Digg HD-DVD code debacle.

Met someone from headshift last night and very nice he was too - they work on social software for government.

Last.fm creates user-generated club night.

Last.fm teams up with channel 4 for music charts.

Open-source PHP amazon WS client that includes EC2 and S3 support.

My taste remains amusingly obscure (about 2% mainstream).

Nine Inch Nail's latest viral promotional campaign (am I the only one that thinks the wilful obscuring of cultural product is a little pathetic and a poor attempt to augment the value of an artefact in the era of digital reproduction?)

A portrait of romantic breakups culled from blogs. By Golan Levin.

We won two people's votes at this year's Webby awards, plus an official award for Best Music Website.

Enterprise software that harnesses social behaviour. A smart lot who are onto something.

Social network visualizations that look great.

YUI library is JSDoc'ed for your reading pleasure. Well worth a look, even if the framework is a little heavyweight. I've been checking it out for my latest side-project. Of which more later...

Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones do the latest BMW advert. UNKLE sample Beethoven for the sound. Youtube doesn't really do it justice...

The creative duo's GAS book, in case you enjoyed the advert.

Nat from O'Reilly posted this video on the radar a while back. It's his kids.

Designing for the lowest common denominator. In the era of mobile devices, this is a better paradigm than 'graceful degradation', which is its polar opposite.

Leisa coins the useful term 'ambient intimacy' with reference to Twitter, our last.fm FOWA talk and various other things.

More discussion on osmotic communication. I see a mini-meme sparked off by our FOWA talk doing the rounds...

I like flowcharts. They tell me what to do next.

Profile on the most ace structural engineer Cecil Balmond.

An exhibition of Otl Aicher's graphic design from the '72 Olympics in Munich. Showing in Central London.

If you enjoy photographing public places in London, take a look at this.

Ian from BBC Backstage posts up a bunch of videos from FOWA.

Excellent visualization of relationships between scientific paradigms. Forms an interestingly organic looking form.

The latest UNIVERSE worldcast contains one of our Cacao tracks. It's ace.

Prototype 1.5 ports Ruby's Enumerable interface and makes me feel good about using JS for once. The prototype API doc is superb - example driven, clear and concise.

Audiovisual collaboration with a live performance at the IMAX in March...

This series of short documentary vignettes from Phil Niblock is currenlty showing at Sketch in central London.

Christian Marclay is exhibiting at the White Cube right now. Don't miss.

Genetic furniture and bubble highrises from Chris Bosse. He talks Feb 27th at the AA in London.

Designer council flats sprouting up in Madrid...

Generative poster about typographic history.

From Daring Fireball. I am suitably amused.

AOL implement openID support in a bunch of services. Great news. Half the big service providers are showing encouraging signs on the openID front. Question is, who's going to build an interoperable web-based contacts manager on the openID platform...

Open source Basecamp substitute, expressly modelled on Basecamp.

Workaround for ie's Active X activation restrictions. Useful for all flash content publishers.

My dad put this up last week. It's an investigation into the life of a friend of the family. A painter in hiding (lived in an attic with no light for 8 years), Santiago Montes was imprisoned at the end of the civil war, going on to make copies of original Prado works that were so good they bemused critics.

New documentary film on this free jazz pioneer. Screening at ICA in London.

Boat megastructures.

Renew your faith in Excel with Excel art.

Simon Reynolds surveys the musical landscape and picks out, um, dark stuff (metal, noise, dubstep) as the new trend.

Surprise! The RIAA are out of touch with the culture industry. Here they try to argue the cost of a compact disc as an attractive consumer proposition, despite consumers around the world feeling otherwise and showing it through their purchasing behaviour. Hear that? It's the sound of the RIAA humming to themselves with an index finger in each ear...

Modular octahedral components form a micro dwelling. Very bucky. Very cute.

This video of Luke's band 'Birds of Delay' doing their thing. In London next weekend for 'Sotto Voce' festival. Don't miss.

The giant thread on flickr old skool accounts. Interesting skim.

Bruce Sterling on Flickr's termination of Flickr-only accounts. Old skool members like myself now have to join the Yahoo! network in order to use Flickr. I feel exactly as Bruce does. Where's my value proposal?

BBC on MMORPG's

Paris Hilton? Exposed? Paradox of the week, given this might possibly be the most photographed woman in the world. A large portion of Paris Hilton's belongings are bought at an auction. Potentially leading to a Paris Hilton museum, while she's still alive. Exposure loses meaning.

Steel in 20th century architecture. I particularly like Norman Foster's Renault Distribution Center.

Feats of structural engineering

Photographs of people walking through New York subway turnstiles

ADDED SQL

The openserver project is run by friends of mine at Platoniq in Barcelona.

Data visualization service. Haven't tried it out yet.

Like 'Spore' level 1, in flash

Norway suing iTunes over DRM formats. Great news.

Proposed changes to the London underground network between now and 2016.

Read this trying to figure out how & why myspace decided to block all out-bound links from Flash on its pages.

Loblolly house. Green prefab architecture in a forest. Superb design, really efficiently put together (in 3 weeks)

More on loblolly house from Wired.

Really interesting to see a simulacrum of social unrest. Because the consequences aren't grave and the possibilities (in SL) are limitless, people seem able to express themselves with abandon ("exploding pigs and volleys of gunfire").

By David Foster Wallace.

My friend Alberto from UCLA reports on a paper hypothesizing that people with connections across 'structural holes' are more prone to having good ideas. I regard inter-disciplinary activity a must for innovation. Interesting stuff.

This is a fundamentally flawed strategy for creating secure online communities and will backfire, although perhaps not in a highly visible manner (slow defection).

Check the audio clip.

Details on the scaling of Myspace's infrastructure.

Architectural proposal for this Russian oil giant. Check the photo gallery. At a glance i knew which proposal was from OMA. The rest are pretty repulsive. Foster and others walked off the jury and the project was awarded to one of the worst proposals. A blow to functional, socially informed architecture.

Great discussion of second life from an architectural perspective.

Trailer for a upcoming (out late 2006 here in the UK, must have missed it) documentary on GM's Electric Car which died a death in the nineties. I imagine the oil lobby takes a pounding. And rightly so. Personally, I won't take a driving test until car engines are updated with 20th Century technology. What can I say, I'm demanding.

Someone brought this up on #last.fm. I ordered it same day.

Great js animation/effect syntax (scroll down to Bernie's 'killer feature' )- scriptaculous could do with this syntax. Also, Berniesoft: Best software company name ever?

Random models photographed in the OMA studio.

Airport hotel inspired by Japanese capsule hotels. Looks interesting. Opening in gatwick/heathrow.

A mini classic from Shirky - this made a big impression on me when i was at college. Agree with the major thrust of this.

Flexible active matrix display modules in mass production in UK

Interesting looking bit-torrent plugin for Firefox. Haven't tried it yet.

Photography of manufactured landscapes.

Classic collection of natural history illustrations.

The photographs of Giles Revell are an inspiring investigation into form. I particularly like the 'line' series.

The ex-US director of OMA talks about 3 architectural projects at TED

Zefrank talk from 2004. Had me smirking/chuckling.

Get hassled via email. Simple. Useful.

Documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim's talk on world peace. I've been watching a lot of TED talks :)

Fun vlogging from music critic/geek Matt Ingram (aka Woebot). The first installment is about prog rock. Well produced, informative and entertaining.

Greasemonkeyt script to color you gmail messages by label (in an Apple Mail style). Works with a few mods.

Keeping production notes in CSS. Simple but powerful approach to collaborating on web design.

Drown out background sound with this noise app

One of the better visualizations i've seen.

I really want to see this Marker film - on the wars that followed the second World War. Plus Paris '68.

A new distributed content creation medium is found. Everyone.

Stay foolish stay hungry. As Jobs is wont to say.

Photographic portraits of Wii users

Mashup thing with lines and nodes and general bounciness. In my experience these flash visualizations do not get used regularly.

Old Slashdot thread that contains an interesting discussion about how monetizing attention could be a plan for spam. I agree with most of the first comment.

Seth's posting again. I always find something of interest in his sometimes opaque posts.

My OS X application find of the month - i use this to concentrate on text i want to read, and to focus when writing a long piece of text. Brutally simple. Brutally elegant. Brutally effective.

I'm obsessed by this old record from Kit Clayton (max/msp contributor, ex-orthlong musork label head). The record is based on seismic data, with field recordings from rocks and water mixed in. Despite having had it for years, i'm still fascinated every time.

Using information visualization to bring a fresh perspective to this age-old argument.