I’m thinking of changing the title of this blog to “Via Lawrence” or maybe I should just set up vialawrence.tumblr.com. It seems like a lot of the content on here comes from him that I almost feel bad at adding the via thing at the bottom of the post. Anyway here’s the latest one which made me crease up at work.
Scary stuff. I need to disconnect more and relax / read books / learn to concentrate again.
Recently I heard the expression ‘one man and his blog‘* to summarise the same material being posted to every single blog on the internet. It’s perfectly true and you often see that same funny/colourful/slow mo/band video or series of images posted around. It’s usually referred to as ‘going viral’ although you don’t tend to hear that term so often now.
It is a bit of a problem though as a lot of people look at the same kind of sites either via a Twitter feed or an RSS feed. Sites like Kottke.org, Boing Boing, Colossal, The Retronaut, PetaPixel, Devour, It’s nice that, DesignBoom, Dezeen, Co Design etc usually have rich pickings for people looking for ‘cool stuff’. I also have a few nerdy ones that I occasionally find some good stuff on such as DaringFireball, ParisLemon, ShawnBlanc and Marco.org.
Sometimes that image/link/video is everywhere for a very good reason, it’s insanely good. But then most of the time it’s just good. Deciding what sets something apart in terms of interest and quality is difficult and nine times out of ten I add it to my Instapaper queue and come back to it later. Sometimes this can be days or even weeks before I reconsider it. Is it really worth posting? But then I consider my site as more of a scrapbook or journal really. Something for me, but also something that others might discover.
The other argument is perhaps, just because its everywhere why shouldn’t I post it too? I’ve often found that outside of the tech circle there’s far less penetration of some of these things. I often start a post with the words, It’s already been all over the Internet but…. As a way if excusing a repeat i guess for those who have seen it. I always find that there’s someone who will comment or engage with it as they missed it first time or it want in their circle online.
I think the key to all of this is making your site about your interests and what engages you. Sometimes that will overlap with the masses but often it won’t. As soon as you post cool shit because others will like it then I’m not so keen. Be yourself online I guess.
*Quote from Lawrence.
Fantastic look back at the BBC and all it’s different iterations from 1999 – 2013. Same old headlines but different BBC site. Funny that you don’t really remember how basic sites were back then. Maybe it’s due to incremental improvements but very nice to see it all laid out graphically like this.
See the full sized shot on Flickr. The rest of his photo stream is also well worth checking out.
I think I found this amazing Tumblr site via Brant Richards many years back and it’s been a fairly constant source of great cycling imagery. Viewing it on the website is great as you can just scroll and scroll forever with all those fantastic images trundling by. It might be easier to view all those images together in a wider format but that’s my preference.
I prefer to view this site in Reeder on my phone and laptop. Usually by the time I come to look at it theres a couple of hundred posts waiting to be viewed.
The images seem to cover all aspects of cycling including some weird and wonderful frame designs to the latest trends and theres always a link back if you want to find out more. The sheer variety makes it well worth viewing, especially if you’re in the post office queue etc. Add it to your daily viewed sites!
Emma really does say some funny stuff. I wish I had time to write it all down but there’s just too much of it. This kept me chuckling for a few hours recently.
I like social media but I don’t want to be too social because you end up with all these dicks in your timeline.
Wise words indeed.
I can almost see Emma rolling her eyes now – ‘Another blog Andy, reaaaaaallllly?’. Yes well I have made another little blog for all my Scaffold of the day pictures, which my sister recently described as ‘…a bit weird’. You can find it at scaffoldlove.com and maybe I’ll buy a domain for it later. Why Tumblr? Well I don’t ever really want to clutter up my Flickr with Instagram photos. It seems like it’s just not the place for them.
The best thing is that I don’t need to ever update it, I just used the wonderful IFTTT website – which stands for If This Then That. So each time a photo on Instagram is tagged with #scaffoldlove it magically finds its way over onto this Tumblr page. All my Instagram shots also go to a massive album on Facebook, which probably annoys the hell out of everyone, using the same service.
Clever stuff when you think about it really. It’s amazing that you can fire up a new Tumblr blog in a matter of minutes and start posting content as well as automatically pipe stuff to it. This used to be so painfully hard but the internet does seem to be getting to the stage of “It just works” – very Steve Jobs – with all these clever services.
As demonstrated by our local Chinese Restaurant. Just a simple scanned menu uploaded as an image, but works so well.
There’s a new cycling blog in town and it’s not run by cycling vigilantes or nut jobs moaning about the state of two wheeled travel. This one has an overtly positive stance for those of us who enjoy cycling around for whatever reason but don’t enjoy the crap blogs that normally go with it. It also brings great photography along with it which makes me like it even more.
There’s been a couple of great articles already such as the With Associates studio interview as well as the recent interview with Lawrence.
We want to change the way our readers think about cycling in London, whether that means finding a positive slant on biking in the rain, challenging the way that we think about urban transport, or refuting common wisdom about, say, helmets or traffic lights.
Cycle Love is about the stuff that makes cycling great, and celebrating the diversity of cycle culture — bikes *and* people.
It feels like it’s a site for people who cycle but aren’t, or don’t necessarily want to be labelled as, cyclists. Maybe that’s putting words in their mouth, but I think the only way cycling is going to get better is when you don’t have to be a cyclist to do it and we embrace it as the best form of transport for the city.
You also should buy a T-shirt from them.
Back in January I posted about a Tumblr blog I’d found via Twitter – Need some design inspiration? This collection of images and format inspired me to start my own version entitled – architecturepastebook.co.uk.
At first I wasn’t sure whether I would use it or whether I would become bored with it. I’ve embraced it entirely and have, shock horror surprise surprise, become a little obsessive about it. It started out as a way of recording a series of precedent images I was looking at during work time. Rather than save images to a folder on the server and lose any idea of what they were or where they had come from, I would chuck them at the Tumblr. We would then refer back to them later in the day when we were discussing design progress or the development of the architectural language for a series of construction details. Previously I had started to use the Gimme Bar web service but hadn’t connected with it in the same way really. For some reason the Tumblr (with the chosen theme) seemed a better way of doing it. Also as it was public there was a certain pressure to keep the quality up.
architecturepastebook.co.uk – something to dip into for inspiration?
The blog has grown from a semi-personal scrapbook (or paste book) into a slightly more public semi-curated archive of great Architecture as well as the occasional inspirational image. The way Tumblr works is also part of this more social feel to the site as people can “reblog” posts. I can also do the same to theirs which allows me to re-use content I like from others, it’s through setting this up that I’ve really engaged with Tumblr. It’s become a place to record images I’ve seen during the day from the likes of Dezeen, ArchDaily and designboom as well as a few select users and groups on Flickr. Sometimes I will select a series of images from a completed building which I think is worthy or often just a single image that provokes a response such as a texture or composition. Sometimes it’s just nice concrete which I’m a complete sucker for.
I’m intrigued by the idea of a visual archive that can be looked back upon, something along the lines of day books or sketchbooks that I keep at work. I’m obsessive about these and love sketching details or small areas of plans or sections. I think we also suffer from sheer overload of visual information – “Where was that great detail in the magazine from last year? Oh I saw something like that a while ago, it was interesting how they solved it” etc etc. This is my way of addressing that and trying to keep inspiration to hand. The way I post also allows me to keep a link to the original article which I can refer to for further information.
Day books – full of notes, sketches and ideas.
As an Architectural Photographer I’m also keen on constantly upping my game and viewing imagery to critique and make my own work and techniques better. This constant viewing of other photographers work has also made me far more critical of the the visual representation and also the actual architecture that I see. This is also something I’m also keen to document – the stunning image or the play of light that the photographer recorded, the unique angle or way in which it was post processed or the composition of the image and so on.
Tumblr as a visual archive.
So, another website to maintain and curate but something that provokes a critical appraisal of work and somewhere to keep it all. Want to add something – an image or a project?
Submit something and I might add it.