Playing Word Games in Blog Comments
I just noticed a whole series of word-association and other games going on in the comments of Fail Blog posts. I have no idea if this is a new phenomenon, but I …
58 Posts
Blogging
The Network Generation is in The White House
Photo: barackobamadotcom on Flickr It is hard to overstate just how different these US elections were and what a shift in thinking Obama and his campaign …
Playpen Broke. Now Fixed. Sorry.
Apparently Playpen has been broken since yesterday and I didn’t notice (I was on a train from Hamburg most of yesterday). The robot running it got all …
OLPC - I take it all back
Some will argue that I’m weak-willed, but I have made a 180-degree change of opinion on the merits of the One Laptop Per Child project thanks to Tom …
Respect for Akismet
Akismet does an amazing job, it has to be said. Comment spammers do a terrible job.
Sorry Goodby, Silverstein & Partners!
Thanks to Jim Coudal (I love the giant ‘Finally’ on Coudal.com at the moment too) and Sidney Bosley from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for …
Tom Coates on Andrew Keen
If you don’t know who Andrew Keen is, Google him, I’m not linking because I find him and his views on the internet and the changing face of the …
Creative Collaboration & The Future of Education
I presented my seminar on Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education at Urban Learning Space yesterday and very much enjoyed the Glaswegian hospitality …
Break-time at Playpen
I’m going to take a few days off for a break, so I probably won’t be blogging for a couple of weeks. But stay tuned, there is much more to come as …
Postful ripped off
[UPDATE: There are several updates to this post, which has made it a bit confusing to read. I don’t like deleting posts, so it’s mostly persevered …
Second Life is like an empty restaurant
I wrote a post a while back about how dull I thought it was that Adaptive Path were researching Second Life (along with many, far too many, media academics). I …
The 12 Kinds of Ads in the World
I don’t really blog about advertising or marketing, though it seems to be one the most popular blogging subjects. I usually read Iain’s Crackunit …
Interview with Nik Roope from Hulger & Poke
My first Core77 Broadcast with Nik Roope about Hulger has just gone online. It should become one of a series of podcasts for Core77 and I’m really pleased …
Wind to Light
A few of you may have already have seen the tiny LED wind turbines recently. Putting lots of them into action onedotzero and riba london have commissioned a …
Avant-Garde Tube
Nice post from Dan Hill over at City of Sound about finding a whole host of avant-garde films on YouTube, particularly Len Lye’s film, Free Radicals (see …
Draw on Walls, with Light
A while ago Chris O’ Shea wrote about the Philips Simplicity Project, which had a number of mainly light-based inventions, several of them interactive. …
Play matters. Do it first.
As you know I think and write about play quite a bit and am a big advocate of most of what Pat Kane writes about in The Play Ethic. My interests are a …
Big Switches and Panels
If you’re into interaction design you should already know of Dan Saffer, interaction designer at Adaptive Path and author of Designing for Interaction. …
Company relationships are like a marriage
Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users just made a brilliant comparison of customer relationships to personal relationships. She points out that many …
Inane Searches
Sometimes I trawl through Playpen’s stats to see how people find me. (Yes, yes, navel gazing - don’t tell me you don’t do it too). Anyway, I …
Backup iTunes online with Bandwagon
I’ve been struggling with separate iTunes libraries on different machines for a while now and I also made a stupid command line error a few weeks back …
Djing with the Wii
There’s been a whole lot going on about the Wiimote as an interface to pretty much everything. It’s very flexible, relatively cheap and easy to use …
The Computer Behind Playpen
Okay, it’s not really the server behind Playpen, but it is the machine on which I write most of it. Iain had the nice (and as it turned out simultaneous …
Yes, it's five things.
I’ve seen the Five Things meme floating around and now Nik tagged me. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, like Nik I’m going to …
Regine comes to the Bauhaus
I’m delighted that the very brilliant and extremely well-connected Regine Debatty from we-make-money-not-art.com is giving a talk at the Bauhaus on …
Invitation À Jouer
I was recently contacted by Yves Bernard who writes the ArtNumeur blog about a piece I wrote a for the Game/Play exhibition little while back called An …
Playpen on WMMNA
Just a quickie to thank Regine for the name-check on we-make-money-not-art.com. WMMNA is the source for all things interactive/new media art/design, or as she …
The Omnium Blog
I’ve written before about my work with the Omnium Project and the Omnium Creative Network, but it has been needing another home… My colleagues from …
The War on Blogs
Now that large corporations like Dell have started to ‘get’ blogs since the various Dell Hell blog posts started panning their stock price it …
Pixelsumo links
Rather than cross-posting from my Bauhaus blog, I just want to point you in the direction of a post with some very good links on interactivity, environments and …
Bauhaus Blog
Not really a post that may be of interest to lots of you, but I have started a new blog for those of you who are/will be my students from the Bauhaus (or anyone …
The Brain Behind Del.icio.us
I’m not sure how old this interview with Joshua Schachter, inventor of del.icio.us, is but it’s a fascinating insight into the Wisdom of Crowds. It …
Vote for my manifesto
Having spent a long time thinking about and writing the Re-imagining Higher Education essay I am trying to get it published as a Change This manifesto. So, if …
Cambridge University prove their stupidity
You don’t have to be stupid to be a Don here, but it helps. I really enjoyed Francis Beckett’s article in the Education Guardian regarding Cambridge …
Necessary Procrastination
Interaction guru, John Maeda suggests that procrastination might be useful after all (hey, I bet that’s what you’re doing right now right? Reading …
New theme
It’s about time I had a new theme I felt. Noodling around with themes is a great way to fritter away real working time. As usual I haven’t had time …
Taking the emotional temperature of the world
I feel very jealous, but also excited. Every so often, okay very often, someone makes a piece of interactive work that I really, really wish I had created. More …
Perceived value in creative industries
I’m embroiled in an interesting debate about the perception of value of creativity versus (in this case) lawyers over at Greg’s Blog. I won’t …
Digital media discussion after the horse has bolted
Anyone would think owning a TV station was a good idea. The Australian’s Mark Day wrote a couple of insightful articles today about Senator Helen …
Guardian launches 'Comment is Free'
Guardian Unlimited has just launched its new multi-writer blog and communtiy called Comment is Free. Not only are the writers of high calibre (which will make …
Flagr - tagging all over the world
It had to happen: Flagr is a combination of Google Maps, Flickr and Delicious wrapped up in a nice AJAX interface. Basically it allows you to …
More multi-touch interfaces
Chris O’ Shea over at Pixelsumo just mailed me with a great round-up of other multi-touch interfaces for those of you interested. (His blog makes good …
Last.fm - a replacement for Pandora (already)?
Not long ago I wrote about Pandora the service that allows you to find music similar to your own tastes. It trawls through the Music Genome Project database to …
Google Earth now for Mac
If you are a (the) regular reader of Playpen you’ll know of my fascination for Google Maps and Google Earth. Google Earth is a downloadable application …
Hours wasted improving productivity
If, like me, you are one of those people who is forever wasting inordinate amounts of (enjoyable) time searching for tools, tips and techniques with which to …
WP 2.0 broken permalinks and 404 error
Ironically, the recent post I wrote about upgrading painlessly to [Wordpress 2.0](http://wordpress.org] had a broken permalink. This resulted in my trackback to …
Subscribe to Playpen with e-mail
If you’re fed up with visiting my site (boo hoo!) but still enjoy the content (yay!) then you can now subscribe via e-mail. Click on this link here or …
Playpen upgraded to Wordpress 2.0
Playpen has now been upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 largely without pain. In fact, without any pain at all, although I was particularly careful to back-up everything …
Wordpress 2.0 released
So, Wordpress 2.0 or “Duke” has been released. It now has a WYSIWYG Editing system using AJAX thanks to TinyMCE and a whole host new integrated …
Best 50 All Time Gadgets
Okay, so I did blog on Christmas Day, but hey, it’s bit like reading the papers or watching James Bond movies isn’t it? As it’s Christmas I …
Sony breach copyright to prevent copyright infringement
Per Johan Johansen, code reverse engineer par excellence (he reversed-engineered much of Apple’s iTunes Music Store DRM code) has discovered Sony have …
RDC theme
I got a bit tired of the old Kubrick theme and I still have not managed to find the time to design something different. So I’m borrowing the RDC theme by …
Lost for music? Try Pandora.
Okay lots of bloggers have been raging about Pandora recently. It’s come from the Music Genome Project and is brilliant example of collaborative filtering …
Xooglers
Ex-Googlers Doug Edwards and Ron Garrett have set up the Xooglers blog. It makes fascinating reading for anyone who has ever been involved in a dotcom …
Food, Fabrica, Cameron
I just stumbled across the Fabrica blogs mainly due to the link to the old antirom photo that I blogged the other day. Then, of course, I found Andy …
New Feedburner Feed
I’ve changed my subscription feed to a Feedburner feed (see the link in the sidebar) in an attempt to tidy things up a bit. Subscriptions to the old feed …
Comment problems
There seems to be some problem with comments on my blog. Some people manage it whilst others never get posted. They all go through an approval process as I was …