beatnic - just wondering

This sounds like fun

Pazzazz Music is led by professional performers and educators from the UK’s top arts establishments. Pazzazz Music is the only music club for these ages of 4 to 7 that embraces conventional music training but also uses the children’s creativity as a core educational principle.

During each 6 week course the children will produce and perform a composition that will be recorded onto their own CD! Within the composition process we address the fundamental skills, essential for their future music education.

The classes are open access, anyone interested is welcome to attend, regardless of any previous musical training.

Taster sessions in Dulwich at 1pm-3pm on Saturday 4th Feb, and Greenwich at 1pm-3pm on Saturday 11th Feb.

More info here at http://www.pazzazzmusic.co.uk/

And Joanna did the website :-)

Vote for your favourite British design icon from 1900 onwards.

The Great British Design Quest is a vote to discover the public’s favourite British design icon. Organised by the Design Museum and The Culture Show, the vote opens with a shortlist of 25 and is narrowed down to a Top 10, Top 3 and a final winner.

I went for Harry Beck’s London Underground map in the end. Following that it would be the Routemaster Bus and the Mini.

• !Gambado! : : beckenham
  It’s like a life-size platform game.

  “Supermarket-sized warehouse of high octane, high energy fun for the under 10s and accompanying adults”

  (tags: gambados gambado soft-play beckenham london southeastlondon)
• South East Kiting Association - Welcome
  (tags: kiting kites kiteboarding southeast)

Many happy returns :-)

• Service Ecology - ServiceDesign
  (tags: service servicedesign serviceecology context design ecosystem Gestalt wiki)

And they are:

Allianz Australia Insurance, Australia
ALTANA Pharma AG, Germany
Bank of Ireland Group, Ireland
Capital One, USA
IBM, USA
Merrill Lynch, USA
METRO Group, Germany
O2, UK
Staples, USA
Vodafone, UK

Summary:
This year, we saw increased use of multimedia, e-learning, internal blogs, and mobile access. Winning companies also encouraged consistent design by emphasizing training for content contributors.

Read more on Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com

Congrats to all winners.

It would be useful to know how many entrants there were, I couldn’t see that info available, maybe I missed it.

pervasive

adj 1: spread throughout; “a pervasive anxiety overshadows the triumphs of individuals” [syn: pervading]

2: spreading throughout; “armed with permeative irony…he punctures affectations”; “the pervasive odor of garlic”; “an error is pervasive if it is material to more than one conclusion” [syn: permeant, permeating, permeative]

fabric

n 1: artifact made by weaving or felting or knitting or crocheting natural or synthetic fibers; “the fabric in the curtains was light and semitraqnsparent”; “woven cloth originated in Mesopotamia around 5000 BC”; “she measured off enough material for a dress” [syn: cloth, material, textile]

2: the underlying structure; “restoring the framework of the bombed building”; “it is part of the fabric of society” [syn: framework]

Source of definitions: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

• A List Apart: Articles: Web 3.0

244 posts
105 comments
29 categories

Most frequent commenter: Mum

:-)

Sounds fun, I haven’t tried it yet. My friend Paul R says it’s only got 1 out of 3 of his so far!

songtapper.com

Song Search and Retrieval by Tapping

This site lets you search for a song, by tapping the rhythm of its words (lyrics).

Let’s say you have a song stuck in your head, and you don’t know the name of it. Never fear! Load up our search screen, and try tapping the rhythm of the song on your space bar while humming the tune. Tap the space bar for each syllable that you sing. It’s that simple!

• Intranet Benchmarking Forum
  (tags: ibf intranets benchmarking intranet)
• Google Touts Bigger Mini
  If they can do 500,000 documents for circa $12000 they’d be laughing and so would we
  (tags: intranets search enterprisesearch google googlemini intranet)
• Search for your family name to see how it’s distributed throughout the UK
  “A recent research project based at University College London (UCL) has investigated the distribution of surnames in Great Britain both current and historic, in order to understand patterns of regional economic, population movement and cultural identity.
  (tags: names lastnames distribution 1881 1998 surnames familynames)

Recently I’ve had quite a few invitations to join LinkedIn.

So I joined and checked it out and there’s something about it makes me feel a little uneasy.

I think it has to do with my instant aversion to the idea of actively “networking” as a business activity - it just brings the cynic out in me.

The language used doesn’t help win me over either…

4.6 million experienced professionals already use LinkedIn

I mean, what or who on earth is an “experienced professional”?

Also, the very nature of something that you have to belong to and lives behind closed walls goes against my idea of connecting with people. Doesn’t the very essence of the world wide web allow us to connect with each other already?

Maybe I’m missing the point, but I don’t think it’s for me.

I’m quite happy being LinkedOut. You know where to find me :)

It’s an aura thing.

Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows.

Researchers [from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada] found that the brain makes decisions in just a twentieth of a second of viewing a webpage.

They were surprised as they believed it would take at least 10 times longer to form an opinion.

[...]

The researchers also believe that these quickly-formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”.

If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website’s content.

Since people like to be right, they will continue to use the website that made a good first impression, as this will further confirm that their initial decision was a good one.

Full article on BBC News.

Just wondering…

Was this intentional?

Does it bring in more business than if they’d placed their logo somewhere else?

When a man gits old he jist likes to sit without botherment.

From a book on photography from 1943.

Just wondering… does anyone anywhere know of a webserver-based RSS aggregator that will run on an intranet?

Commercial, open-source, it doesn’t matter at the moment, I’m just interested to know what’s available.

It would help people share both internal and external feeds (subscription lists).

I’ve searched high and low but so far to no avail.

I wrote to the folk at Bloglines, but they said they had no plans on this front.

• Shaping Things - The MIT Press
  Via blackbeltjones/work
  (tags: tobuy design industrialdesign book mit)

Many happy returns :)

A search for a definition of the currently much- (some say over-) used word mashup takes you to this wikipedia disambiguation page (i.e. it has more than one meaning) which then leads to the following:

Mashup (music) redirects you to this definition:

Bastard pop is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the a cappella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts.

Mashup (web application hybrid) is defined as:

A mashup is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) and JavaScript includes.

The etymology of this term almost certainly derives from its similar use in pop music.

Many people are experimenting with mashups using eBay, Amazon, Google, and Yahoos APIs.

• Intranet Trends to Watch for in 2006 - Weigh In - weighin - CIO
  No surprises, but a useful summary of what’s going on
  (tags: intranets trends)

Happy New Year :-)