Had a lot of questions about the new theme so here are a few answers.

It’s a variation on a pro theme called Sketch’d. I say variation when I actually mean ‘broken’. Straight out of the box the theme does some very nifty stuff that creates a blog somewhere between the traditional kind and more magazine-style blogs that seem to be in vogue just now. Being old fashioned and a moron I took it apart, snapped off the cool bits and kind of blu-tacked it together again.

All the bleeding and badly stitched code is down to me and not the guys who built it.

It’s the first WP theme I’ve paid money for after years of swapping out and tinkering with some very cool free ones. The inspiration came from Christian. It just never occurred to me to pay for something until he did. I’m easily lead.

I’m not sure what the blog is called anymore. It’s been Visible Monsters for the longest time (but I’ve also got that space to do something with at some point). I guess Sizemore covers it for now. I have older posts, not archived here, that date back to 2002. I’m still mulling over whether it’s worth importing all that stuff here.

The line I’m not a field agent, I read books is from one of the best movies of the 70′s: Three Days of the Condor. It’s been a tag-line here for a while, ever since Saying The Wrong Thing Since 1972 picked up a life of its own out in the real world.

The Hunter S Thompson quote is from a letter he wrote to Keith Stroup about the lawyers who got him out of some jams back in the 90′s. It’s republished in Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream. It just jumped out at me as something important given the social media world I now find myself a part of. I’ll be writing about that gang aspect quite a bit I expect.

The line This won’t hurt is the final line of Hunter’s suicide note. It’s something I aim to do something else with too.

Categories need an overhaul as does most of the sidebar content. I’ll get to that. Also gonna have a few standalone pages built under those tabs at the top and yeah the About page is also out of date. The fact that Max Rockatansky is looking after my 404 page makes up for this.

And then there’s the bunny. Go track down Pani Poni Dash.

Please ignore the mess. Lotsa change coming.

Go watch something else for a bit. I hear the new Alec Guinness movie is top notch:

This is interesting:

This website follows Bryony as she attempts to make the world’s first UGC zombie movie.

What’s a UGC movie?

UGC stands for User Generated Content. That means it’s a film that’s made entirely by contributions from the online community…

So what’s the BBC’s involvement?

The Zombie movie is entirely up to Bryony – we’re just following her as she makes it…

The Beeb are actually doing a bit more than that. By choosing to follow the project and committing to having a documentary by the end of it the BBC are in many ways legitimatising what Paperlillies is up to. At least in the eyes of BBC viewers who think YouTube is nothing but a place to watch old episodes of Doctor Who or ‘that video with the monkey’ (take your pick).

It’s an interesting step for a channel like BBC 3 and I think the correct one. Just recently I watched Adam Buxton’s MeeBOX and while I’ve always enjoyed his work and he’s obviously very in tune with the Internet  this came across as a tad dated and way too obvious. Disturbingly he also suddenly looks a lot like Documentally.

The other show that promised to play in the world I live and work in was Delta Forever:

This was a pilot for a proposed show about an online community whose lives revolve around a very Harry Potterish series of novels. Some things the pilot got absolutely right (the Scottish character defending the original title of the first novel over the bastardised American version rang some serious bells for this Dark Materials fanboy), but the most obvious failure was the idea that these kids needed a visual cue to help them stand out as Internet nerds. The cast had to suffer a tedious amount of OTT makeup. Horrible to watch, which was a shame for the few good performances that got buried. But there was something there that to me at least warranted further viewing and I’d be interested to watch the concept develop if it gets picked up for a series.

That may of course have more to do with the pilot revolving around an advance geek screening of a film that the fans will either love or loathe. Something I have a certain familiarity with…

The zombie project though is an entirely fresher idea. First and foremost this is a project developed by an already popular online community member and something that was set in motion before the Beeb swung a beam on it. I think an organisation as big and respected as the BBC getting involved at this stage of an online madcap idea is very important and the payoff for everyone involved is accumulative.

There is of course the danger that if handled improperly the YouTubers will come off as a little irregular, but to survive on YouTube you need to be pretty thick-skinned so I’m not too worried with that angle. It should be win-win for the Beeb as this kind of thing makes them look web savvy at a time when they need a leg-up in that area. The worry is that they’ll cut corners on this in the way they have with the iPlayer (great concept, horrible realisation – note the two show links above now have nowhere to go which will now instead send you straight for a torrent).

What they could have on their hands is something as vital as say the upcoming We Are Wizards or at the very least an interesting companion piece to it. It also comes at a time when Joss Whedon is putting a fork in this space too.

Oddly enough this seems to be the summer for home-made zombie projects. I’ve been made aware of a small pile of them currently in production with budgets ranging from the very modest to the very respectable. This however is by far the most interesting. The plot for once is the least of my concerns as I’m far more interested in how a community comes together to pull this kind of project off.

It’s the kind of thing that was talked about a lot in the early days of Seesmic but it came to nothing. While some of my more succesful recent projects have been built in a similar way by finding the right people with the right skills in my own social media backyard (which handily stretches across the globe), but nothing quite on this scale.

Getting the right people together to land an interview with Stephen Spielberg is one thing. Beating him at his own game is quite another…

Toby Moore‘s Cool Curve presentation is now online:

This is the presentation he gave both at the Tuttle and Reboot from an original concept worked out with David Terrar and David Tebbutt. The video is a cleaned-up version of this talk, but now filmed (properly) by Laura Kidd, further tweaked and distributed just about everywhere by Phil Cambell.

The content of the presentation has been refined through lots of feedback, but this is the first chance to put it in front of as wide an audience as possible.

I’ve been hanging out with the Cool Curve for a couple of months now, testing it on people, catching reactions to it and generally building up a picture of what it covers and where it still needs a little TLC. I’m very interested to track the feedback on this so if you can free up 20 minutes and a coffee please give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

At 19+ minutes it obviously needs editing down and I also think there’s a couple of natural pauses in the flow that will allow us to split the presentation up. The latter part regarding Chris Brogan‘s “conversations are rivers” and how that should be developed feels like it’s going to grow into something that works as a stand alone piece. I’d love to see The Cool Curve refined a little more and given to the guys at Common Craft to play with.

That said, I’m a big fan of Toby’s drawing over powerpoint style and this makes a great jumping off point for conversation.

When I first started talking to DT and Sleepydog about the Cool Curve I was immediately struck by how my own creative (and not so creative) endeavours fitted within the structure. That’s something I want to discuss further as I’m not usually comfortable being pigeon-holed between two axis, but this is such a resilient little idea that it’s hard to dismiss, even for a contrary SOB like myself.

More to come once the video has been digested a little further… (it’s also up on Google Video and Vimeo)

Slowly working my way through a large to do list that I started on my return from Cannes. Lots more to say about what we did out there, but also a large blogging back log to take a stab at between all the other stuff I have going on right now. Thanks for your patience (and all the impatient emails telling me to pull my finger out).

This seems like so long ago already:

Two questions I was asked a lot last week: 1. Is your blog dead? 2. Is Visible Monsters a video blog now?

No would be the answer to both.

I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time off-blog, but where as I would usually come back and mention little things like the fact that someone tried to mug me again or the night I got to hang out in a New York City firehouse at midnight I’ve been Twittering or Seesmicing them instead.

Some like the term microblogging, but I prefer to call it lazyblogging – I love both Seesmic and Twitter, but in some ways they make it too easy to just throw something out to the crowd. Once out there it bobs around for a little and then gets dropped in favour of the next shiny sparkly thing. I love other people’s cool new services, but this place is mine and I like filling it with stuff.

I am going to messing with video a lot more this year, but there is also going to be a lot more of that word stuff so don’t throw away your good reading eyes just yet. The blog got all dusty and neglected for a number of reasons, but this isn’t a ‘sorry I haven’t been updating post’ as much as it is a ‘back to business as usual’ post.

So let’s get back to business as usual.

After giving it a lot of thought I decided to bring my other blog under this roof.

Running two blogs (alongside all the other stuff I’m doing) meant that both were suffering. Plus it’s been made clear to me that I can’t keep ‘work’ separate from all the other crap I get up to because a lot of the time it’s the ‘other crap’ that finds me work. I’m lucky that way.

So if you’re already here stay put. Or better still add this RSS feed to your reader as the content is about to increase rapidly. I’m rolling the shutters down on VMII, but I’m hoping this will be my last move for a while.

Sorry. Didn’t mean for this to get off to a false start. Was kept offline (but not off Twitter) by a lousy Internet service coupled with a bout of summer flu that forced me up at 4am each morning like a ghoul. At least I got some semi-decent photos.

Right off the back of that I was squirreled away in a command bunker for two days for a very productive round of team talks. Between throwing my router across the room, coughing up lungmeat and drinking coffee while squinting at Excel spreadsheets I simply haven’t had the time to get back here.

Until now.

Lots to catch up on then…

My name is Mike Atherton and this is a new blog in an old place. Thanks for dropping by.

I need somewhere to blog ‘work’ related stuff and seeing as this page has always been the entry point for anyone who finds themselves with one of my Moo cards in their pocket it seems like a good place to dig in.

Longtime readers: I have no plans right now to close down VMII. Thankfully my work is far from dull and dry and I’m in the lucky position to allow my interests to drive the jobs I pick. The plan is to keep Sizemore just as readable as the old bucket of bolts next door.

New readers: In case you were wondering, I’m a full time freelance writer/editor/tech-evangelist who also has time for a little consulting. I’ve been blogging regularly since 2002. I’ve been published in magazines, worked on academic books (I have a Masters Degree in Literature), been a film correspondent, a web editor and also co-wrote an eclectic guide book to London. I’ve also been a guest blogger and reviewer on numerous websites and played an advisory role on others.

Right now I’m working with Webjam and Trusted Places on a Web 2.0 kick. Fun stuff! I’m also working on two new books, a return to non-fiction with a movie theme (co-written with this guy) and something a little more messed-up concerning a stone monkey and a journey West. Rob and I are also launching a new blog that will be a little different from anything we’ve ever done before. Exciting times.

All of this and more will get touched on here (with a little room for crossover with VMII).

Most importantly this won’t be just about me (hell, Sizemore isn’t even my name) because in my line of work I get to meet interesting people on a daily basis.

So if you’re here because of a Moo card that I gave you at a meet-up, there’s a good chance that this is where I’ll talk about you…