Woo – family photo!

We were wandering through Columbia Road flower market (where we live) with Antony, great friend, recently arrived from Hong Kong.

In the market there’s a great photography gallery called Lupe which is in a nicely renovated warehouse style building, housing a very attractice combination of art and commercial photography. Very accessible, very attractive and very assured.

Seamus Ryan is the gallery’s director and a commercial photographer in his own right. Anyway, he’s instigated a series of ‘shoots’ in the gallery on sundays, taking people straight from the market. He’d done a shoot called “Jump” where members o’the public bounced on trampolines against a black background. The results are posted on the website here.

So much for history. We were in the gallery last Sunday and the theme was “hero”: there was a stout “cloudy” background and a great windmachine. People were posing in napoleonic poses and generally having a laugh. Antony suggested that we all pose and, after a moment’s thought, Seamus went for it. The result is this fun ‘family photo’. The quality is lovely (medium format, film, well scanned… Ah – can’t beat it). The pose is a laugh although I’m a bit saddened that my wiry thatch doesn’t really ‘do’ wind!

The shoot has been renamed “Windswept” rather than “Hero”, but I think our pose is a mix between both 😉

Have a look through the whole shoot and you’ll see many local characters and market regulars in a new light. It’s a great record of the community and a fun way to spend time on a Sunday.

Nielsen’s latest alertbox is entitled “RIP WYSIWYG“, in which he argues that the graphical interface of modern operating systems (Mac OSX, Windows XP) has reached the end of its useful life.

His argument is based upon the difficulty of finding commands when you need to click, drag, point your way to them, via nested menus, toolbars etc. He mentions that MS Word has over 1500 commands and blames the menu system for the fact they’re seldom used (rather than the fact that most users don’t need or want the features – it’s all things to all people, hence the feature bloat).

Nielsen’s rather credulous support of the new interface paradigm for Microsoft office is surprising. The idea of ‘tabbed controls’ is fine, but in essence each tab seems to simply have a couple of rows of, ahem, toolbars… The graphics are new, but that’ll simply mean that every other software company will need to microsoftify their interface so that they don’t look totally yesterday. Is this really so new? It’s just another way to use up screen real estate. Clicking/burrowing may be reduced, but is there any evidence of productivity improvements or greater use of the feature set? We’ll see, since I’m sure that I’ll be using it in due course, alongside 95% of office workers…

That aside, this alertbox really chimed with me. His thoughts are always interesting, but sometimes there’s a moment when you realise that your own behaviour had already changed but that you hadn’t articulated it. This is one such case.

AOL confirms Weblogs buyout | The Register

Hot on the heels of Gawker media’s deal with VNU for distribution/syndication in Europe comes the response from Weblogs Inc (erstwhile baiter of Nick Denton, and loud proclaimer of being the ‘business model of web 2.0′).

Calcanis’ answer to how to monetise his blog empire? Sell it to AOL!

From AOL’s perspective I have to wonder how this is any different from the Portal Dreams Phase of the web, when every portal had content editors and syndicated puffery in every ‘zone’ – to provide “stickiness” and to attract traffic. Hmm. This time round it’s a collection of mis-spelled perimeter sites (eg “Joystiq” for gaming info). Surely this is no more than creating your own affiliate/syndication network of part time hobbyist/journalists?

I wonder how many staffers you could have bought for the alleged $25m?

Despite the hype, this seems like a yesteryear deal to me. Then again, maybe I’m just miffed not to be trousering large ones from AOL 😉

Gizmodo International Unveiling – Gizmodo

What an interesting development (also covered on Nick Denton’s blog).

While paying for bloggers to effectively run online maga/fan/niche-zines was a great idea, the question was always around scale. Nick’s business model was neat and, where the personality and chosen niche gelled together the compelling read could easily turn a nice profit (where ad revenue > cost of blogger). One would always be at risk of said blogger being poached or going solo (as happened), but the clear niche for Gizmodo, the momentum behind it and a swift, good replacement covered that nicely.

The next question was enhancing the commercial model. There were forays into paid/sponsored content, or getting closer into bed with advertisers, but these sit uncomfortably with the open, “part of the community”, blogger approach.

The current link with VNU is therefore a neat change. Nick gets distribution (and free translation!). Good brand extension. Syndication, in a word. VNU gets some cobwebs blasted off its offerings in this area and hopefully lots of names and addresses so they can sell subscriptions to them when they have their work hats on.

Nick hasn’t anything to lose: hell, anyone could have copied/linked to the blog anyway! VNU gets to see whether these micro, difficult to manage “communities” have any point. I wonder whether they’ll manage to find a way of making supplier/advertiser support more palatable?

I also wonder of course how the sk8tr-boi geek patois of Gizmodo will translate into French or Italian… If only my French were good enough to be able to tell!

This move shows that Nick is still combining learnings from publishing, especially syndication, with a good ‘nose for a niche’ and an eye (ear?) for a deal.

Poor Alice, here in the isolation room at the Royal London Hospital.

She’d had chicken pox, then impetigo and then lethargy/stomach upsets and general not-wellness. To top it all off there appeared a nasty swelling at the base of her neck, hot to the touch and painful. Quick trip to the GP was on the cards. One referral to hospital later and there ensued blood tests, swabs, x-rays, ultrasound and finally an IV drip of antibiotics.

Alice took all of this rather well, helped by a liberal supply of “I’ve been brave” stickers. What a great idea.

Since there was some concern that the lurgy couldn’t be identified and could be contagious we were put in an isolation unit and Vicky had the joy of spending 24 hours there with Alice.

Staff were great, the environment was as good as could be and overall everyone worked to make the stay as painless as possible. Cheering to be able to report so positively on our brush with hospital. It was very hot there, though 🙂

Helga stayed over at our house to look after Manon who seemed unpeturbed by the temporary loss of her twin, rather enjoying the attention as an only child for a while. Since Alice’s release Manon’s been very solicitous and informs us all the while that Alice isn’t well.

This photo of Alice shows her watching cbeebies on the monitor while awaiting a scan. Thank god for cbeebies!

Identity2.0 – OSCON Presentation

Superb presentation on “Identity 2.0” – how to move beyond the user/pword paradigm currently on the web, as well as getting ownership of “your” identity (rather than having it bound up with the site – eg Amazon ‘owns’ your purchasing history and you can’t ‘take’ that to Barnes&Noble for their view on recommendations for you!).

The presentation style is very slick, humourous and impressive. I was going to say that it reminded me of a presentation that Lawrence Lessig gave at the RSA back in 2004, but the last slide credits the presentation style of Mr Lessig, so it’s clearly not only me that was impressed.

There’s an O’Reilly conference on Web2.0 in october with a session on Identity2.0, and Dick Hardt’s weblog is at identity20.com.

Well, not quite… Just as I was making the last post I looked out of the window to see the railway arches on fire, belching smoke. The view is over the canal to the railway arches off Chester Road in Manchester. Ahh, made me feel homesick for London 😉

gilest.org: I’ll send you a deck

Giles Turnbull adds his comments to a Washington Post review of Tufte’s excellent pamphlet The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.

I got my copy last week from the excellent Holborn Books via Amazon and there are some great snippets of info here with which to continue the war against ‘Th’Ubiquitous Deck’…

In Jesus Green, Vicky’s taking 5 while Manon and Alice attempt to reach takeoff velocity in their fairy outfits…

Google Talk | MacMegasite

Google’s new service, ‘Talk’ made a front page splash on today’s FT with talk of a move away from ‘organising information’ to becoming a ‘portal for everything you want to do online’. They didn’t mention the new ‘open standards’ that Google would be using/inventing, but MacMegasite have revealed that the underpinnings are Jabber‘s standards which are in use. Excellent!

There’s also details of how to configure your IM client… Just done that and I’m not in splendid isolation as the online person I know on Google Talk! I’m sure that won’t last long, but in the meantime I’m going to try and work out what it’s going to add to my life, over and above the AIM, MSM, YIM, Jabber and IRC accounts I already have…