devolute.net

I’m a big fan of Twitter. Through it I have acquired design advice, job interviews and technical help. More importantly, it also allows me to follow the adventures of Princess Diana (aka the Queen of ‘Arrrrrts) as she enjoys her time in Heaven, amongst all the other celebrities. Just like when she was with us on earth, she is a constant source of inspiration. Her Twitter account is perfect if, like me, you have too much self respect to buy the Daily Express and read about her there. She also sent me this rather fetching badge. As it came through my door this morning i ran to the door, only to see a white Fiat Uno race away down my street. I shall wear it proudly, always.

Follow DianaInHeaven on Twitter. We miss you, Ma’am.

Twitter bird and fail whale

This brilliant illustrator has unleashed another ‘State of the web’ report. I love his vectors and his take on what matters on the web. I still think we cat-fans still prefer his seminal piece: How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you, though.

The State of the Web Winter 2009

3 inches. Not great, but even more worrying is that, according to the ‘Newest Twicks’ column, lots of girls are a lot bigger than I am. Never have I felt like less of a man. Honest.

Find yours at twicksize.com

It seems rampant right now. Lots of speak about of account hacking and all sorts of nastyness. Perhaps this is why twitter needs a proper API key system? Flickr has one and that’s usually pretty safe. People seem perfectly happy just to give away their twitter username and password to any site or firefox plug-in (some of these are almost adware) asking for it! My advice is don’t! As with all great ‘web2.0′ *spit* apps, Twitters strength lies in its expandability and openness, but I think more work needs doing to get a secure, working, framework in place.

Still, at least there is a comedy upside (thanks to a thousand twitterers for re-tweeting this).

Obviously I’ve missed the boat a bit on this one but if anyone wants to follow me on twitter, here I am: twitter.com/devolute. I’m going to be looking at ways to intergrate it with my WordPress install. I’ve just started but have had no problems with downtime and slowness that used to be blogged about at length a bit ago. I’m already finding it a useful tool but then you already knew that, right?

I’d never knock Google search. It just gets the job done. But check out Kosmix if you want more detailed results without having to click round. It’s a search service mash-up, kinda. More a ‘search organiser’. Ugh, what horrible web2.0 terms! Wait; let me explain:

When you search for something in Google you can then go through to what it feels is the most relevant page. If you search for something with Kosmix, it will show you everything it knows about the subject you searched for. It does this by bringing whatever it feels is relevant. So, if I search for Alec Baldwin, for example (hey; the new series of 30 rock has started and I’m excited!) it will bring in a bio from who2, pics from yahoo image search, interviews from CNN, clips from YouTube, books from Amazon and what people are saying on Friendfeed.

All this is presented on one pretty big, well formatted page. It will also bring up related items (so in this example, Tina Fey and ’30 Rock’ and his previous films). It’s great for searching for details on musicians as well, as it’ll bring in last.fm details and also for quickly getting up to date on politicians of interest (where it brings in polling data and Salon.com articles).

So is this a Google killer like some people (foolishly) claimed that cuil was? Nah. But it’s a great alternative for those who don’t like to visit 10 sites to quickly get a good picture of a person or subject.

Give Kosmix a try

I am a redditor and have been for some time. Yes IM buddies; that’s where that interesting link came from. When reddit decided to open up their code to the open-source community we all knew that some interesting stuff would pop-up. One of the UK’s rather more respectable rags; the Independent has decided to utilise the capabilities of reddit to rank its own news stories. It’s great to see a big old paper embrace an open-source system like this, but it’d be better if the Indie’s comments and those upon it’s reddit pages were syncronised. Small steps tho, ‘eh.

There is an announcement on the reddit blog and the new Independant reddit is now live, albeit not as busy as it could be.

usernamecheck.com is probably a good place to go when you first start out with a handle, it’s too late for me and ‘devolute’ now! What this little web-tool does is it scans all the popular web2.0 sites to see if your handle of choice is in use on their service or not. I think it serves a dual purpose of not only checking to see if your nick was a wise choice or not, but also it serves to reminds you where you may have previously registered accounts and forgotten about them.

Visit usernamecheck.com now to check if you have any impersonators!

via swissmiss

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.