I have no idea what it’s like to live in a young offenders’ prison like the notorious Feltham but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the arrival of Crime TV veteran Roger Graef, poet Simon Armitage, pioneer documentary director Brian Hill and Channel 4 to make a ‘documentary musical’ in which the prisoners themselves, their wardens and counsellors perform rap tunes about their lives and aspirations made a dent in the routine. The result, Feltham Sings, shown on Channel 4 tonight, was chilling and moving and often surreal (a particularly disturbed boy rapped about suicide while two of his warders sang a chorus about paracetamol) and reminded me of what Channel 4 was invented for.
Barbie is among us
My daughter Billie is three today and yesterday we had a party. Barbie came. I mean the real Barbie. Then she left and fifteen dumbstruck three and four year-olds won’t ever be the same again.
Speechless
Matt Webb’s account of what happened to him fourteen years ago left me speechless. Link via LINKMACHINEGO.
RSI and accupuncture
Danny’s got RSI. You can actually see me getting RSI in real time here. My RSI – numbness and loss of strength in my left arm and a horrible pain in my shoulder (I was pretty sure I’d had a stroke) – coincides with leaving my job and my Aeron chair and taking up residence in my ergonomically-unsound shed. The cure? Accupuncture (plus a proper keyboard for the laptop). My excellent NHS GP gives me five minutes with the needles and I feel miraculously better. But the NHS won’t fund accupuncture and the inflexibility of the system forbids my doctor from charging me for it so he’s giving me this mysteriously effective (I still don’t really believe in it) treatment for nothing.
Soho Lunch with Juliet, Azeem and Duncan
(there’d be a picture here only it’s gone)
Hail Freedonia!
With the unreality of Firefly’s Freedonia, the British pop media is now entering its third continuous week of multi-page coverage for the fact that the Prime Minister’s wife was made to look stupid (I mean really, really stupid) by not one but two scumbags – a ‘lifestyle guru’ whose CV includes a period spent as an enforcer for the terrifying Exegesis cult and a con-man of such comicbook extravagance that Esther Rantzen says he’s one of the worst she encountered in a long career exposing such pond life.
Meanwhile – in case you missed it – on Friday, the EU nations agreed to admit ten new member states on May 1st 2004 – bringing the Union’s population to 370 Million and its GDP to $9 Trillion. As a story it couldn’t really be any bigger – but you’d struggle to find it in most of the UK media this weekend. Presumably some time this week somebody will notice that we just had a hand in creating what could become the greatest economic power in history. Google News, as ever, is a great instant poll on the relative importance of stories like this. Trawling the results, two really good articles stand out: Michael Myer’s The Death of Europe and Will Hutton’s Observer leader East is East and West is rich.
An infinitely hot and dense dot
Geeks – at least those with any vision – dream of ‘the singularity‘. For the social software geeks, this singularity will arrive when information space collapses into a sort of zero-dimensional dot. The distance between related concepts will approach zero. The relevance of any given link will rarely drop below 100%. Connection will be automatic and total. Ideas will swarm and clump together quietly and instantaneously. The like-minded will exist in a state of total and perpetual communion. Hallelujah. In Ben and Azeem‘s fascinating to-and-fro over categorising blogs, there’s something of this dream. They seem to see, in the exceptional information-efficiency of the blogosphere, the seeds of a hyper-connected future. I’m not so sure. I’m almost convinced that there’s some evolutionary value locked up in the friction and inefficiency of human communication. I’m as excited as the next man about the potential of social software to speed up interconnection and make groups more useful but I think we might need to preserve some of the noise and the information loss. It might be what makes us human.
Government content? exciting, huh?
Mike Butcher blogs a deal between the UK Government and MSN to offer Government content to MSN users. Mike draws out an analogy with the recent discussion of Azeem Azhar’s BPL idea. I think the comparison is valuable but the big difference it that so much Government content is paralysingly boring so it’s unlikely that the content industry will throng to repurpose it. Most interesting is the potential for MSN (or anyone really – preferably Google) to offer a better interface to Government content than the Government currently seems able to do. See my whinge about NHS Direct’s dire interface to its own extremely important and useful content.
So what is next?
I wrote a piece for The Guardian. I was asked to to write about what I might do next but it was rushed and I wound up cataloguing the current buzzwords – Wi-fi, Social Software, Web Services and Moblogging. I mean it when I say these are the things that excite me right now but the problem with this kind of list is that what you actually wind up doing might belong to one or more of these big technology categories but what really defines your venture is impossible to capture in advance. another.com, for instance, belonged to the ‘web-based email’ category and also to the ‘identity services’ category but what made it unique was something else all together – something to do with personalisation, fun, youth, lack of deference and resistance to categorisation. You just can’t capture all that stuff in a ‘what’s next’ piece.
Jack’s Google tips
From the outboard brain department, here’s Jack Schofield’s October piece documenting the neat things you can do to improve the results of your Google searches. I searched for this article for about twenty minutes using The Guardian’s search function and then it occurred to me to use Google… Duh. Jack’s a great exponent of the ‘Google-as-universal-interface’ school of thought.