meish dot org: life, unfolding

This collage of web 2.0 logos should be pretty familiar to many people by now. It’s been knocking about for a few years, ever since the whole Web 2.0 Koolaid (what’s the British equivalent? Ribena?) started flowing.

During that time, I’ve seen it printed out and stuck up on the walls of companies and individuals, appearing in about a million blogs, and it should almost go without saying that this image gets used endlessly in presentations at events about the social web, or web 2.0 technologies, or the changing face of business in the last few years, or design and UX in the new web.

In that context, it is usually accompanied by sentiments like “Web 2.0 isn’t going anywhere” or “the social web is real and growing” – using the sheer quantity of Web 2.0-type offerings starting up in 2005ish as an indication of how much they were shaking things up and changing the game. Dare I even say shifting the paradigm? ;)

Anyway, having been professionally involved in one of the companies featured on the original logo collage, an avid user of a handful of others and a casual user (OK, I registered a username) for a whole bunch more, I’m as aware that the web 2.0 landscape has changed as you are.

So having recently been confronted with this image in a presentation (used as being indicative of current reality), I thought it was time that it was updated.

I present these updates without reference to or predicting the demise of web 2.0 or social technologies or anything like that. Just to be a bit more accurate.

The image below reflects which of this original set of companies have vanished or ceased trading, via the highly scientific method of searching for their names and clicking about until I could find reliable information about them.

The most reliable method seemed to be to go to the original Techcrunch (or mashable) hyping of the new service in 2005ish, and then follow the link to the company. If the link is kaput, then so is the company.

More than you thought? Or less? Certainly some of the daft names (and business models, and ideas) have dried up, but others remain, and still more have sprung up in their place, no doubt.

It’s also worth noting that there are a handful of others listed as alive on this diagram (or rather, not crossed out) which are, to put it politely, dormant or dwindling if not actually dead.
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It’s my lovely sister’s birthday today, and she’s far away. So please hop over to her site and wish her a happy birthday.

(I made her a silly card – my first experiment with stop-frame animation. Pretty chuffed with it though obviously Wallace & Gromit have nothing to fear)

I’m not a hugely crafty person, and I’m rubbish at finishing massive projects (no time!), but I can’t resist tinkering with things, and I’m a huge map fiend, so I came up with a little crafty project a little while back that even someone with limited crafty talent (i.e. me) would be able to manage: a cross-stitch version of the tube map.

My love/hate relationship with public transport is well documented which made this even more attractive. But if that wasn’t enough, my reasoning was this:

1. It’s all straight lines
2. and blobs for the stations
3. and easy angles
4. it’s already laid out on a grid structure
5. Beck’s simple graphic design means it uses set angles, thicknesses and colours
6. Instantly recognisable, even without any words on it
7. I live in London and take the tube every day
8. It’s just mindless enough to be able to do without full attention i.e. while watching a DVD box set or something on telly

So, here’s how I did it:

1. I got a tube map from the TFL site
2. cropped it to the central zone (basically zone 1 + a chunk of zone 2)
3. in photoshop, erased all the station names
4. still in photoshop, increased contrast
5. used mosaic filter to transform image into 5×5 blocks
6. added a 5×5 grid over the top
7. blanked any squares with partial colour in them (this meant shifting some stations slightly to the left or right)
8. simplified the pattern by filling in boxes with block colour (e.g. stations)
9. went to local craft/knitting shop and selected some embroidery silks based on tubeline colours (not exact, but I can live with approximation)
10. sewed a purple perimeter border which looks decorative but which actually made it easier to count off stitches inside the grid
11. annotated a printed version of the map, with square counts (between stations, for example)
12. started in the bottom right hand corner with the H&C (pink) line and then worked my way around the map, line by line
13. I left all the stations until the end

So here’s the pattern, in case anyone else wants to have a go:

And here’s the (nearly) finished result:

For reference, it’s roughly A4 size, using 14-count Aida fabric (which I got from John Lewis).

It’s not perfect – there are some small counting errors in there, so I had to get a bit liberal with some of the joining angles, especially towards East London, and the stations are a bit square – but it’s not bad for a freehand thing, and a first attempt.

All in all, I’m pretty chuffed.

You can see I’m in the process of adding a border to it, to secure the edges, and I’ve still got to fill in the Thames before I can frame it or turn it into a cushion, but it’s too nice outside today…

Inspired by Dan Meth’s US sitcom map, which places a load of sitcoms on a map of the US, I’ve knocked up a UK-centric version, which covers sitcoms, soap operas, drama and comedy/drama serials and a few children’s TV series.

Now, this list has just been drawn up off the top of my head. It’s not exhaustive, either – I ran out of room in the South East, so I might have to do another one for that area.

In the meantime, if you can think of any others which are set in specific places, then please do share names and locations in the comments below, or as a note on the image on Flickr.

Updated to make it bigger and to include many of your fine suggestions. And Catweazle.

The way it inspires people to collect examples of terrible or inconsiderate parking and share them with the world.

1. Parking space hogs
2. Stupid car parking
3. I don’t know how to park a car
4. Parking tards
5. Bad Parking Iceland
6. Bad Parking
7. You park like an asshole
8. Can’t park
9. You park/drive like an asshole: Atlanta
10. Examples of bad parking in Yahoo carparks
11. Creative Parking
12. Cars in Bike Lanes: NYC
13. Police Parking
14. American Parking Jobs
15. Douchebag Parking Jobs
16. Egregious disregard for the compact parking spot
17. Parking wizards
18. Self-Absorbed Bike Lane Parking Morons
19. Parking idiots
20. Gallery of fools
21. I’m alright Jack
22. 4×4 assholes

I don’t often write about work-related stuff here (keep meaning to, just no time), but given that I’m at home with a stinking cold (no voice and you really don’t want to know what’s pouring out of my face…I barely want to know myself), and I’m particularly proud of this project, I’ll make a happy exception.

Since Obama’s historic election win, a few weeks ago, I’ve been quite heavily involved with the Message for Obama group on Flickr, which started out with a few snaps from my iphone (like the one above), taken around the Guardian offices, and snowballed in members and submissions over the following days and weeks. In fact, contributions are still rolling in, and the group continues to grow.

If you’ve got five minutes to spare, I heartily recommend having a flick through the slideshow of images in the pool. Fascinating viewing.

It’s three weeks exactly since the group was created, and I’m chuffed to say that there’s now an accompanying book, containing some of the most striking, thought-provoking, funny and interesting images and messages from the Flickr pool (with full permission from the contributors), as well as exclusive images commissioned from Guardian photographers around the world, capturing the global reaction to the election result.

The images selected for the book are representative of a wide variety of political views, cultural perspectives, positive and negative views as well as photographic styles. It’s absolutely not a giant backslapping happyfest, though it does in aggregate capture the interesting mixture of hopes and fears, joy and disappointment, expectation and relief which were all being exhibited during the time after the election result.

So the last few weeks have, for me, been full of corresponding with Flickr users and publishers, keeping permissions records, laying the book out gradually using Blurb’s BookSmart software, keeping an eye on the group and weeding out the occasional flurry of images of kittens, weird folk-art, gimps with their cocks out, rippling soft-focus flags etc.

(Aside: Seriously – you’d think the clue to the group’s criteria would be in the name of the group: is it a Message? Is it for Obama? Is it something that you’d like to address directly to him? No, it’s a picture of a rabbit. While I realise that may well be your personal tribute to the president-elect, in furry/naked/flag-waving/bad-photoshop form, unless you actually make part of it a message (title/description if nothing else) then it’s not a message for Obama, it’s a picture. Or people failing to grasp the rather simple point that a picture of the words “Obama is Rubbish” or similar is actually a message ABOUT Obama, which still isn’t a message FOR Obama, and that removing it from the pool has absolutely nothing to do with censorship (you could’ve happily put a message in which says “Dear Obama, I think you’re rubbish!”) and everything to do with our rather literal interpretation of the format. Sheesh.)

Ahem.

Anyway, after many late nights and computer fails and transatlantic phonecalls, the book is now available to buy from Blurb and I think looks rather spiffy, actually.

There’s much more background about how the project came about and my involvement in it in this interview I did with the lovely Mr Hg, for instance:

What has been the most striking aspect of this project for you personally?

The amazing creativity and thoughtfulness of contributions to the pool has been incredibly inspiring. It would have been easy to have ended up with a thousand webcam pictures of people with their thumbs up saying “nice one!” but actually, people have found interesting ways – and words – to express their hopes and fears about an Obama presidency.

Plus there’s quite a bit more detail in the comments of this article on the Guardian site (in which I attempt to put right some misconceptions about the project from people determined to believe the worst. Sigh. See that windmill? Excuse me while I wander towards it…)

All the Guardian’s profits from the same of the book will go to the Katine development project, which is a very worthy cause. So if you’re wondering what to get for the democrat/republican/interested outside observer/Palin impersonator in your life, look no further…

A couple of taster screenshots after the jump.
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Fantastic article (via kottke) about noticing things, and the way noticing can be helpful in design and innovation.

“But once I’d noticed something and photographed it, chances were good that I’d notice it again—as if that click of opening the shutter coincided with the creation of a new info-capture zone in my brain.

This process of noticing once and then noticing again is how you start finding patterns and uncovering themes…”

This is similar to what I was getting at a couple of months back when I wrote about being receptive while on a commute (especially, but elsewhere too), and finding patterns, similarities, in the seeming chaos. It’s a key skill in anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork, and one which yields rewards in other areas, too.

The article takes the form of a conversation between two men working in the field of design, customer insight and research. It’s a great interaction, and a lovely way of exploring the theme:

Soltzberg: Which really supports what we were talking about earlier, that it all begins with noticing. There’s another classic Zen concept that everything you need to know and experience is already happening and present, but you need to get your old ways of thinking out of the way so you can experience it.Doing contextual research is like using “super-noticing power” to peel back those layers of preconception, culture and habit. When you do that you get to something fundamental and then you’ve got a really solid platform for developing new concepts.

Portigal: Super-noticing power really is a strong cultural idea. The enhanced human with awesome noticing and synthesizing powers crops up regularly in science fiction (e.g., the Mentats in the Dune series or the neurachem from Richard Morgan’s books).

Soltzberg: Right, sort of like a super-charged version of William Gibson’s Cayce Pollard character in Pattern Recognition.

Noticing definitely draws on a set of skills that these kinds of characters embody and amplify, but at the heart of it you have to genuinely be interested in the world around you and in other people.

Super-noticing is something which happens a lot if you’re trained to be receptive and observant, but also if you’re thinking about a particular thing.

Years ago, in 1990, I won a scholarship to go and study for two years at an international college in western Canada. Having never been to Canada before, I became hyper-aware of the mention of anything Canadian, so all of a sudden there seemed to be holiday offers to Canada and visits by minor royals to Canada and singers from Canada releasing new albums and documentaries about wildlife in northern Canada and books set in Canada and Canada Canada Canada Canada Canada everywhere I looked.

Was there really a sudden surge in True North (strong & free)-related promotions and media in the spring and summer of 1990, or had that stuff been there all along, only now I was more attuned to it and therefore noticed it more than previously?
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A few weeks back, I attended a Flickr minimeet at the London Transport Museum and took a bunch of photos which you can see in this set on Flickr.

Now, the nice people from the LT Museum would very much like to feature a bunch of photos from the event on their site, and yet cannot decide which of the 680(ish) taken on the day (or rather, uploaded to Flickr from that event) should make it onto their site.

Which is where you come in.

I’ve written a blog post about my experiences at the museum over there on the event site, and I would be most obliged if you would chuck in a vote for one of my photos while you’re there. You can vote for as many photographers as you want, but you need to choose between a pair of photos for each person.

My pictures can be found on this page (and in context of the blog post about the day here), and they are, respectively “Live in Metroland” which is a carriage door handle from the heydey of the MetroLand exodus

and “Ducks”, a reflection of the museum architecture in a thirties-esque living room display.

Much obliged. x

I’m chuffed to bits to announce the relaunch of the Anti-Valentine cards for silly season 2008.

There’s been a lot of work behind the scenes by the lovely P to make the card-sending functionality scale, which hopefully means that this year there’ll be no server drama (just the ginormous bandwidth bill, as usual).

You’ll notice, too, that I’ve revamped the card designs, so they’re clearer and bigger than before. The old designs had been cobbled together so long ago (2001!) that it was definitely time for a fresh coat of paint.

The keen-eyed among you may also spot that I’ve removed some of the old cards from the pack – there were some which were just mean, and while I still think certain people might benefit from a card saying “stop talking about your fucking wedding” (not you, though – you’re lovely), I don’t want to propagate people being mean or hurtful to each other via the internet. It’s not cool, and no-one thinks you’re cleverer for it.

Anyway, it’s up, as ever at http://meish.org/vd/ (though you’ll notice that this redirects to vd.meish.org – something to do with the way we’re serving the application this year, don’t worry about that) and since this site’s still waiting re-insertion into google, please link link link. Thank you!

(Oh, and if you want to link to it graphically, please steal the image above, or one of the smaller ones, below the fold!)
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I know it’s a bit early, but I’m too excited to hold it in any longer.

Those of you who have been coming here for a while will no doubt be aware that every year towards the beginning of February, we launch the latest batch of antivalentines so that the internet public can send each other messages of aconsumerist adoration (and also cards about cat wee) while simultaneously causing my server to melt.

In fact, when various media outlets ask (as they inevitably do, in interviews about the project):

“…and what will YOU and your HUSBAND be doing for Valentine’s Day?”

(I think, secretly hoping that I’ll confess to a romantic meal and a pile of rose petals on the bed), I am most likely to reply:

“We will be sat in front of a monitor, nervously watching the server fall over (me) and furiously writing patches to optimise the code to its bare minimum (him). Just like last year.”

And the only thing likely to be on the bed is the cat.

Anyway, we’re currently rummaging around thigh deep in CGI and thinking about how to get this year’s incarnation up without the usual tears and giant bill side-effects, but in the meantime…

…you might be interested to know that thanks to my lovely friends at MOO, you are now able to choose from a selection of VD designs to be printed on beautiful stock and dispatched to you promptly, so that you might send or give them to your honey, your flatmate, your friends or enemies on February 14th (and, frankly, any other day you choose).

This is very exciting, principally because I am such a huge fan of MOO’s products, but also because I love the idea of extending the antivalentines into the Real World. Better still, you can choose a couple of VD card designs to go in a pack alongside any of the other stunning designs by real proper designers. So you could even secure your position this VD by sending an antivalentine AND a beautiful card.

Anyway, if you’ve ever sent a VD card from this site, spread the word and consider getting some yourself. Feel free to link, too!

</shameless self promotion>