probably represents a profound wobble for his stable understanding of the way the net works.
I can say this because that's how it feels for me too... In fact, I'll bet every prematurely grey hair on my head (and that's, like, all of them) that blogging is the 'paradigm shift' we were pretty sure was happening back in 93 or 94 but which disappointingly evaporated.
(incidentally, this entry includes my first embedded link to Google Labs' very promising Glossary feature).
February 21, 2003
No substitute for a fat consulting fee
I've just noticed that the sweeties at think tank Demos have given me a heart-warming credit on their new weblog. 'Inpired by Steve Bowbrick' it says. This is in lieu of payment you'll understand...
February 19, 2003
Power laws
Bloggers are fixating on 'power laws'. I've read all the stuff (including Clay's perfectly sane starting point) and it's obviously useful stuff with plenty of predictive power but it's dry as dust. Now this dreary economic concept is going to be rattling round the blogosphere for months and we're going to have to get used to listening to a thousand second-rate interpreters flattening it out and applying it way outside its useful scope. Nothing inherantly reductive about the concept – but something very human and inevitable about its cooption to a simplified mechanical worldview. The reductivists are a bit like the 'pub Darwinists ' I mentioned earlier – expending way too much energy shoe-horning reality into their favourite model. There's something autistic about this obsessive focus on one of the many factors that produce a web site's popularity, currency, connectedness, influence, personality...
I wrote about this – and Richard Sennet's excellent the Formation of Character in a World of Inequality – in my column for today's Guardian.
February 09, 2003
asynchronous pulsation!
Technorati provides evidence of my first ever French inbound link – from Mario, a Head Teacher in Quebec (directeur d'école = Head Teacher?). Thrilling. Better still is Babelfish's translation of the entry in question:
“I like much the idea that evokes "the attentive listening" of the tone of the notebook Web. To find its voice, its stamp of voice as a letter at the post office that one deposits, but which only takes one moment to slip surreptitiously with the screen of those which choose of reading. Emotion in a bottle thrown to the sea that one writes for oneself, certainly, but which titillates curiosity to have a presentiment of the heart of that or of that which will give echo. Provocation, insolence, "rise of milk", sigh, music of bard, idea of genius, lament or denunciation and then also jewel, lucky find, illumination, soft futility, bravado or ode; all that populates the "blogosphère" for the cause of the conversation, with asynchronous pulsation! How I like this wavelength where the ideas, without inopportune interruption, run with floods and return, often with time, sometimes without, but always at named point! Thank you for the inspiration "Guard without-limit"...”
February 07, 2003
My favourite search terms
People arriving at my web site via a search engine are searching for the strangest things. According to my logs the number one search term is "The Gruffalo" which makes sense. Also pretty high up the list are "diy coffee table" (and, of course, "coffee table diy"), "chat rooms for boring gits", "bamber gascoigne birthday" and "good cowhand photos". My favourite, though, is "quotes on being ignored". I'm number 1 result at Google for "bamber gascoigne birthday" and "diy coffee table". With results like those it seems obvious that what I should really be doing here is not rambling on like this but selling Bamber Gascoigne-themed birthday gifts and DIY coffee tables.
February 04, 2003
Bowbrick at large
My latest column for Guardian Online is up. It's headlined Secret of their success and it's about weblogs and the uniquely conversational tone of really good bloggers.
Perkins is among us
If you've never heard of The Red Herring it might be a bit late for you to catch up. For most of the nineties and throughout the tech boom, the Herring was the absolute dead centre of the entrepreneurial universe, typifying a distinctively Californian attitude to business –