Tim B-L says “This is serious” June 22, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social media, internet, theory, web2.0 , add a commentI tend to have a kind of “faith” that once the technology has been invented, then it generates a momentum of its own which will obey certain natural laws regardless of individual human motives. So once the internet existed, it was pretty much inevitable that people were going to communicate and collaborate across international and corporate boundaries, and that any attempts to stifle or steal ownership of this could always be circumvented, sidestepped or innovated around. If somebody did manage to completely clamp down on the present internet then we’d just set up another one wouldn’t we? Well maybe I’m being over optimistic. Tim Berners Lee says it’s serious:
When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.
Net Neutrality: This is serious | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs
Citizen Frankie June 20, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social media, UK , comments closedFrankie Roberto is taking a week off from the Science Museum to join an experiment at the BBC.
Frankie’s own news site : http://frankieroberto.com/citizenjournalist/
Reporting Back ( BBC Diary of the experiment )
Phixr Art June 9, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : tools , comments closedPhixr is a new online image editing service which they quite rightly point out is handy for when you’re on a computer somewhere that doesn’t even have paintshop or iPhoto installed, let alone photoshop or theGimp.
“typical cases are computers in schools or companies where users are not able or not permitted to install software.”
Being an online service rather than an installed application, the amount of processor heavy computation for realtime effects you can do is seriously limited, and this would naturally be seen as a disadvantage to the geeky side of digital photography. But for artists, restrictions are often welcomed as an interesting challenge which inspires new forms of creativity.
jellyArt , for example, was all based on the restriction that the only brush mark available is in the shape of a rectangle.
Well the paintpot in phixr has the same restriction. All it can fill is a selected rectangle, no clever edge detection here, and no magic wand either. So here’s my first attempt at PhixrArt, nicely integrated with Flickr by the way.
( derivitive from original drawings by children with Barry Cunningham )
Deleted Comments June 6, 2006
Posted by Andy Roberts in : General , 2commentsI just spent a wonderful week in South Wales, relaxing and resting after completing three years’ work for my degree. What a relief! And it didn’t even rain hardly at all, ( see photoset on Flickr)
On my return, there were over 350 spam comments on this blog, there seems to have been an epidemic recently, it’s not just me. So I set about deleting them using “mass edit mode” but I was tired at the time and carelessly carried on too far, dleting half a page of genuine comments as well. Oh no! Since I don’t get many comments at all, the deletions went right back to part of my online exhibition from March, so they need to be restored for historical purposes, which is probably going to involve hand crafting from the email notifications. How I hate doing work which doesn’t improve anything, but merely gets me back to where I was before. Grrr.
Most of the anti blog spam plugins are a little too drastic for my liking, so I’ll think carefully before inplementing any changes. Closing down comments on all posts over 21 days old, for example, seems like giving away far too much ground to the spammers.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
