web
Hey Twitter, here’s why we’re annoyed
It occurs to me that the reason people (myself included) are pissed at Twitter’s removal of UK SMS service is that it discards information and nullifies coping strategies we’ve built up over time.
Text messaging is one of the highest priority communication methods, superceded probably only by a ringing telephone. It tells users directly, wherever they [...]
Digital rights in a restrictive age
One of the difficulties of working in the internet industry is we sometimes feel like we’re fighting a losing battle against regulation. Despite the new horizons the digital age offers:
state databases of our information are growing, yet our access to public information is being eroded,
copyright is becoming more restrictive, making a criminal out of [...]
Agile and the horizon effect
The 1960s saw the first ideological skirmish in computer chess programming (and by extension much of the nascent field of AI) between two schools of thought: ‘brute force’ and ‘selective search’. Brute force methods involved looking at every possible position on the board, whereas selective search advocated pruning the game tree by ignoring moves that [...]
SXSW 2009 - vote for me!
The South By Southwest session picker has just gone online and I’m not too proud to shamelessly solicit votes for my session:
Divorce / Retry / Fail: Keeping Users Infatuated
We know all about lust. Our websites pose, preen and seduce, and it works – those users just can’t keep their hands off our bits. But, as [...]
Wolfenflickr 3D
Some mashups are unlikelier than others. However, none as unlikely as the collision of Flickr and id’s classic shoot-em up Wolfenstein in Wolfenflickr 3D.
The Web truly is a mysterious place.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Wolfenflickr 3D”, url: “http://www.cennydd.co.uk/2008/wolfenflickr-3d/” });
BarCampLondon4
Despite some early WiFi problems (which prompted me to finally go out and buy the broadband dongle I’ve been considering for a while), I’d say BCL4 was a big success. I was particularly pleased to find many people bucking the geek trend and choosing not to watch Dr Who, instead joining in the beery Werewolf [...]
The death of page views, and why we should care
Ask any web geek and they’ll tell you that the page, as we know it, is terminally ill. For many years, it was the proud atom of the web: an unbreakable, fundamental unit. However, much like the atom, it has now been broken down further, and in modern times is being bypassed by Ajax, Flash, [...]
Branes
Also deeply fond of spEak You’re bRanes, the zenith of user generated stupidity:
(Discussing a recent energy white paper) “The government have not said which type of power they are going to use, will it be the dirty fission reactors or the cleaner, more expensive fusion reactors.”
Hugh Pomells, London
(Discussing evolution) “One of the most basic laws [...]
Functional footers are the new black
Time to share a current geeky web design crush: big footers. Seems that quite a few sites are now getting rather bottom-heavy and, you know, I think I quite like it.
There doesn’t seem to be a name yet for this type of expanded area of functionality. Ho hum. I’m calling it a ‘functional footer’ until [...]
ORG is two
A quick Happy Birthday to the Open Rights Group, whom I’m glad to be a supporter of. Put simply, without smart people like this fighting their/our corner, we’d be further down the path of privacy invasion, DRM, ill-informed media outbursts and excessive copyright.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “ORG is two”, url: “http://www.cennydd.co.uk/2007/org-is-two/” });