Quick Response Codes – what what what? Well they act in a similar way to a barcode except when you take a picture of them with an internet-enabled camera phone, your phone will bring up information or take you to a link of a particular website.

It’s something we’ve trialed a bit at the BBC (we ran an experiment in London zoo a couple of years back with these images next to the animal cages so visitors could get more information), also I noticed when I was in Japan last year that they got used quite a lot on billboards and advertising to provide a link back to the product.

Anyway I thought this was quite an interesting use of the technology by Munich-based clothing label Emma Cott, basically you can generate a link to your own website, social networking site etc, they’ll then print it out on to a t-shirt. Here’s the code to my facebook profile (I’m sure there could be some interesting uses for this?):

Really like this video by the artist C215 workin his magic across London. To find more stuff check his flickr account or myspace page.

There’s something I really love about this Muxtape site, it basically allows you to upload mp3’s and create online playlists or mixtapes. However I think it’s the interface which is almost over-the-top simple, but there’s something really beautiful and art-like about it?

Web design, good CSS practice and search engine optimisation - all to a pretty fly beat! Watch here

“design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production

your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned

please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time”

Found this on Tonteau’s Threadless Blog which I thought was pretty funny, a classic British tabloid headline?

In other news related … news, check out the redesigned bbc news site, which is finally starting to drop those Real/WMV pop-up players and replacing them with the new embedded flash video player I was working on before Christmas.

I’m really loving this post on CDM of some guys who have remade the tron movie without the use of any computer generated imagery! Watch the video here - Genius!  

Then again when you combine ‘homemade’ with ‘tron’ you’re always bound to come up with a winner - who can forget good ‘ol Tron Guy a few years ago (incidentally I forgot just how tight those trousers are around the crotch - ewwwww!)

Interesting to see the new ITV Catch Up site, there’s a couple of things that I like about it (though there are a LOT of bugs when using it on a mac) - My main gripe is that rather than using flash video (which everyone has) it uses Microsoft Silverlight (which no-one has?!)

… is on, you can’t go wrong for $9 each?

Here’s are the ones I ordered:

On Saturday a friend of mine booked out a room for a birthday party and asked me to bring some music along. Unfortunately, for some reason just plugging my iPod into the mixer produced a horrible sound quality so I was forced to use the CD decks - this would have been fine except the only CD to hand was a 3 disc ‘Best of the Eighties’ album which I had to make last for over 3 hours (I think towards the end of the night I’d played Grace Jones ‘Pull up to the Bumper‘ about 8 times?!)

Anyway here’s a picture of me posing like I’m doing some cool DJ scratch move or something (in reality the most advanced bit of skill was a fade in)

All in all it was quite possibly the worst bit of DJ’ing ever, though someone came up to me at the end and said that “never had one person done so much with so little” which I thought was nice - and most people seemed to be feeling the fly beats I was laying down:

Creative Review have written a great post featuring some current cool new music video’s. My favourite of which is this one, directed by Keith Schofield for the Supergrass song ‘Bad Blood’. It basically features a wicked trick of locking the camera axis point to random objects and actions in the video … though rather than trying to explain it’s better to actually just watch it.

Wow, this is amazing - like good ‘ol Quicktime VR but with video instead of still images … check out the demo here (be sure to move your mouse around over the video)

Found on the Protein blog

It’s been quite a busy few weeks getting some designs signed off for the next release of iPlayer. In the meantime there’s been some pretty cool developments - firstly it’s now become one of the few video sites (the only other one I know of is youTube) which will work on the iPhone and iPod touch, this is because it can stream in H.264 as well as flash - more info on the BBC internet blog and in the Guardian.

The other thing which has been quite interesting has been a couple of iPlayer clone websites which essentially use the same content and flash player but reorganised into a different site. My favourite version of this is iPlayerList which has the strapline “Making the unmissable, browsable” a little dig at the fact that on the current site, which is very picture heavy, it can be difficult to browse through content quickly and easily (this is something which we’re remedying for the next release).

Anyway it’s actually a really great site, with RSS feeds of programmes, related blog posts, it also pulls in related video from other video sharing sites. I think the main point seems to be though, that if you can easily find and play content it really doesn’t matter what the site looks like?!

What would have happened if design legend Saul Bass had made the titles for Star Wars - Ace! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z25t-PQDn5A

Nice … it’s all about track 2 for me! Download here:
http://fffff.at/audio/top10_rap_4_white_people.zip

Found on the ni9e blog

Really like the new music video for the Justice track ‘DVNO‘ which takes a poke at the old retro tv idents. One of them inparticular reminded me very much of the old BBC video ident - so cooool!