Archive for March, 2008

Outliers

Published
by
on March 30, 2008
in Research
. 0 Comments

Monkey

I just started reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and I’m enjoying it far more than any book filed under economics should be enjoyed:

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

First it is an outlier, it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

My immediate reaction to this was to scribble two words in the margin:

stone egg

For me a stone egg being made magically fertile and giving birth to a stone monkey who would one day declare himself Great Sage Equal of Heaven is a perfect Black Swan. That it’s a fictional Black Swan is perfect.

I’ve been spending a lot of time this year thinking about Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West in preparation for one of two projects that I’ve been working towards for even longer. One is pure fiction, a retelling of the Monkey King myth called West. The other for now is simply entitled Black, but is a lot more involved as it requires a fair bit of research.

Nellie

I’ve been waiting for this financial year to end so I can kick April off with a little space to work on these more personal projects. I’ll be using this blog a lot more for research material regarding both works while still trying to make it as readable as possible.

Also looking forward to a few unexpected turns in the road.

Follow that Swan.

Meanwhile on Reuters…

Published
by
Mike
on March 18, 2008
in Tooled Up
. 0 Comments

Dreaming of sleeping

Published
by
Mike
on March 18, 2008
in Tooled Up
. 0 Comments

I smirked when I saw how they slept at the Googleplex:

Googlepod

 No smirking now that it’s 3am and I’m wide awake. I could do with one of the sleep machines from Judge Dredd that gave you a full night’s sleep in just ten minutes.

I’m gonna feel like crap tomorrow…

Five Years On…

Published
by
Mike
on March 17, 2008
in Friends
. 3 Comments

Doesn’t time fly when you’re bringing freedom to the world?

My friend Christian recently travelled to Jordan with his camera to cover a story that I haven’t seen much about elsewhere. Certainly not in the mainstream press. Christian makes his living from photography, but he’s also embraced Social Media.

In fact it’s much more than an embrace - while the rest of us were still stammering at the front door, he’s climbed up into the bedroom and fucked the living shit out of Social Media. He’s been truly innovative on just about every platform I know and it’s a pleasure to see him go back to his roots and then use these new platforms to distribute his work.

If you’re old media and worried about keeping up you should be paying Documentally for his advice.

Here’s his photo-video (edited by Bill Cammack, another one of the good guys):

I love what he does here with conventional photography - it works in a way that conveys a sense of immediacy that a ‘talking heads’ style approach would never have captured.

The truly sad thing is that as much as I love watching Christian do the wacky stuff he’s become known for, I feel there’s always going to be a need for him to jump on a plane to report on these horrific problems that we keep causing.

Learning to QRawl

Published
by
Mike
on March 15, 2008
in QR
. 6 Comments

Just a quick brain dump of QR related stuff…

The BBC are playing with QR:

BBC Logo in QR Code

The destination couldn’t be duller or more short sighted, but it’s interesting that they tweaked the code to include their logo.

Here’s what the Japanese have been doing for years:

Colour QR codes with graphics

And this popped up today:

QR face code

I did find a temporary QR tattoo in Taiwan:

Temp QR tattoo

If you’re only using them for advertising you probably don’t want a permanent one. But we need to think beyond this:

Da Vinci Code tshirt in Taiwan

Most images via and

Been playing with colour myself this evening

Colour QR

But now more interested in what can be done with the 30% of the code that the reader isn’t interested in…

Also thinking about 3D models of 2D codes and Paul Auster a lot…

I’ve also been asked by two companies to explain a bit more about QR and help work out where exactly they should implement them.

Extra linkage:

A Chinese Social Networking site built up around QR, QR now attached to footy kits, QR embedded into news stories in the UK while Japan has a magazine made up of nothing but QR codes…

Musing while looking for a muse

Published
by
Mike
on March 10, 2008
in Events
. 3 Comments

Thinking more about events.

Watching what’s going on in Austin right now and coming to the conclusion that once again the focus is on the partying and hookups rather than the actual conference. This is the first time I’ve recognised so many friends having fun out there. Some of them are doing some really creative stuff and others just seem to be drunk :)

I mentioned this morning on Twitter that I’d like to see some new Brit events that focussed on the outcome rather than the actual presentations/drinks. We have Hack Day of course and a lot of cool stuff comes out of that, but I’m thinking more about Christian’s Geek Retreat (but with maybe less of a retreat because there’s no fucking way I’m going to Wales) with an emphasis on creation by people with a host of different skill sets. Put a bunch of madly creative bastards in a room and see what gets shoved out the door. It’s kinda how Google foster stuff…

Speaking of events, Mike mentioned on Twitter that tonight’s Mobile Monday is being held at the Transport Museum. I recently did an event with them (old friends WebJam are now hosting a follow up site for that) and the museum is a good example of a perceived dusty old institution understanding what we’re trying to do with 2.0. More venues like this and the Coach & Horses and we may yet find a nice balance between the very old and established city we live in and the mad fuck crazy ideas some of us want to get off the ground here.

That said I had a very frustrating week on my return from San Francisco. Moving from sunshine to storms became a spot on metaphor as my email replies switched from Let’s Do It to Why Do It. The upshot of that is that I cut loose a bunch of finks that I no longer want to work with. Life’s too short to try and lead a dinosaur to water.

But on a lighter note let’s loop back to the beginning and watch Christian and Jo do some karaoke 2.0:

Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid (CC license)

Seeing in 2D

Published
by
Mike
on March 10, 2008
in QR
. 0 Comments

Lots of incoming love regarding QR codes, but here’s something that I particularly wanted to highlight:

2d Code: QR code and two dimensional bar codes, news, views and analysis

Something to keep an eye on / get involved with if you’re thinking of playing with squiggly squares anytime soon.

Meanwhile my LG Viewty refuses to play ball. I may have to revert back to the N95…

Leaving the comfort zone

Published
by
Mike
on March 10, 2008
in Events, Friends and Research
. 3 Comments

I hate reminders that I live in a very insular space. I try and make my interests as wide as possible, but I keep hitting language barriers and that’s down to me to fix. I hate learning new languages and yet it’s obvious the pay off would be huge.

I saw some interesting statistics earlier today while doing some research and what jumped out at me was this:

the Japanese language is the most used language in the blogosphere (37%), with English following closely behind at 33%… While this is impressive, research efforts by JR Tokai Express, however, have indicated that almost 67% of respondents worked in companies that did not have corporate blogs. The majority of Japanese blogs online then must be credited to individual content providers. (via)

Can you imagine all the good stuff I’m missing? Drives me nuts.

The biggest value that Google Reader now gives me is the ability to see just how many blogs do nothing, but feed on the exact same carcass. Something I’ve also been guilty of in the past. The same old same old, or as Beckett put it The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

Accept we have an alternative. Sort of.

Anyway while I’m talking about language barriers here’s a video by fellow STAB TRUCK devotee, Fred, in Paris. This is his first video in English. Can you imagine me even attempting to do something in French? Thought not:

DATE: March 12 HOMEWORK: Do something…

WANT

Published
by
Mike
on March 8, 2008
in Tooled Up
. 1 Comment

Evernote

Go watch the Evernote presentation.

Haven’t got my invite yet (come on guys!) but it looks like this year’s Skitch. And I already want to have that app’s babies. I may have to marry both and visit on alternate weekends.

And moleskines just got upgraded:

Custom Laser Engraved Moleskine Notebook

Custom laser fucking etching

Now I have hipster drool in my beard.

So that QR Geek Lunch…

Published
by
Mike
on March 8, 2008
in Events and QR
. 4 Comments

QR Code Geek Lunch

… was pretty damn good.

We had a huge turnout for the Tuttle Club. I got there around 10.30 and it was already standing room only. I spent the morning catching up with friends (which is a nice side effect of the Social Media Café) but failed miserably at meeting anyone new until our QR experts arrived for the Geek Lunch. By this time we were a small, but formidable little party.

Myself, Gia, Laura, Lee, Nik, Francine, Mecca, Suw, James, Martin, Andy, James, David and Kimm (we were also hoping to meet Anthony but he had to go back to Australia at short notice which was a shame). It was a nice range of expertise and interested geeks. The feedback so far has been great.

I think the most important thing that I took away from the discussion is that while Japan may be years ahead of us in their use of QR they haven’t really done anything inovative with the technology yet. It so quickly became accepted as part of day to day life that it kind of faded into the background. The same way that here we take a regular barcode for granted.

While others were more interested in the practical aspects of QR I’m hugely interested in making some very impractical projects so you’ll probably start seeing a lot more QR stuff around me.

Maybe even on me.

The most interesting thing that came up in conversation was when Mecca announced that Moo had opened up its API. This is a HUGE deal and I can’t wait to see what people come up with. Seeing as Moo have already been experimenting with matrix codes in their sticker books it was a logical step for them to open that procedure up to the users and they’ve done just that Richard Pope has done just that with the Barcode-Sticker-O-Matic.

I’m confident that this will be a big leap forward in generating interest in the codes. Once these little squiggly squares start turning up regularly at geek meets on moleskines and laptops things will get very interesting very quickly…

Then once the I-nigma reader gets embedded into your handset: BOOM.

Watch this space. And that one. And the one over there…