To celebrate the success of the PlayTime event and continue Tim Wright’s mission to play golf on the moon (with David Bowie), XPT is offering a iPod Shuffle to the person who comes up with the best photographic simulation of a particular aspect of the the 30-year plan.

By concretising events and situations in a series of manipulated images, we are making the whole project more real, more achievable. Simulation=Solution. Remember - don’t leave space to the professionals.

A few weeks on, I’m finally getting around to uploading my slides from my PlayTime presentation, Playing with Pictures (it’s a 20MB+ PDF file, exported from Keynote). I was intending to annotate these so that they’d make more sense to someone who weren’t at my session, but I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll do this.

This gist of it however was this: Photo manipulation has always had a bit of a bad name, and even today we’re still worried that adding, removing or modifying parts of a photographic image detract from photography’s perceived ability to show us the truth. But you could argue that these techniques - and especially montage/manipulation (cf. the history of collage, Eisenstein etc, blah blah) - allow us to see other, new truths (all that nonsense about MegaWords was a joke about quantifying this). And the things you need, stock imagery, skills, tools etc. are becoming more available and affordable all the time: see all the examples of the web services* I mentioned. So we’re going to see a lot more of it, especially with the YouTube generation, and it’s also something that we (XPT and everyone else) are going to continue to have a lot of fun with…

*Most of the links to these are embedded in the PDF, but for convenience here are the best of them: Worth1000, Photoshop Tennis, iStockPhoto, Snipshot, Tourist Remover, Riya Visual Search, Lazy Mask, Zonetag, scanR, retrievr, Mappr, Ning Photos and Google Moon.

News about the Moon-Golf-Bowie photo competition we’re running and the ‘Golf on the Moon’ Google Maps site to follow in a subsequent post.

There I was thinking I’d completely got out of the habit of blogging.

I was invited today by one of my clients - The Climate Group - to watch Al Gore give his presentation on Climate Change at the bfi London IMAX Cinema. Gore’s presentation is pretty well covered elsewhere, so I’m not even going to try and summarise it here (it was too dark to take notes and besides I’m a lousy note-taker anyway). Suffice to say for someone who has a reputation for being boring, he’s both funny and extremely passionate about our need to find a common moral purpose to deal with this “planetary emergency”.

Here’s Al Gore and The Climate Group’s Steve Howard standing beneath “one of the world’s most widely recognised and requested photographs of all time” the last image of the Earth shot by a human being (from Apollo 17 in 1972).

Al Gore and The Climate Group’s Steve Howard at the bfi London IMAX
Originally uploaded by Rob Bevan.

The vertiginous, somewhat uncomfortable feeling you get sitting up close to an IMAX screen (the UK’s largest) really enhanced the images of huge ice shelves collapsing into the sea and all the ensuing discussion of ‘tipping points’…

(See also The Climate Group’s coverage of today’s event).

( Technorati tags: al-gore | climate-change | imax)

Like most of the UK’s web development community I was at the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps summit a couple of weeks ago. A couple of highlights for me were Tom Coates’ wonderfully lucid and entertaining synthesis of all things Web 2.0 (see also Jeremy Zawodny’s annotations of Tom’s slides) and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Ruby on Rails ’sermon’. Although I’ve been working with Rails intermittently for at least eighteen months I’ve never seen David speak and it had never really occurred to me before just how Scandinavian Rails is: minimal, beautifully designed and good for the soul.

DHH’s Devil
Originally uploaded by Damien Tanner.

Anyway, by now, the talks (sorry, ‘podcasts’) are all available for download, there are numerous write-ups (best of which are Simon Willison’s notes), hundreds of Flickr images and Lars Plougmann’s mindmaps.

( Technorati tags: futureofwebapps | rails)