Reasonable Force

Our Director of Communications is giving a talk entitled "Persuasion on the dark side".

I am not sure whether the first thing that sprang to mind should have been the enormous untapped potential of Jane Austen / Star Wars crossover fanfic, but now that the idea has lodged in my mind, it has shown no intention of going away.

Still, at least this offers some distraction from administrative politics.

If I could walk that WAI I wouldn't need the guidelines

Since the Understanding document ['Understanding WCAG 2.0'] is more than double the size of what it purports to explain, this itself may indicate a problem with WCAG 2.

Is it just me, or is an exposition of something often longer than what it's explaining? Particularly (one might even argue necessarily) when you're translating from technical specifications into more generally-accessible language, i.e. from high to low information density?

That ain't gherkin

My pictures from IWMW-2006 have now been uploaded to my brand new gosh-look-I'm-still-excited-about-social-tagging Pickle account.

>> Photos, mostly of Bath (city and campus) and ducks

Pickle is like flickr (photo albums with tagging / social networks), only more so. You can add video as well as still images, and (here's the best bit) you can create unique email addresses to which you and others can send photos, to upload them into an album. So, for example, after that amazing party, when you're really hoping somebody took a photo of the incident with the absinthe and the inflatable penguin, you get your guests to send their photos to something like yourname.party@pickle.com, where you can caption the photos, organise them, and generally do what you like with them (though blackmailing people with them is deprecated). Or something like that. I mean, give me a chance, I only signed up yesterday.

My initial impression of it is that it's no quicker than flickr (which is a shame, as that would have made a great tagline) but has a nicer UI -- I haven't played with flickr much, but that's partly because it doesn't feel that intuitive[0] to me. Pickle claims it works 'like email' but the interface looks more like "My eBay" to me, though that's not a bad thing.

If you want to know more, read the Techcrunch Review ... or just dive in and try it!