Sometimes, I’m amazed by how much thinking other bloggers do. They seem to be thinking all the time, and this means that they always have something to say.
This is wholly admirable, but for the last two days I haven’t thought anything that would be remotely interesting to anyone. This has happened to me before, like I’ve hit some bloghole in the road and am scurrying to find a way out. And all the time there’s my website, just sitting there, not being added to or updated, silently reproaching me for not having anything interesting to say. There’s this very, very public dinner party going on, I’ve just turned to the attractive and laughing woman on my right, I open my mouth, and…..nothing comes out.
So, I took the best blogging route. When you’ve got nothing to write about….write about it.
It’s a terrible indictment of British humour and xenophobia, but the Dutch, lovely and happy and beautiful as they are, still have the most hysterically funny accent in the world. As one comedy Dutch doorman in the red light district said to us on Monday night: “Hey, ladeesh and gentlemen, quality schleeze and filth in a luxshury environment.” Amsterdam should adopt it as a tourist slogan.
If you’re sort of obsessed with search, the publication of new thoughts from currybetdotnet is a major event. And his new thoughts on “future librarianship” are no exception: revealing and interesting all at the same time. And the powerpoint is well worth downloading….
So I’m sitting in an IFRA conference in Amsterdam which is in a converted church with a hangover thinking of some parallel I could draw with the human condition. But I can’t. Conferences fry your mind.
I inflicted a little bit of pretend Celtic sentimentalism on the wife and kids this week, taking them to North Wales to see the area between Llangollen and Ruthin where my mother was born and grew up, before moving to Manchester. But despite all the potential pitfalls (rootless English chap approaching middle age decides to appropriate Celtic heritage and bores entire family in the process) it was a roaring success. We stayed in a little two bedroom cottage in the grounds of a bonkers pseudo-castle built by a London architect two decades ago, with views over to Ruthin. The weather was blissful (yes, this is Wales I’m talking about). We went to Portmeirion on Saturday, and everyone plugged in to the weirdness of the place without hesitation (it’s the contrived village on the coast of Snowdonia where The Prisoner was filmed).
And I took everyone to meet my mother’s cousin Sheila, the family historian, who gave me pictures of my Welsh grandmother (who died before I was born) with all my great uncles and aunts (about a dozen of them all-in-all) and more stories than you can shake a leek at, including this one: my great uncle Levvy (presumably short for Llewellyn, but I didn’t check that) fought in the First World War aged 16, and was sent out by his troop to check on the German lines, because he was the smallest and could get underneath the barbed wire. The Germans were a lot closer than anyone, including Levvy, realised, and they attacked while he was out in no-man’s land. He hid under a sheet of corrugated iron, and the Germans marched right over him, attacked the English trenches, and marched right back over him. When he got back to his trench, everyone in his troop had been killed.
Stories, see? That’s what being Welsh is all about, cariad.
Blimey. Cory Doctorow is moving to London to “to work for Creative Commons and EFF on a variety of projects”. And Ben Hammersley rightly writes: “I have mental visions of Godzilla striding across the ocean. I don’t know why. Morale is High. I repeat: Morale is High.”
So, Webmonkey is no more. A sad day for everyone who’s worked on the Web for a while. Though if you’re like me, you never actually learned anything new from Webmonkey. You just sat down one lunch hour and said “now I’m going to teach myself Javascript!” and got really into it for five minutes or so before deciding that downloading another personal organiser application was a: easier and b: more immediately compelling.
Let’s hope everyone who worked there got a new gig somewhere else. They deserve it.
According to the Register, the BBC is putting more flesh on the bones of its plan to distribute programming via a P2P network:
“The BBC’s new media director, Ashley Highfield, said that a P2P network will allow the BBC to handle the volume of traffic it expects when the Internet Media Player (IMP) goes live. The IMP will enable users to download or stream content to their PC, laptop or palmtop computer.
The corporation is exploring ways of using legitimate P2P systems to “get users to share on our behalf”, Highfield said.
This is a neat way of tackling the bandwidth issues it would otherwise face, but in effect passes the buck to the broadband providers. With BT in talks with the Beeb, it seems reasonable to expect some kind of partnership deal.”
My old colleagues at Yahoo! have relaunched their search, in the US at least, and it’s pretty good. They’ve dropped Google, but in its place put a Web search which looks like it’s powered by Inktomi and seems, at least on first glance, at least the equal of Google.
Main things that strike you immediately is that the treasured Yahoo! directory, which for so long was seen internally as the crown jewel of the company, has been relegated to a secondary tab; a simple keyword search now defaults to a Web search.
And there’s a really nice innovation, too: where an RSS feed is available on a particular site, it’s flagged and you can add it to your My Yahoo! RSS panel. Very good, that.
The search makes a good stab at integrating itself with the rest of the site, notable Shopping and News, by repeating the tabbing metaphor across these sites and adopting consistent look and feel.
Overall, very good. Nice one.
Urghh. Police have discovered the body of an 18-25 year old woman in a suitcase by the Thames in Barnes. Apparently the suitcase measured 3ft by 2ft by 1ft.
