Blog posts

Over the past few months, Kari and I have joined the church at St. Luke’s, West Holloway. The church building has just been renovated (and looks great) and now we’re starting to host a new series of events under the banner of “Breathing Space.” Yesterday, Martin and I got the website ready for public viewing. There’s more to come (particularly on the visual design front), but if you’re likely to be able to get to North London over the next few months take a look and see if there’s anything you’d like to join us for. ...

BLDGBLOG: Robbie Williams CDs will be used to pave roads in China EMI has announced that “unsold copies” of Rudebox, by British pop star Robbie Williams, “will soon be used to resurface Chinese roads.” (tags: cds recycling robbiewilliams) stereogum: New Gnarls Barkley - “Run” Not had a chance to listen to this yet. (tags: dangermouse gnarlsbarkley)

Every year I intend to write a “top 10 records/films/etc.” blog entry. I put it off until some time in the middle of January so I can catch up on a few releases I’d missed around the end of the year, and then either forget about it, or realise it’s too hard to reduce the list. The easiest way round that would be to just link to my listening charts for the past 12 months over on last.fm. But right now those are rolling charts (so if you look at them six months after I write this, they’ll have changed) and they’re also skewed towards records that came out early in the year. There are certainly a few highlights in there—including Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, Feist, Grinderman, Bjork, Radiohead and Panda Bear—but there are also several missing. So perhaps it’s easiest to just throw up a few notes, and then let go of this angst for another year? ...

Guillermo del Toro may take on The Hobbit | News | Guardian Unlimited Film Sounds like a good choice (tags: deltoro film hobbit tolkien)

A couple of weeks back I attended NCVO’s seminar on the Future of Citizenship. Building on a recent report by The Henley Centre that developed four scenarios of how notions of citizenship and civic involvement may change over the next twenty years, the workshop-based afternoon was focussed on the challenges and opportunities that such changes will present to voluntary organisations. It was a fascinating afternoon and I’d highly recommend taking a look at the full report (PDF) and checking out the follow up questions on the Third Sector Foresight website. ...

I don’t talk much about my work here, saving the more in depth stuff for the other place, but every now and again it seems worth mentioning some new project that has launched. In spare moments over the past few weeks I’ve been setting up Future Music Talk. It’s a site that pulls together blog entries from a group of people talking about the future of the music industry, music promotion, etc. There’s a lot of good discussion taking place, but it’s all so widely spread out that it seemed helpful to bring some of it together for easy discovery and maybe some more cross-fertilisation. ...

Last.fm for television - jonathan.tweed.name An attempt to build social services around the BBC’s iPlayer, in the form of a facebook application (tags: facebook iplayer last.fm media socialtv)

Discussion about the future of the music industry abounds. Whether it’s advice for artists or labels, discussions of the release of new technologies, or predictions for the future, there’s a lot of it out there. It’s good to get a range of perspectives, but until now it’s been hard to know where to get started if you want to delve into that world. Today I’m announcing the launch of Future Music Talk, a site pulling together blog entries from a range of thinkers and practitioners. For those familiar with such things it’s a variant of the Planet-style sites so popular in the web development community (it’s powered by Planet Venus). ...

geobloggers » The overdue Places post II - Prototyping Iconicness Dan Catt talks about the process of building flickr’s Places feature (tags: api flickr geotagging prototyping) Send files faster with X-Sendfile | John Guenin A good overview of how the X-Sendfile can help rails apps send files for download without taking up mongrel processes. Since this was written native support has been added to Rails. (tags: filetransfer http mongrel rubyonrails server x-sendfile) Living on the Edge (of Rails) #3 - X-Sendfile and many other sexy enhancements ...

John Resig - HTML5 DOCTYPE It seems that IE7 will allow you to style elements it doesn’t ordinarily recognise if you create an instance of them using JS. John’s pondering whether that means IE7 can be forced to handle HTML5. (tags: doctype html5 ie7 javascript webstandards) stevenberlinjohnson.com: Outside.in and The Washington Post outside.in’s content will now appear on the Post’s website, and vice versa. A sensible connection. (tags: localisation maps newspapers washingtonpost) Version Targeting and JavaScript Libraries — All in the head ...