Yesterday saw the biggest change to the Google homepage since 1998. They replaced the minimal, functional and revolutionary design of the original – which has remained largely unchanged for 12 years – by adding a Bing-like background image that you could change, but not remove.

Now, a few hours later, Google normality is restored; the ‘Change background image’ link is there, but it’s something you opt into rather than not being able opt out of.

So it turns out this was a ’24 hour experiment’ to publicise the feature which, when you think about it, had to be the case otherwise Google’s famous themed logos would have become redundant, and that would seem very odd given their popularity.

Still, it’s surprising that Google appears to be so afraid of the growth of Microsoft’s search engine that they decided to do this.


At last, I’ve finally knocked this site into a shape I’m happy with. You’ll find no crufty div soup round here. It’s all HTML5 goodness and it works on IE8 and IE7 using Remy Sharp’s magic HTML5 enabling script.

I found HTML5 to be a bit odd at first, but as I started experimenting with it, the simplicity and meaningfulness of HTML5 mark-up started to sink in. The best way to think of the new elements is something like this:

• use <header> and <footer> in the obvious places, this negates the need for <div id=”header”> and <div id=”footer”>
• use <section> for the main sections of the page eg. <div id=”content”>
• use <article> where you would have <div class=”post”>
• use <aside> where you would have information related to an article, eg. <div class=”date”>
• use <nav> for your navigation links

Then, instead of using IDs and classes, you use CSS selectors to select parts of the document tree to style. I found the W3C’s table of CSS3 selectors invaluable for this. I’ve mainly used CSS2 selectors for compatibility with IE and older versions of Firefox.

I’ve also made use of the @font-face selector to embed Museo font for the heading styles. There’s a good list of free fonts available for embedding on the Web Fonts Wiki.

I must give credit to Croc Camen and Alex Gibson for their inspiring work with HTML5. I haven’t had this much fun with web design in years.

BBC Transmitting Station, Daventry circa. 1930. Unknown photographer. Source.

Kinoautomat (1967), the first interactive film. Tyneside Cinema, 5 March 8pm.

Well thank goodness for that. George ‘Dubya’ Bush is no longer the President of the United States of America, they now seem to have an intelligent and considerate President and the world breathes a sigh of relief.

I thought today would be a good day to relaunch my personal site and consolidate over eight years worth of posts from various blogs I’ve maintained and let lapse (although mainly from frownland.com which ran from 2000 to 2005). These posts have been through about five different blogging systems, from the original Blogger, through to my own crufty PHP systems, Textpattern, PyBlosxom and so on and so therefore need sorting out a bit, formatting, categorizing etc.

The design still needs work; I’ve spent months (on and off) working on and discarding more polished designs but I’m reasonably happy with this for the time being. I’m using some CSS3 specific layout stuff which doesn’t work in IE7 but I don’t really care.  Thanks to Spain for the domain suffix.

In 1991, Richard Dawkins presented the Royal Institution Christmas lectures for Children, and to help illustrate our tendency to think we are superior to the rest of the species on the planet, he invited a member of the audience to read an excerpt from Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYPE2pJ5Els

The lecture series, titled ‘Growing up the Universe’ has recently been released on DVD. I remember it when it was first broadcast on the BBC, and as a 15 year-old who’d had a vaguely Christian education and thus had many unanswered questions about our origins, it was a wonderfully inspiring and educational piece of television.

Much as I like Radio 4, the one-sidedness of the Thought for the Day section of the Today programme disappoints me. Why are religious views implicit when we think of Thought for the Day, when there is no such mention of religion in the title?

In 2002, representatives of the British Humanist Association, the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association sent a letter to the BBC complaining about the fact that the two minute, forty-five second slot is only for the broadcasting of religious views. As a result, the BBC granted some air-time for a secular viewpoint from Richard Dawkins, and this wasn’t even part of the Thought for Day slot. Furthermore, while there have been speakers representing other faiths, the views expressed are pretty much always from the believers in a Judeo-Christian God.

Just as the BBC has policy of un-biased, neutral reporting of news, should not the same be true for the Thought for the Day. I have no problem with some religious view expressed, but how about about a more balanced selection of speakers throughout the week?

To provide this balance, I’ve had the idea of providing a ‘Rational Thought for the Day’ podcast including audio and video of prominent secular thinkers and writers, and maybe publish it at around 07:50 when the Radio 4 version goes out. It would take a bit of development time and a lot of co-ordination, but does anyone think this would be a good idea?

r|o|o|m| is now a Rhizome art object.

A few days ago, I posted an entry about a spamming incident on the Rhizome list. Here’s what its creator has to say about it [mailed to the list a few minutes ago]:

” >> SHUT UP SPAM MAN

In this case, the man was a PHP script which sends an email
when a 404 error occur in x-arn.org website. The file that
contains the broken link is read by the script, and its URL
is linked in the email. So, in fact, the so-called spam is
the result of a global activity in the net, reflecting the
kind of disorganisation inherent to updating process, file
moving and renaming, as a network movement origin. “

http://www.x-arn.org

Stu reports on newvenue.com – “presenting the most innovative ‘new movies for a new medium’ to a world-wide media-savvy community”.

‘Wassuuup’ is perhaps the most annoying meme of the 21st Century so far. Now, I bring you the all new ‘eeeeehhhhuuuup’ meme. Got this via email attachment so I don’t know where it comes from or who did it. If anyone knows anything about it, let me know.

I think the only way we’re going to survive the apparent slump in the world wide web design industry is to lift ourselves out of this trend [we are just talking about front-end design here right? Surely some of the ‘back-end’ heavyweights, Yahoo, Amazon etc. are thriving]. On the surface, we are seeing an over-saturation of design for it’s own sake; sites so overladen in their own self importance that they forget the importance of the customer. The last few years has seen a huge appetite for this type of approach; clients are willing throw lots of cash to agencies who can come up with the sweetest eye-candy. It’s time to move on, but until the telecoms companies get their act together and a world-wide broadband network is in place, and the internet takes its next evolutionary step, things are going to continue to stagnate around here.

Don’t you just love receiving hilarious jokes via email? Yes… don’t we all, but do you know the history of it? If not, read: Before There Was Email: Forwarding Jokes Through History.

Animate! – “If you have an innovative idea that can only be realised in a short animated film, and you are seeking production funding to make it, we would like you to send us a proposal”.

Thanks to Timo Arnall for emailing about this [he designed the site]. Check out his design agency at andorif.com and his personal site at elasticspace.com. Nice work.

I concur with Powazek, plastic.com is gonna be big. I just registered as a user and everything about it seems pretty smart.

TV Swansong

Aesthetic Management – internet artwork by Patricia Reed.

It’s now the end of the day, and I still can’t get the phrase ‘Eduardo Kac’s Transgenic Glowing Rabbit’ out of my mind [re: earlier post]. Such is life.

SublimeTV – “an online digital festival dedicated to the exhibition and promotion of digital filmmaking and digital video art”. Nice idea. Cool URL. Shame about the poor design of the site.

I’ve had a few enquiries about the ‘colab’ section and when it will be on-line. Well… unfortunately the answer is ‘not for a while’. I think I was a bit ambitious when I put that there, hoping that I’d have time to get something sorted out. Things are just a bit too hectic at the moment as I’m leaving my current job and starting another in a few weeks. So I’m not going to be able to afford much time on it over the coming months. In the meantime, you can be confident that I’ll be posting loads of [hopefully] interesting stuff here.

A quote from the information overload that is the Rhizome list:

“Resistance to the corporate infiltration starts with the cleansing of the cyber pollution of flash. For animation is opium for the intoxicated masses…”

Do all your christmas shopping at etoy.com.

Fresh content over at v-2.

Are you bored with the Internet? is a current talking point at the BBC site. To those bored people out there, I suggest you get your own site and say something, anything.

the freedom to be bad: design elitism, the web, and evolution – new content over at v-2

International Symposium on Electronic Art 2000

A report in this mornings Metro (a free newspaper I pick up on the way to work):

“Magicians have been known to make elephants, jumbo jets and even entire islands disappear. But none of the grand illusionists can claim their conjuring powers have had such a dramatic effect as those of unknown, part-time conjuror Lau Yin-Wai. He saved his neighbour from her knife wielding attacker by throwing a coat over his blade and making it disappear.”

How cool is that? Now there’s an idea for an action film character – Jackie Chan and David Blaine all rolled into one.

Buy a limited edition ‘Obey Jakob’ t-shirt from mememachine. You never know, it might be worth a fortune in 50 years time… then again it might not.

I can’t believe the number of typos I allow to slip through when I’m typing. I had to correct at least 3 in my last post. I was in a bit of a rush when I wrote it. More haste less speed I reckon.

I’ve been looking for ways to continue this project for over a year, and a possible collaboration with the v-2 organisation may allow me to do this. Read: building code = genotype / architecture = phenotype. I have a strong interest in the use of metaphor to describe the many ‘systems’ that crop up in our lives. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon is a good novel to read on this.

So here it is, the all new design. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying add content and it wasn’t working out at all, it was like to trying fit an awkward piece into an even more awkward jigsaw puzzle. So instead, I decided to strip it all down and re-arrange the content across more html files. I don’t really have that much time on my hands to maintain content other than this blog, so I thought this route was the best one to take. As always, there is still more to do, like get the archives up and running and get the ‘co-lab’ section online. Anyway, I think it’s an improvement.

Redesign imminent. “Less is more” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

More raw material for Nielsen parody purposes. Lookin’ good Jakob.

Why is it that ‘net artists’ always display their email conversations as part of their work and think that constantly spawning new windows is somehow interesting and original: TM

FlashForward 2000 should be renamed ‘CashForward 2000’ judging by daft prices of tickets (1000? – surely they are taking the piss). What a sorry state of affairs. I can sense a parody site on its way from somewhere.

Immersive film lab at atom films.

Download some cool screensavers at the ICA.

subsist.org

Interesting article at salon.com about the ‘mouse jockey’ generation.

Splash art by Praystation at Rhizome. I must admit a renewed interest in the whole net art thing…. although I hate the term itself for some reason. Why give it a label? Is a Rothko painting ‘gallery art’? subsist.org is going to contain my experiments and collaborative work… so check it soon.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between weblogs and ‘reality tv’ phenomena like Big Brother, and how a merge between these two could be the future of broadcasting…

It’s now the year 2004, the World Wide Web has taken a back seat behind the plethora of web applications now delivering ‘entertainment on demand’ and shop ‘til you drop-one-click-purchasing.

Three years after buying out Napster, Microsoft dominate with their recently released internet application ‘UNIVERSE’. This application is now everywhere, on every wall in every street, in every hand, on the vacuum cleaner, the fridge, the toaster, the shower and of course, what used to be known as the television.

The software ships with multiple digital video cameras so that people can broadcast their lives to anyone who chooses to watch, it is no budget ‘entertainment’… the days sitting around the TV are now gone. Instead, families sit round and make the TV. They can also download or swap their entire entertainment collection in seconds over the internet if they choose – this includes their old CD/DVD collection (relics from the solid media age). It is worth noting that this part of MS UNIVERSE was adapted from the original Napster.

Meanwhile, the cinema is a desolate place… no-one can be bothered to sit and watch the latest in special effects for the next two hours, instead they’d rather be glued to their palm-top machine checking out what the Joneses are up to.

Whilst most of the contents of the Internet remains completely worthless, there is still plenty to be hopeful about. It’s a very different world although the original bloggers still battle on, keeping the World Wide Web sane with their hypertext. Things ain’t so bad after all.

Hey, I could get used to this blogging thing, although it becomes a bit addictive after a while, which is bad.

…
If you find this colour scheme a bit harsh on the eyes, please let me know… i’ve realised that it is not quite as readable as it could be (especially on brighter monitors). You kind of get used to it after a while though… honest.

…
If you haven’t seen O Brother, Where Art Thou? yet, go and see it. It’s slightly more mainstream than other Coen Brothers films, but it’s still kicks the arse of most of the pap that appears on our cinema screens.

This log is powered by the excellent Blogger™. The reason I haven’t added this as a permanent fixture is that I’m having trouble working out where to put it (sorry Blogger people, I’ll have this sorted out right away). As you can see… i’ve opted for the minimal route for the design of this site. I’ve spent the last few months designing complicated layouts with loads of graphics and I realised that I didn’t really have anything to put in it, I was trying to do too much too soon. So here it is, this is how it starts – it will grow with content (images, video, links), but not quite yet. For now, it is basic… i just wish i could force myself to keep it that way.

[inter:face] is a digital arts festival taking place in Manchester, UK from the 29th of September to the 22nd of October.

Haven’t got the colour scheme quite right yet have I?

‘Big Brother’, ‘Reality TV’… is this the future of the internet? In 2 years time, you will have your own ‘TV channel’. You’ll be mixing together your favourite films with interviews with your next door neighbours and streaming it on the internet. People will re-watch ‘Wayne’s World’ and see it as a prophetic film. You will be hyperlinking your video content to your friends work. It’ll be real, people’s eyes will be glued to their palm machines. It’ll be cheap, fast, bad quality, lo-fi, but people will still ‘tune in’. The technology will sprout from the World Wide Web and find its proper place.