Filed under: ir2p
I’ve lately been working with a talented and motivated bunch of people, to help build and launch a new site - www.ir2p.org.
iR2P is an initiative that aims to connect, support and motivate individuals to further the public understanding and political support for implementation of the United Nation’s “Responsibility To Protect” (R2P) doctrine, and to promote the importance of individual responsibility in this context.
The essential principle being that an individual can make a difference - no matter how small - to any issue. The issue that we draw your attention to is genocide and crimes against humanity. The United Nations and its member states undertook a ‘responsibility to protect’ the victims of these crimes yet Darfur continues, the Burmese government continue to block aid workers, and Mugabe remains in power and able to cause suffering at will. We fear that similar atrocities will continue into the future. We also fear that the international community will not live up to its obligations.
If you share our concern, but also our optimism that governments are accountable, that we can make a difference, that individual actions matter, then join our movement, sign our pledge, unite: www.ir2p.org/pledge
We will alert you to developments in the international arena, advise you on actions that you can take, and encourage you to get involved in a range of activities. We also want to hear from you with ideas, suggestions and critiques. We are building up our own capabilities at the moment but are excited by your interest and the possibility of what we can achieve together.
Filed under: Random
Where does all that creative juice come from? Behind the scenes tour of of an award-winning creative farm, juicing process and distribution in South West England.
Filed under: Media, Technology
It looks like the semantic web is about to gain traction with the Yahoo! Search open platform that was announced last month. In summary, Yahoo! is hoping to spread the use of semantic web standards by supporting microformats and RDF - promising enhanced search results for content adhering to such standards.
And with this promise of an enhanced search presence will come the marketing need for publishers to create content that capitalises on this. Just as SEO emerged as an industry all of its own, I expect Semantic Web Optimisation to emerge as an industry all of its own in the very near future.
[Before submitting this post, I quickly searched on the topic (yes - I appreciate the irony of having used Google!) and came across this article - essentially saying the same thing as me above. But please can we not fall into the trap of applying version numbers after “Web” for every evolution in web technology that occurs!]
Filed under: Media, Technology
Another graph. This time showing how the number of websites has grown since 1990. Actually, things only really started to grow about ten years ago in 1998, a year or two after I first played about on the Internet at university. It took six years (1990-1996) for the number to reach 100,000. In 2008, it is now 162 million! While the numbers have risen and risen, what is also interesting to note is the dip in numbers during 2002. Post dot-com bubble slump? Anything to do with 9/11? Or was it simply that a lot of domain names, bought during the dot-com boom years - with little more than a holding page to show, expired at this time? This little blip aside - it seems the upwards curve is un-stoppable. Will it ever reach saturation point?
Filed under: London
Last night’s Liverpool St freeze on ABC news - I’m the guy pushing my bike 
Filed under: Media, Technology
Scary or exciting?
Filed under: London, Random
Vote Ken, originally uploaded by markrocky.
Rumour has it they are part of a campaign against Banksy’s backing of Ken. Subtle. Most people will simply think Ken has gone all street and down with the kids.
[Edit: cycled past this morning and they’ve now been boarded over]
Filed under: Friends, Random
Back in the day, my friends and I used to share mix-tapes. Many of which I still have - kept in an old school trunk - unable to listen to them due to a backwards compatibility error (I don’t have a working tape player), this trunk holds many musical memories. But, I digress, the point being sharing music was a great thing to do. And now we can again, with muxtape.com. Today I’ve been listening to a selection of tracks put together by a friend who has just returned from Kinshasa and what a joy it has been to listen to music like this again. I’d previously browsed through a few other people’s Muxtapes but I didn’t know them - there’s something very nice about knowing who has put it together, so thank you Fred! Any more Muxtape suggestions?
Filed under: Technology
Google has just released “Google App Engine” - which will let you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. It sounds similar to Amazon’s offerings (S3, EC2 and SimpleDB) and the ill-fated Zimki:
- Dynamic webserving
- Persistent storage
- Automatic scaling and load balancing
- APIs for authenticating users and sending email
- Fully featured local development environment
Python is the only language supported at the moment but they say more languages will be supported in the future. With the weight of Google behind it, this service looks set to provide an excellent all-in-one route to rapid web-app development. So long as you are happy using Python and all of Google’s Web services.
Filed under: Random
There’s been some good gags circulating online today:
Filed under: Technology
Yet another critical web app has a brief spell offline…
Again - while annoying - I do find a slight comfort in the fact that even the big boys have bad days.
Filed under: Technology, Random
Bit of a random rant this one but I seem to be caught in a perpetual loop with Tiscali and BT support. Over the last couple of weeks, there has been no ADSL connection at home - which affects both our internet and TV, as we receive Homechoice (aka Tiscali TV). So we’ve called support, they’ve gone through the standard questions and then sent out an engineer. The engineer, when at our house, then blames the company that they are not from (i.e. Tiscali or BT). Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum. I’ve heard from a couple of other people that their ADSL connection with Tiscali is also down. Is this an issue with the ADSL line supplied by Tiscali TV then? Bring back Homechoice!
Filed under: Friends, Media, Technology, Random
I’ve just taken a quick look at friendfeed.com - it’s basically a lifestream service, where people can aggregate and publish their web-lives. It’s done rather nicely - enabling you to quickly create your own lifestream from various feeds (here’s mine) and not too different in look to the lifestream I quickly hacked together with pipes - but done way better and on a grand scale! You can also track friends’ feeds easily too, making it a much more two-way tool than others out there - say Tumblr, for example, which publishes your combined feeds. There’s definitely a need for this - with the whole micro-blogging/twitter/lifestream thing, it is useful to show this data in one place and provides an excellent way for potential stalkers to gather all their up-to-the-minute information on a particular target in one easily digestible feed 
Filed under: Technology
“Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, Campfire, Writeboard, Ta-da List, and our blogs are all offline” - Ouch.
37signals System Status, originally uploaded by markrocky.
One reason why you shouldn’t rely on all this fancy web 2.0 stuff for your business…
Although I do get a certain reassurance from seeing that even people like 37signals can have bad days (sorry 37signals)!
0 Comments