Archive: July 10th, 2007

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Should we simplify spelling?

The cawl for speling reform in the Inglish langwidge iz misguyded and franklee, kynd ov styoopid.

Police In Knife Standoff Up For Awards (from The Argus)

Yet more on the events I blogged about down the street, again from the local newspaper.

We Love to Fly and It Shows: Inside the World of Mileage Running

This is a fascinating insight into a mindset that I simply cannot comprehend. Sounds like hell.

Faceball: your face, our balls

Here's a little teaser from Dunstan. Prepare for the greatest sport of the century.

Grab your place at dConstruct

I’m preparing for a big day at the Clearleft HQ. Tickets for dConstruct 2007 go on sale at 11am today.

Historically, dConstruct has always been fast to sell out (to sell out of tickets I mean… not to betray its principles). The first dConstruct sold out in just half an hour but there were only a hundred places to fill. Last year’s conference had 350 places and took a day and a half to sell out. This year we’ve got a lot more room—about 600 seats. I think we’ll manage to fill all the seats but tickets probably won’t sell out quite as fast as previous years. If you’re of the gambling persuasion, place your bets now.

I’m reviving the podcast of the conference; it was pretty popular last year. Once again I’ll be releasing sporadic, short, snappy episodes in the run-up to the event. I’ve already got two in the can: a retrospective of last year’s talks and a chat with some of the Last.fm folks which was recorded at the culmination of a night of carousing in San Francisco. I think that one will be hard to top. I may have to record all my interviews in the same manner.

This year’s dConstruct will be quite different from previous years. There’s the subject matter for a start: Designing the User Experience. Then there’s the workshops. For two days before the conference, you have the chance to attend full-day hands-on workshops in the salubrious surroundings of Casa Clearleft. Places on the workshops are limited to 15 people to keep things intimate and two of the workshops have already sold out. But you can still book a place on Thomas Vander Wal’s Tagging workshop and there are still places left for the workshop that’s dearest to my heart: Microformats.

The microformats workshop will be a joint effort by myself and Tantek. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy… or, failing that, deliver a kick-ass workshop that will embed knowledge of microformats straight into your neocortex. We’ve got lots of ideas and I hope we can squeeze them all into one day.

So if you or your organisation has any interest in the semantic power of microformats, then you or your boss should book a ticket now.

Oh, and did I mention that attending a workshop automatically gets you a free ticket to the conference too?

Update: Wow. Tickets sold out faster than I thought—just 6 hours. Now the only way to secure a ticket to the conference is to grab a workshop ticket.