imran*

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  • The Darjeeling Limited

    Thedarjeelinglimited
    Wes Anderson, one of my favourite directors, has his latest film premiering in a few weeks; The Darjeeling Limited is the story of three estranged brothers that journey across India together in an attempt to put aside their differences, following the death of their father.

    You can find HD trailers at the Quicktime site, as well as on YouTube.

    What’s goin on?
    I dunno, I guess the train’s lost.
    How can a train be lost…it’s on rails?

    I’m not sure why a POV shot of a train hurtling down a track makes me chuckle…I guess Anderson doesn’t need Bill Murray to make me laugh 🙂 

  • Bingley Music Live

    BingleymusicliveWoot! Along with a couple of my favourite bands, The Charlatans and The Bluetones, my mate Paul’s band – The Good Die Young – are playing the Bingley Music Live festival this weekend at Myrtle Park in Bingley.

    I can’t make TGDY’s set during the day (my cousin’s wedding reception…!) but I’m gonna try catch The Charlatan’s late on Sunday 🙂

    UPDATE: The gig will be streamed live online by Bradford Community Broadcasting and on the air at 106.6FM.

  • Microblogging: Tiny Social Objects

    Jaiku’s Jyri Engestrom‘s recent presentation at reboot 9.0 orients successful social networks around ‘social objects’ – such as Flickr’s photos, del.icio.us’ bookmarks and MySpace’s music and five principles for building such services…

    • Define your {social} object.
    • Define your verbs.
    • Make your object sharable.
    • Turn invitations into gifts.
    • Charge the publishers not the spectators.

    All very useful (particularly for our own mee:view and Believr) though I don’t think its fair to write off non-social-object networks. However, the most interesting part of Jyri’s talk speculated on where future disruptive innovations in blogging may come from. Defining disruptions as either simpler, cheaper or more convenient, Jyri believes that blogging will trend from occasional (a post per week, a photo every day) to continuous (hourly micro-posts).

    This is clearly the continuous presence paradigm that Jaiku is pursuing and Twitter has dominated. Sadly, though Jaiku’s a much more elegant and refined service, with a ‘social object’ metaphor, it’s actually the people-oriented Twitter that is repidly evolving into a de-facto infrastructure for presence across all contexts.

  • Bat For Lashes: What’s A Girl To Do?

    Descended from an ancient dynasty of gravity-defying Pakistani squash players, Natasha Khan of Bat For Lashes is kinda like a Björkian Goldfrappy Portishead.

    Haunting and poppy at the same time…the new single, What’s A Girl To Do, is this week’s iTunes free download and the video is a cool, eerie collision of ‘E.T. and Donnie Darko‘…

    Wow and she’s cute too…I should send her parents a marriage proposal 😉

  • Jetpacmanhattan

    JetpacmanhattanEarlier today, I got talking to Tom Scott about organising simultaneous BarCamp events in Leeds, York and Manchester next year…I could then jetpack across the Pennines after presenting a session in Leeds and re-run it in Manchester 🙂

    Epiphany! Never mind Barcamps, why has no one run an alternate reality version of 8-bit classic Jetpac! Sure, it’d be dangerous, life-threatening and expensive…but isn’t dying what video games are all about? come to think of it…think of the possibilities in mashing up Pac Manhattan AND Jetpac!

    BTW – jetpacmanhattan.com is still available…

  • Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0

    Web2conf
    The emergence of web culture continues in the North of England with next week’s inaugural Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 conference, hosted by the University of York and focusing largely on the emerging culture around social media and its implications for the social sciences.

    MIT’s Web Science Research Initiative,
    augmented by the participation of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is also seeking
    to stake out a number of new disciplines in this emerging field, so
    it’s great to see some alternatives to the WSRI already springing up.

    The 2-day event has been organised by a cross section of the
    university’s social informatics, sociology and communications
    departments. The conference programme includes the controversial Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur) and BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester.

    Curiously, sessions on Flickr, Facebook etc. don’t include
    representatives of those services. this may provide a useful
    alternative perspective to the proceedings…alternatively, perhaps the
    University simply couldn’t attract the necessary heavyweights or wished
    to keep an academic focus to the event.

    Nevertheless, I’m looking
    forward to seeing where the conference may lead and welcome its
    emergence right here in the UK 🙂 You can find out more at the conference blog and on the conference’s Upcoming listing.

    { reproduced from O’Reilly GMT }

  • Gelato CMS

    GelatoI’ve just spent the afternoon tinkering with Gelato CMS, a tumblogging application, kinda like an open source version of Tumblr.

    Apart from WordPress, I haven’t really played around much with installable web apps, so I’m patting myself on the back for successfully installing Gelato on MAMP!

    Gelato’s neat – as a simple tumblelog for sharing YouTube clips, URLs, quotes, pictures and MP3s, it works really well…though I had trouble importing chats from MSN Messenger.

    I’d like to see a plug-in that scraped my Flickr, del.icio.us, blog, Last.FM and YouTube posts to automagically write a tumblelog on my behalf…oh wait, that’s kinda what my Feedburner feed does!

    Though Gelato works well – I’m not sure I can find a use for it within my personal workflow…though I can see potential to integrate Gelato into a bunch of future projects.

    —

    Incidentally, I grabbed the screenshot of my Gelato tumblelog using Paparazzi.

  • Tarek Atrissi Design

    TarekI was recently asked to help a client develop an Arabic language edition of their web product. They have strong brand with a great contemporary aesthetic and some Web 2.0 flava, but there is a dearth of contemporary Arabic typefaces that would enable their brand to retain its design DNA once translated.

    Aside from Saad Ahulbaab’s work on Arabetics – which is largely focussed on helping non-Arabs learn Arabic – Arabic graphic design is constrained by the availability of type styles that sit well with modern graphic design.

    However in researching resources for my client, I came across the work of Tarek Atriessi. In a great post on Arabic Type Design, Atrissi talks about his approach to developing typefaces for Al-Ghad, last year’s Asian Games in Doha,  Bahrain’s Amwaj Islands and Ayna.com.

    Each is perfectly suited for use in various contemporary digital applications…I can’t wait to  suggest them to our client and also use them for our own future Arabic editions of Believr 🙂

  • Norman @ Telecom TV

    NormantvMy previous boss and mentor, Norman Lewis (recently appointed at Chief Strategy Officer for Wireless Grids) was recently interviewed as part of a panel session for Telecom TV…

  • iTunes Gets Friendly?

    I always wondered why Apple never added Last.fm-like social features directly to the iTunes user community – a world which seems really very closed.

    However, it seems Apple’s finally getting friendly with the launch of a bunch of iTunes Widgets to show off your iTunes purchases, reviews or favorite artists. I guess it won’t be long before we see these springing up across the blogosphere, MySpace and perhaps even as an F8 Facebook application.

    It’s kinda underwehlming though, Apple’s done little to move the needle. Typically Apple, the widgets only show your iTunes history, ignoring the bulk of your non-iTunes collection…of course, this may simply be for copyright reasons also 😉

    Here’s my favorite artist widget…

    Perhaps we’ll eventually see a more social iPod…?