Today in London Bridge

Billboard at London Bridge

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A couple of mini rants

This campaign to stop architects working on prison designs (via Design Observer ) seems rather inconsistent to me. OK, so prison might not work very well and for sure there are too many people locked up. But I would bet a lot of money that the kind of architects that would sign up to this boycott have never been asked to design a prison in their lives, and I am sure there will be no shortage of people willing to sign off drawings for new prisons, given that I can't see clients starting to boycott architects who design prisons. Hell, there are probably architects who only design prisons. Surely we should be actually looking for better prison designs. Will Alsop has, I have seen, being working on precisely that, with prisoners themselves. Isn't this a more intelligent and clever way to turn the prison paradigm around into something positive, using the power of good design to make an environment that allows prisoners to see some hope, experience some creativity and be stimulated ...
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On MyWeb vs. Google Personalized vs. Del.icio.us

OK, so as everyone blog-related and probably no-one not blog-related knows, Yahoo has launched the public beta of it's answer to the huge social bookmarking thing , and Google now has Google Personalized . I just did a half-hour test-out of them both, and will keep testing them as I go. This is very much a lay-person's view of these services - I am not one of the many bloggers who has been secretly beta-testing for weeks. But I think, as an amateur enthusiast, it's useful to see how these work for the majority of web users who are even less tech-savvy than me. [And I've also not been paid by either company to say nice things about them.] First, Yahoo: I until now had no Yahoo account. It was irritating that I had to sign up, tell them my Zip code and the name of my favorite sports team, etc, just to access enhanced search. Sign up to del.icio.us and all you need is a username and password. Plus, once I'd done all the signing-up, there was no immediate evidence of w...
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An expanded post on 'social networks'

For me the internet is a tool. I appreciate its ability to link me up with people but my primary interest is not in making new best friends - it's in staying abreast with developments in areas that I'm interested in, and finding out stuff I want to know for work or play. I don't care about the online popularity contests. Now in MyWeb , if I save a link, I can't see if anyone outside my contacts has also saved it and therefore, whether they might be potential good new contacts of mine. It relies on finding people through the friendship-based 'degrees of separation' not the shared-interest based 'we share links' like in delicious , where I regularly link-hop to find people whose bookmarks might be worth raiding. And for my internet, the 'degrees of separation' through shared links/interests is way more interesting and useful than going through my buddies. Friendster, Orkut, etc seem to me to have really failed to stay popular with 'online' ...
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