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Here’s a brief diversion. On Twitter, I learn that Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council in South Wales have spent £190,000 on a set of three dormice bridges designed to allow the rodents to cross a new major bypass [...]
I’m going to spend 10 minutes on the 13th November being interesting. About Lego. On the same day, dozens of other people are also going to be interesting, about topics as diverse as sidesaddle riding, feral children, American baseball scorekeeping and cake. This isn’t just a random occurrence, it’s part of an event called Interesting North, [...]
Martin Belam has written an interesting series of posts on internal vs external linking on the Guardian’s website. His latest one summarises some of the comments and discussion that have taken place around the topic…
ReadWriteWeb wrote a recent article called ‘I Don’t Know Much About Art But I Know What’s Online’, in which they reviewed the different online offerings of art museums, and concluded that there weren’t yet any stand-outs…
TechCrunch has an interesting report about how Bill Gates has been speaking at a conference in Lake Tahoe called Techonomy about the future of education. His central thesis was that, in the not-too-distant future, you’ll be able to get a better further education using the web than you could simply at a single University institution. [...]
This video is pure Lego porn. If you can get over the somewhat cheesy intro, this is actually a pretty compelling pitch for a new lego set which lets you build London’s Tower Bridge. The designer in the video is Jamie Berard, who used to be simply an adult fan of lego (an AFOL, in [...]
Something I find interesting about design is how patterns often emerge that then get rapidly copied and widely adopted. The ‘like’ button, which I moaned about in my last post, is one of these. Another is what I’m calling ‘notification numbers’ [...]
Something that’s stuck with me in social software design is the importance of selecting verbs. This notion appeals to the linguist in me, but I truly believe that it’s a really significant step in the process of design. In Jyri Engestrom’s superb, and in some ways canonical, work on social objects, defining verbs is one [...]
I really like the recent blog post by Tom Taylor, titled “you’ve either shipped or you haven’t“: You’ve either shipped, or you haven’t. You’ve either poured weeks, months or even years of your life into bringing a product or a service into the world, or you haven’t. If you have, you’ll know what I’m talking [...]
The Guardian editorial this morning (“In praise of … the rule of three”) reminded me of a memorable lesson I had at school about linguistic devices used in political speeches. (It was probably this kind of lesson which prompted me to later do a degree in Linguistics.) Here’s a quick list of the patterns I [...]
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