• “Always capitalize ‘Bible.’ You don’t want to get letters from those people.”
• “‘Arglebargle’ should only be used in the non-hyphenated form. “Argle-Bargle,” of course, refers to the infamous imperialist bloodline.”

Bonus points for spotting the writer uses Birdhouse, the semi-ridiculous iPhone app which allows you to save your draft tweets so that you can re-read, re-read and refine your work. If you did want actual grammar advice, you could always try following ThatWhichMatter, but it’s not quite so much fun.

Glims is a very useful free add-on that enables you to fix that, plus you can easily add Google UK as a search engine, and there’s a nifty full screen mode too.

Favourite term: FB = 腐败 = fǔbài. Originally the corruption of government officials, now commonly used to refer to going out to have a nice meal. Oddly close to fubar.

(via @monglor)

Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality. The video below shows 100 dancers in central London recreating the dance from Beyonce’s music video for her song ‘Single Ladies’ (which Peter Sagal called ‘a wonderful, brilliantly performed dance number set to an irresistably catchy pop tune’). As a piece of PR in reality, it holds very little value – few people would have the chance to actually see it, as it the dancers and organisers take pains for it to appear to happen spontaneously on the street. It’s over in three minutes, and few of the people who happened to be walking by would actually be able to make sense of it because it only works if you’ve seen the original music video. Indeed, the behaviour of the dancers only really works if it’s watched as a video, passed around virally on the web. It is, essentially, VR: actions in reality that are targeted at, and only make sense when experienced virtually.

By now you’ve hopefully seen Juno; it’s a wonderful film with a sharp script and well drawn characters. It uses music beautifully, too. Rather than simply whacking it down as a thudding backbeat to some flash images (CSI), or using overfamiliar tunes to prop up dead scenes, the team behind Juno make the music integral to the shots it plays over. It’s distinctive, too – rather than the familiar grab-bag of orchestral/rock/pop/mulch that many films opt for – it’s generally acoustic, scratchy, and on the surface at least, quite twee. The opening in particular, uses a tune by Barry Louis Polisar that’s extremely… sunny… as you can see from this YouTube clip of the film’s beginning.

While playing the soundtrack, I looked up some info through the Last.FM app – and found some pretty funny tags hanging around Mr Polisar, as you can see from the screenshot above.

Even better, it seems like ‘drops wet cement on unsuspecting crippled children’ is not, as you might think, a lonely furrow to plough. Nope, as you can see, it’s quite a thriving genre:

Title and artists for a mixtape, right there people.

I actually think this is quite a cool use of tagging – just as we’ve seen users on Flickr using somewhat abstract, emotional terms to describe their pictures, Last.FM users are using tags for opinions/reviews/jokes. Just goes to show how complex a field search is, I think – plain text search is fine, but more often than not, people plot links to things based on far more intangible criteria.

You have to activate the stats to get them working, and it takes 24 hours to kick in – so I’ve not had a chance to play with them yet. Stats are only available to Pro members, and when you do activate them, you get to look at a lovely mid-90s era animated gif:

Nice to see Flickr still knows how to talk to the geek in its fanbase

A cat, ready to pounce, yesterday.

Just a short post; I’ve signed up to Pownce, the Twitter knock-off/second coming from, among others, Kevin Rose of Digg. The best thing about it is there’s a lot of vowels in the name compared to most Web 2.0 sites, but I’ve not used it that much yet.

Anyway, as a result of getting in, I have six Pownce invites available, so they’re up for grabs to you, my loyal, bribeable readers. Whereas my Joost invite give-away was first come, first served, this time, there will be an element of skill involved. Leave a comment on this post and add the name of your favourite pouncing animal, and the good ones will get invites.

And I am so relieved. For the past 18 months or so, helping create a new website for Custom PC has been something of an obsession for me. I’ve talked endlessly about it on flights, in bars, in many, many meetings and bored the Jesteress to tears with all my ideas and frustrations. I’ve scribbled brainwaves in notebooks and written thousands of words to try and get the ball rolling and convince people/the company that what Custom PC needed was a really, truly, good website – and that what this would entail would be a very different site, organisation and approach to the one we already had.

One of the biggest problems Dennis has had (and it’s one shared by many other publishers, I think) is that when taking its print brands online, in the rush to ‘get down with this new thing called the web’, a lot of the good ways of working that we had developed on the magazine editorial side were thrown out – although they were of course accompanied along with some ones that did need to go. Baby and the bath water etc. So the creation and maintence of the sites was made largely separate from the print editorial side, etc etc. It is easy to see why; the web is, after all, very different to print. To some extent it’s true that a magazine should not work on the web – that’s why it is a magazine. A
website should not work if you print it out or disconnect it.

However, good magazines do tend to be produed by relatively small, dedicated teams who are passionate about both their subject and the medium in which they are working. In any good publication, there’s an awareness of how style, form and content can be blended together. The same is true for good websites. Make the teams too large and too dispersed, go for an approach that’s too generic, too rule-based and disconnected with what the content relates to and you get a site – or a magazine – that lacks any sense of life. So what you want is a magazine and the website to have shared DNA -
shared editorial values, perhaps some shared content
(depending on the project) and the same overall quality – but, crucially, this all needs to find a different form of expression in print and on the web. The DNA needs to create two seperate, independent, unique characters. Brother and sister, rather than two clones.

We work hard to produce a magazine that makes best use of the printed format (for instance, see this post),
and it became obvious to me that we needed to take a similar approach
online, and make a site that really, genuinely worked as a website. Not just a repository of text and picture content,
but a resource for PC hardware and news, a place for people to discuss
their computers, mods, tips and tricks: a flexible tool that could be
the hub of a techy community.

With our new site, I think we’re starting to get towards this nirvana: it’s all written by the same team as the magazine, it has both articles from the mag plus web-specific stuff (particularly the news, which my colleague Ben is doing a great job with), lots of RSS feeds, sensible URLs for ease-of-use, plus WordPress-powered blogs for both staff and readers, complete with file space, so you can chuck up your pictures, benchmarks, CPU-Z screenies and mod shots and not worry about hosting.

The next big upgrade will come when we start writing our copy using a database and then we’ll be able to do very smart things with benchmark data and tech specs. This is just one of the improvements scheduled to be added – we tinker with the magazine every issue, trying new things, improving it, honing it, and now that we’ve rebalanced the editorial team so that we all work across print and web, this should also be the case with the website.

In terms of inspirations, personally, this post by Information Architects Japan was what convinced me of the need for ‘big, clear text’ (although IA probably wouldn’t like the bright colours of the rest of our design), while the excellent Journerdism provided a constant stream of challenging, thought provoking discussions on the way print media was working (or not) online. Wordblog, Modern Life, Publishing 2.0 and MagCulture have all given me great ideas, too.

The editorial team and the project team at Dennis Interactive (DI) has worked really hard on making the site happen. The project has been a huge learning curve, because not only has it involved a lot of technical engineering for the coders and designers of DI, it’s also required a re-engineering and re-balancing of how editorial and interactive work together, and a reassessment of many, many aspects of the company’s old approach to the web. There is still a long way to go, but the new site is a good first step.

And, so without further ado, here it is. www.custompc.co.uk. I now have a work blog, www.custompc.co.uk/blogs/alexwatson, and if you want to subscribe to it the RSS feed is here.

Also, the Media Guardian has written up the site launch.

Jason Kottke started the ball rolling for the ‘Facebook is the new AOL’ story by writing a tempting little note in a link post. It turned into a headline, and as the hours zipped by, a host of talented bloggers filled out the body of the story with some really good pieces. Is it true, though? Is the mighty Facebook (and its newly launched platform) really just the evil old AOL mindset in disguise?

Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood is probably the most negative of the respondents assessing Facebook’s platform, saying that “I feel very strongly that we already have the world’s best public social networking tool right in front of us: it’s called the internet,” and eloquently arguing his point. Kottke himself has more praise for Facebook, but also makes it clear that he doesn’t think their platform is the future, while Mathew Ingram goes for a 50/50 balance, concluding hist post by saying, “I like Facebook a lot, and I totally see the value of the news feed and the photo-sharing and so on, and I think the F8 platform is a brilliant strategy. I’m a big Facebook fan. But I really like the Internet too.”

“Facebook = AOL 2.0 because it’s another walled garden” is the accusation. It’s an emotive comparison, a great headline and it paints a good picture – but I think ultimately it’s not true. Here’s why that equals sign shouldn’t be there:

I first got online in 1995 with a 14.4 modem, and at the bottom of the box were a couple of floppy disks containing a free month’s use of Compuserve. By day two of the trial I was spending most of my time in the browser, on the WWW, rather than on the Compuserve boards and member areas. I got fed up with the limited range of information, its shallow depth and the fact it all came from one rather bland editorial perspective. Out there on the web, I could find out anything.

And that was a new feeling then. The idea of unlimited information seemed like a good thing. A brilliant thing – although my parents weren’t so convinced as I took to tying up the house’s sole landline for hours at a time. But the web was great. Slow, certainly, but we had no idea what spam was, what malware was. We weren’t automatically suspicious of .ru sites, and we didn’t have to be ready to rip our headphones off when hitting a new site because a crappy ad was waiting to deafen us.

How times change.

The idea of a walled garden – a place with a reasonable, not infinite, amount of information, where a high degree of relevancy is actually attainable, where you’re dealing with people you know and trust, where ads are controlled and where there’s no spam, is, I think, incredibly attractive. Not to the hardcore, maybe, and not to me so much, but I’m sure you’ve got plenty of friends who are addicted to Facebook and who never used the web much before. Facebook works for them in a way that blogs, Flickr and Twitter don’t. Those services are morally wonderful, open, standard-loving, CC-sporting, RSS-spewing etc, but they’re just not catching on in the way the Facebook is.

The web is very different now to ten years ago; the majority of people go to places they trust, such as Wikipedia, the BBC, the big blogs like Engadget, because when people are foraging for information, the majority will take the most efficient, optimized path that is guaranteed to return a pretty good result – not an uneven, unbalanced approach that sometimes returns amazing results but that other times is simply frustrating and fruitless. The success of platforms like Facebook (it may not be FB themselves) and Wikipedia attest to this.

As Jakob Nielsen says in the piece linked to above, “Progress [when foraging for information] must seem rapid enough to be worth the predicted effort required to reach the destination.” Too often on the wide open web, this just isn’t the case. A walled garden is not as ‘good’ (in both moral and qualitative senses) as the free open plains of the WWW, but this, like so many other areas of human behaviour, isn’t about right and wrong.