Category: Musings

webly too

Every now and again I look up from what we’re working on and gaze in awe at some of the stuff that’s turning up in this ‘web 2.0’ evolution. Yes it’s a catchphrase, a handy bucket to lump innovative ideas for the media but the reality is there’s a lot of very clever stuff going on out there. The evolution of the semantic (knowledge) web is happening ever faster, fuelled by and fuelling Google as we all know – but they’re not the only ones out there.

Here are just a couple of the things I came across tonight (with grateful thanks to Tom Coates, a real web visionary, for the initial link that kicked me off):

• Riya – face and text recognition software for your online photos. It works on the principle of limited set recognition, which means that it can recognise people in your photos that you teach it to recognise, but not every photo on the web – yet.
• PeekABoom – an amazing concept by the main guy behind Captchas where you reveal a photo to a hidden human opponent and they have to guess what it is. Through this the goal is to improve image recognition – amazing concept, and fun!

Understanding comics – scott mccloud. This may have been a random present for someone else, but having read it twice now it’s definately filed under ‘fortuitous coincedence’. In this comics classic McCloud attempts to define ‘comics’, what they are (and what they aren’t), their history and analyse the various mechanisms used to communicate a story. His insights are great and drawn in comic form themselves – my favorite concept is that people related more closely to comics as there is an almost blank template of a person/hero that is very easy to project yourself into, wonder if this accounts for some of the global success of Gorillaz (other than awesome tunes of course)?

Share and share alike

So another file sharing company site has bitten the dust. Grokster has settled their high court case and closed their doors to further file sharing. One quote caught my eye in this article: “[Grokster] agreed to stop activity that leads to copyright infringement” – which basically translates as, even though they personally weren’t infringing copyright, they were facilitating a crime by their actions.

So this leads me to a question – how come the same rules can’t be applied to gun manufacturers? Surely armed crime would be significantly harder to carry out if guns were not manufactured and easily available over the counter?

The hogfather – terry pratchett. For those of you who’ve read Terry Pratchett’s discworld novels you already know the rough plot, style and characters. For those of you who haven’t read any this isn’t the one to start on – I’d recommend Reaper Man or Pyramids which require less pre-understanding to really enjoy. In this, the twentieth Discworld novel (blimey), Discworld is suffering an attack of belief as the Hogfather is destroyed and Death’s grand-daughter is required to go and save the day. Death is one of Pratchett’s strongest and most entertaining characters, so this is definately in the top 25% of his books, but a lot of the plot falls under standard Discworld machinations and slightly sub-witty humour.

My name’s Bond, Philip Bond

Ah, fond memories. This is due to chatting with M about Hester Buell, the female lead in the Planet Swerve strip in the much missed Deadline comic. Mr Bond’s last comic that I read was Vinanarama, a Vertigo imprint written by Grant Morrison – one of my all time fave comic writers.

Remember, remember

Tonight is the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes trying to blow up the British houses of parliament. Funny how time flies. Of course since I’m over in America then the familiar British tradition of fireworks night is sorely missed. I have a lot of fond memories of going to Brockham bonfire and watching the drunken revellers carry burning torches past my grandparents old bungalow. Watch out for those sparklers kids!

Elbow’d

Had a smashing time out with Jem last night – we went to see Brit band Elbow playing at the Hiro Ballroom. Good fun with lots of Brits and American folk enjoying a lovely intimate set in the 400+ venue. Their lead singer Guy was sporting a natty little cane after doing his ankle in – either due to falling over on the tube or while rescuing three people from the sea, depending on which story you chose to believe. There was also a lovely little Q & A session between Guy and the crowd while Mark the guitarist fought with repeated attacks of amp destroying gremlins.

I took these piccies in between the expensive rounds of drinks at the bar. Hiro’s a great little venue but their prices are less then pleasent on the pocket. Plus had a fun chat with the Japanese/Irish bar maid (remember her, Nami?) about how all English people don’t tip after I’d asked her to break a twenty so I could tip her. Bless. All in all a lovely night.

Oh say can you key

Hmm… apparently the government is now not only reading everything I post on my blog, but also everything else I type on my keyboard – all in the name of national insecurity [via metafilter].

Ah well, I guess at least it’s not as bad as China yet, where I wouldn’t even be able to post incriminating blog entries to anyone who cares to Google them (even if they aren’t linked anywhere). Yep, Google managed to find an historic entry on my blog that isn’t connected to my home page. I guess their indexing of Blogger is a bit more invasive than one would hope.

Geek Tourism

Thanks to Mobile Monday New York I got to go hang out at Google’s NYC office last night. Good fun, and great to see inside one of the biggest ‘dot coms’ ever. Three floors inside 1440 Broadway with a huge atrium which, though cute, has crappy acoustics if you’re doing a presentation at the bottom. Last time I was at that building we were visiting Diddy’s (previously Puff Daddy) Bad Boy Records company to talk about Vote or Day – fond memories.

The whole thing made me very nostalgic for the old Quidnunc days (RIP), as the place seemed very similar in vibe and the people wandering around, plus the ‘Knowledge Share’ vibe of the presentation. That said the Google playschool colour scheme is a little bit jarring when it’s on top of every notice posted around – made me yearn for some mango orange…

Ps, the Google submarine should be awesome when it comes out in Q2 2006 {;).

Wrong about japan – peter carey. Post 9/11, Peter Carey decided to bond with his son on a trip to Japan to investigate Japanese culture, and specifically the hero worship around comics. Here we have father/son inter-relations, cultural observations and great writing all in one. My only gripe is that the book is way too short – especially when compared with almost every other Carey book.