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English newspapers have always intrigued and really rather disappointed me. I can read a headline in the tabloids, shake my head and wonder if the idiots reading it really are taken in by the print. The spreadsheets don't get off lightly either. Do people think that the people writing the columns are wise sagely beings who speak for the nation? Wake up and smell the tea bags people.

Today I took Harry to the cinema and stopped off at McDonalds for a quick breakfast. The Daily mail was around and a piece of 'commentary' caught my eye. The story was about Lily Allen, she had been co presenting an award with the loathsome Elton John. I feel bile rise in my stomach as I read on.

Allen had bitten back at the princess when he made a quip about her drinking. Allen angrily replied that she still had her life to live and had 40 years ahead of her. Good comment I thought.

The hissy fitting wig wearing knob end, real name Reginald Dwight then made a retort that was so very clever: " I could still snort you under the table"

Oh how I laughed, how I held my sides at the thought of fat Reg using cocaine. What a great advert for all and sundry. Never mind the massively spiralling drug driven crime on our streets, or the kids driven to the street by the vile grip of class A drugs - everyone stand up and salute the near pensionable age balding bloater - because he can snort Lily Allen under the table. Stop the press, ignore the plight of those in Haiti, because piggy Reg does drugs - hilarious. Or not. The man is a class A turd.

I find Reg Dwight's (I'm not using his silly stage name) attitude and lifestyle sickening to the pit of my stomach.

Sir Reginald Dwight - anagram 'danger whilst rigid' - is no doubt a musical genius, but he's also a detestable moron who is idiotic enough to make such a stupid quip. This from the 'man' who spends hundreds of thousands of pounds on flowers each year - the very thought of that waste of money sickens me. Don't misquote me or think I'm alluding to his homosexual lifestyle - I'm not, it's him, just him. I cannot abide him.

...and the commentary from the paper? They were having a go at Lily Allen for saying she felt depressed. Not a word about fat Reg. Incredible.

Whenever I heard Fat Reg's music before, I cringed. Now I'm going to make an effort to run and switch it off if I can.

I'd love to see Reg stripped of his knighthood. I'd like him to be Jade Goodied. Make him lose his money and while his life away in Tower Hamlets.

Candle in the wind? More like a fat princess covered in charlie... I cannot bear the man. I hope the nation follows suit.

‘’‘’‘’

Dimensions are 36cm in height, 42cm in length and 32cm in width. Can you help find a way to use this crate?

And let’s imagine all the answers we will have to come up with. Like
“How are we going to incorporate non-Coke items in Coca-Cola crates?”

Questions like this spark other questions like “What are the
dimensions of the Coca-Cola crates and bottles used in east Africa?”
and so on.

Can anyone with thoughts, answers or more questions please post them here by commenting? Click here and scroll down.

More from Simon here.

Update:  I’ve also just e-mailed the product design course at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, part of Birmingham City University.  Worth a try! If any of the students pick up on this let me know, I’ll happily praise them to the skies, as I’m sure will others.

The Geek Syndicate has a weblog that will be covering the 2008 Birmingham International Comics Show, with audio interviews promised from some of the big names.

A new “Tales of Creativity” website, from students at Birmingham’s BIAD…

My last post (it's been a busy old week) was about the thin end of the wedge and I wondered what Carol Ann Duffy would say about regarding her poem being taken off the syllabus.

I've now got my answer... she's published a poem named after a teacher who described the first poem as "absolutely horrendous".

Check out what the Guardian says about the whole thing.
http://tiny.cc/duffy

Personally, I think the new poem should go on the syllabus with Education for Leisure and they be taught together. Open up the discussion about censorship with students. What could be better at GCSE than to make students think?

I also love that there's scandal about poetry. It's been too long since people really got passionate about poetry.

::Update::

It's a wonderful poem. Read it here: http://tiny.cc/gcse158

reismenschen

(tags: thericeshow)

paulcanning: How not to do video about recycling

(tags: lgcomms video youtube)

Dave Lee / jBlog » The best reporting at the US elections, from an unlikely source "I found this incredible report. Watch it. To the end. The final few scenes really are gripping stuff." Widgetbox › Times Online All the online widgets created by Times Online on Widgetbox (tags: widgets rss mashup) Get The Times Agenda in Google Calendar - [...]

Not Eastside, however…  Sourced from EGI, this makes me sick: Lisa Pilkington 05/09/2008 10:30 A public inquiry into Birmingham city council’s compulsory purchase order for a 290,000 sq ft shopping centre above New Street station will take place next year. The council wants to take control of the Pallasades mall to enable its £550m redevelopment of the station. Michael [...]

My Clore Fellowship starts in just over a week, and I’ve got lots of thoughts rolling around about what this means, and what I’ll be doing. So I’m thinking them through here… any ideas, let me know.

The Fellowship starts with a two week residential ‘course’ which consists of a very exciting programme of high profile speakers, training, and personal development thinking. I’ve been told that the content is non-blog-safe for the most part but I’ll be posting some personal reactions and thoughts I expect.

However that’s not what’s worrying me. Even with trying to cut down on commitments I’m still incredibily busy and I’m not sure how I’m going to manage to take two weeks out with little or no internet/phone access.

So my approach these last few months is just to get used to not having those things around and not relying on them. It’s quite difficult, but it’s certainly made me put failsafes in place for anything serious that might need attention. And I’m feeling quite confident that it might just be possible for me to not be around for that time and for nobody to actually notice.

However - the thing I am busy on is my new web startup. The work on Odadeo is absolutely on a roll at the moment. I suddenly realised this week that we were ‘polishing’ rather than doing solid development. Tasks have now come down to the ‘can be completed in under a day’ level, which is fantastic. In fact I’d probably be confident in opening the site up as a public beta today. But I’ve decided that that would be unwise without me being around, so it will have to wait a short while.

Meanwhile, Tom, our new community manager, who takes over from Jason now that he’s finished as Graduate Apprentice, will be taking care of the site. He’s been a member of the site since early on, and is the most active user on the site so far. He’s also something of an expert on fatherhood (if all dads aren’t of course) so it’s fantastic to have him to bounce ideas off. We had a great ‘mashup’ meeting this week where we pretty much thought about any API we knew of and whether we could apply it to dads. “Oh hang on. Is that featureland?” was our catchphrase for turning down non-immediate ideas.

So with suddenly being away for two weeks as of next week I’m making sure that anything that I am involved in is going to be handled. As always I have a backlog of correspondence to go through (nothing changes, even with Dubber’s help), but in the main I’m confident that the sky won’t fall in on anything I’m responsible for.

However, what about my little girl? I’m going to miss her, especially seeing her pick up new words and behaviours. And I’m guessing it’ll be strange for her too.

So, I’m going to spend a few evenings before I go, with a video camera, recording me reading some of my favourite kids’ stories so she can watch them for bedtime. I’m actually considering just putting them on Youtube and seeing what reaction I get. I think it’s a nice idea for any dad to do for their kids when they are away for long periods, and with iMovie you can burn simple videos to DVD very easily.

I’ve also suddenly rediscovered an interest in PlayDoh, which is great fun to mess around with before the day starts. I can now make a pretty realistic looking cow in about thirty seconds, and Imogen seems to love planes, cats, pigs and today’s chicken that I created. Good fun - another potential YouTube hit?!

Pete Ashton always says ‘a blog is not a diary’ but it seems to me that that’s what my blog is becoming, and is potentially going to become even more with starting Clore. I guess a blog needs to move and change over time, and now that I have Twitter my posting rate has reduced it’s nice for me to put together more prosaic ramblings once in a while. So continued apologies if you were expecting useful insights into Clore in this post.

In short - I’m worried about the time commitment, worried about how to support my family and lifestyle whilst taking a chunk of time out for personal development, I’m even worried about huge opportunities passing me by, but I’m also very excited about what Clore is going to be.

Tonight I met up with the West Midlands group of Clore alumni, and they set my mind at rest of a few issues, but also pointed out that Clore is going to be a total shock to the system. In one year 20 of 23 people taking part just quit their jobs to concentrate solely on Clore.

I’m not in the position where I want to or could do that, especially with a little baby coming in January. But what does that mean? Is this going to be as big a time commitment as they make out?

I’ve already decided to stretch my time on the programme over a slightly longer period. Maybe it needs to be longer…

Basically it all comes down to what happens in a week’s time. What will I learn? What will I decide? What will I decide I want to do? And with who? And for what?

Some big questions.

But my focus right now is on Odadeo and making it a success - growing the team to build on the beta we’ve been working so hard on, completing this phase of the project to timescale (we’re about a month ahead), and most importantly securing further investment to make the thing fly. I feel a pitch coming on…

Exciting times.

Ex collegue of mine Matt Cashmore is about to blog motorbiking to Russia for charity, some of which he'll be doing as audio by phone - here's his handy guide to doing just that (the phone thing, not the motorbiking): "Sound simple doesn’t it. Just find a way of leaving a message on something like skype, then get it to encode your audio, upload it to the server and generate the XML." [link]

Of All The People In All The World is a unusual and fantastical piece of art/theatre created by Birmingham-based Stan’s Cafe. They have a grain of rice to represent every person alive today and the piles are continually re-arranged to represent different statistics - it’s far better that I’ve made it sound here, go and check out their site. After gaining plaudits around the world it’s finally being set up in Birmingham from the 13th September - 5th October.

Unlike some artists in this copyright obsessed age, Stan’s Cafe are encouraging people to take photos or video as they visit, and now to share them on the internet.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours finishing off a site - the rice show -  with Nick Booth that attempts to collate everything said and any media made around the show — a sort of automatic collective memory, and also a great forum for discussion on the ideas behind the show.

It’s a lot simpler than UpYerBrum (which does aggregation, but also voting), it’s a lightweight WordPress installation, with a plugin to fetch RSS feeds and a little custom jiggery-pokery to make sure that everything sits up front. It fetches Flickr, YouTube, blogs, news, twitter activity and also Radio Rice - which is a super online version of the stats from the show.

Do go if you get chance — and tag anything you take or make thericeshow.

Yesterday I was interviewed by BBC Midlands Today about the state of the region's economy.

These things are always tricky to gauge. You may be interviewed for ten minutes, but you know that only a few seconds of what you said will get into the report.

I was trying to strike a balance: I didn't want to come across as the next Alistair Darling and be talking the region into recession, but I also didn't want to be overly positive and come across as naive.

I'm not sure the end result achieved that objective, what do you think:

At least a shot of the Birmingham Post website was seen by three million people. Sliver lining?

To mark 1000 posts on this blog, I thought I’d reflect on what I’ve learned since post #1.

1. Blogging is not ‘writing a blog’. Blogging is linking and commenting. Any writing is a bonus.
2. Regular posting is important…
3. But quality posting is even more important. Spending a week or more on a single post can be one of the most important things you ever do.
4. First knowledge, then analysis, then ideas.
5. A picture is worth a thousand words. More importantly, a picture is worth a thousand words in two hundred countries. The fact that readers don’t need to speak English to understand what you’re communicating can make a word-free post - or at least one with a good image - your most successful one.
6. For similar reasons, video works. It may not be search engine-friendly, but if people can embed it the word is more likely to spread.
7. When video meets conversation, good stuff can happen.
8. Everyone looks ugly on video. Get over it.
9. Online video is not online TV
10. Podcasts work better when there’s more than one of you
11. It takes time. Sometimes years. Persistence counts.
12. Being early matters
13. A big idea travels far
14. Pingback/trackback is a wonderful thing, a form of distribution news websites are still struggling to match. What can be more interesting than someone who is interested in you?
15. Cliques and old boys’ networks exist in the blogosphere too
16. We are too fucking Anglo-American
17. Language is a massive barrier
18. BASIC principles matter
19. Social bookmarking makes researching a post much easier
20. The best reason to blog is not to show everyone else what you know, but to find out what everyone else knows
21. RSS is one of the most undervalued technologies in the world. Once you understand what to do with it, you can bring the world to your desktop, your mobile, and your blog, and vice versa.
22. A blog doesn’t open doors for you, it just gives you the idea to try knocking.
23. When people Google you, it saves a lot of time explaining things.
24. Blogs are just one part of a social media ecology. Half the stuff that used to go on this blog now goes on Twitter; more goes on Delicious; and some on Flickr and on Seesmic.
25. Don’t get me started on FriendFeed, Plurk, Jaiku, etc.
26. Humour is effective, but not everyone will get it
27. I seem to like linking on verbs
28. Streaming live video from your mobile is a pretty amazing thing when you think about it
29. Streaming live video from your mobile uses up your battery quickly
30. Web browsing on your mobile also uses up your battery quickly
31. If you’re moblogging an event, bring a power lead, an extension lead - and a spare phone
32. The N95 kicks iPhone’s ass
33. (But I’m prepared to be persuaded otherwise)
34. Wordpress plugins are addictive
35. Firefox extensions are addictive
36. Signing up for beta web services is addictive
37. I don’t really care about Twitterspam
38. A simple, fun idea can be around the world in minutes
39. If you want to campaign against something, you already have the technology
40. If you want a service, create it yourself
41. Google is the biggest popularity contest in the world
42. When you realise you don’t have a readership - you have a community - then you also realise you can mobilise, and get things done.
43. Technology is easy; community is hard
44. Meeting in person is important: I read blogs by people I’ve met much more often than those I haven’t
45. Geography still matters
46. Birmingham has a lot of bloggers
47. Liveblogging and Twitter-blogging are not the same thing
48. Privacy is a fluid concept: just because it’s in the public domain doesn’t mean it’s not private
49. Wordpress.com is better than Blogger
50. Wordpress.org is better than Wordpress.com (see Thing 34)
51. Content is not king.
52. Conversation is king.
53. Conversation is the kingdom.
54. We shouldn’t try to be the media
55. If someone is sending you a press release about something, you shouldn’t blog about it
56. As a journalist, blogging is a good way to rediscover the joy of journalism
57. Blogging is also a great way to rediscover how great having a good editor can be
58. Do what you do best and link to the rest
59. Blogs aren’t worth dying for. That’s what alcohol is for.
60. Setting yourself a maximum number of posts per day is a good idea
61. Setting yourself a set time to look at your RSS subs every day is also a good idea
62. If you rely on third party services, prepare for the rug to be pulled from under your feet
63. If you publish the comments widget high up on your blog, more people comment
64. A blog without comments is broken
65. A site that has comments, but edits or buries them, is not just broken, it’s malevolent.
66. Leave posts open ended if you want people to comment
67. Leave a post at the top of your site for more than a day if you want people to comment
68. Being transparent about your sources is not only good journalism, it’s good distribution.
69. The search engine optimisation industry is the new snake oil. I can tell you all you need to know about SEO in five minutes
70. Although it might take me another five hours to answer the resulting questions
71. If you expect to make lots of money from blogging, you are either naive, stupid, or Robert Scoble.
72. If you expect to make lots of money from blogging, don’t expect to make it through advertising
73. Being read by a few, key, people can be worth more, professionally, than having lots of visitors
74. Being frequently linked to can be worth more, commercially, than having lots of visitors
75. Beware advertisers bearing text-based gifts, or generous offerings of ‘free’ articles. Understand linkspam
76. Be aware that you have an ego
77. Be aware that everyone else has an ego
78. Unconferences are great
79. There’s only so much talking you can do. Sometimes you have to do something.
80. There should be more money available to do something
81. Ideas aren’t a problem. Knowing which ones to pursue is
82. Only 10% of Americans read blogs
83. But 26% of Americans write blogs
84. How does that work?
85. Blogs are far more ethnically representative than mainstream media
86. People may not trust the print and broadcast media, but they trust online news even less
87. The 1-9-90 rule
88. Rushing off a blog entry just before bed is a bad idea
89. Rushing off a blog entry hours before your wife goes into labour is not a good idea either
90. Some news travels faster than an aftershock
91. People don’t need managers to organise them - just connections
92. When I can record a video comment straight from my mobile phone, I’ll be a happy man
93. Don’t underestimate the power of corporatisation
94. Don’t underestimate the power of big corporations
95. Don’t underestimate the power of governments
96. If, after all this, we have to go back to living in caves and eating rats, it’ll be a real shame
97. Lists have become the biggest cliche in blogging and the most shameless tactic for getting to the top of delicious/digg/reddit.
98. But people still read them.
99. Have you bookmarked this yet, by the way?

1000. I can’t count.

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A month or so ago, sitting in my flat in London one evening, I discovered that my Sky dish can pick up BBC regional television. Honestly, I've been watching Sky television for so many years but I didn't know it could do that.

What a gem, I thought. No more tracking down to Birmingham to see what's in and what's out - or what's 'kicking', as they say. Instead I can do it simply by the click of a button. In actual fact, you can find out local television news of any part of our sceptred isle. All you have to do is readjust the settings with your remote control - simple.

So being a Birmingham Post columnist, I tuned into BBC's Midlands Today. Imagine my horror, that the old presenters - including one who was voted Britain's top bore on television - are still, after what seems like decades, sitting there looking smug and making lame, inane aside comments to viewers.

Poor Midlands' viewers, I bet they must feel like throttling them.

I would.

But it got me thinking how dead regional news format is. Midlands Today has the same structure as other BBC regional programmes - there's no difference whatsoever. For instance, there's the obligatory boring sixty year old male, sitting with a pretty young thing of about twenty. They both look cheesy, 'adorable', with her throwing loving, glances at him in a girlie smitten kind of way.

Oh please, can we not have such sickening display of femininity - especially not during dinner.

And I've also got a problem with weather girls.

Why is it that they all look alike, dress alike and talk alike? I'd be hard pressed to differentiate them because they exist without a personality.

And do the likes of Shefali Oza or Central's Emma Jesson actually think their viewers believe they studied meteorology? Come on, who are they kidding?

I'm also against one or two 'girls' whose dubious style of clothing leave a lot to be desired - you know who I'm talking about!

And why is it that GMTV has recently started showing weather girls from top to bottom strutting about in over-sized stiletto heels? What's that got to do with the weather?

I've got nothing against people growing old gracefully or young women with brains. But I am against bores and air-headed women on television news programmes who are robbed of all sense of character and personality and do nothing more than patronise viewers.

My point is that BBC bosses should bring fresh intelligent faces to their programmes not the same old haggard looking men or women approaching sixty but dressed as if they're if they're going out on the pull. I mean, for heaven's sake, there is something called class!

Now I’ve got the bug for a bit of coding (pardon the expression) - I thought it best to set up my own publically viewable bzr repo.  Launchpad is a great platform for collaboration, but I feel like some of the stuff I’m working on doesn’t belong on Launchpad.  The projects I’m planning to work on have a shelf life of about a week, so I don’t want to clutter up Launchpad until I know I have an applications that others will want to collaborate on.  With bzr, when that time comes, it’ll be easy to do.

So today, I spent a whole 10 minutes (I was amazed at how easy it was) setting up my bzr branch..  it’s up at http://bzr.zrmt.com (using Launchpad’s very same loggerhead browser).

If you want to check out the code, or branch it.  I’d recommend just dropping me an email for now.. I’ll link it to Launchpad so that we can all contribute the code to the same codebase.. after all.. that’s what it’s all about.

Oh bliss; Amazon got Spore into my letterbox at about noon today, and it’s installing now. Perfect for one of the wettest afternoons of the so-called “summer”. One thing that stuck me immediately about the DVD cover — a 12+ age rating by PEGI, given due to… “depictions of violence”. I haven’t played the game yet, but judging from the in-depth reviews, that seems about as odd and prudish as slapping a “12+” rating on Tom & Jerry cartoons.

Update: the game installed well, connects to online servers easily, and plays like a dream on Vista. There’s no anti-aliasing in the graphics, but those with Nvidia graphics-cards can force this fairly vital feature “on” using the free Nhancer. The anti-aliasing setting “Combined + 8xS” worked best for me, with a screen running at 1920 x 1200px…

Beautifully put by Jon over at Birmingham: It’s Not Shit:

Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis is set in “the extraordinary Gothic skyscrapers of a corporate city-state, the Metropolis of the title. Society has been divided into two rigid groups: one of planners or thinkers, who live high above the earth in luxury, and another of workers who live underground toiling to sustain the lives of the privileged.”

Birmingham 2008 has parallels according to this clip on the ol’ YouTubes:

Vid made by vjdelsyd.

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£130m Grassroots Grants scheme opens its doors to small local voluntary and community groups

(tags: vcsmatters)

Ever in search of the video soundbite and in an attempt to look concerned about 'communities,' David Cameron will be in Birmingham on Monday as part of a programme being made for Panorama.

While the BBC have managed to assemble a collection of suitably diverse people against which to show Dave, they apparently struggled to find a white man or woman between 20 and 50. I'd have applied myself, but they didn't want anyone with strong political views. Nothing that might challenge Little Lord Toryboy seems to be the order of the day.

Only a couple of weeks ago, Dave was busily engaged in diplomacy, threatening the Russians with the most appalling sanctions - being banned from Selfridges, apparently. If only Chamberlain had thought of that when negotiating with Adolf, how different history might have been.

But then he's not known for the depth of his thinking. Challenged this week in advance of the government's rescue package for housing, his only idea was to recycle the abolition of stamp duty.

I had a sudden breakthrough today concerning my artwork. I’ve always found it hard to brand it and find some sort of logo or common theme to represent it. This isn’t to say that all artists should have to brand themselves, but having some sort of consistency in your artwork/style(s) can help people relate to it and understand it better.

Today I finally created a sort of avatar to represent myself artistically. It’s a very simple avatar, but then why should it have to be complicated (just like that sentence structure)?

With this I can now finally push ahead with creating branded promotional material *sigh* and just generally feel good about my practice!

Spore’s executive producer, who presided over a £25-million development budget (some say £43m) and years of development, spills the beans about additional online features. As well as the bean-counting basics (t-shirts, mugs, mobile phone games, yawn), there’s a Spore-branded in-browser Comic Book Creator app, and a Facebook application to show off your creatures.

And the interview also has some heavy hints that future expansion packs will not just be things like flora editors, 3D figurine services, and interfaces with playground playing-card games (all mooted previously), but expansions that could fundamentally deepen the gameplay so Spore appeals more to hardcore PC gamers…

“We designed Spore so that we could take any area of the game deeper and provide even more engrossing experiences, adventures, and activities. Expect to see us add depth to gameplay, enhance the editors, and increase the kinds of strategic choices that impact the game play”

So far, the shallow level of the gameplay has been a constant criticism in magazine reviews — magazines aimed at hardcore gamers.

Also an intriguing mention of a possible taxonomy add-on…

“Members on our team have been studying cladistics. You know, “How would we ultimately categorize all of the species that have been uploaded to our Sporepedia?”"

And on the eve of this crucial moment for the future of PC gaming, one that will hopefully bring in millions of non-gamers to start playing videogames, even The Sun newspaper gets in on the act with a review — which will surely help shift another 250,000 copies in the UK.

This is all fascinating stuff to someone who teaches videogames; I really hope that someone’s planning to write a heavyweight academic book on Spore’s development, economics, and audiences — it’ll make an absorbing case-study of an industry on the verge of becoming the biggest form of entertainment media on the planet.

With just (only just) over a week to go before Artsfest the programme of events has just been released on the website.

With 500 or so events scheduled, picking through the programme isn’t easy but there is at least a ‘recommended’ section on the homepage.  When I get a chance I’ll have a flick through and pick out the bits that I think look most interesting.

Volunteers are still needed, by the way.

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Pop on over to Rhubarb Radio to check out the live stream for Birmingham’s newest radio station.

For the time being you can’t listen through your web browser, but will need to use your media player of choice (iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, whatevs).

There are plenty more bits and pieces to come on the site; this is a very early version with the music being provided automagically - at the moment I’m listening to a dubby-breaksy kinda mix.

There’s still plenty of time to get involved with Rhubarb Radio and you can check the development on the Rhubarb Radio blog which is providing a really interesting insight into how a collaborative project can come together.

Congrats to Mark Steadman who’s put the site and live stream together.

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I’ve been feeling a bit off-colour the past couple of days, so apols for the lack of decent posting.  If anything’s going to raise my spirits it’s the prospect of a sodding great whale and a huge robot both turning up in the city.  It’s like Power Rangers or something.

The former comes courtesy of Claudia Losi’s Balena Project as presented by Ikon Gallery (and previously alluded to).  A 25ft cashmere whale will be deposited by the escalators in The Mailbox from 24 Sept to 26 Oct.  This is what it looks like:

Hmm, so it doesn’t look like a fearsome, city-levelling villain, more like me flopped on my sofa feeling sorry for myself.

Meanwhile, flyers for Hello Digital (a mere 6 weeks away and still no-one knows quite what it is) will apparently be distributed around the Bullring tomorrow by a giant robot.  Brilliant!

I’ll write something about Hello Digital when I know what’s going on but details have been trickling out:

• It’ll be happening predominently at Millennium Point and will be free to attend
• SCAMP will kick things off on the first night with an “electro-acoustic and live visual performance”
• An international digital conference called ‘Hello World’ will take place on 23-24 October
• There’ll be an interactive ‘Field of Light‘ from the Plus Expo people, controllable via a microsite (this sounds dead cool)
• Capsule’s ‘Home of Metal‘ project will launch at Wolverhampton Art Gallery on Saturday 25 Oct
• Baskerville: The Animated Movie will get it’s premiere
• Killriculum seems to involve getting kids to watch scary short films while lying in coffins
• Digital Storytelling is “a touching vision of the world we live in”. Hmm, sounds very worthy
• The Light House in Wolverhampton, in association with 4Talent, will be screening “contemporary and classic film from the Film4 back catalogue”

So far the Hello Digital blog and Twitter are up and running and the main site is due to go live any minute now.  Meanwhile here’s the flyer:

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The social enterprise behind Hero rats has just won a £500,000 Skoll Foundation grant to develop its work using rats to sniff out threats to humans from landmines to disease. You can adopt one of the little critters for 5 euros a month.  Christmas present? Read more here and hat tip here.

Brilliant; the nearby Post Office that I use, a small two-counter affair with a nice ‘village feel’ to it and its surroundings and with easy/safe bike-locking at the local art-house cinema, has won the “best in the UK” title.

Speaking of which, a new creative commons typeface that’s based on the edges of stamps…

[ Hat-tip: Substrakt ]

One of the great treats of going to Brazil is a trip by boat to swim in the river. We find a nice spot with a sandy river beach, ignore the resident caiman, and pile in to the caramel coloured water. The water isn't cold, exactly, but it feels cool after the roasting heat of the sun. I love the tropics, but don't care for the heat very much, so I value any opportunity to get cool. The current is surprisingly strong, so you can use the river like a natural, water-treadmill. You thrash away as hard as you can, then find that you've made barely any progress relative to the bank, but when you've swum a little way, you can let yourself drift back, to start again.

The visibility under the water is very low, which is slightly unnerving. We know for sure that there are a lot of piranhas in the water, and every now and again you get a little, gentle nibble on a limb or your back, which keeps you on your toes. The reputation of piranhas is much more ferocious than they are (for a start, many species are not carnivorous), and it's quite safe as long as you don't have any open wounds. Similarly, the caiman just keep out of your way.

I know that it's not an efficient stroke, but I think that breaststroke is wonderful for wild swimming. You can see where you are going and hear all the bird calls bouncing off the water. As you look ahead, your sweeping hands slice the calm, virgin water cleanly, making you feel as if you're the first person ever to swim in the water. Even if you're swimming with others, you can point yourself towards a bit of open water and it's just you, your hands and the river. Bliss.

How could Shakespeare get Internet Social? - I've been working with Mark Ball of the RSC on a research project about how culture organisations can engage with online communities. This is the first of a few posts. Comments and ideas very welcome!

Yum, a tasty little photography show in Wolverhampton, Gingerfest. The show runs through September in the Quadrant Lounge on Lichfield Street, and celebrates those lucky enough to have ginger hair (I’m not being sarcastic here), in the form of 25 prints + a book by David Rann which also documents the project and people’s stories. Last night saw the launch event, including…

“the launch of my book that accompanies/documents the series of photographs and some of the stories behind it.”

… and it featured (of course) carrot cake and ginger beer.

David Rann’s series of photos is online here.

The first crop of substantial Spore reviews are in, written by those who have played the game up to a significant level: IGN (UK); CNET (USA); MTV Multiplayer blog (USA); PC Gamer magazine (UK); PC PowerPlay magazine (Australia); EuroGamer; and an excellent thoughtful Games Radar review by Kristen Salvatore, which has perhaps one of the most perceptive comments, judging from what Will Wright has said about the game at demos…

“Where is a tutorial telling me the “right” way to do this? And then I realized: games have tutorials. Toys don’t. Kids don’t consider the “right way” to play with a toy — they just amuse themselves with it. […] I now understand that this is the crux of enjoying Spore: just play. […] And once I understood that Spore’s gameplay mechanics were never going to rise above the very basic — and that what I’ve been expecting of Spore is not what Spore is trying to be — I had a damned good time. This isn’t a game that rewards you for your ability to beat a [hard] game, but rather one that rewards you just for playing.”

It’s interesting how each review pinpoints different source games as being the inspiration for different stages of Spore. And these in turn are almost all different games than the ones Will Wright has identified in interviews and talks.

Spore’s music and sound-design get universal acclaim — excellent news for Brian Eno.

 

Under the new Government proposals announced yesterday, first time buyers with income of no more than £60,000 per year will be able to borrow 30% of the cost of their first home from the Government provided it is a new home. This loan will be interest free for 5 years.

The question then arises "is this a long term solution to the current problems in the housing market?"

Let us assume our potential purchaser is a single male earning £60,000 who borrows £150,000 (2.5 x salary) from his local building society and £65,000 under the newly announced loan scheme. Provided that he has funds available to meet the additional costs such as legal fees, stamp duty and removal expenses, he will be able to purchase a £215,000 property.

So far so good! But read on ...

The net income after tax and NI of our first time buyer will be just over £41,000; mortgage repayments will be circa £1,000 per month.

The main problem becomes how to meet normal living expenses and repay the £65,000 scheme loan. If he wants to repay the £65,000 at the end of the five year interest free period, he will have to find an additional £13,000 per year. This means that a total of £25,000 out of his £41,000 disposable income will be going to pay for his home.

With council tax and other living costs it seems highly improbable that this will be achievable for many people.

How therefore is the £65,000 going to be repaid? The only information we have from the Government is that if the loan is not repaid at the end of 5 years it will attract an interest charge (rate yet to be confirmed). There is no indication whatsoever of how much longer the loan will be allowed to remain in force if it cannot be repaid.

Is the Government therefore in danger of merely deferring the problem for first time buyers for five years?

One could be forgiven for thinking that the Government is banking on the housing market recovering to the point where, in five years time, borrowers under the scheme will be able to go to 'normal' sources of mortgage finance to repay the loan. But is that not the same mistake banks have made in the past in lending heavily in a rising market?

It is vital that the Government announces clearly and unequivocally what the position will be in five years time for those borrowers who are not able to repay loans made under the scheme. Will they, fore example, be prepared for the loan to continue in the long-term, or alternatively to take an equity stake in the property on a "shared ownership" basis?

What about the couple earning £30,000 each. They will also be within the scheme. Their joint net income after tax and NI will be circa £45,000 per year. An improvement on £41,000, for the single person, still not enough to allow that £65,000 loan to be repaid at the end of 5 years.

Also what happens in these circumstances if they have children and one of them has to give up work or work part time - resulting in less money available?

Surely the long term solution must be sensible lending policies that take account of all eventualities and do not rely upon a housing market continuing to rise in value at the same rate that has been enjoyed in recent years.

There is one very important thing that the Government can do to help matters and that is to ensure that local councils are more moderate in the demands they place upon developers seeking planning permission for new housing sites. A significant contributory factor to higher price increases in recent years is the increasing Section 106 agreement demands that developers are forced to accept.

Under Section 106 agreements developers can be called upon to contribute to social housing, educational facilities, recreation facilities and infrastructure costs (such as roads and roundabouts).

In the past developers have not objected to reasonable demands in this area, but in recent times local councils have increasingly seen new developments as a major source of funds for them to meet, not only legitimate costs associated with the development, but also the cost of other amenities for the local population generally.

The Government now needs to recognise that these costs have to be recovered from somewhere and that means either from the developer's profits and / or increased house prices.

In the current market, developers have to reduce prices not increase them, and are making very little profit (if any); if there is no curtailment of local authority demands, sites will simply not be developed, ultimately further aggravating the housing shortage.

Has the time not now come for the Government to intervene with local authorities to ensure that their actions are not making the problem worse?

Over at sister blog JournalismEnterprise.com there’s an interview with Rue89 co-founder Pierre Haski. Rue89, a French news website, “doesn’t live off advertising. The cash flows from 4 sources:” Website design (50%), advertising, third-party services, and contributions from users (the tip-jar model). “The ad money is “out of reach” for a mid-sized player such as Rue89 and “it’s unclear if it will be in the future”.”

Read the full post (by Nicolas Kayser-Bril) here. We’re always planning other interviews - if you want to conduct one for JournalismEnterprise.com, let me know.

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Microsoft and Future Laboratory imagine what Birmingham might look like in 2033, if enough of us start working from home and on mobile devices. New St. Station to be replaced by swimming pools, apparently, and what looks like an enormous pier/diving-board. Let’s hope someone told MACE.

Google’s excellent Picasa 3 picture-indexing software is available as a beta (Windows only). Ars Technica takes it for a test-drive…

“A unique new feature that Picasa 3 presents to users with a first-run wizard is the ability to take over Windows Explorer’s duties as an image viewer. […] Double-clicking an image in Windows Explorer will evoke a dimming overlay over the desktop and any open applications, displaying a border-less full version of the photo with a slick scaling animation. A media strip sits below, just above the Windows task bar, containing thumbnails of other images in the folder and basic navigation controls.”

It works beautifully for me, and is a fine system-wide replacement for things like Vista’s own Photo Gallery or for tired commercial apps like Firehand etc. It’s a beta, yes; but a Google beta (which means it’ll probably be that way until about 2038).

The accompanying Picasa Web Albums service has also had a brush-up. Just what you need for your 246 pictures of flying jellyfish.

I’ve blogged before about the problem with ignoring comments. But recently “marketing man gone native” blog Bloggerheads has been providing a rather stronger case.

Julie Moult is a journalist who wrote a particularly poorly informed non-story for the Daily Mail about UK MP Hazel Blears being Googlebombed (in short, Blears wasn’t Googlebombed at all: the top result for her name just happened to be a humorous image).

The Bloggerheads blogger (’Manic’), frustrated by its inaccuracies, posted a comment on the story correcting it. Because that’s what comments are for, right?

Apparently not.

The comment was not published. So Manic took things up a notch.

He posted a lengthy - and search engine optimised - blog entry - Julie Moult is an idiot - to demonstrate his points:

“I think with a quiet word to my readers and a few other web users, I could easily have the entire front page for ‘julie moult’ in Google Images filled with images telling the world that Julie Moult is an idiot… and if she thinks really, really hard about it, she might just begin to understand that what enables/powers the eventual result isn’t magic or trickery, but instead Google detecting a genuine public response to my appeal and her own damn articles”

Just over an hour after publishing, his post was the top result on Google for the search ‘Julie Moult’. Now, as predicted, the whole page of results is also filled with similar entries.

Yesterday he published an update taking things up another notch - this time targeting the Daily Mail itself.

The problem? Despite the fact that “tens of thousands” of readers had seen Manic’s post (including “people at 36 different workstations at Associated Newspapers,”) the article has not been updated - and not a single comment has been published.

“After thousands and thousands of visitors that have dropped by knowing that there is something wrong with this article, not one comment has been published about it and not one change has been made.

“And if that’s not bad enough, The Daily Mail then go on to lie about it:

“”No comments have so far been submitted”…?

“What a pack of lying bastards.”

He’s now inviting readers to help document “the lies and falsehoods of the Daily Mail (focusing on a subject, speciality or columnist of your choosing)” and get Daily Mail Watch to the top of the Google search for Daily Mail.

They’re hitting the Daily Mail where it hurts - on search engines - and who can blame them? It is incredibly frustrating for any reader to put the effort into posting a useful comment on a news website only to see it disappear into oblivion. I know - it happened to me when I also published a comment correcting a Daily Mail article last February (worse, Martin Belam’s comment was edited to remove criticism*).

The lesson behind all this is best left to Manic himself:

“Just so you’re aware that your notoriously self-serving comment moderation policy does have its hidden costs; normally you lot wouldn’t be worth the time and effort, but your ignoring/deleting my quite reasonable comment response to your article annoyed me just long enough for this idea to take shape. There, now aren’t you glad that you censored a polite comment pointing out an obvious flaw?”

*UPDATE: It seems Belam’s full comment was eventually reinstated, lower down the comments and with a timestamp the day after Belam blogged about it.

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Students and a lecturer at the German Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences have put together a 60Mb test PDF booklet (non-direct link) of samples, for testing print-on-demand book printing services…

“a test book researched and produced […] during an intensive two-day workshop with London-based designer James Goggin (Practise). The book’s intention is to act as a calibration document for testing colour, pattern, format, texture and typography. Exercises in colour profile (Adobe RGB/sRGB/CMYK/Greyscale), halftoning, point size, line, geometry, skin tone, colour texture, cropping and print finishing provide useful data for other designers and self-publishers to judge the possibilities and quality of online print-on-demand”

This, and an initial proof-copy or three, should get you a long way toward a reasonably satisfying POD print quality. Just don’t expect miracles, since they’re not what you’re paying for.

[ Hat-tip: Drawn ]

VoluntaryNews » Item » Scholarships for Cranfield MBA

(tags: vcsmatters)

Report 103: Your journal on creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business

Techniques for encouraging story telling to help develop new ideas. Reminds me a bit of some work we did with Stan's Cafe http://www.birminghamfutureschool.org.uk/

(tags: storytelling)

After working on my own php + mysql system for Purchase Order Generation, I realised that in order to get the code ‘right’ - I’d need to rewrite it multiple times in order to utilies the Object Orientated advantages.  After rewriting a single page about three times, each time improving my code and making it more scalable, I felt that I was wasting my time.. as each time I finished it, I’d improved myself sufficiently to see a better way of doing things. How annoying.

For the last few months, I’ve been looking to Django.. not for this project - but as something to be used for designing some private websites.  It looked neat, used python (and language that I find quite intuitive) and a few guys from SBLUG used it.. so I knew I had some people to go to for support.  However, my first few attempts at the tutorial involved me really immersing myself in the framework.. and having not used a framework before, I really wanted to undestand the entire structure of what I was doing.

Finally, I was able to designate a portion of my time to this new Django project.  Since my php+mysql project needed rewriting, I thought Django would be a good way to kickstart that.. and I wasn’t wrong.  I don’t think I’d have had much success had this been my first exposure to Django, but I managed to get things ticking over quite smoothly.  I went through creating my models and populating the database with ease.  There were a couple of problems that I had to get the guys in #django, and the lovely Danux from SBLUG to help me with.

Despite all that, what had taken me a few rewrites to do in php+mysql was running great in Django.  I’d even managed to set things up so that the functonality I needed could be provided entirely thorough the admininstration interface.  Coupled with the brilliant contributed permissions and user/group modules - I was able to set everything up exactly how I wanted.. with much more functionality that I could have hoped to acheive using my previous approach.

So, God Bless Django.. and I hope that this is the beginning of a fantastic partnership.

 

all my code is available on Launchpad.. www.launchpad.net/~andylockran

Well it seems I have contracted Django fever, a disorder where by I just can't stop making things in Django. During my last blog post I went off to snipurl as normal and created a link to put in to my Twitter. I thought, "I should be able to just enter my Twitter details and have this put straight onto my account, rather than the tabbed madness of cut and pasting I've become accustomed to."

I had a look around for such a site that let me do this but generally found they were either too bulky, i.e. offering more than just URL posting, or had 'this app is asleep' or something on their homepage. Realising that it would be incredibly easy to create such an app in Django I stopped behind after work and began to create Twitit.

I couldn't find a decent domain so I had to go with info. I am well aware that of all the TLD's .info is perhaps one of the longest, but the URLs created, with hash are no longer than those of snipurl, so whose complaining?

Anyway, I'm sure I'll write more over the coming days, but in the meantime, Twitter users feel free to have a play with the site and out forward any suggestions / comments you may have about it!

Discuss    Comment

Now that Gustav in New Orleans has passed without - thankfully - causing too much damage, I wonder if like me you thought the city's Mayor, Ray Nagin, was being rather dramatic when he told his citizens to get their 'butt out' because 'the storm of the century' was coming.

He was also heard warning those who were reluctant to leave that they must make sure that they keep an axe with them to chop their way out of the roofs of their own houses.

Oh dear.

What is it about the Americans that makes them go over the top? Why can't they be like the British?

I mean, how silly the Mayor must now be feeling for using such over-charged Hollywood language as if he'd watched more than his fair share of disaster movies!

Instead of turning to Hollywood, perhaps he should have taken a lead from British television. The lesson here is simple. As Jack Jones (played by Clive Dunn) in Dad's Army used to say, 'Don't panic, Captain Mainwaring, don't panic!' Or like Dot in Eastenders he should have simply put the kettle on!

Because, let's face it, Gustav was just a storm in a tea cup!

The story so far…

Google release a browser. The whole world of people who care about such things go “Oooh! Shiny!”

Someone reads the End User License and doesn’t like what they find, says they’re a lawyer (though emphasizes this is not legal advice) and declares they can never agree to this.

The tech blogosphere goes mental. I picked it up from Jemima Kiss at The Guardian via Twitter but the big shitstorm seems to be happening on Gizmodo with the not-at-all-hysterical headline Google Chrome EULA Claims Ownership of Everything You Create on Chrome, From Blog Posts to Emails.

Now, for the record I haven’t downloaded Chrome (it’s Windows only right now) and probably won’t use it since I rely on my extension-loaded Firefox too much to change. It sure looks interesting though and I expect a lot of the groovy under-the-hood stuff detailed in Scott McClouds comic like the V8 Javascript engine and improved memory management to make it over to Firefox eventually. So I’m not that bothered about the EULA personally and have no real desire to defend Google on this one.

What bothers me is, other than the lawyer’s personal decision, the reporting on this has been appallingly misleading and devoid of any calm, rational thought. Sure, the EULA has some nasty sounding passages in it thanks to it being written in legalese but it doesn’t say Google “owns” your stuff. In order to understand what it means you have to understand how web services operate, which makes the bad reporting of this by tech journos even more depressing. I mean, if this was some monkey at BBC news then I’d be annoyed but shrug it off. But when my own people fuck up like this…

Anyway, here’s a short refresher in how the Internet works for those who were asleep at the back.

When you create something you own the copyright on it. You can choose to give this “right to copy” away by signing a publishing deal or similar but at the point of creation the fundamental right to copy is with you. So let’s say you take a photograph of a dog. You created that image and therefore hold the copyright on it.

Let’s email that picture to someone. What happens? First of all you upload a copy to your email service. If you’re using Gmail this then sits on the Gmail computers, probably a few times since they back stuff up. It’s then sent to your friend who uses Hotmail, so another bunch of copies are stored there. The image is huge, having come straight from your camera, so when your friend views their email Hotmail creates a smaller version that they can check before deciding whether to download it or not. This is modifying your original work, something that is protected by copyright law (I believe).

So when an EULA says “reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute” that’s what it’s covering. The right to make copies and display them to people without having to ask you for permission every time.

You like how you can click one button and have Google Docs turn your Word document into a web page? Covered by the license. You like how Flickr can make your photos appear in searches and be embedded in other people’s blogs? Covered by the license.

I believe (and I could be wrong) the reason for these licenses is not to let large corporations steal all your stuff and use it for their nefarious ends. It’s to stop litigious opportunists suing the shit out of them for the sort of copyright infringement that is essential in making these services work. Without allowing Google to make copies of stuff that other people own they wouldn’t be able to let you email it or, I suspect, display it in your browser as every time you look at a web page a copy of that is stored on your computer.

And (I believe) even if you give away the “right to copy” you still own the stuff. You’re just letting other people copy it, within specific circumstances.

Anyway, enough of my cod-lawyering. The point is I’d hope the tech-nerds out there who report on this stuff would have the nouse not to get drawn into this bullshit and actually apply some thought to what they’re reporting. The same thing happened when Billy Bragg decided to take on Murdoch’s MySpace on similar grounds. I had a hell of a lot of respect for Bragg before that. I lost a lot of it afterwards.

You people are not stupid. Stop acting like you are and leave the stupid to the Register where it belongs.

• Google’s Chrome Terms of Service take out a royalty-free license for Google of any content submitted by users over the internet
• Some Facebook Secrets to Better Operations (High Scalability)

I've got 5 more Dreamhost invitations (the link explains how they work). Here are the codes, in case you want to use one:

312559460095
954046739122
218045114524
371122736379
651598559782

Thanks to the other people who've used my codes.