WebMink

Glastonbury Blog

This weekend sees the Glastonbury Festival, a Great British Tradition held annually on a farm in the west of England at which leading-edge rock music and cloying mud are experienced in roughly equally quantities by vast numbers of actual and wannabe 20-somethings. Our local camping store told us they had a sold a whole lot of tents this week so I'm guessing it's as popular as ever.

This year, as well as the usual tide of broadcasts on the BBC, there is also a BBC staff group blog of the event - we'll have to see if it can develop an authentic voice over the weekend.

posted at 10:52 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Thursday, June 26

Cool PDFs

Only just noticed this on Norm Walsh's site, but he offers a PDF digest in addition to his other non-HTML formats. One of the benefits of a home-brew all-XML CMS I suppose.

posted at 9:38 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Supernova

I just signed up to deliver one of the industry perspective talks at Supernova in Washington DC. I'm looking forward to it - there's a risk it will be like Steve McLaughlin describes another conference:
To take a recent example, you had a conference about blogging's impact on the business world where bloggers sat on panels with other bloggers, some of which were blogging what was said, while other bloggers sat in the audience blogging about all of the blogging discussions.
but at least Dave Winer will be at OSCON in Portland so can't write about me like he did about last year's IBM speaker. (" These guys lie.")

posted at 2:21 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Wednesday, June 25

... and it's goodbye to Frames

Well, I received plenty of advice to tell me Frames Are Bad For Blogs so I am going to see what happens if I ditch them. At the same time, in common with probably thousands of others, I'll see what happens if I give Google AdSense some of my space. Let me know what you think of the new design.

posted at 3:36 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Tuesday, June 24

Sun Bloggers

For a while now I've wanted a reference list of people at Sun who maintain weblogs (first called out by Timothy Appnel). I've not found one, so decided to thow one together - Sun Bloggers. If there is a list I missed, or there are bloggers I've not encountered, let me know.

posted at 4:34 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

RSS is a Big Deal [WebTech]

Guess which Webmink item has been linked the most of late? Seems I wasn't the only one (Sam, Bill) pleased that Blogger has fixed their RSS problems after so long. I've had to explain to quite a few people of late why RSS is a Big Deal so I'm really pleased to see progress towards unity on the subject. Having a truly open and united RSS format will catalyse the next wave of the web, I have no doubt, so I enthusiastically support this initiative.

PS Bill: thanks for the kind words, hope the link between me and injury isn't too strong in your mind...

posted at 1:50 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

A ban on passengers? [SocioPolitico]

The vultures are circling here in the UK over use of mobile phones while driving, and the timely appearance of a Swedish study seems to lend weight to the argument. This time round it's a little better than the Tories Yuppy Tax (a previous Conservative government made provision of a cell phone to an employee a specially taxable benefit) and there's no doubt that most people want to see a ban on one-handed drivers, head cocked, lost in a world of conversation.

But the ROSPA research used in the UK concerns me. A quick skim through the report suggests something of a rush to judgement, selecting the evidence to support the desired advice. To be specific, where are all the control experiments with a passenger in the car holding a conversation with the driver, which is surely the equivalent of a proper hands-free facility? Some of the US research on fatal accidents for example suggests that talking to passengers is the number three reason for distraction-caused accidents (8% of all accidents, ROSPA p.8). Once we get beyond the obvious idiocy, we're getting into dangerous territory - after all, one will save more lives banning passengers or music in vehicles.

posted at 1:18 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Sunday, June 22

Rowling an Inkling? [BiblioPoesis]

The new Harry Potter book [UK|US] arrived first thing Saturday morning from Amazon and the whole family has descended on it - it now has four bookmarks at various stages (none of them mine - not worth even trying until the family has finished!). I will be interested to hear the accuracy of the predictions made by John Granger, author of what looks a remarkable book decoding the symbolism of the HP series (The Hidden Key [UK|US]) if the NRO review of it is true.

While I am (heresy!) not totally smitten by the Potter books, the negative reaction of many christian commentators has been something I have viewed with distaste. It's not entirely surprising that people unable to understand the subtleties of biblical truth are also unable to spot the clear fact that Rowling is not motivated by the same imperatives as Philip Pullman, but even if even a fraction of Granger's analysis is correct then she has been treated in the most disgraceful way by the fundamentalists (including catholics as well as the usual suspects) who treat her as satanic.

posted at 6:17 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

RSS now valid [MetaBlog]

Hurrah! Blogger has fixed both the date and the escaping of special characters and my RSS feed now validates - I have republished the whole site just to make sure. And for what it's worth, my RSS feed is now funky, which it wasn't before.

posted at 1:54 AM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |