I’m just back from this. Wow! - that was probably the most interesting talk I’ve been to this year, and definitely had the most engaging Q&A afterwards. The most interesting details: the license will be based on the Creative Commons one, an Attribution, Share-alike, Non-commercial variant with the controversial caveat that you can only share this stuff to other people in the UK!. The discussion centred mostly around rights and how to secure permission of the rights holders of the myriad works in the Archive (no mean feat!); there was also mention of how to generate the meta data (initially centralised, but eventually pushed out to the individual prosumers) and how to get the content to the audience (P2P is the only way apparently). I’ll write more when I have time.

The Flickr blog brought my attention to this cool group ("squared circle") of photos of circular subjects cropped to squares. I started thinking though (as I stared at the mug in front of me), that sometimes it’s the asymmetrical quirks of an image that make it interesting, so I created a new group called –squaredcircle to explore this (it’s great how interactive Flickr can be). Here are my initial submissions to spark the debate:

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It’s not even been a year since I got my 3rd generation iPod, but I want one of these .
Gizmodo has all the stats.

As mentioned over at BoingBoing, LWT is hosting a talk on the opening up of the BBC Archives to the great unwashed (i.e. you and me) on Thursday night and I will be going along. I’m pretty excited about this initiative - the potential for creating novel derivative works from past BBC productions seems virtually limitless and is definitely something I’d like to try my hand it. It will be intriguing to see how this is to be implemented and what proportion of the BBC Archives will be made available - I’ll keep you posted.

Wet London 20
Originally uploaded by Ti.mo.

This is how London felt this afternoon - wet! The picture is from a great photostream by Ti.mo on Flickr.

puppetbeatlebuskers
Originally uploaded by dps.

I saw this amazing display of thunderbirds-like puppetry this morning outside Covent Garden tube station. The buskers were playing “Revolver” from a hidden CD player and moved the Paul, George, Ringo and John puppets in their stage display. Strumming and drumming were eerily accurate and most amazing was when Paul and George approached the 2nd mic to harmonize at exactly the right moments!

This quiz at anti-mega.com is great fun, and lots of the places featured are just around the corner from where I live and work. It had me pulling my hair out at so many things I could recognise but couldn’t place!

As widely anticipated, SpaceShipOne has today successfully claimed the Ansari X-Prize. The prize is worth $10 million, but I’m sure that this team (and many of the others competing around the world) have shelled out more than that to get here.
I remember when I first read about the X-Prize when it was announced - back then it sounded wildly ambitious that a craft to make space tourism viable could be built with private investment - to be honest, I didn’t think it would be done (though I was sure plenty of people would try). Congratulations, therefore to everyone involved! What intrigues me now is to see if space tourism can blast off - my biggest concerns as a passenger (apart from the money required to secure a seat!) would be safety related - how can a private operator convince the public that a tiny craft like this is safer than the million/billion? dollar Space Shuttle (and look how safe they are!)

Well that’s not quite the full story… Out for dinner with friends (at Wong Kei’s - a [good] cheap and cheerful Chinese on Wardour St) a couple of weeks ago I said “I’m so full I think I need a trip to the vomitorium”. A vomitorium, I explained was a special room in the Roman villa that the debauched Romans would use to be sick in between courses of their mammoth banquets! A vociferous debate ensued - nobody believed me. Well, now Padraic has dug up the truth: there is no such thing a a vomitorium, at least as a room in the house for chucking-up. But the Romans did have “vomitoria” - the entrance ways (vomitoria!) at the colliseum were so efficient for getting specators out to the streets at the end of an event that they were literally vomited out of the arena! I’m not the first person to believe the room-in-the-house story though, my New Oxford English Dictionary says it’s a “popular misconception”, so now you know!