Archive For November, 2009
This is Japan! from Eric Testroete on Vimeo.
The video above is about as frantic a tour around Japan as you can get in a few minutes. Stacked with plenty of classic Japan iconography, it also comes with a bit of a health warning – this tour is fast.
Best enjoyed in full screen.
I’ve been struggling to decide what to write about this week, hence the slight delay. I could write about the painful experience of making myself go to my drawing class on Thursday, only to find halfway through that my inner critic had firmly taken ove…
I’ve been struggling to decide what to write about this week, hence the slight delay. I could write about the painful experience of making myself go to my drawing class on Thursday, only to find halfway through that my inner critic had firmly taken ove…
Eels – Electro-Shock Blues (1998)
Why it’s taken me so long to get round to Eels is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it’s the fact that there is so much choice. ‘Daisies of the Universe’ for example soundtracked a whole summer back at the turn of the decade while ‘Blinking Lights And Other Revelations’ continues to give up [...]
Have you ever wondered whether it’s okay (or appropriate) to pepper your web copy with humour? How do you decide when it’s a good time to be funny?
Humour can please your audience, but it can easily offend, confuse and disappoint.
I’ve been writing copy for a few different social networks and they often need something light-hearted. [...]
WriteClub is taking its lightly-planned networking loveliness to the capital. So if you’re a writer in London, do join us! And if you’re a Brighton writer, why not mingle with your city cousins? What can we learn from them? What can they learn from us? So on Tuesday 1 December I (Leif) will be meeting [...]
Ian Plimer, for those who are unaware, is a man who continually seeks to muddy the consensus on climate change. If polls are to be believed, he and a few others are doing a spectacularly good job. According to George Marshall, scarcely ten per cent of people in the UK regard climate change as a [...]
I’ve spent most of my writing time over the past week or so working on a piece about climate change denial for Lucid Magazine. It’s given me plenty of food for thought regarding the way we discuss climate change, and I expect I’ll write more on the subject shortly. For now, here are the first [...]
Psychedelic Furs – Talk Talk Talk (1980)
The Psychedelic Furs delivered on the post punk promise with verve, this, their second album sprints from the traps like a whirling dervish, a cacophany of guitar, sax, drums and Richard Butlers trademark rasp combining to set the listener up for perhaps the most extraordinary song of the era [...]
Some “social media” guys have taken to bitching about the term “social media”. They feel that it doesn’t adequately describe what they do. It doesn’t make them feel sufficiently … special.
Well, there’s two ways you can go. Either you replace the term “social media” with something more specific, like “Interactive social network enablement systems”, or you go the other way, and invent a brand new buzzword that’s shorter, snappier, and more subversive-sounding.
In which case, I vote for “Goo”.
Goo is the amorphous, gelatinous set of shifting organic interconnections and linkages that binds and connects us all together. It’s not a restrictive “web” or a fixed “net”-work. It’s goo.
A locus of goo, like Twitter or Facebook, becomes a gooball. The connections between gooballs, the part of the internet that deals with crosslinks between social media hubs, becomes the intergoo. The global user environment for goo becomes the Gooeysphere, the view from within is the Gooeyverse. “Intelligent” software support for goo (“web 2.0″-based automatic book recommendations, and so on) becomes smart goo. Goo generators like Blogger or Wikipedia, that let users spawn new collections of goo connections are hypergoo.
Corporate blogging and twitterring becomes Blue Goo.
It also ties in well with the idea of links between software and wetware … and the fact that a Graphical User Interface – the thing that you look at when you use a piece of software – is referred to as a GUI (pronounced “gooey”) doesn’t hurt, either.
All good clean fun.
Trouble is, how are you going to explain to your mother that you have a career in goo?
“Social media” doesn’t sound so bad now, does it?
