Which gave me a daft idea: why not add a bit of colour to Twitter postings that way? As in:

emokid1982 Oh, woe is me, I am so depressed and everybody hates me #000

raspberryreichman Bruce LaBruce has a queer zombie flick at Sundance! http://tinyurl.com/2r7qun #ffc0cb

ecowarrior my new hemp trousers are just spiffy #008000

Then, some clever coding person could whip up a beautiful interface to Twitter, allowing users to browse tweets according to their hue. And another even cleverer coding person could write a thingy that analysed the text of colored tweets, matching words to their associated shades.

Wouldn’t that be fab? By which I mean spectacularly pointless.

Update: I’d forgotten that del.icio.us actually implements something akin to this, for folk who want to ‘bookmark’ colourschemes, though it’s quite tricky to use.

This morning in the shower, I heard something on the radio and thought, ‘Oh, I must remember that!’¹ and at the same time my left hand formed the shape required to hit Shift+Ctrl+S, which is the command key combination I use to launch the del.icio.us Firefox extension.

In the future, this will, of course, be a completely reasonable response. The Spinex 9000 OmniLogPuter embedded beneath the skin on the back of my neck will respond to such a gesture by automatically scanning my recent thoughts, linking the desire to remember to the timecoded BBC Radio 4 stream, recording the audio snippet in question and its associated URLs, adding a huge array of metadata, and placing a new item in a queue for later review so that I can choose to post to either my private todo list or my public MegaWebLifeWorkEntertainmentFilterLog (which will be called Submit Response for nostalgic reasons).

Just now, though, it is a sign that I really need to get out more.

1 - Lacking both an embedded Spinex 9000 OmniLogPuter and a working short term memory, I’ve forgotten what it is I wanted to remember. ↩

When I last had a spell in hospital, the thing I noticed most, aside from the agonising pain and sweet, sweet relief provided by morphine on demand, was the flow of patients between departments, which was far from smooth. For example, I needed at least one chest X-Ray a day, and this involved a painful transfer from bed to wheelchair (top tip: don’t get your chest tube caught on the bed rail) followed by a wait for a porter, followed by another, usually lengthy, wait to see the radiographer, with many fellow patients, most in worse nick than I was, followed by another lengthy wait for a porter to return me to the ward. This is not good - keeping patients with serious conditions in a waiting room is dangerous, compared to the safety a bed, surrounded by lovely nursing staff and handy life-saving equipment.

With a full patient-, and, for that matter, staff-location system, combined with software tracking the status of each department, the time a patient spends away from the safety of the ward could be minimised: is there a backlog in the X-ray dept? Then don’t move patient X off the ward, and move patient Y back to their bed. Is the surgeon’s RFID tag still on the golf course? Then stop pumping anaesthetic into the arm of patient Z, summon up the nearest RFID-tagged porter pusing an empty RFID-tagged trolley-bed, and pop her back to the ward.

Spending money on technology like this certainly seems a better idea than, say, pushing it out of the NHS and into the hands of private sector.

(Just after posting the above, I spotted a more frivolous health-related use of RFID, at RFID In Japan, surely the geekiest feed I read. It’s a talking doll that aims to foster a caring mentality in children by occasionally coughing and sneezing, then responding to treatment with RFID-tagged syringes, sweets and medicine.)

When I make a new piece of work, it feels like someone else’s

Then, a friend who is working on a treatment for a film mentioned that he was having trouble, since he always begins with roughly sketched characters, which develop as he writes, and in turn suggest the film’s plot and structure, but his agent is keen to see the whole picture from the get-go.

Not having a creative bone in my body - passing judgement on the work of others is much more my thing! - I always find these little insights into the process of making fascinating. This is why I’ve been following How We Work, a series of posts at Rodcorp examining the working methods of the great and good.

Here are some of my favourites, by some of my favourites, so far:

As an experience, madness is terrific… and not to be sniffed at, and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets as sanity does.

- Virginia Woolf

I expressed myself badly when I said to you that “one should not write from the heart.” I meant to say: not put one’s personality into the picture. I think that great art is scientific and impersonal. One should, by an effort of mind, put oneself into one’s characters and not create them after oneself. That is the method at least; a method which amounts to this: try to have a great deal of talent and even of genius if you can.

- Gustave Flaubert

My plays are no more constructed than a carrot is constructed. My method is to hear the first part of a conversation in my head. Then I listen to someone else replying to the first statement. Soon this imaginary dialogue continues until I can flesh the conversationalists out with actual names and characteristics.

- George Bernard Shaw
(paraphrased by Isidor Saslav of the International Shaw Society)

A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable, and should be secured, because they seldom return.

- Francis Bacon (the Elizabethan one)

As a writer I have discovered there are certain kinds of things for which I still need the pen, there are certain things for which I need the computer, certain things for which I need a felt-tipped pen. And the kind of instrument I am using is influencing my writing enormously.

- Umberto Eco

I mean, those viruses that spread themselves by hijacking a user’s collection of email addresses - the ones that tend to have .pif attachments and subjects like ‘Re: Your Message’ - seem to either pretend to come from someone you know, or at least has your email address, or from someone they know, by spoofing email headers. Therefore, by tracking the spoofed email addresses of apparent virus senders, you could end up with a useful set of addresses that could be analysed to find out where you fit into a given social or, more likely, business network.

Hmmn, not sure I explained that too well, but by way of an example, I just found a virus-bearing email in my Spam folder which purported to come from someone I’ve met, but didn’t - until now - have an email address for. So, now I can email the person in question, thanks to the virus. And, if some application was tracking these virus spam emails, I could build an address book of contacts and contacts of contacts, effortlessly. Which would be a good thing, if it weren’t for the fact that the people at two degrees of separation and above have never given me permission to find out their email address.

Anyway, if this does make any sense, and I haven’t made false assumptions about the way these viruses do their thing, it’d be nice if something useful could be made out of the malicious practices of virus-writers.

Obviously, we’re quite old now, and those days of being a sixth former or undergraduate - when far too many crazy new ways of thinking are rammed down your throat and half-digested - are over, but it still seems that it’s been a while since anyone really whipped up a storm in terms of theory and philosphy.

So, to, um, paraphrase Bongwater: what’s big in thinking now?

The problem with links, in the context of weblogs, is that they are assumed to be endorsments by the linker of the file being linked to. Not, of course, by the real human reader, who can evaluate a link in context, but by the unthinking spider sent out to read weblogs by the search engines, aggregators and filters that we rely upon to find content - especially ephemeral, of-the-moment content - on the web.

For example, if I link to the British National Party, I am improving its ranking on Google and inserting it into the indices of Blogdex, Memigo et al. In short, I am, albeit infinitessimally, casting a microcontent vote for the BNP.

This is not ideal. I don’t agree with the BNP, to put it mildly, and my link to them ought to register that fact. The developers at Technorati (one of the more sophisticated trackers of weblog linking activity) have cottoned on to this and propose an interesting solution: VoteLinks. Without getting too technical, the Technorati team are suggesting a way to flag links on a web page with a vote for the content being linked to, a vote against it, or an abstention.

You won’t be able to see the difference but this link to the BNP registers my disapproval of their site’s content, rather than simply pointing to it and, therefore, implicitly endorsing it. Future applications designed to track linking activity across weblogs and websites will be able to register this disapproval, aggregate it with the disapproval of others, or weigh it against the approval of others still. The result: differentiation between fame and notoriety, with linking as commentary rather than simple pointing. Sweet.

Similarly, the problem with the social networking sites (aside from the fact that they are essentially pointless) is their binary approach to relationships. A fellow user of Friendster is either friend or not-friend. When relationships are so bluntly defined, the usefulness of a vast, browsable network of related people diminishes with every connection made. There is, obviously, a significant difference between the Friendster I’ve known since childhood and the Friendster I met in a nightclub once six months ago, and marking both relationships as the same breaks the social functionality of the site.

Flickr, the social network meets photo sharing meets live chat site that launched Tuesday last, provides a solution. The site has been garnering much praise for actually having a point - the focus is firmly on the photos - but taking it for a spin last night, I was as impressed by the rubric for categorising relationships as I was by the slick interface. Instead of simply flagging someone as a friend, you can rank them as Acquaintance, Friend, Best Buddy or Soul Mate. The wording is mawkish, reading like an American take on the primary school playground demotion (‘Get out of the sandpit! Eric is my best buddy now!’), but the comparative subtlety should give Flickr a longer shelf-life than the countless networking sites I’ve joined, only to lose interest in within a month.

The point? Subtlety is good. I might be looking at this through weblog-tinted spectacles, and this point is a commonplace for fellow travellers, but it seems that where I once saw the web as an archive of information to be mined for research, that archive now seems to sit beneath a web of people; people who filter and mediate by making links. Where information can often be ranked simply (not always, I know, but often), uncovering the links between people, their views and tastes, cannot. These subtle tweaks to the way we make links, be they social or hyper, aren’t just interesting, they’re fast becoming essential if we are to have any chance of navigating the massive messy morass of information that is the web.

Not unrelated:Blog Discussion and Citation, Flickr - Birth of an online community.