Fitting the battle of life

Receiving 40 prints free just for joining isn’t such a bad offer even when first-class postage (the cheapest I could see) is £1.50 – that’s 3.75p per 6″x4″, which isn’t too bad really.

Some of the prints turned out a little darker than they’d appeared on-screen (some of the detail in the photo above was lost), but others were just fine, so I’m not entirely sure whether it was a problem my end or theirs. They were bloody fast tho – put in the order on Sunday and they arrived on Tuesday morning, in a nice sturdy envelope containing a wallet of prints. I’d ordered a mix of 6″x4″ and one 6″x4.5″ (don’t ask), but thankfully it was all in one delivery.

I was also rewarded for clever naming of files – they print the file name (sans suffix) on the reverse, so if like me you are a bit anal about naming your photos (including date, location, event…), they potentially save your memory a little strain in the future.

Try them out. Even if you don’t like them, the 3.75p prints offer is good enough to take up.

The Guardian is reporting that talks between Facebook and Twitter regarding a sale of the latter to the former have died out. Well, thank twit.

I think I completely agree with Jemima Kiss when she says in this article that

though it would undoubtedly take Twitter to a more mainstream audience (Twitter had 6 million users as of last month – Facebook has more than 100m) it would also dilute some of the early adopter power juice of Twitter among a community that is still experimenting with how to use it, rather than pigeon holing it as a lightweight friend updating service

I am a fan of multiple services that do single jobs very well. Facebook isn’t nearly as good as Flickr at photos. Facebook isn’t nearly as good as YouTube at video. Facebook statuses are just not as good as tweets – commenting on other people’s status just isn’t the same as an @reply.

Now, companies working together to integrate services – or preferably, letting people do this by opening up APIs – is something I like to see. Being able to show off your flickr photos or latest tweets on your blog or whathaveyou is a good idea. But yanking Twitter out of its (valuable) niche and forcing it into Facebook wouldn’t have been a good one.

Allow my tweets to appear as statuses, by all means (but looking at my profile recently, I’ve decided I might stop that due to sheer volume), but do it by allowing applications to use each service’s APIs. Too many technologies/webapps owned by one webapp to rule them all just doesn’t appeal to me.

I had a thought the other day as I was handed a massively long till receipt for one book, that all the millions (billions?) of paper receipts given out in this country, and indeed across the world,

The idea is simple:

• Link your debit/credit cards with a mobile phone number/email address
• Buy something
• Instead of churning out receipts, you get sent (instantly) a text or email or both
• Saves paper, ink, etc.

This has the added benefit of being alerted instantly if your card is being used without your knowledge (depending on how the back end works, I suppose).

For cash transactions, I can only think of tying it to loyalty cards. And who actually checks their change against receipts anyway?

Well, having posted a message for Obama in the flickr pool as I blogged the other day, I was rather excited to see the following message pop up in my inbox yesterday:

As you know Guardian News & Media (GNM) recently set up a group on Flickr called “A Message for Obama” to capture the many and diverse personal reactions to the election of President Obama. Thank you for taking part! We have been inspired and excited by both the quantity and quality of contributions so far – it’s an amazing collaborative effort.

To further commemorate this historic occasion, Guardian Books is publishing a book called “A message for Obama”, featuring some of the images uploaded to this Flickr group. The book will be 140 pages long, with a recommended retail price of up to GBP 9.99, and will be available in December 08.

This is a not-for-profit venture, as GNM will be donating all proceeds from this edition to the Guardian Katine project, details of which can be found at: www.guardian.co.uk/katine

We would very much like to include your photograph in this project.

www.flickr.com/photos/joshblacker/3008960552/

Of course, with 140 pages to fill, I’m not the only one. There’s a thread in the flickr group about it, but apart from that, no mention I can find on the web. Bobbie Johnson (a tech writer) seems to be the only staff member to have acknowledged publicly that this project is going on. The Guardian’s Deadline USA blog has the original announcement, but nothing of the new book project. [Edit: also found this blog post about it from another flickr member.]

You’d have thought that putting together a £9.99 book and hoping to make profits (for charity, basically) would require more of a marketing push. Are there really that many people who’ll buy it, when all the photos are online? Depending on the license applied, you could download them all and print your own book of your own favourites anyway – for as cheap as the printing costs you. Of course, that wouldn’t net the very worthy Katine project any extra funds.

Hmm. (This is me not knowing what to think.)

[Update: The book is now out and I have my copy!]

Saw this on Jono Bacon’s blog today; here follows my entry to this latest meme.

In the same period, he wrote a sequence of profoundly searching and abitious history plays – Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V - which together explore the death throes of feudal England and the birth of the modern nation-state ruled by a charismatic monarch. (from The Norton Shakespeare)

I guess it helps I’m meant to be reading Othello at the moment. The instructions:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST. [Honestly, Shakespeare was indeed the closest. It's still closer than my laptop, actually.]

After a couple of years of trying, the Union are once again getting down to a governance review. Looks like this time they’re trying to do it properly, with actual consultation with students and everything! (As an aside, one of the characters in the booklet about trustees wears a Tux t-shirt!)

This leads me to wonder about governance in general, of large communities of people. (The Union has around 20,000 student members.)

The Union is meant to be a governing body. We elect sabbatical officers, committee members and other representatives who are meant to pass policy and look after the running of our bars and cafés so we don’t have to worry about it. This is not entirely unlike how actual democracy works. People elect other people to look after their interests and do ’stuff’ for their benefit without having to worry about these things on a day-to-day basis.

Countries have Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings, Queens and/or despots. We have no clear leadership structure, just six sabbatical officers in an office near one of the bars. Individual societies and clubs have Presidents, but not the Union. This, I think, is meant to be ‘fair’ or something.

Without clear leadership, the Union has bogged down in factional politics. The Sabbs seem at time to be fighting a losing battle against some sectors of the student population who seek to pass some rather controversial motions. At others, they seem to be in disarray and not at all in touch with the students they purport to represent.

How would having a clear ‘leader’ solve any or all of the problems we currently face?

A sole person whose responsibility is to provide a clear, unified vision would, er, do just that. The Union has none of it so far. The Sabbs seem content not really to shake the boat, even a little bit. You stick by the rules and we’ll all get along fine, they seem to say. Well sod that. We’re meant to be students.

A sole person whose remit is to be a figurehead for the student popualtion would be a single face for people to remember, one email address to send their concerns to. Six people isn’t many, I’ll admit, but simplification can’t be a bad thing, right?

A sole person to chivvy the Sabbatical team up when they’re slacking/arguing/not working solely for students would, again (do you see a theme?), do that.

Is it a job I’d want? Hell no. But I think it’s a job that should be created in my Union.

Message for Obama

Originally uploaded by jkblacker

Meant to blog about this the other day, but the Guardian started a pool on Flickr asking for people’s messages for the President-Elect.

Two points:
1. This is a great idea. Some of the messages are really positive, some are negative. Conversation has ensued in the digitial sphere using nothing more than photographs of people holding hand-written signs (among other forms). I like this kind of thing. It shows what can be done with online tools like Flickr. Photos like this are so easy for people to produce, and are infinitely more exciting than the same messages in plain old text.

2. I think it’s a bit cheeky that a newspaper is effectively making money out of a free tool and being lazy journalists – letting the news come to them, instead of going out to find it – but to be honest, props to them. Makes a whole lot more sense than doing actual work.

Just thought I’d hilight one of the Ubuntu Open Week sessions I attended yesterday, a very informative and useful talk from Tony Whitmore of the Ubuntu-UK Podcast on Media Production using Ubuntu. You can read the log here. It was a good overview of the apps you might need to produce video, photography and audio using open source – well worth a read if you have ten mins or any interest in multimedia.

When I checked Engadget’s OS poll earlier today, Linux was sitting at just 11.8%, but now it’s broken the 12% barrier. Of course, these stats are subject to change, but it’s surely a good sign, no? On a leading tech blog news review etc etc site, with a renowned Apple bias, Linux accounts for the preference of more than 12% of readers.

This would be the perfect time to test out WordPress’ new built-in poll feature, but I daren’t the embarassment of 3 votes being cast for the entirety of the future of the internet.