I just announced that the NovelContext project is live and needs your help. It is an open content literature project, based on out of copyright books. You can simply read them if that is what you want, but more interestingly you will be able to build the rich social context behind the books on the site.
It is an attempt to build a topic map based context behind the existing out of copyright books. The article on NovelContext gives a lot more detail and the wiki is where you come in. I need your help to make this happen.
October 2005 Archives
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Interesting what people capture, their experience with the BBC to screengrabs
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Spring 2005 survey of fiction advances in the USA median was 5000USD for first book
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If you can't get up, or just want a huge noise
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Wikipedia can be shown to not be factually correct, a concern for newsrooms and libraries, how can it be fixed?
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A call to action to open up the publication system for the US Government document archive
It is that time of year again, London Film Festival, hooray. My annual orgy of cinematic delight, Lucy and I have 11 films planned in the next fortnight, one already seen last night and two tonight. I really enjoy the festival, it is a great opportunity to see foreign films and independent cinema. Though, I still am planning to see Serenity too.
LFF reviews will pepper this blog for the next few weeks...
Another one of these occasional words, kind of the small feature table of content on takeoneonion, still we are at number two. Exhilarating, the very word fills you with excitement and premonition. In fact the root of the word is from Hliarus, meaning cheerful and gladdening, though today it has connotations of thrill-seeking. I quite like the wordreference definition connecting it with mountains, certainly walking in the alps is definitely exhilarating. The Merriam-Webster gives a more factual and latinate definition.
So what was the last exhilarating thing you did ?
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lovely and useful
Apple released more hardware today, the really quite nice, if not revolutionary PowerBooks and faster Quad PowerMacs. Yet the thing that took my attention was the Aperture application. Are Apple really trying it on with a Photoshop competitor ?
RAW image-based workflow, image management, full screen working space. All colour managed, with an emphasis on print. It looks lovely from the flashy Apeture website. The 100 percent loupe is a lovely feature for working on images and from the video it seems very quick. Though it does prefer the faster G5 machines. Importantly I could see myself using this application and getting on with stuff, much as I love Photoshop, is this a case of less being right.
Apple are seriously muscling in on Adobe with this application, let alone the specialist RAW convertor companies. This looks focused, competent and well thought out. I'll be very keen to see a comparison between Photoshop CS2 and Aperture. This isn't the first time either, Shake and Motion are making in roads, just like Final Cut Pro before them.
Apple are becoming the creative persons tool of choice, from the alpha-geeks at O'Reilly conferences to the bio-scientists, to the more traditional visual creatives. It is fascinating to watch each move.
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Good hack for getting you past the afternoon torpor
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This powers the radar.oreilly.com tag cloud
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The Gartner Hype Cycle graph, innovation marketing and adoption
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cats in boxes, what more could anyone ask for
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Ah, wouldn't this just be ace, about the only way I'll get into orbit...
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15th version of this conference, this time in the UK, up in Edinburgh, call open til November 4th.
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How they make these amazing images
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Rough transcript from a panel of five bay area teenagers and their internet tastes / habits
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Space elevator competition, opening in a week or so, into orbit in the twenty-teens, I'd love to be.
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videos of an autonomous robotic motor bike, which can drive itself in desert conditions
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this is cool, spreadsheets are annoying to work with and share.
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Collated free content, with a range of public and private contributors, including O'Reilly and the UK national archive. Sort of a wider gutenberg, which is multimedia too. Yahoo and the Internet Archive are partners too.
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Really nice webapp that lets you generate custom folded paper pdas, choose the type of page you want and print them out.
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David Allen article, author of Getting Things Done in the guardian by Ben Hammersley
Lots of excitement happening off-blog at the minute, over the past few months, we've put our flat on the market, found a nice house in Walthamstow and are nearing exchange and completion, which is really exciting. I'm looking forward to living in Walthamstow, north of the river for the first time since I arrived eight years ago. Being near a big daily market and on the tube will be fun too. It is also near Epping Forest, which is lovely and lots of friends are nearby on the other side of the River Lea/Lee.
Also, I'm leaving the BBC after four years and will be working for the Nature Publishing Group in November. I'll be their Product Development Manager, building new social software tools for scientists, they already have some great existing products - Connotea (download the code) which is a group reference manager cum social bookmarking application and their various gateway collaboration websites. I'm really excited by the move, though of course sad to be leaving my friends at the Beeb.
This post explains why I've been feeling a bit frazzled, mainly down to the joy of buying and selling a house in the UK. Living in SE London and house hunting in NE London is time consuming. Each property might be the right one, then you see that the current owners have ruined the place, or it just isn't as it seemed in the description. Every property reflects a life time of design decisions, some of them for the better, but all of them right for someone at the time. The variety of shapes and changes of the stock Walthamstow two/three bed Victorian terrace never ceases to amaze, as does the variability of the estate agents. More on old houses in another post, later, though the 60s and 70s did sad things to victoriana.
Anyway, back to being stressed, a while ago, whilst trying to get talkeuro live, stress felt like big heavy things closing in on me. Recently it has felt more precarious, unfinished, I guess it is the desire for closure and my inability to control the process. Hunting for the right house and waiting to hear about a job are the same kind of stress I think, neither is resolvable entirely via your own actions alone.
I think it is interesting how we refer to these different feelings by the same name, being stressed. The talkeuro feeling was more like a kind of pressure, I wonder if the feeling drove the name or if my imagery comes from the name. There was a sense of inescapability to it, more like work stress, too many things to do and not enough time.
Buying a house is more unresolved, too many possibilities and decisions to make. Wait for something else; buy that one; buy a cheap knackered one and refit it; buy the perfect one and move in... waiting to hear about a job has less variability, but the same sense of waiting for the right thing to happen.
So, pressure and tension are names for types of stress. I've got Getting Things Done on order, but one thing I feel is helpful is DoingLessStuff™, pick one thing and do it well, if you get stuck more on. Easy to say, but from the conversations I've had with people quite hard to manage in practice.
In this light I've started to shed projects I have no longer anytime to complete, so that I can concentrate on SocialDocument ideas, my forthingcoming new house and my new job. So pick the bones clean of these ideas on my Backpack page - crazy schemes and loose ideas.
Gavin's guide to DoingLessStuff (tongue firmly planted in cheek)
- write down all the tasks you are planning, fairly high level
- write down the rest of the things you are doing
- pick 4 of them (this number will vary for you)
- remember you have a job and a personal life (household) to run, so there are two already
- workout which other two things you'd love to do
- write them down
- check up in a fortnight and see if you are still doing all four, it is so easy to drift.
- If you drift put one of them down again.
- lastly, finish things, half finished is worse than not started.
So, a plan of sorts that I've been following for the past few months, not always that well, but it has helped me attain that all important focus. Of course, I'd love to be a wildlife photographer; finish that novel I've half started; run the other five web projects I've got plans for; apply for the funding for the SocialDocuments ideas; and a dozen other ideas, but I ain't got time. Realising that is obvious, but hard to maintain.
Given that I've not read GTD yet, this is probably straight out of there and I've just absorbed it from the collective, still this rocket science helped me over the summer, well that and eating frogs... doing the hard tasks first.
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The history of childrens fiction in the UK, drawing on Eagle, Pullman and Rowling, looking at why it works and how it reflects our current society - fantastic stuff
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opinion piece from theguardian calling for a more open BBC
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And then there were three. Today's announcement is a long time coming, I remember this being talked about in 2000, but their bulging debt held the merger back. Should be an interesting competitor on both broadband and television.
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A 25 question quiz from the BBC aimed determining how European your thinking is, I come out pretty pro, not surprisingly
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room temperature casting resin for tabletops
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howto make clear resin / plastic objects of your stuff, I'm going to make tables with it
Every week I exclaim, usually to myself, that's a great word, so I thought I'd start sharing some of them with you. Today's word is tines, which is one is the set of pointy bits on a fork. It is a delightfully onomatopoeic word, as I discovered today when cleaning our garden fork, after a satisfying afternoon in the sunshine tidying the garden for winter.
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I particularly liked 14 and 15
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a selection of good ajax applications, there is another batched linked off this one
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which web apis are playing with which, or where are the cross overs happening
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Built on pips - yay!
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ajax library offering drag and drop, auto-completion and shopping carts etc
Building Social Web Applications by Gavin Bell.
