Tag: Social software

You’ll have noticed (if you can see my right-hand nav at all, which some of you apparently can’t) that my weblog is now sponsored by an Apple dealer and an online liquor store. This seems quite appropriate, given my interests. The new addition, Arthur’s Bar, is not your standard bottle shop either – principally, if you ask me, because of one extraordinary product – a blended whisky that costs nearly 150 quid per bottle. Classic Cask is the only 35 year-old blended whisky in the world and Arthur’s Bar is the only place you can buy it (they blend it themselves, you see).

Any half-qualified alcoholic will tell you that nobody bothers to keep blended whiskies for more than about twelve years – the bottle of Classic Cask in my drinks cupboard was distilled in 1964 – the year of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Harold Wilson’s first Government. The extraordinary complexity and smoothness (that’s the limit of my fancy booze reviewer language right there) of this whisky should be enough to persuade you to remortgage your house for a bottle of something so strange and so lovely. You’ll have to take my word for it, though – they don’t do free samples.

Is it reasonable to assume that the net and cheaper, more accessible digital media tools are making us more creative? More to the point, would it be a good thing if we were? Would a more creative society be a better one – more generous (nothing more generous than sticking your neck out in the cause of art), better at problem solving, more enterprising? Pass. No idea. I do know that lots of organisations are investing money in boosting the creativity of their people, though.

They think a more creative workforce will produce better profits. If this is true, isn’t it likely that an effort to make the wider population more creative might have a similar effect on the national economy? Could we effectively reduce expenditure on unemployment benefits, anti-depressants and incarceration if we gave more people the warm glow of making something, entertaining someone, expressing themselves? I wrote about the next generation of ‘personal creativity tools’ in The Guardian yesterday (I was filling in for the legendary Jack Schofield).

Listen. Googlewhacking is stupid. Dumb non-phrases that occur only once precisely because they’re useless in speech. Come on guys! Now this is more like it – a proper three-word phrase – used in a real sentence that actually means something – that occurs only once on the whole web. I’m going to call it pseudowhacking (if nobody minds, of course).

Handsome, huh? I used Firda Beka’s excellent Firdamatic to generate the stylesheet and basic templates and Paul drew the picture of me. I’ve got to finish detailing the stylesheet, reinstate some odds and ends (like search) and figure out why the new stylesheet seems to kill off my en-dashes – making lots of my entries totally incoherent (I mean more incoherent than usual) – but otherwise I’m pleased with it. Comments please.

Danny’s got some exasperated and nicely-phrased Orlowski bait over at Oblomovka. The thing about Orlowski is that he’s not an aberration and he won’t be going away any time soon. He’s what you get when a self-consciously geeky underground phenomenon gets its head above the parapet and attempts to create meaning for a group larger than its creators.

He’s an irritant and a bore but he’s also quite brave (debunking trendy ideas is sometimes lonely work) and, one of these days, he’ll say something really interesting or uncover some genuine elitism or a real plot. In the meantime, he’s always an entertaining read.

William Gibson has stopped blogging to write a new book. He thinks the two activities are incompatible and has a metaphor that makes me feel a bit sick:

“The image that comes most readily to mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left off.”

Obviously, I’m I’m now wondering if blogging is stopping me coming to the boil!

Appropriately fogey-ish response to blogging from Damian Whitworth in Britain’s least wired broadsheet The Times. He’s obviously intrigued but trying hard not to sound too keen in case the other fogeys at the paper send him to Coventry. Oh, and Azeem says ‘crap’.

Very privileged to have entertained some of the bloggerati at Blacks on Monday night. From left to right, Dan Gillmor, James Crabtree, some sardines on toast (I think they call it ‘crostini’), Matt Jones, Vic Keegan (who doesn’t keep a weblog but edits Guardian Online which is good enough for me), James Cronin (likewise, but has a hand in many things including STAND and Fax your MP), Simon Waldman, Azeem Azhar, Tom Loosemore and Tom Coates. Although, of course, my guests did all the entertaining and Azeem arranged it all. Click the small pics for bigger ones (the weird, green pics are using the camera’s low light setting).

Mark Lloyd has been my lawyer for years and is now keeping an interesting weblog – mostly about sporty things and cycling in particular – Mark’s passion. Should be worth watching during the Tour De France. Speaking of the Tour, The Observer’s excellent “cheat’s guide” is a jaw dropping account of drug abuse, short cuts, bribery and sabotage going back 100 years.