Russell Davies

conference advice

I want to go to some conferences next year. Conferences about things I don't know anything about, so I can hear new stuff. With the weakness of the dollar and a few left-over corporate airmiles I can probably afford one trip to the US and one mainland Europe trip. I'm not one for chatting in the foyer much, not very good at that. So I don't want a conference that's good for networking, I want one that's good for sitting in a chair and listening to people talking.

I'm thinking I'd like to go to a proper tech conference (not a marketing and technology conference). And I was thinking about ETech because it looks like it'll be about the future, not the internet. But I'd love advice on other possibilities. ReBoot always looks brilliant too. Or Lift?

I'd like to go to a proper art thing. Not an art shopping event like Frieze but something properly long and impenetrable. Like a biennial or something? Does anyone know about those?

And I want to go to a literary festival. The only one I know of is Hay, but is that too obvious? Is that like going to Reading?

After that I'm very open to suggestions. A design thing? Architecture? Postopolis would be great if it happens again. What did anyone think of Poptech? I can't afford TED again but I loved its range of speakers. Is there a cheap TED? (apart from Interesting). Games? Logistics? Model railways? Printing? I'd be up for any of those.

And I'm very keen to supplement the big things (tech, art, books) with some more unexpected things - golf course design, chicken-sexing etc so if anyone has any thoughts there that'd be good.

Sorry, this is a bit lazyweb isn't it? But I thought it might be a useful conversation for other people too. If anyone has any thoughts. Many thanks.

UPDATE: I forgot about We Love Technology. I'll defintely go back for that if they do it again. And dConstruct.

coffee

I think that, for me, coffee morning has run its course. I'm working too often on a Friday to organise it regularly, and now it's turned into a thing I don't have the energy to do it properly like the likemind folks. This Friday was going to be my last one, but as if to prove my point, I can't now make it. But I would love it if someone else would take on the coffee morning baton. All you have to do is say you're going to be somewhere and invite others to come. All that's required is purposeless chat. Though, you, of course, might have different rules. (To instantly start the nostalgia click here)

on the value of specificity

best urban spaces

There's a fantastic blog called Digital Urban. It's the work of a guy called  Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith and is "aimed at examining the latest techniques to visualise the city scape via digital media". There's always interesting stuff on there, especially all the work they're doing on virtual london. A little while back they raised the notion of making a book about the World's Worst Urban Places and Spaces. It's going to be a crowd-sourced, self-publishingy thing written via contributions to a special flickr group. I thought that was a really interesting idea, a great way to use a distributed publishing model.

But, while chatting about it with Mr Dan Hill and, both of us being mindless optimists, we wondered if we could do a companion piece about The World's Best Urban Places and Spaces. That seemed like a good idea too. Accentuate the positive and all that. So we checked with Dr Hudson-Smith, he's cool with it, so here we go.

This is the plan. Dan's set up a flickr group here, all you need to do is contribute a picture or pictures and as much text as you think is appropriate. We'll leave you to interpret 'best' 'urban' 'space' and 'place' as you like. Could be anywhere or anything; bus shelters, buildings, bombsites or benches. Rather than wait until we've got enough for a book (which, of course, may never happen) we're planning instead on doing a series of pamphlets. We're going to try and persuade some top designers to do them for us. There'll be a free one as a pdf online and lovely specially printed ones for everyone who contributes and/or who'd like to buy them. Obviously we've not really worked out all the details on that yet, but will let you know when we have.

Does that sound interesting? I think it might be. Pile in, if you'd like to.

deadline

If you're thinking of having a go at the APSotW thing, over at Paul's blog. The deadline is approaching.

interesting pictures

James asked a question about digital versus film. Well, this is my most favourited picture on flickr, so I'd say yes.

money changing

One of the things I like about fairs and amusement arcades is the way they have a slightly different sense of money. Arcades almost always drive you to the change machine to get piles of metal to shove into the slotties. Which makes money much more tangible than it normally is. It must be one of the frictional drags on their business. Both the palaver people have to go through to pay and the business of collecting, storing, counting and doling out physical cash.

Clearly they're not the only people who have to worry about this. Visa and Oyster are doing all sorts of cashless things. And the phone and other companies are working on it too, which of course they've already done in many bits of the world.

Even Westminster council is doing things , they're about to remove loads of parking meters and replace them with 'pay by phone'.

But I think I was struck most forcibly by the whole thing when we went to the winter fair in Hyde Park yesterday. Most fairs now have a system where you have to buy tokens to pay for rides - presumably to stop petty theft among the people running each ride. I always liked those tokens, they were like play money but they had real value. It made you think about the actual value of money a little bit. At this fair though, these were the tokens you had to buy. You could see why they'd do it, easy to administer, less bulk to deal with. And, these expire that day, so, if you're left with one over, as we were, they're very happy. This must be a transitional stage though, it can't be long before these things are contactless; just swipe a card or a phone and get on-board. I can see the advantages of that for customer and ride-people but I hope someone's giving some thought to creating some digital ephemera to replace the tokens and tickets some of us love to keep for souvenirs.

yule audio again

We've just been planning the Christmas drive North, and I remembered this audio thing from last year. And I  also remembered that Jeremy was after some Christmas tunes. So I thought I'd stick it up again. Ho ho etc.

MP3

comment free

I'm away and offline for a week so I'm afraid no comments will get through for a bit. If you had any. Which you probably didn't. Anyway. See you soon.

dawdlr - a twitter for the long now II

Dawdlr has just updated for the first time. (What's dawdlr?) I think it's worked rather well. People have sent excellent things. Some florid, some restrained, some silly, some thoughtful. It's like twitter; people are making up 'what it's for' on their own. And, of course, even though there's been six months to get one in some people are late.

I wasn't quite sure whether to scan both sides of the postcards but mostly I did, unless there was really nothing on the other side.  The only problem thus far is tumblr only lets you do fifteen posts per page, which means the first update stretches over a couple of pages. Apart from that I like the way it looks.

I wonder what'll happen now. Is this lot just a first novelty flurry or is this somehow interesting or useful? We shall see.

Next update May 21st. At this rate we'll be out of beta by 2312.