Playing Numberwang on Twitter
Ha! That'll show the foons who say Twitter's nothing but a waste of time? Won't it? Eh?
Labels: tech
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Recording London
Recording what Russell Davies calls ambient speech was by far the most interesting and challenging aspect of creating The present sounds of London for The Morning News. Since I was only using my iPhone (for reasons of forgettingness), I had to try and get right up close to the people I was recording.
In cities it's not hard to get close to people, because there's often a big crowd to mingle with. But it is hard to get close to the people who are saying something interesting, or saying something dull but in an interesting way, and point a phone in their face without them noticing.
So what I did was put on my most innocent lost-tourist face, and stood as close as I could get to the talky people while looking left, right, and down at my phone, over and over again.
I hoped I gave the impression of being someone who was consulting his phone's mapping software.
I also hoped that none of the people I was recording would notice me and offer directions.
And that I wouldn't get mugged for my phone, which I was stupidly waving round on busy London streets, Tube stations and passageways.
Consequently, the recordings that ended up in the finished article are a fraction of the total. I recorded quite a few that didn't work - mostly because I just didn't get close enough, or didn't point the phone in the right direction, or because something else happened to ruin the recording.
In Waterloo station, for example, there was a drunk woman singing her heart out. I moved in closer (still doing the innocent lost puppy face), but two police officers reached her first. She stopping singing and the conversation was then shielded by the police officers' bodies, so that didn't work.
It was also impossible to record conversations while moving. I spent time walking up and down some busy streets, listening in to couples or small groups walking and chatting. I could hear them, but couldn't find a way of pushing my phone in front of them and getting away with it. I had to wait for them to stop walking - which is how I managed to get the two Americans talking about how far away from the Barbican they were. They'd been talking all the way down the street, and suddenly stopped at a pedestrian crossing. During a pause in the roaring traffic, I grabbed that snippet of speech.
Armed with some more professional equipment - a proper digital recorder, a fluffy microphone on a stick - I'd have got much higher quality recordings, but people would have, you know, noticed. It was great fun, in a sort of Famous Five sense of the word, to be sneaking around and recording in secret.
Quite addictive, in fact.
Labels: audio, iphone, tech, work
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Dear Royal Mail, here's an idea for you
Dear Royal Mail,
I've got an idea that'll make you a few bob, make me and a bunch of other people happy, and revive interest in what we folk on the internet call "snail mail".
Geek folk have been getting quite excited about printed things in the last year or so, and that excitement is growing. Many geeks are terribly fed up with electronic communication, but they still love their computers. They want to find ways that will help them communicate on paper, via their computers.
A lot of them would love to be sending more postcards more often, for example, but it's a hassle to buy a postcard, buy a stamp, find a postbox, send the thing.
How about you make something that would take away that hassle, but still let us send postcards to the people we love - printed objects that would arrive through the letterbox and make those people smile? Hmm?
Here's the idea: you make a mobile application. I use an iPhone, so I'd like it to work there, but you could make it to run on all sorts of phones.
And it needn't be complicated. Here's what it would do:
- You open the app, and you're asked to take a photo (or pull one in from your existing photo albums)
- You're asked to enter some text - about 60-100 words. There's a little counter visible on screen that tells people how much space they've got left as they enter text.
- You're asked for an address. If the recipient is already in your phone's address book, it's simple: just tap on their name and it's done. If not, just type in an address manually.
- Tap the "Send" button on the phone.
- Over at Royal Mail HQ, you have a few machines set up to print these postcards out. It's all automated. The cards are done on-demand, as-needed, and posted as normal.
- A day or so later, the recipient gets their postcard, and smiles.
Now, you could give away the app itself for free, and charge for the postcards. The important thing is to charge the right sort of price - I know print-on-demand is more expensive, so people will expect to pay more for it. But don't be greedy. The price has to be low enough to make it not-worth-thinking-about. People have to not care about spending it. That will make them send lots and lots of cards.
I'd suggest something between 50p and £1 per card would be good.
There's room for flexibility, of course. You could have First and Second class cards, for example. You could have cards that are plain white on one side, and have the photo and the text on the other; or more expensive ones that are like a traditional postcard, with the image on one side and the text and address on the other. You could play around with these; some of them could become add-ons.
Thing is, this would be huge. Honestly. People would love it. No-one's got time to faff around writing letters any more, but everyone's got a phone and time to faff around on it while they're waiting for trains and sitting on the beach. And everyone likes getting letters. They just don't get round to writing them any more.
I think it would be so huge that you'd very quickly make profit from it. And of course, you could expand it into other services, like:
- Submit a bunch of photos, and the prints get delivered to the recipient
- Submit a longer text (perhaps via email) and it gets printed out (in a handwriting-style font of the writer's choice), stuck in an envelope, and posted
- Super-cheap mini cards (talk to Moo about this) - a tiny photo, a line of text, and zap. Like Twitter, but in the post. Fantastic.
Anyway, that's my idea. Hope you like it. Hope you make it. Cos I'd be using it straight away.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Cat haiku
Labels: photos
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Reviewing Ulysses
Friday, July 17, 2009
XMenu screencast
(Intended to use this on the Cult, but clean forgot. Never mind.)
Friday, July 17, 2009
Copywriting
This is what copywriting smells like.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Some ideas for iPhone apps
SUPERMARKET SPOTLIGHT - like Spotlight on your Mac, but for supermarkets in meatspace. You tell it that you're in Tesco in Trowbridge, then start typing in the product you're after. It tells you: "Aisle 12, section 2, top shelf, on the right if you've got your back to the cash tills." Either that, or it simply does the augmented reality thing and takes you there, beeping louder as you get closer, like a geiger counter.
GARDENER'S DELIGHT - gardening is part science, part art, and part memory test. Every garden is different, so a gardener needs to keep records of various things - what happens when during the year, and what needs to happen next. This app would behave like a free-form database, into which you can put all the information about your garden. You control reminders about events, and you can add notes and photos too. It might also include a reference book element too, full of advice about particular plants.
KEYNOTE FLOW - only useful during Apple keynotes and special events, this Apple-made app gives you the highlights from the keynote in the form of slides and an audio soundtrack, live and as it happens. It will take some of the pressure away from Twitter.
RADIO TIMES - I don't care about telly programmes, but I do want to know when stuff is on the radio. Yes, even in these days of iPlayer and Listen Again, sometimes I still listen to live radio. I want a thing that will tell me when stuff is on the UK radio stations of my choice; it must be searchable and allow me to bookmark or tag the shows that I want to listen to, and view that list independently of the listings. And be able to send tagged shows to my calendar and/or todo list.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
0 comments
Dopplr for iPhone
Dopplr's new iPhone app is now available for free in the iTunes App Store.
Tom Taylor, Tom Insam, and Matt Biddulph have been working on it for some months now. It's really good. Open it up and it can tell you where the nearest good stuff is. If you're in a new city and you just want to find somewhere good to eat within 10 minutes walk, it will tell you in seconds.
And it's an interface to Dopplr too: if you find somewhere cool that isn't on the map, you can add it. Just tap on the blue location icon and fill in the details. Next time you access your info at dopplr.com, you'll be asked to confirm your additions.
The app also knows where your Dopplr fellow travellers are, and where they're planning to go next.
I've been doing various bits of work for Dopplr in recent months; my contribution to this was small. I wrote the copy for the app home page, and helped put together a handful of words inside the app itself.
Hope you like it. Tell your friends.
Labels: work
Thursday, July 16, 2009
The BBC has a folk blog!
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Posterous: they listen, and fun stuff is coming
Another thing that's very noticeable while exploring thePosterousphere (sorry) is that the site's developers are listening to
the users. I emailed them a question and they responded very quickly.
They also post comments on user sites where appropriate.
A short amount of searching showed me that they plan to add per-site
Autopost settings soon (so you can have more than one Posterous, each
with different Autopost options), as well as support for Markdown
(which would be a huge improvement, in my opinion).
Edd said that "Posterous gives me warm feelings"
(http://bitten.twiceshy.org/posterous-gives-me-warm-feelings), and I
see exactly what he means. It feels natural, useful, and easy.
Another unexpected thing: the total lack of template customisation
feels like a good thing! Less for me to fiddle with. What's there is
simple and works.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Using Posterous to post by email to Wordpress
Posterous has a nifty feature whereby it can automatically re-postyour content to your other sites and social network accounts. Now the
last thing I want to do is have everything I post in one place
automatically appearing in others, but Posterous does offer a certain
amount of fine-grained control that can come in useful.
One way I've found it useful is for getting content into Wordpress by
email. Now, in theory, Wordpress has this feature built-in, but in my
experience it's a pain. You have to provide Wordpress with a mailbox
of its own, that it checks periodically for messages. I've tried
several times, and never got it to work.
Now Posterous takes that problem away. You can set up a Wordpress site
for autoposting, and then make use of the fine-grained control to
ensure that only the right stuff ends up there. So, if I want to send
a photo to the Bradford on Avon blog via my Posterous account, but
*not* have it sent to any other services I might have linked Posterous
to, I can do so by emailing #text@posterous.com, where "text" is a
string of characters found in that site's URL.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Bit busy
Been a bit busy today. Reviews to write. Stuff to do.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
@robertbrook goes north
Robert Brook Twittered his train journey to Scotland today, with great wit and aplomb
Monday, July 13, 2009
Installing Radio Gaga
Monday, July 13, 2009
Photoshoot
Monday, July 13, 2009
Time passes
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Recording London
My work for Dopplr (of which more anon) has taken me in and out of London many times in recent weeks. One day, it struck me that the noises of the place are different from the noises where I live, in a quiet little Wiltshire market town. I felt the urge to document them.
The result is published today as The Present Sounds of London at The Morning News.
I discussed the idea with Rosecrans and he was instantly keen. He knew exactly what I had in mind when I described text and audio alongside one another on a web page, and as usual the TMN production team has done a smashing job of assembling it all into something that looks (and sounds) good.
My intention was to record on my little, oft-recommended Olympus voice recorder. But I forgot to pack it, and found myself halfway to London with only an iPhone in my pocket. That, I decided, would have to do.
In hindsight I think it was the better choice anyway. I used two apps: Audio Recorder and the Voice Recorder that comes with iPhone OS 3.0. Voice Recorder can be a little timid about registering your taps on its controls, but it makes a decent job of recording clean sound, and the share-by-email feature is very convenient.
This was fun. I want to do more audio-based writing.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Day trip to London
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Archives
June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009
