The BBC Radio Labs team have been up to some very interesting stuff, as often they are. This time they’ve taken a novel approach to The Archers, a long running daily radio drama broadcast on Radio 4. Now while I’m not a fan of The Archers, in fact I never listen to it, I’m familiar enough with the format. It’s short and there are a number of scenes seperated by silence. What the Radio Labs folks have done is parse the structure of each episode into scenes with attached information on characters, location, weather, which storyline, and other tags. It means locating a scene is easy, reconfiguring them as segments is easy, concentrating only on one story line is simple etc. The effort is to create metadata for the development of a new dynamic page for the show. So you could click into a page about a character or storyline or relationship, and be presented with the scenes and info on other related facets. Very clever.
The New York Times have for some time had some pretty good blogs and quite a selection, such as Errol Morris’s (which seemed like a series of really good essays rather than rattled off blog postings), and Freakonomics.
They are now straight linking to other people’s content at the Ideas blog. Basically like an old style blog they’re pointing you to the good stuff. The link economy is bedding in at the Grey Lady.
I’d love to see the Irish Times editors do something similar. What does Madam’s eyes scan as she sips her tea and stops thinking of new ways to fill August’s silly season pages I wonder. Do you think she reads xkcd?
I suppose it’s not that surprising, but Wallace and Gromit are modelling on behalf od Harvey Nics. Nice idea, pity I can’t afford an Alexander McQueen suit. I wonder who Topshop could get to model, Fireman Sam?
Last night at 9pm I sat on my bed and opened the first page of Man In The Dark, I put it down nearly three hours and two cups of tea later. A quick enough read so I thought I’d throw a quick review together.
I’ve read quite a few of Paul Auster’s books by now, though not his last two books, Travels in the Sciptorium and the Brooklyn Follies. So by point of comparison I have in the past really enjoyed Moon Palace, his New York Trilogy and the more recent Oracle Night and The Book of Illusions. Man in the Dark probably won’t be sitting quite so high in my estimation . Continue reading ‘Quick Review: Man In The Dark by Paul Auster’
… and David O’Doherty! That is winners of the if .comedy (formerly Perrier) awards at Edinburgh. Nice one! I’ve absolutely no excuse not catch him live now.
The new Eircom building has some pretty incredible lighting, though I wasn’t aware of just how much it changes and varies its transitions. The building is part of the development south of Heuston Station. There’s also a pretty voluminous building going up near the entrance to the Phoenix Park for the Courts Service which I’ll be interested to see completed.
A lecturer at the The University of the Arts in Philadelphia has put together a walk through of design history. A nice map of design history as taught to design students. Check it out.
It's the arbitrary aggregation of various and disparate ideas, likes, dislikes, fancies, curios, diversions and procrastinations that have passed by the window of my mind. A personal blog then.
