Just finished a four–month stint hacking Drupal to help finish the marvellous new Watershed website. A real pleasure to work with David, Oliver et al — good times.

After a long hiatus, finally a new post on my blog. And why? Well, because I’ve just made the new version of Commentpress public. Nothing to do now but wait for feedback — oh, and make a start some of the enhancements I’ve got in mind.

The latest project that I’ve done with Futurelab has kept up the tradition of being nominated for a New Statesman New Media award. Congratulations to the team on the nomination and commiserations that it didn’t win the award this year.

April fool’s day is, it seems, confusing for some. In my morning trawl around the net newswires, I kept seeing comments from people who were unsure as to the veracity of the stories that were being posted online today — and bemoaning the fact that this was how they felt.

It occurred to me that this was actually a Good Thing and that perhaps a campaign should be started to make every day a day when jokes can be played before midday, thus reducing the gullibility quotient of the population in one fell swoop.

Talking of swoops, my favourite prank today has to be the BBC’s flying penguins advert for their iPlayer. I hope they leave it up beyond the next six days.

Another installment of Izzy’s creativity. Last time it was stop-frame animation. This time it consists of taking one of Stephen Appleby’s superb cartoons literally…

What she wanted, though, was to tell some stories about the adventures of Monster Potatohead — or “Bob” as he’s been officially named. Here he is with Izzy and a puppy on a farm in West Bengal, India:

I look forward to the further adventures – perhaps he’ll meet Mighty Mouse in another animated spectacular sometime. Roll on another wet weekend…

Born 13:40, 16th January, 2008

Safe zone in case of earthquake

On a recent trip to Peru, I thought it somewhat alarming that every hotel we stayed in had signs just like the one above — but now I know that they were deadly serious. I’d never heard of them until I stumbled upon this BBC report, but kudos to Telecoms Sans Frontieres who do a job that’s often overlooked in the news media’s obsession with more grisly details.

Congratulations to the Create-a-scape team on the announcement of their nomination in this year’s New Statesman New Media Awards. They’ve been selected as finalists in the education category which apparently “go to the body or project that has made the most significant contribution to education through the use of new media technology.”

I worked with them on the support website for the project and through that have read most of the support material for it. I reckon they’d be deserving winners. It’s an excellent and innovative idea and I hope it goes far — good luck folks!

[Update] Create-a-scape went on to win the award last night (24th July 2007).

New Media Awards 2007 Winners

Congratulations!

Go on, you know you want to swap a car trip for something better — walk, cycle, hang-glide, whatever — perhaps even work from home for the day if your employer will let you. Whatever you do, register it on the site I just built with the chaps at Tijuana Design:

Change Your World website

Girls playing traditional games in Vava’u, Tonga (mirrored from Wikipedia)

Many years ago when I performed a juggling show round the world, I heard rumours of a South Pacific island where all the women were jugglers of exceptional skill. Initially, I considered the story to be a kind of urban legend amongst the juggling diaspora, but the exoticism and allure of the idea of Pacific islands inhabited by juggling women remained with me.

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