An excellent outing last night to the British Library for the latest talk accompanying the Out of this world exhibition. A nice illustration of the benefits of CPD – I was looking around the BL site for upcoming events for the CILIP in London Google Calendar of interesting stuff in London (fancy contributing? get in touch) just when they were adding the events listing. The result was myself and a mate were in a packed crowd for Alan Moore in conversation with Stewart Lee. I suspect tickets would not have come my way if I had heard about it through slower channels.
It was a fascinating discussion ranging across scifi, science, religion, technology, genre, labels and who can remember what else.
There were demonstrations of IP red in tooth and claw – for example why some comic books are movies and others are not. And how clashes over IP have impacted on the quality of writing in comics. Alan Moore apparently gets no money from the sale of V for Vendetta Merchandise – but does get an enormous sense of personal well being from seeing them at demonstrations around the world (DC less so – apparently we won’t be getting any more V movies as a result).
Moore takes an interesting position on technology being extremely interested and reading widely about it but largely refusing to adopt it. He no longer has a television since they dropped the analog signal in Northampton, refuses to have a mobile and has no email address.
There was a fab quote from Stewart Lee “what is twitter if not voluntary surveillance” that gave me a wry chuckle thinking of all the people who might be signing up for CPD23 over this week. I originally joined Twitter as part of my involvement in the CILIP Defining our Professional Future exercise so I must be slightly past my one year of involvement. I do find it useful (as well as entertaining) but access at work is limited which prevents me integrating it into the flow of my day in the way I might like. I recently signed up for TweetyMail that has helped with some of the link sharing issues caused by using Twitter predominantly via Snaptu.
RSS is not a new thing for me. I had a long love affair with Bloglines that I used for a good six years and I have commented already about my current RSS consumption.
I was surprised to find that I was able to get Pushnote installed on my work computer. I say installed as I am struggling to decide if it is working or not. I follow a fair few people on Twitter but there is little sign of them being involved in this and I cannot really see the point. I do not seem to be alone in this based on peoples tweets. Maybe a use will become apparent.
You can find some other Alan Moore & Stewart Lee footage on the web. At the time of writing there a still tickets available for R.U.R. on the 6th of July – it has been a brilliant series of events.
(the) health informaticist 