Pragmatism in URL design
I was at the 2nd Linked Data Meetup London last week. It was great, and there was a lot of consensus and momentum built, but one of the smallest remarks by Tom Scott generated the most debate (partly egged on by me).
Tom was discussing how the BBC uses “the web as its CMS” for some [...]
Saving BBC 6 Music
Since late Thursday night, I’ve been distressed. The news, first leaked in the Times on Friday, that Mark Thompson is planning wide-ranging cuts at the BBC as part of a “strategic review”, is deeply distressing. According to the leak in the Times (now more or less confirmed), this will include cutting the BBC website by [...]
Posted on February 28, 2010, 2:52 pmPhil Gyford's news project
Phil Gyford is doing a news project. He’s just written up day one. The project’s aim, in his words, is to:
spend the week writing an online news website … I’ll probably spend the week reading a lot of existing news and re-writing, quoting, linking, summarising it all … all being well I’ll publish the [...]
Playing the Apple Tablet guessing game
Okay, so some time today, the Apple Tablet is going to be announced. That much seems certain. Everything else is a guessing game. And ‘game’ is the operative word. It’s a game that’s being played by every newspaper, many bloggers, and even has its own scorecard. Games need players, and I don’t like to be [...]
Posted on January 27, 2010, 10:29 amMapping Haiti
The Haiti Earthquake has shaken the world with its staggering enormity and absolutely devastating effects. The news has made for grim reading over the past few days.
Amongst all the generosity from nations and peoples across the world (a UK appeal is being run by the Disasters Emergency Committee and is being promoted by Twitter, Facebook, TV ads, [...]
Monoblogging for the Masses
Over the past couple of weeks, I seem to have launched a new social web platform. I say “seem” because it wasn’t something I particularly set out to do.
The project is called Wordr, and it’s basically like Twitter, except that you can only post one word at a time.
This started out as a joke: I [...]
Posted on November 7, 2009, 10:00 amDesigning with Intent with Dan Lockton
I visited Brunel University yesterday, out in the Uxbridge suburb of London, in order to visit Dan Lockton and take part in one of his workshop research sessions.
Dan’s been studying and writing about an area of design he called ‘Design with Intent’ – which in a nutshell is how design can be used to intentionally [...]
Logos in Lego Town
I love the list of ‘fictional universes’ on Wikipedia. It contains everything from The Simpsons to Star Trek to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The Fictional Universes database on Freebase is even better, as it contains thousands of details about the universes, such as species, objects, and even ethnicities.
However, one universe neither site coves [...]
Ditching the Dust Jackets
I’ve been thinking a bit about books lately. Partly because I’ve actually been starting to read them again (I tend to go through phases).
I was musing through my bookshelves this evening, and decided to put all the hard backs on one shelf. Nearly all of my books are paperbacks (I’m one of those cheapskates who [...]
Open Plaques project update
Thought I should write a quick update on what’s been happening with the Open Plaques project. (A quick re-cap: this is a project to gather data and photographs of all the blue plaques in the UK, a very simple idea which I first explored on Twitter, and then in a blog post here).
I first kicked [...]
Posted on June 18, 2009, 10:40 am