Visible Cities – Ludocity This sounds like it was a brilliant game. I wish I'd been there and been able to play.
The Transformers at dConstruct 2011 – Hubbub The City and The City, Baarle-Nassau, the recent riots in London, overlapping worlds, social stratification, and the role of (different aspects of) games. I wish I was this smart. Go and read it.
Check against Delivery This is an absolutely brilliant talk about, essentially, how those in power are trying to get to grips with the world we have today, instead of the wordl we have tomorrow, and how this is a mistake. Key quote "a two term Prime Minister today would end his term of office with an iPhone 64 times as powerful as the one he won the election with. (Or the same thing, but 1/64th of the price.) His policies, therefore, need to written with that future in mind, not the present. "
Mastergram Instagram is an absolutely brilliant thing – I'd be using it for my photoblogging, if it hadn't launched about three weeks after I started 365bullets, but it's going to be the tool I use for the next photo project after that. But, as this project shows, it's not the filters that make the photo (and they're not why I think instagram is great). Sure, sometimes they enhance what's there, but they'll destroy a great shot more often than they'll rescue a mediocre one.
Warren Ellis » GUEST INFORMANT: Jess Nevins Jess Nevins does a guest stint on Warren's site, and, in the process, teaches us all something about the history of fandom. I imagine a good number of you will have seen this already, but if you're someone with a connection to fandom who doesn't read Warren's blog in some format, I commend this particular post to your attention. Don't you want to know what Byron thought of about fandom?
Home – Readmill I've just signed up for the beta of this service. Will dump books across to it in the next day or so, and give it a go. The app certainly looks nice, just as a shame apple don't expose an API to pull books out of the iBooks app, meaning I'm going to wind up with (quite a lot of) duplicate data on my iPad.
What Does Google Mean By “Evil?” (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought) This has been on my mind lately, and it's an interesting perspective. Swartz is suggesting that Google's definition of "evil" is "not making things worse for users in order to make more money". It's not a bad suggestion, and if it's accurate, it's still more than many companies even attempt, but (as is probably obvious if you've listened to me bang on for a while) I think it's perfectly possible to be "evil" and still hew to that definition. (I also don't agree that the G+/real names nonsense passes that definition of "evil", but that's another thing.)