Weblogs

#joiito Flash Mini-Mob / Field Art Trip

weather_proj_small.jpg


The Weather Project (which is only on show until the 21st March, so hurry if you want to see it - which I'd strongly recommend you do) at the Tate Modern, London. The full clickable image is a composite of four photographs taken using a Canon 300D, vertically stitched using Panavue and then downsampled for the web - the master composite image is a 9MB JPEG, 3000 x 5000 pixel image - i.e. not web friendly.

This was the rather austere venue for an almost impromptu gathering of various UK #joiito channel irregulars. After basking under the cool sun for an hour we walked for what seemed like 8 miles until we eventually found a pub for lunch and drinks. Good fun and interesting web/blog discussion and debate was had by all. Including giving Suw Charman a hard time about the Welsh language and about how in written form, it was hard to tell it apart from corrupt data packets.

Two new gold stars on my blogroll for bloggers, Suw Charman and James Cox.

Sean B. Palmer has uploaded his photos from the meeting here.

How Not To Get Fired Because Of Your Blog

Yours truly gets tipped the wink on this here Blogger tutorial today. Blush.

5,000 pageviews today and rising, and I've noticed there's some commentary at Metafilter about the actual need for the Web Fire Escape and how you can just Alt-Tab or some other keystrokes combos. You could, of course, do that but the cool (and fun) thing about the Web Fire Escape, and the reason I came up with it in the first place, is that it's a universally recognised image and the fact that it lives on the webpage template itself, means it's function is also universal regardless of operating system or browser.

And, simply, I thought that it was a cute, tongue-in-cheek, humorous and, if I may say so myself, neatly re-purposed marketing refresh of an old idea. Which is a hobby of mine.

Disclaimer : You'll probably still get fired if you surf too much when you should be working. I don't accept liability yada yada yada...

Meta-Metamorphoses

I'm wondering what the emotional drivers are behind the small spate of blog re-designs and platform changes I've noticed of late. I mean, it's not like loads of people are changing but, of the blogs I tend to visit, it seems like it's the soup du jour; Winer, Euan Semple, Mark Pilgrim, Shelley's in the middle of some changes and Frank's thinking about binning Radio and moving to Movable Type as I did a couple of months back.

But, since blogs can sometimes be intimate personal extensions of ourselves, or at least components of our personal identities, you'd think that there might be a vaguely tenable emotional connection, either in terms of effecting a change or being motivated to do so, or a change having a resultant emotional effect on you.

I read the other day that doctors believe that it is now possible to carry out face transplants. Besides the fact that the not inconsiderable moral issues associated with this notion are just plain freaking me out, in a meta meta-physical sense I can't help but discern some kind of parallel between changing certain aspects of your face (or whole face) and doing the same with aspects of your blog template.

But that's me.