Earlier today I attended a WIRED seminar moderated by David Rowan, Editor of Wired UK, with Chris Anderson (Editor in Chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail). The seminar’s title was pretty promising. Anderson covers an astonishing array of new technologies and idea in each issue of Wired. But which out of them does he feel merits the title of the Next Big Disruptive Idea?

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Are there any big brands in The Guardian’s Top 100 sites this year? Yes - 1. That’s all. Oh dear.

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I’m pretty tired of modern tech having a life expectancy of a mayfly. My granny has used the same TV for as long as I can remember but over 14 years I’ve buried 4 PC’s and 2 Macs in the CPU graveyard. My last mac lived 3 years. That’s about equivalent to 76 in computer years. So when it came to upgrading, I wanted to try and maximise my laptop’s lifespan from the start. read full post »

Flickr searches can be slow, so one man decided to speed things up. Doc Rogers talks to ‘Houser’ inventor of FlickrLeech … is it life in the fast lane?

Doc: I’m always surfing the web looking for new and interesting sites for this and my own blog (www.docrogers.co.uk). I stumbled across FlickrLeech last year and thought it was a pretty cool piece of programming. I emailed ‘Houser’ who created the site, and caught him half way through a Beta launch.

Hi Houser, good to speak to you … what’s FlickrLeech all about for those who haven’t seen it?

Houser: Initially it started out as a little tool I used to check the ‘Interestingness’ photos on Flickr for a particular day. Because that feature is a real-time moving target (it potentially changes every minute). read full post »

We haven’t talked much about Widgets on Knitware. Graham mentioned sharp’s latest Aquos Net widget TV, but I think they probably deserve more dues. I’ve been building a website for my wedding for some time now; I just wanted it to be a simple and easy to use site that tells people where the hotels are and how to get to our little corner of England. The problem is that I was desperately ill equipped to design a website. read full post »

I’m laying down a challenge … what are your top three internet sites. No cheating, they have to be final destination (so no Google) and you can’t include your own site or blog. Let’s get down to business and my top three …

1. Flickr - the original and for me still the best picture place.

2. Wikipedia - the worlds biggest encyclopedia.

3. Youtube - destination tv … a window on the world.

Now your turn, three links and why.

Isn’t it interesting how the results differ when you type the same search in Flickr as Google Images?  Google Images throws up the most obvious commercial images, whereas Flickr tends to throw up much more interesting creative work.

 Try “cat plush” in Google Images and you get this. Lots of cheap, cheesy toy cats. The sort they sell in Toys R Us.

Try “cat plush”  in Flickr and you get this. Really fresh, cool looking, quirky toy cats. The sort they sell in Habitat. 

 Amateur content really can be better than professional stuff

(Weird how Google Images doesn’t see into Flickr - I guess because it’s owned by Yahoo! If you know more than that,do let us know.)

Earlier this year, I thought Facebook was amazing. I updated my profile every day, sometimes many times a day. I was visiting 10 or 20 every day. I was adding billions of applications, biting chumps and poking my friends. Briefly, it became an obsession.

It wasn’t just me. There was a time in summer 2007 in London when you couldn’t go anywhere without catching the word “Facebook” in bars and pubs and events and public transport and even from groups of people passing you on the street. There was a time, I estimated, when I was hearing just the word “Facebook” about 70-100 times a day. The newspapers were doing a daily Facebook story. It was on telly. It was everywhere.

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I scored an invitation to the beta of PhotoPhlow.com via a badge at Joi Ito’s blog and discovered an amazing story linking back through the history - yes, history - of Web 2.0 photo-sharing phenomenon Flickr.

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