Russell Davies

a web we still have

There's a fantastic article here about how a web page works. It's good. But I snagged on the first line:

Ours isn't, for instance. It's a page constructed to deliver services.

I sometimes think this is going to be the most important thing we learn. We're building webstuff at scale - but with a different imperative to most of the modern web. How's it going to be different? Do you need, for example, different analytic tools if you're not optimising for clicks? 

Maybe that's an answer to Matt's question here:

Perhaps the business models don't exist for a vibrant ecosystem built on HTTP* and RESTful APIs but public service models certainly do. We still have this web - helping it blossom is the fun of it.

beautiful corners

Spent Saturday night - from about 11pm to about 6am - riding a big loop around London. Crystal Palace to Alexander Palace and back again. (For a good cause, donations still very welcome.)

Observations:

There are a lot of white Range Rovers on the roads at 4AM.

There are no ways to communicate between the worlds of drunk and sober. We would cycle around, grimly focused on the remainder of the 100k, drunk people would see us and shout one of two things - either 'wiggo' or 'tour de france'. In their universe this was hysterical.

Whoever you are, wherever you've been, London has beautiful corners you haven't seen.

 

discovery writing

Further to yesterday's post - why am I trying to write a post every day? Because writing more, for me, equals thinking more. It's the so-called EM Forster quote - how can I know what I think until I hear what I say?

lower your standards

I'm trying to write a post every day this month. Inevitably some of them will be rubbish. This is one. Why?

favourites

I was sitting infront of the Apple TV the other day - listening to some music - and I found myself hypnotised by the screensaver. I'd never really noticed it before, I'd set it to flickr favourites and not really ever looked at it. It's like an edited, 'best of', of your life. Obviously, probably, the best bits are in 'Friends And Family only' so you're not going to see mine, but still...

plaything of the rich

 

Mr Shirky said this on Quora a while ago. 'sgood. And, remarkably, Newspaper Club is four years old this week.

ux

I'm just putting this here so I can google it one day. It's bound to come in handy.

may

May was mostly wet and dark, but, looking at flickr we managed to have some splendid days out. Warm, friendly days.

And the day I took this, I read this, which seemed appopriate.

undawdld

Well, I think we can accept that dawdlr is broken. At least for now. It's not been updated for a year.

What killed it was the impermanence of the physical. Turns out that my real world addresses break before my digital ones. We moved offices, I switched jobs, I stopped being able to afford a PO box. All that. But tumblr tumbls on.

I will get it going again though. Hurrah, you shout, like you care.

smart citizens make smart cities

I was fortunate enough to talk at Digitalt Byliv the other week. Was really good. I don't think they filmed things but the talk Dan did was broadly similar to the one he did at Next. And it's well worth watching.

So watch already.