The Backchannel

I’m presenting at the Meeting Professionals International event in London in April: the Europeans Meetings and Events Conference. (Yes, the meta-ness of speaking at a conference about conferences is not lost on me). I was invited to do something on Web 2.0 and ‘where is technology headed’. After some thought, I’ve written up some notes …

Watchification

I’ve been helping out as the ‘chief engineer’ at Speechification for a while, and I’m now proud to be joining Russell and Steve in making Watchification happen too. The aim of the project is reassuringly simple: in the same way that Speechification curates speech radio from around the world, we want to make it easy …

X is the new Y for 2007

The Boston Globe’s Ideas section today features an updated version of my “X is the new Y” diagram. [Update: it’s actually the front page feature of the Ideas section. Thanks to Kelly for the picture…] Originally inspired by the LeisureArts chart from 2005, I decided to bring the idea up to date in September. Essentially, …

Flickr Stats

Flickr is great, isn’t it? Last week, they introduced in–browser photo editing (via Picnik), and this Thursday they added stats.  If you’re a Pro user, go and activate stats for your account. I think you’ll like it. By digging around my stats, I now know that this generated ‘fractal flame’ picture (generated using Apophysis) appears …

I’m not (just) a blogger

I blog, but I tend not to call myself a ‘blogger’ these days. On my twitter profile, and indeed on an early batch my Moo cards, it used to say “Metaverse Evangelist | Blogger | Geek”, but more recently I’ve been dropping the ‘blogger’ bit, since I don’t think it defines me. I mentioned this …

Thoughts on TV Licensing

I recently wrote about the iPlayer, and made a throwaway comment about not having a TV licence, yet enjoying the ability to finally be able to legally watch TV programmes online, on my Mac. It sparked quite a discussion. Nick Reynolds (no relation) of the BBC kindly pointed out the new licence fee page on …

BBC iPlayer gets (a little bit) better

If you really know me, you know two fact about me: I’m quite tall. (at 6′ 4½”) I don’t have a TV license (though I do have a TV, connected to a Wii and a Mac Mini) The first fact means I don’t mind standing near the back of gigs. The second fact means that …

ffffound

ffffound.com (closed beta. Sorry, no invites left) is really very lovely. This: del.icio.us crossed with Clipmarks crossed with Flickr. It’s social bookmarking for images. It’s also a lot simpler than del.icio.us. As nice as that simplicity is, there’s a big part of me that really wants it to support tagging. I’ll try to share inspirational …

Here Comes Another Bubble

Ze Frank recently linked to a wonderful Web 2.0 parody song/video called ‘Here Comes Another Bubble‘ by an a cappella group called The Richter Scales. It’s brilliant. I particularly like this moment from 1:36, with Scoble being used as the backdrop to “blog even if you’re wrong”. Much as I enjoy it, I would make …