Blog posts

Saturday saw us out in the rain for the National Climate March. Given the appalling weather and the minimal level of publicity the turn out of 7,000 or so was respectable, and the rain didn’t seem to prevent people from turning out in plenty of costumes and high spirits. It’s probably too optimistic to think that the march had anything to do with this announcement, but it’s still good to hear it so soon afterwards. ...

Caught in the flash | Observer Music Monthly meets Radiohead Radiohead are finally breaking their radio silence. This interview is based on fan questions, which works fairly well thanks to careful editing. Good to hear the band talk about all the fuss around the release of In Rainbows (tags: forblog interview music observer radiohead) Morethanseven » Insert Dojo and YUI bookmarklets Between Jash and these, it’s getting easier and easier to insert your javascript toolkit of choice into arbitrary pages and explore/change to your heart’s content ...

Caught in the flash | Observer Music Monthly meets Radiohead Radiohead are finally breaking their radio silence. This interview is based on fan questions, which works fairly well thanks to careful editing. Good to hear the band talk about all the fuss around the release of In Rainbows (tags: fordevblog interview music observer radiohead)

A number of people have been linking to Jeremiah Owyang’s presentation at the Web Community Forum (I think I found it via Beth Kanter). It’s a good overview of the pros, cons and options for using facebook to promote a cause, campaign or brand, and well worth some time if that’s your focus. There are two pieces from his presentation that I wanted to pull out. The first appears to be a recurring theme in his work on web strategy, centered on the acronym POST. That breaks down into: ...

James Clark’s Random Thoughts: Thai personal names Using the way Thai culture understands names as an insight into how complex internationalizing an application can be. We learned a little about that while in Thailand this summer and were particularly fascinated by the way Thai script has no spaces. (tags: i18n l18n language thai) 24 ways: JavaScript Internationalisation A little help with internationalizing javascript-based UIs from Matthew Somerville and his friends at the North Pole ...

The content on this blog has been a bit more diverse of late and while I tend to take the approach that if I enjoy some of the content on a blog I might as well keep an eye on all of their content to get a more rounded view of the writer, I recognise that some readers may not be interested in tracking everything. As a result I’ve added separate feeds for my two key consulting foci. So if you’re just here for musings on music on the web, you might want to grab this feed and if you’re looking for thinking on the web and other technology for charities, campaigns and other non-profits then you’ll want this one. The main feed remains at its existing location. ...

Riding Rails: Rails 2.0: It’s done! DHH’s announcement of Rails 2.0 (tags: frameworks gems rails ruby rubyonrails web2.0) Beacon Saga Comes to an End: Facebook Adds Global Opt-Out, Apologizes “Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted on the company blog this morning apologizing for missteps with the roll-out of their much maligned Beacon advertising system.” (tags: beacon debacle facebook privacy) Softies on Rails: Softies on Rails Interviews: Orbitz Nice interviews with one of the guys from Orbitz about why they decided to use Ruby on Rails for a new product development ...

Third Sector have a report today about MyCharityPage, “a new website billed as the sector’s answer to Facebook”. The site is currently just showing a page to sign up for notifications, so any reporting or commentary is likely to be speculation, but I have to say I find the whole thing rather puzzling. Special interest social networking sites are far from new. Whether it’s last.fm for music, flickr for photography or dopplr for travellers there are plenty of examples around the web. One of the strengths of those sites, however, is that they don’t describe themselves as or set out to be a “facebook.” They each focus on serving their niches and doing what they do very well. In the case of dopplr, it’s very clear that they see themselves living alongside other social networking sites by providing excellent tools for importing your contacts from other places, and displaying your dopplr data outside their site. ...

All reports, and the evidence of the subversion commit log, says Ruby on Rails 2.0 will be with us very shortly. Apparently the announcement has been delayed until the gems have properly circulated. For those who’ve not been following, Rails 2.0 isn’t going to seem like a huge step forward as it’s mainly focussed on cleaning up existing features, and moving quite a few out of the core and into plugins. ...

Creative Business : Blog Archive » Substitutes and complements (tags: economics futureofmusic marketing musicindustry) Comet works, and it’s easier than you think (tags: comet javascript) Producing, not consuming, makes the GeoWeb go ’round. « Into The Pudding Arguing that if you’re producing something with geographical content (an event, a news story, etc), you should publish the geographical information to go with it. (tags: georss neogeography)