My blog Webjam atom@webjam.com en 981aa32c-697e-42d7-8479-117a5a53677f Passport 30-Jul-2007 A Bittersweet Life while I was out there. Some people buy carpets in Istanbul - I buy cool-as-ice Korean revenge movies. This was a nice movie to fly back on as it counterbalanced watching Alain Delon in Un flic on the way out. All of this is a long winded build up to the fact that this week I bought a new hard drive. This one.

My new baby

It's small, sexy and (now) filled with evil. Never again will I travel without a copy of William Shatner's Kingdom of the Spiders or Special Agent Dale Cooper's Twin Peaks Tapes or indeed my beloved Telly Savalas album (the 'music' that must never be played). I sleep easier with this knowledge.]]> Published d6641ae6-1e23-4410-9360-982eadebdb2b and we write and write and write... 29-Jul-2007 rabbit + crow blog:
I could never understand why someone who didn't know me, the IRA, would want to harm me. And I couldn't understand why someone would do something so ugly. And I struggle to find beauty in everyone and everywhere because of it. 

The Plain Janes

]]> Published ff1f2d84-15c1-4aab-b139-e98572246404 What just happened? 29-Jul-2007 my other blog under this roof. Running two blogs (alongside all the other stuff I'm doing) meant that both were suffering. Plus it's been made clear to me that I can't keep 'work' separate from all the other crap I get up to because a lot of the time it's the 'other crap' that finds me work. I'm lucky that way. So if you're already here stay put. Or better still add this RSS feed to your reader as the content is about to increase rapidly. I'm rolling the shutters down on VMII, but I'm hoping this will be my last move for a while.]]> Published b0ee65b0-2e1d-47be-ae7a-69f3337a80da HOTT 19-Jul-2007 Dontcha Wish Your Cell Phone Was Hot Like Me? Now I'm going to be late for my flight :)]]> Published 0ff37196-f427-4875-b55e-a5d524dd05f4 Istanbul 19-Jul-2007

Istanbul - Google Maps

Back in a few days. ps Have fun at the Moo Party!]]> Published 8ba1c0fa-0685-4ada-a800-d397dd95d274 Earn a living from your blog and get laid too! 16-Jul-2007 use a bold font to make a word stand out. Or reveal insider blog knowledge such as a catchy headline is better than a non-catchy headline. If you know the kind of blog I'm talking about then please head over to Rob's:
Blogs as self-perpetuating shit farms?
Personally I'd have left the question mark off.]]> Published e61db272-d89c-4821-a09b-537e30340dbf Screw the bigger boat 15-Jul-2007 Satoru Iwata gleefully tells The Times that he is swimming in a clear sea teeming with women, pensioners and repentant couch potatoes... he is explaining his belief in the "Blue Ocean" theory of business, which says that to succeed you must reach markets (blue oceans) that are free from competitors. Venturing into "bloody red oceans", where packs of rivals fight tooth and nail, can only lead to failure. The central premise – that it is best to zig when others zag – sums Mr Iwata up perfectly. via]]> Published 48785636-9070-4190-ab06-722ea6b84911 Grasshoppers 15-Jul-2007 taste. Being added as a vampire, zombie or STD is plain annoying so there'll be less of that. Watching how smart people use Facebook seems to be the way to go. Take Chris Brogan's Grasshopper group, for example:
Facebook isn’t just a school toy or “yet another social network.” From what I’m learning, it’s a pretty useful system that can be used very effectively to build a very vibrant network, provide excellent tools (especially with lots of good 3rd party apps), and then provide you the chance to use it to DO SOMETHING. I believe that Grasshoppers is a great way to prove this. Join the group. Determine what we’re doing and how you can apply yourself to it. And then dig in. Turn social networking into action.
Thats a jawdropping idea. Especially seeing as so many people seem to use it for nothing more powerful than sharing photos of old school friends ie. a dusty box best left under your fucking bed. PS

Kung Fu Wanted Poster

]]> Published f2eac629-4935-49c0-8a30-cd6883722cea Hearting Skitch 11-Jul-2007 Skitch. It's not just a pleasure to use it's fun. Here it is in action on my desktop:

Skitching

Check out their great little video here. The UI takes a little bit of practice, but it's so refreshing after using Photoshop and PSP for so long. If you need a very cool way to play around with images then this is the app for you. Still in invite-only beta, but with so much happy buzz around the product that I'm hoping that Plasq open it up soon. I have a couple or three invites left if anyone wants to try it out. Mac only don't forget... PS The video gets as much attention as the app. Check out Keith Lang's blog post of how he put it together here.]]> Published d2d78ed5-9823-4134-aeda-dbf74c3478cd Do anything to him 11-Jul-2007

Shut it

Sigh. I got a Facebook account. It is here. Poke away. Initially I got very defensive and insisted that a Facebook refusnik like myself had only finally caved in because it was getting impossible to keep up with certain work related tasks without one - this helped sweeten the poison as I could retort that I was getting paid to use Facebook. Now I've got my head around it my thinking has changed. Slightly. I completely understand why so many people use it and indeed enjoy it. Tellingly I completely understand why so many of my non techy friends are on there. It's easier than running a blog, you 'get it' instantly unlike say Twitter and because it doesn't do much you're not going to go scratch your head over it a lot. It picks up the Friend's Reunited users in one fell swoop and doesn't charge them a penny. I still don't like it. But it has it's uses. I'm also trying to learn to love Pownce. I keep comparing it to Twitter and it loses so bad I feel sorry for it. Like a three legged dog. If I try and see it as a way to share stuff with people it shines a little more, though I'm far from making friends with it. But I'm trying... I have a bunch of Pownce invites by the way. Lemme know if you need one.]]> Published 38e0ee4a-14d9-4107-870d-d3367ab7df06 Top of the world, Ma... 11-Jul-2007 Brands & Blogs conference the following day. Just having coffee ready for me was enough to make the event a million times more successful than the Chinwag fiasco. We were running late so managed to avoid the roving camera, but found the speakers to be on the whole an interesting bunch. Yet again there was a blogger shaped hole up on the stage, but it was interesting to hear the American/Canadian perspective from Jeremy Wright and Richard Rocca (B5 Media and Glam). Shiny revealed some interesting facts too:

Shiny stats

 There's a Flickr set of the day here including the view from atop Centre Point:

The view from Centre Point

 Not a bad place for a conference...]]> Published e11243fe-213d-4a1a-8c06-2ecd16968a60 Chinwag host the worst London event ever! 10-Jul-2007 Chinwag 'Big Summer 07' event. Quite simply the worst event experience I've had in London. Jess and I were in the queue for 45 minutes. A team of volunteers for The Big Chill managed to work the line and hand out crap very quickly, but no one from Chinwag could do the same to get us through the door faster? Once we neared the front of the line we then saw signs informing us to get into two separate queues marked A-N and M-Z depending on the first letter of our email addresses. Madness. No one was in the mood to split up from their friends at this point despite the sudden barking orders of Chinwag militia. As it turned out it didn't matter as both lines bottlenecked at a single table anyway. The stressed staff where by this point having as much fun as we were as they dealt with pissed off people and multiple printed lists of registrants that weren't in alphabetical order. Shambles.

Scrum

 By this point we had been joined by Rob and the Twitter drums were informing us that once inside things weren't much better. We sound found ourselves pushing through yet another incredibly long queue for food to join an even longer queue for the bar.

Displeased Rob

 Rumours about the money running out in the next half hour or so where all that people were talking about. It was a little like being in a badly run student union bar, but as one fellow Twitterer put it, "Everybody is scum". The wanker ratio was high. Leaving poor Annie Mole behind we left and bumped straight into Ian Forrester with his ever handy videocamera and felt much better after slagging the event off on 'tape'. In fact we did meet some interesting people there, but they were all in the queue or fuming and already on their way back to the nearest station. We went for a nice meal (and a large quantity of wine) at Dino's before rounding up more Chinwag survivors via Twitter and retiring to the nearest pub for some more venting... This is from the final reminder email they sent out to those of us 'lucky' enough to have registered in time:
Save time & hassle - print your badge in advance! Simply print it out, cut it out, write your name & company on it, bring it along, and hey presto you're in faster than those who don't!
Everyone I saw had done this and it did nothing to help speed things up.
Doors open at 6pm and the bars open at 6.30pm, when entertainments also begin. We anticipate sizeable queues, so best to get there early
I have friends who got their way earlier than me (they queued for just as long) and friends who got there after I left (they also queued for just as long). Bottom line: I'd rather chew through my own lower intestine than go to anything branded Chinwag again.]]> Published ba8054c5-89a5-4c17-8043-f274f4fe480e I'm a Moleskine Urban Interviewee 02-Jul-2007 this interview, but it looks like it was just published (or not - I'm useless at keeping track of these things). Ironically that main photo was taken on my way back from the airport when I was less than overjoyed to be back in London. I should go hang out with the tank more as I'm never happier than when Hulk posing (I heard there's a Banksy there now too). And it was a nice touch to trawl my Flickr stream for anything tagged 'moleskine'. Almost makes me look creative :) Thanks Claudia!]]> Published 0c2726a9-0563-4453-8977-57fbefb602e4 (inter)networking 01-Jul-2007 Friday I was invited over for a chat with the nice folks at Shiny Media. I've been jumping between a few unique and very hip offices of late, but Shiny have the best set up so far. For one thing they're atop an interesting building complete with a kooky elevator that allows you a nice overview of all the other creative types tucked away in open plan spaces below. The first thing that strikes you when walking into the Shiny office proper is the male/female ratio. There isn't one. I'm so used to walking into buildings filled with guys and a couple of women that it was momentarily disorientating to see so many geek girls all working in the same place. Not that Shiny is an all-female endeavor, but they certainly have the cream of the crop when it comes to the xx chromosome. I hooked up with Katie and Ashley, both whom I've met before at various events, but this was the first chance we've had for a proper natter. Shiny are (correct me if I'm wrong) the UK’s first and largest commercial blog publishing company so it was interesting to bounce ideas around with them. I've been popping into a few of the bigger and more established web companies this year and although they all strive for the non-corporate feel Shiny are the first ones to pull it off convincingly. It just felt like a great place to work - which is a big deal coming from an anti-office freelancer like myself. A good day then despite initial bursts of terrorism, rain and men falling from the sky. Thanks to Darika for setting it up. If you haven't delved into the ever growing Shiny empire then a nice in is the ever growing number of videos they throw into their YouTube channel (here's Ashley and Katie playing with a USB guitar!). I wish more companies did this.]]> Published d349c32d-abd0-428b-a480-df5d1971ed97 Christopher Hitchens and The Jetsons 28-Jun-2007 Mike, you of all people should get a kick out of the guy which is like telling Cartman he should love 'Family Guy'. If I found out that Hitchens was programmed by a group of manatees it'd make a lot of sense. That said I couldn't resist this interview simply because Tom over at the Amazon Blog gave him a 'Jetsons' related question to ponder:
Amazon.com: It's rare to think of visions of the future that include religion. They don't go to church in The Jetsons. But yet it remains with us. Hitchens: We still have a need for the transcendent. I dare say even the Jetsons, if you talked to them earnestly enough about it, would say, look, you're standing in Cascadia at sunset, and you're hearing the strains of a Mozart symphony. Are you going to tell me that all life is is a chemical reaction? Surely there's a bit more to it than that. Of course everybody feels this.
What I like here is not the way that Hitchens takes the curveball in his stride, but that Tom threw it at him in the first place. It's appallingly easy to ask the obvious questions when interviewing anyone, but finding a hook to keep the interviewee and the audience from tuning out (especially mid-junket) is a good talent to cultivate.** *I was quoted on CNN's Inside Politics. They pulled out something I wrote about "norm meat" in reference to US Senator Norm Coleman vs. UK firebrand George Galloway. ** And this is a nice introduction to a new category here on Sizemore - RSS this - simply excerpts from the stuff that flows into my Google Reader that I feel the need to share and comment on. I have no idea if the Amazon Blog is already on a lot of your radars, but I like it a lot as it's a way into a lot of subjects that I would never, ever go near in a million years. And it feels nothing like a corporate blog1 1Another good talent to cultivate (oh and before we drown in footnotes of footnotes I don't really like 'The Jetsons' either).]]> Published 5dab7e80-a55b-4673-9c21-44cd8ba50b12 And we're back 28-Jun-2007 Twitter) by a lousy Internet service coupled with a bout of summer flu that forced me up at 4am each morning like a ghoul. At least I got some semi-decent photos.

IT BURNS

 Right off the back of that I was squirreled away in a command bunker for two days for a very productive round of team talks. Between throwing my router across the room, coughing up lungmeat and drinking coffee while squinting at Excel spreadsheets I simply haven't had the time to get back here. Until now. Lots to catch up on then...]]> Published 615b61a7-8d6c-45c2-94b0-a4db5b7252a9 One click creation 21-Jun-2007 Webjam that I think a lot of people will get a kick out of. It's a one step creation tool for creating a content heavy website from scratch. Simply add any topic you like into the field below and click the Adopt! button:
It's a handy tool for aggregating content from across the Internet, but I think there's a lot more potential here than simply creating a fanpage (although it does that wonderfully). One of the things I had to research recently was Spaghetti Westerns. I already know more than a little bit about the genre (I was lucky enough to do a crazy M.A. that covered some really unusual bases), but was a little out of touch with what was going on out there right now. I used the Webjam tool to create this page. Now I'm not going to build a blog around this subject (but I could if I was that way inclined by simply dropping a blog module onto the page as easily as I could pipe Morricone music through it) but as a research hub I'm finding it particularly useful. One of the feeds for example pointed me towards this unpublished book by Alex Cox that I'm having a lot of fun with. Now most of you will already have blogs, but we all know someone who likes the idea of a real website, but hasn't got the time (and sometimes chops) to put it together. The nice thing about Webjam is that it's increasingly making the creation process simpler and easier. Even someone with an already noteable web presence (be it on Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type, Flickr, Twitter or whatever) could use the platform to beef up their content. The interesting thing is that this is only a starting point for Webjam. Often compared to Pageflakes and the like it would be easy to gain some buzz around this feature alone, but the team are a lot more interested in using simple page creation to create real communities. There's a full version of the tool on the Webjam homepage and be sure to check out the video... you may recognise the voice.]]> Published 3f342ab2-8179-4868-8188-7e30d4f8a3d5 Crime is our business 17-Jun-2007 The Split.

The Split

I recorded it off the TV maybe ten years ago so rather than try to dig it out I'm looking for a digital copy. It amazes me the crap you can get on DVD - often in several flavours - while the really good stuff is stranded way down the long tail waiting for someone like me to give it a home. I usually have a list of around ten movies a month that simply aren't available that I need. Now 'need' is an interesting word. Sometimes of course I'm just being greedy and it would simply be nice to have a copy of something like A Man Called Sledge with James Garner playing against type (that one I found pretty quickly). A lot of the time though this is work related. There's a very good chance that The Split will be nothing more than a footnote in the book that Rob and I are working on, but I can't with good conscience even write a footnote without refamiliarising myself with the movie. Plus who'd give up a chance to watch Jim Brown, Ernest Borgnine, Gene Hackman, Jack Klugman, Donald Sutherland, James Whitmore and Warren Oates fall out over a heist. Danny Ocean 2.0 wishes he had such a crew. So for whatever reason The Split is unavailable to me. But one way or another I'll have it in a few weeks because someone will have a decent copy and that copy will be out there in the wild. And digging this stuff up means you find treasure buried right along side. Another heist movie called Three-way Split with Robert Vaughn wasn't on my radar until this morning. No idea if I've seen that one, but the tagline is hard to resist:
Three "Sex-O-Pathic" Killers Attempt the Most Daring Heist of Their Sordid Careers...Sharing the Danger...The Money...And the Women...In a..."Three-Way Split"
]]> Published 02e10fbc-96f8-4d8c-8641-2654367a414d Dirty job 16-Jun-2007 gastro tour of Borough Market:

Good day

 This seems somehow appropriate.]]> Published 9edf6b47-224b-4bd9-818f-3ee4dfadaf7a Somewhere old, something new... 13-Jun-2007 Moo cards in their pocket it seems like a good place to dig in. Longtime readers: I have no plans right now to close down VMII. Thankfully my work is far from dull and dry and I'm in the lucky position to allow my interests to drive the jobs I pick. The plan is to keep Sizemore just as readable as the old bucket of bolts next door. New readers: In case you were wondering, I'm a full time freelance writer/editor/tech-evangelist who also has time for a little consulting. I've been blogging regularly since 2002. I've been published in magazines, worked on academic books (I have a Masters Degree in Literature), been a film correspondent, a web editor and also co-wrote an eclectic guide book to London. I've also been a guest blogger and reviewer on numerous websites and played an advisory role on others. Right now I'm working with Webjam and Trusted Places on a Web 2.0 kick. Fun stuff! I'm also working on two new books, a return to non-fiction with a movie theme (co-written with this guy) and something a little more messed-up concerning a stone monkey and a journey West. Rob and I are also launching a new blog that will be a little different from anything we've ever done before. Exciting times. All of this and more will get touched on here (with a little room for crossover with VMII). Most importantly this won't be just about me (hell, Sizemore isn't even my name) because in my line of work I get to meet interesting people on a daily basis. So if you're here because of a Moo card that I gave you at a meet-up, there's a good chance that this is where I'll talk about you...]]> Published