2008 begins as an undesirably blank canvas. The natural reaction when faced with such a clean slate at the new year might be to contrive a grand set of resolutions, over-ambitiously clawing at physical, social and professional achievement to replace whatever it is that’s missing.
Lately I’ve somewhat failed at blogging. Not in a colloquial meme ‘FAIL’ manner, in an actual if-you-put-me-in-a-competition-and-judged-me way. The lack of activity in both redesign and writing would have this site reclassified as a holding page for some other Ben Ward who would later poach the domain name from my idle mitts.
This time last year — that’s March — I did something new. Annually, geeks of the web, film and music variety descend upon Austin, Texas for South By Southwest. 2007 was a blast; allowing me to meet a huge roster of new and wonderful people, whilst enjoying seven days in the sun and heat of Texas. It does wonders after a dreary British winter (I miss the days when we got snow). It’s replenishing, really.
For reasons I’ll elaborate on in a moment, I’m home from South By Southwest with two completely identical cameras. One of them is mine, the other… not.
After a slightly longer drafting period than I’d planned, my article Kelkoo goes microformatic has gone live on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.
I’m considering scanning all the old family photographs. The question is ‘how?’
An excerpt from Smile’s online banking system.
Florence and The Machine is putting out her first single; ‘Kiss With A Fist’. I highly recommend you give it a listen.
At BlogTalk back in March and again at BarCamp London 4 last week I did a session on the foundations of Distributed Social Networking; a simple guide through the basics of describing ourselves and social relationships with XFN and hCard and how they can be pulled together to do some first-step but useful things.
This week’s issue of the excellent Digital Web Magazine leads with an article I’ve written about Distributed Social Networking, published under the title Portable Social Networking: Building Blocks of a Social Web
Apple have launched Me.com and are citing Web Standards whilst blocking users of Microsoft Internet Explorer. A shame then that there’s not a trace of web development best practice to found in this clusterfuck of a web app.
As may have been noted lately, I’m leaving the UK and moving to San Francisco this summer (sometime early August). To celebrate the fact, and try to engineer the opportunity to see Everyone I’ve Ever Known one last time, I’m declaring the weekend of July 26th and 27th to be Ben’s Great Getaway Weekend. Two days of festivity that basically consists of meeting up in some pubs, oscillating between said pubs and a nearby park, eating, drinking, and having a good time.
Talking about the importance of disclosure control in location-based applications.
Pausing before I move to San Francisco.
It’s the hardest thing in the world, seeing your mother cry. It’s one of those things that doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, comes as the starkest reminder that what’s going on is a really big deal.
Eight and a half hours in the air takes the edge off the raw emotion of leaving. The mind settles down, you remember that the people back home are going to be fine and you return to your middle point; contemplative but with no bias toward sadness, happiness or otherwise.
Since I’m a failure at regular blogging, I’m pushing microblogging instead. At least then I can only micro-fail, and at scale you’re really just talking about some minor disappoint that can be solved with ice cream.
28 days after moving to San Francisco.
Surfing like it’s 1998. I’ve switched from back tabbed to multiple windowed browsing on Mac OSX.
The scenario I’m trying to support is this: Rather than someone come to this site and subscribe via RSS just to the blog, they would subscribe to the lifestream. But, the lifestream would be built such that the content is relevant enough they don’t get irritated by its content.
On the presentation of voter breakdown in the United States, the division it perpetuates, and the fact that it’s horribly wrong and over-emphasises a party-political divide between coastal and central states.
I’ve written an article for the awesome 24ways; Geotag everywhere with Fire Eagle.
On being laid off from Yahoo!, coping with it and the closure of Brickhouse, having a housewarming party and getting laid on again.