Ex collegue of mine Matt Cashmore is about to blog motorbiking to Russia for charity, some of which he'll be doing as audio by phone - here's his handy guide to doing just that (the phone thing, not the motorbiking): "Sound simple doesn’t it. Just find a way of leaving a message on something like skype, then get it to encode your audio, upload it to the server and generate the XML." [link]

Of All The People In All The World is a unusual and fantastical piece of art/theatre created by Birmingham-based Stan’s Cafe. They have a grain of rice to represent every person alive today and the piles are continually re-arranged to represent different statistics - it’s far better that I’ve made it sound here, go and check out their site. After gaining plaudits around the world it’s finally being set up in Birmingham from the 13th September - 5th October.

Unlike some artists in this copyright obsessed age, Stan’s Cafe are encouraging people to take photos or video as they visit, and now to share them on the internet.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours finishing off a site - the rice show -  with Nick Booth that attempts to collate everything said and any media made around the show — a sort of automatic collective memory, and also a great forum for discussion on the ideas behind the show.

It’s a lot simpler than UpYerBrum (which does aggregation, but also voting), it’s a lightweight WordPress installation, with a plugin to fetch RSS feeds and a little custom jiggery-pokery to make sure that everything sits up front. It fetches Flickr, YouTube, blogs, news, twitter activity and also Radio Rice - which is a super online version of the stats from the show.

Do go if you get chance — and tag anything you take or make thericeshow.

An old PA football story somehow finds itself published as new news on This is Croydon - to the ire of commenters. The very funny ire. Read the comments from the bottom-up to get it chronologically. [link]

Firefox extension that hides comments on YouTube by grammar, spelling and punctuation. It's a very good way of filtering the dreadful and purile comments that litter YouTube. [link]

UK Twitters awoke to a email this morning telling them that updates by text were no more (follow the reaction on Twitter itself). Unlike in the US where the standard has been to pay to receive texts, Twitter has been stumping up the cost of updating UK subscribers. That, according to Twitter has become a cost too much to bear:

It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users.

Whatever you think of their calculations, you can purchase SMSs much cheaper in bulk (for fractions of a penny) and I’m not convinced that it’s a huge number of people with text updates on at all times, if they can’t afford it then that’s fair enough. Negotiating with the carriers for a cheaper rate doesn’t seem the best solution to me, even if they reduce costs per user growth in Twitter usage will eat into their funding.

Better to take this opportunity to introduce advertising in some form.

If a third party service was to set up and use the Twitter API to send out free text updates, but send one advert for every ten (at the same time as a real update so you didn’t get a false alarm) I’m guessing it would have both a revenue model and a lot of sign-ups. If it introduced additional functionality (perhaps a contacts directory/speeddial thing so you didn’t have to keep typing out @conmpl1cated_names-withpuntuat|on), then it would be adding value to the SMS-based service.

So, perhaps Twitter could do it too — they at least have unfettered access to the API and with the Summize technology they could deliver context sensitive ads. If it worked in the UK, then maybe it could even expand to countries where — at the moment — they can still afford to text you.

Nice piece about the BBC's "research mansion", doomed to closure and the dispersal of some incredibly talented people. [link]

I working on a site (which I can’t reveal yet, it might not even see the light of day) that is basically a fake social-network, populated by characters that don’t exist. The main point of it will be the feeling and story generated by the charcters and thier interactions, but it’s important to get the look and feel right.

I’m using Wordpress and a theme called “facebooked” by Justin Tadlock, it’s very well done but is only intended to give a blog an appearance of Facebook (which I’ve tweaked to be FB-ish, but not exactly the same). So I’m adding stuff in, by judicious use of plug-ins, page templates and custom fields. I’ve managed to generate workable status updates, friendships, groups and events as well as profile pages — but what else does a social network need?

I threw out the question on twitter and Anthony Herron suggested adverts, which is good. Not only would you normally see them, but it will help to fill gaps.

But I’m open to suggestions — not for what you’d like to see in a social network, but for what you wouldn’t believe one could work without.

I know they’ve become quite the retro-cliché, but Public Information Films are a fine example of Government agencies passing information directly to the public – without spending an awful lot of time and effort second guessing the media. And I’ve just found an archive online — that you can watch, download, and use (subject to normal Crown Copyright rules).

Some might contend that they’re only remembered due to the limited options we had on TV then, much as people will claim of ‘Morecambe and Wise’ “anyone could have got 20M viewers, there wasn’t anything else on”. But unsuccessful TV programmes didn’t get 20M viewers even in the 60s (in fact Eric and Ernie’s dreadful first series was watched by a tiny amount of people, despite there only being 2 channels). The best of the PIFs are remembered fondly because they were well made and got their message across — and that’s something that can be done with social media tools today.

It’s interesting that they get shorter and shorter (generally) from 33mins(!) to snappier advert style as the years go on, the makers having learnt from the commercial sector. In the same way organisations now can look to the big YouTube hits and other social objects (Lolcats for example) and use some of the best techniques.

If you remember ‘Clunk-Click‘, ‘SPLINK‘ there’s a good chance you’ll have taken on the message too.

Here’s my particular favourite, Tufty the Road Safety Squirrel (I even own the LP):


[Link]

Launched today in the West Midlands, MyNeighbourhood.info is a official version of those map mash-ups of crime statistics that have been produced for some time now. The interface isn’t the most intuitive (in fact I’d call it downright unfriendly), and the mapping window is tiny:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

It’s also difficult to see the use of the site as it stands is. Interesting the data might be, but in its flat form it doesn’t “do” much.

Freeing the data to my compared and overlaid with other types of information (more than the “bus stops and police stations” that can be toggled here) would produce so much more — imagine house prices, cctv density, education standards, regenerations spends and other info combined. What truths would we be able to see?

Nice start, many more possibilites.

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