Standing on the shoulders of web pages

Just to record that something I have wanted to have for a while now exists in the form of a sidebar from Google. They call it ‘Sidewiki’ and it allows people to start a stream of comments alongside any web page. In the background this gets stored somewhere by Google along with all the other stuff they seem to hang onto. I can’t judge it on a screenshot or a thirty-second video but it looks as if the weakness, if there is one, is the separation of the two streams (original, critique) into different areas of the page. This is OK for general commenting but does not support remarks specific to a single element (a word or a sentence for example). I’d like to be able to add simulated post-it notes in place on the page, but of course that would rapidly obliterate the original content. Perhaps there should be lines to connect comments with source text? No idea how that could be done, but hey.

And then of course there is the potential for drive-by abuse. We shall see how that one works out.

Thoughts: what happens when people use the Sidewiki to add comments to a blog post which has already has a comments facility? Are people who don’t have the Sidewiki installed going to be at a significant disadvantage: will it become an essential browser component?

Thanks to Slashdot for the nod.

Truly an excellent medley

I’ve just attended this concert [the one on 23 September that is] given by Passamezzo and merely wish to record how much I enjoyed it (very much) and urge others to see them. Seventeenth century music is currently rocking my little world.

Hope I’m not becoming a red Tory, but…

I recently met the writer Adam Wishart and today found a link on his blog to an episode of Start the week from mid-June 2009 in which he participated. I enjoyed the programme enough to listen to it all, and hence it seems worthy of a post here.

It was explained that Adam’s recent documentary The price of life examined the way in which groups lobby the UK government agency NICE, which vets new drugs, for their cures of choice to be underwritten by the NHS. In the light of more recent news from the USA it is rather good to think that in the UK the argument is over the dispensing of a social service rather than whether such a service should be brought into being.

In general the conversation was around the issues of entitlement and liberty that are I suppose the characteristic fodder of the thinking middle class. But it contained a few thoughts that chimed with my own, particularly from Phillip Blond, a political philosopher who calls himself a ‘red Tory’. Amongst other things, he advocates supermarkets would be best broken up and their business returned to independent shop keepers. Further than I would go, but interesting. His Wikipedia profile provides more quotes.

Climate Wake-up Call on 21 September 2009

A rather nice use of Google Maps in a good cause. I’m intending to attend the Reading meet-up which is scheduled for 1310 – true to form for Reading it is outside John Lewis in Broad Street.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/tcktcktck_map/

Hardware refresh goes on order

In the end the decision was mostly about the quality and characteristics of the hardware, and in particular the mouse pad which I use for vector editing and page layout. It needs to be large and come to hand immediately. I also thought hard about the OS and I will be installing Ubuntu alongside (plus countless virtual machines, to be sure…). But even in its weird coding ghetto and even if my Adobe applications are DOA, I still have to acknowledge Apple is the only operating system provider, proprietary or otherwise, that can get me working as happily as it does. And the current machine has been staunchly reliable in the face of serious maltreatment. I thought for over a year about a new machine, then waited till money was tight, so I hope I made the right decision.