1. That Steve Tyler is some sort of compositional genius:

    Really pleased to see him publishing more of his music online. If you get a chance to go see him play (with Katy or Andy or whoever else really), don’t pass it up!

  2. Ben Werdmüller: At this point in my career I'm prepared to recommend that we all standardize on ASCII art and forget about "videos" and "multimedia".

    @benwerd videos are such noisy things, whilst ASCII art has a certain serenity about it. But lack of video does mean no more Clangers :'(

    …unless…

    VCR TIME!

  3. Identified next personal block after some false starts: toolkit which makes not only subscribing to content but maintaining subscriptions+crawling historical content extremely easy.

    Basic requirement for compelling services:

    • feed reader
    • spam prevention
    • search engine

    all of which I’ve started building separately before realising that it makes much more sense for them to all be the same thing.

    Made a lot of progress on foundations this afternoon, code still in domain-specific anti-spam tool repo github.com/barnabywalters/shrewdness but nearly ready to be packaged up and put to use!

  4. Thoughts about whilst reading Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things — mf vocabularies e.g. h-card, h-entry, h-event are basic-level categories, the level at which:

    • it is easiest for humans to learn and reason about,
    • we have the shortest, most common names for them,
    • defined by how we interact with them

    E.g. h-entry ≈ “post”

    • short name
    • extremely common on the web
    • well-defined interaction patterns e.g. writing, posting, replying, reading, browsing through a feed, searching for/within, liking, reposting, quoting etc.

    Rather than RDF or schema.org which seek to create pure, objectivist, hierarchies of categories — our brains simply don’t work like that.

  5. Observed problems:

    • assumption
    • obsession with figureheads; metonymic tendencies
    • lack of empathy
    • adversarialism
    • casting as good/bad

    &combinations of the above. Unsure how to fix them as of yet.

  6. Andy Robinson: @BarnabyWalters Yeah, there is that. But really, I think it should just cut me some slack :-)

    .@andycayenne oh I agree — but whenever I think about how stupid computers are, only doing exactly what we tell them, I think about how much worse it would be if they tried to guess what we really meant ;)