devolute.net

Even a 4 year old knows that. Or so said NYUs Clay Shirky at the recent Web 2.0 Expo08 [blip.tv video]. He detailed how things are shifting away from passively watching television and into more interactive forms of media. He uses the example of the millions of hours of work that has gone into Wikipedia and other community-based wiki-like project by a great many people.

“Media that is targeted at you but does not include you may not be worth sitting still for.”

Shirky knows why we watch television. It’s because since WW2 we all have so much free time. Isn’t it better that we interact with something rather than just sit there and consume it? I think he’s right. Collectively, we watch far more adverts on TV than we do using brilliant collaborative projects such as Wikipedia. Has anyone watched television recently? 99% of it is rubbish. Getting involved with media is a lot more fun than an osmosis-like filtering of it into ourselves.

Still, regardless of this, Peep Show does start again tonight and I’ll definately be taking time out from the collaborative Web for that!

Video found via random($foo).

It’s only after you read the BBC Innovation Labs briefs that you start to get a bit bogged down by ‘Web 2.0-speak’. It has even started to creep into Private Eye magazine on an almost fortnightly basis now. We need help in these fast moving times. We need a man who knows the media. A man so pioneering, a man so brave and a man so in touch with what’s happening right now. We need this man to help us through all the buzz words. The man we need is Alan Partridge. My colleague at rckt wrote a few Partridge-esque ideas that might help the BBC in producing some new and exciting content for the web.

“Photos posted to Flickr from Alan’s Iphone, geotagged and mashed onto Microsoftâ„¢ Live Map”

This is what the web needs.

Sometimes it feels nice to rant against blatant stupidity and get the support of my peers (read: fellow redditors). I’m happy to be upmodded when it’s something I care about. Sad? Well, maybe. But in this case; when it involves media-scaremongering that makes people terrified of their own neighbourhoods (specially when it’s my neighbourhood), I’ll happily take those votes.

This collection of web-site nosey-ness is evidence that web devs do have a sense of humour! Well, almost. Nice to see the geeks at top sites like facebook are as frustrated as I am when it comes to hacking the crappy IE box-model into working properly. Makes me feel… like a proper front-end web developer.

I wonder if I can get away with sneaking stuff like this into my clients work, as an aid to my occasional frustration.

Not me. And no, not that Obama girl. I keep meaning to write my take on the Facebook phenomena. When I do; this is definitely going to get a mention. Apparently on Caroline Giuliani’s (daughter of terrorism-obsessed mega-bore Rudy Giuliani) Facebook profile, she’s backing Barack Obama. This has to be pretty embarrassing for the Republican candidate. Kids ‘eh!? I guess even she got fed up of him going on about 9/11.

The constant rain and subsequent flooding yesterday was pretty amazing. I’m lucky that I live and work on some of Sheffield’s higher ground, so I wasn’t personally effected. However at work we could watch the citys traffic cameras online. Roads either became blocked with traffic, closed off, flooded or in some cases blocked with abandoned cars and flooded. We saw industrial buildings to the North of the town catch fire and Sheffield Forgemasters (who coincidently, I’ve helped develop a website for) were pretty much submerged. I’m now quite familiar with Sheffield and it was eerie to watch recognisable places and structures suddenly acquire their own moats in real time. The local web forum was full of people posting pictures of their homes and offices partially submerged and their cars floating. The roads, bridges and the station is still a mess.

For me, it was also interesting to see how locals made pretty much immediate use of web forums, imageshack pictures, blogs and youtube posts to spread their, sometimes quite scarey, stories.  All in all, a case-in-point example of a so-called Media 2.0 ‘hard news’ day.