…because, after all…

Please say no.

What’s this Facebook all about then?* I only signed up because I’m vain, someone was linking to here from inside it and I couldn’t find out who it was without joining myself.

I now find I have two friends there. The estimable island-traversing Nick Barlow and rolly-smoking posho J. Clive Matthews (he’s very sweet really). Two blokes I know and like in the real world and who I could probably have pint with at almost any time if only I could be arsed dragging my sorry carcass off the settee.

Nick kindly informs me that Facebook is MySpace for grown ups. Which, no offence to Nick, fills me with that free-floating end-of-days ennui that’s doing the rounds these days. Not panic as such, just a resigned sinking-feeling that it largely really is all over for us, culturally at least.

Are our egos so damaged in the swirling mass of eschatological turds that is modern life that we fluff them with online lists of ‘friends’? Christ, at least with MySpace you run the risk of stumbling over a decent tune or two.

Facebook, however and unless I’m missing something pretty fundamental, is culturally devoid of such rare treats. It merely serves the same purpose as a pen and paper and the nagging suspicion that you’re not as popular as you think or would like to be. Dammit, you’re going to make a list to prove it ain’t so. It’s a pissing contest against yourself. Grow up.

*If someone says it’s a ‘networking’ tool, they are banned from this blog forever and I will hunt them down and bludgeon them to death with a table leg. Networking, as I’ve said before, is the hateful and misanthropic practice of pretending to like someone you don’t in order to extract from them something you want.

There’s a breakdancer coming into my daughter’s school tomorrow to strut his stuff. Naturally, YouTube was the first port of call to show her what it’s all about. Just had to share.

This guy is a freak, obviously.

And this guy’s brains were obviously coating the walls of his skull once he’d finished.

Update: Aw! Look at him go!

A bit of thinking out loud, this one.

I don’t think Warren Ellis‘ BAD SIGNAL email list is archived anywhere on the interwebs so I reproduce this recent email with apologies:

Here’s an idea I float out there every couple of years:

Years back, I stole a term from Bruce Sterling, “ideological freeware” — this predated Creative Commons — and applied it to the notion of web distribution of printed matter. We were talking in terms of the dearth of good writing about comics. Simply put, one could create a small magazine about comics and format it for cheap copying in black and white, and free it so anyone could print off copies. And then put it in comics stores. Viral distribution from pixel to print. SAVANT was the one that took up the entire idea, and the first twenty or so numbers of that were fireworks.

I’m talking specifically about web-to-print here, rather than the mags where the PDF was the end result, not the intermediate form.

What occurred to me after that, that I don’t think anyone picked up, was the broadside format. The single sheet. The broadside has a centuries-long history as a device for disseminating news and ideas.

I mean, flyers go up on the web to be printed off, sure. But it’s not quite the same thing. Getting an idea, or a piece of writing, on a single sheet and saying, yes, print this off, copy it and distribute it wherever you like — that’d be interesting.

In web terms, the costs are tiny — host the image on a free hosting site if you’re worried about the bandwidth hit. Use Livejournal or Blogger for the whole thing.

Hell, I might even do it myself one of these days…

The Guardian’s printable G24 is a very nice thing but a one-sheet for the bus, bog or bed would be even better.

It’s an appealing idea and I’m pretty sure it’s one that hasn’t caught on in blogging (at least, if it has, it hasn’t caught on in a widespread way that I’ve heard of). A facility that aggregated a favourite blog’s last five posts (say) into an attractive, printable one-sheet would be rather haveable, I think.

Read it and then leave it on the bus or park bench for someone else. Fold it into a paper aeroplane and send it to a colleague across the office. Virtual virus to a paper-based one. Hmmmm.

Bored and following this post from Chris, I’ve discovered the wonders of Twitter. It’s blogging via your mobile phone as far as I’m concerned.

You send up to 140 characters via text message to a given number and it appears on your Twitter page. Something to keep me amused for a bit.

Those who wish to can receive a Twitterer’s posts via their mobiles or Instant Messenger. A little jiggery pokery lets you post your ‘tweets’ on your blog as well - see in the sidebar on the right under ‘out and about’.

I think I might liveblog my trip to the pub tonight. Bet you can’t wait.

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Just a gigolo.

“Torn by good & evil and an incestuous love affair, a lonely and depraved Darth Vader has a nervous breakdown.“

(Via Tim)

An email arrives. “Some impressive mop-tops going on…” sez Jim. He’s not wrong.

Netvibes is spectacular.

Email, blog and site feeds, search engines and the essential Google News Alerts (via RSS feeds) all collected together on one page that you build yourself using a fiendishly simple interface and can access from any internet connection. You even get to choose the colours.

Go get your own. Just don’t expect to be doing anything productive for the next week. Cheers for that, Donald.

(PS. Any ‘vibes users out there got any tips ‘n’ tricks? Particularly on how to get RSS feeds out of Bloglines and into Netvibes without keying them in by hand.)

Update: For anybody interested, Dave Goodman emailed with instructions for importing Bloglines feed into Netvibes - worked a treat:

Go into your bloglines. Click Edit in the right window. Scroll to the bottom and click ‘Export Subscriptions’. Save the resulting file to your desktop.

Now go to Netvibes. Click ‘Add Content’ top left. Click ‘Add My Feed’. Click the ‘Browse’ button next to your ‘Or import an OMPL file’. Find the file you just saved. Click ‘Import’.

This (via Dave).

I’ve been tagged by Young Mr Ayling to do this bloody 7×7 meme. He’ll pay, oh yes, he’ll pay. Maybe not now…

Anyway, without further ado…

Seven Things To Do Before I Die
1. See a Labour government
2. Meet Elvis Costello
3. Go to New York
4. Eliminate the need for sleep
5. Hear the lamentations of my enemies’ women
6. Wembley Stadium
7. Attain immortality

Seven Things I Cannot Do
1. Long division
2. Listen to Leonard Cohen
3. Eat broccoli
4. Or cauliflower
5. Not have the telly or the radio on
6. See the point
7. Take it any more

Seven Things That Attract Me to… the Mrs
1. Sleepy
2. Sneezy
3. Bashful
4. Grumpy
5. Dopey
6. Happy
7. Doc Martens

Seven Things I Say
1. In a minute
2. For fuck’s sake
3. Mañana
4. I’m never drinking again
5. You’ll never go bust appealing to the lowest common denominator
6. I’m not a scouser
7. Say that again, you’re breaking up

Seven Books That I Love
1. Crime and Punishment
2. London Fields
3. Catch-22
4. The Man Who Was Thursday
5. Foucault’s Pendulum
6. Our Man in Havana
7. The Selfish Gene

Seven Movies That I’ve Loved (at different times and in no particular order)
1. Brazil
2. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
3. Hobson’s Choice
4. The Empire Strikes Back
5. Hudson Hawk
6. The Conversation
7. Seven

Seven People To Tag (in no particular order)
1. Jarndyce
2. Nosemonkey
3. Jim Bliss
4. Rochenko
5. Larry
6. Bag of Bears
7. Snooo

That’ll teach them to mess with me.

How cool is this?