Archive
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft, and everyone who came, for a really great time. I talked about a number of things. I started out talking about Geocities, and how it was a very real thing, a place that I grew up in, and how it was […]
It was the second Gamecamp on Saturday, and by all accounts it was a huge success. I couldn’t attend, but I was asked to contribute something to the one-off newspaper produced for the day. The result is above, with the text below. During the proceedings of the Fourth Situationist International Conference in London in December […]
I was recently asked by the good people at Proboscis to undertake a virtual residency, exploring their Bookleteer suite of tools. Bookleteer is described as “a platform for public authoring and cultures of listening—creating and sharing knowledge, stories, ideas and information”, and also as a form of samizdat for the twentieth century. I’ll be further […]
For a long time now, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with Patrick Keiller’s 1994 film London. And so, this year, I’m doing something about it. I’m studying it: watching it again and again, mining it for references and meaning, analysing and locating shots and scenes. London lends itself to this process, more than any other film […]
I’ve been wanting to play with Layar, the augmented reality browser for iPhone 3GS and Android for a while. So I did. As a test case, I’ve created a layar for Noticings, the utterly awesome photography game created by my friends Tom and Tom. It lets you see and find Noticings near you (if there […]
Update: This newspaper is now for sale. I have been somewhat obsessed with the eccentric figure of Walking Stewart for a number of years, since first encountering him in some dusty library, at the unpopular end of De Quincey’s “Collected Works”. A strange, liminal figure, Stewart seems to stalk the margins of the Nineteenth Century, […]
A couple of weeks ago, Russell Davies noted that most podcasts of the kind we (meaning, I think, Russell, me and some like-minded folk) listen to while wandering around are quite long for most of our wanderings – typically 30 minutes or more, like the radio programmes we post at Speechification. There’s room in the […]
I’m pleased to announce that Artists’ eBooks, a project first mooted in this post a couple of months ago, is now live at www.artistsebooks.org. eBooks, as we’ve been saying for some time, have massive potential to revolutionise not only how we read, but what we read. The incorporation of audio and video, the possibilities for […]
I’m working on a couple of eBook projects, and thinking about distribution. Sales figures are important: in the music world, we’ve already seen the move to recording downloads in addition to physical sales for compiling charts. (Chris Heathcote has some thoughts on the latter, and notes we’re not yet at the per-play stage – c.f. […]
A couple of months ago, I drew this on the back of an envelope: That’s pretty much the best representation I could come up with of what I do. I encompasses all my major projects of the last few years: this site; Bookkake, my print-on-demand, experimental small publisher; bkkeepr, the web app for tracking your […]
Recently, I did some work with Newspaper Club, the new startup from from the fine folks at the Really Interesting Group, building on their rather wonderful Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet project. Looking to test the systems they’re working on and start building a portfolio of possibilities, they offered me the chance […]
In case you don’t read Times Emit (which you obviously should), Apt just released a fun little literary app onto the web that I designed and built: The Book Seer. I wrote about it over at TE (and had a bit of a rant about book data): It’s very simple. It’s just pulling suggestions from […]
A quick heads-up on a little Apt project I haven’t talked about properly before. We got bored with all the comments and crud on YouTube, so we built Quietube – think of it as Readability for your favourite videos. A little bookmarklet lets you easily and quickly generate a nice, clean page – and a […]
I’m pleased to tell you that bkkeepr, my project to create a Last.fm-alike for reading (and more besides) now has an API. An Application Programming Interface (API) is essentially a machine-readable version of an application, and more specifically, the data in contains. bkkeepr is first and foremost an application that does stuff with data, and […]
Back in February, I sketched out this idea on the back of an envelope. I’m pleased to say it is now a reality. Bkkeepr allows you to track your reading and make bookmarks via text message and the web. It uses Twitter as it’s source, generating a timeline of everyone’s reading, as well as pages […]
I’m very pleased to say that my open-source literary festival, London Lit Plus, is happening again this year. Full details at londonlitplus.com, with plenty more to come. Head over, check it out, start spreading the word – and think about holding an event!
The Great Escape cover above, designed by Abram Games for Penguin in 1951, is one of my all-time favourites. And when, Moleskined-out, I needed a new notebook, it sprung to mind. So here’s what I did. I scanned in the cover, and created a dummy edition, complete with 200 blank, numbered pages, which I had […]
Things I Love (a short and selective list): Blogging, WordPress, Books, Penguin paperbacks, Typography. I am, therefore, quite over the moon to announce the release of Marber, a theme for the WordPress blogging platform based on good typographic practices and Romek Marber’s classic 1961 grid for Penguin Books. Marber is a real labour of love, […]
Some people are going to hate me for this, but I think it’s great: The 250GB Book. I did agonise over cutting up the book. I did reject several others in the charity shop because they were too nice to do it too, even if they were just going to rot on the shelf anyway. […]
Sorry it’s been quiet around here. With London Lit Plus in full swing for the last couple of weeks, and a new job, it’s been a little hectic. However, we do have one important announcement. Lit+ (litplus.com) is a new booktwo.org project: taking the London Lit Plus ethos – an open-access, distributed literary festival – […]
For Hire
Booktwo.org is the blog of James Bridle, a book and technology specialist with specific expertise in planning and producing web and new media projects for clients in publishing and the arts. If you'd like to hire me, have a look at my CV and portfolio, and feel free to get in touch.
I am also a member of the Really Interesting Group.
You can follow me on Twitter.
Speaking Engagements:
I am available for conferences and other events. For examples, see my talks at Interesting, Playful, South by Southwest, dConstruct and Tools of Change Frankfurt.
A complete list of talks, with links, is available.