It's exactly 39 days until I'll be speaking in Amsterdam about the Renaissance of Browser Animation for Fronteers 2010, and I'm getting pretty excited about it. A large part of which is due to the fact that the venue looks absolutely incredible. Not only that, but the line-up looks incredible, Amsterdam looks incredible, and my beard's looking incredible.

My talk will be exploring the state of animation in browsers today; everything from HTML, to Canvas, SVG and Flash. It will touch on the performance, workflow, and accessibility of all these technologies and will hopefully give you an objective view of all your animation possibilities as you approach your next project.

If you're a front-end developer in Holland -- or Europe -- I highly suggest you spend a couple of days with Jeremy, Andy, Jina and all the others at Fronteers. I'm certain you'll come away inspired.

Mood Map -- a visualisation of the world's mood

Data visualisation is a strange art. You almost have to approach it like a science.

When you begin, there's a huge mountain of data lying there. Opaque, impenetrable. In order to make sense of it you have to chance a guess; form a hypothesis. Once you have that hypothesis you have somewhere to begin; a way to start analysing your data. And it isn't till you've finished analysing it that you know whether there's anything worth visualising. It's one big fishing trip.

And so it was with Mood Map.

My hypothesis: Key events that occur in the real world would be reflected in people's communications (Twitter). When there was an earthquake there would be global empathy. When there was a world changing announcement, a global rejoicing.

My method: Every minute, sample the public timeline of Twitter for tweets with positive or negative emoticons. It's not a particularly foolproof way of measuring mood, but hey, I'm not a statistician or a text analysis specialist. Once I've got the tweets,...

This is a video I made that visualises a week of the world's happiness, as calculated by analysing randomly sampled Twitter messages.

What would vegetables look like as typefaces?

Makes as much sense to me as this one does.

Thanks to Grafisches Büro for the original.

I've written before about why you shouldn't let your current toolset dictate what it is you create and I still firmly hold to that mantra.

Some of my more recent work has revolved heavily around animation (real-time, interactive motion graphics, to be precise). When approaching such a project I don't have any particular technology in mind, but I do have a very exacting idea of what it should look like and how it should behave. Based upon that idea I can then choose how I want to do it.

A system which relies heavily on animation must make that animation convincing in order for the audience to be immersed in it. Choppy frame rates and jerky motion can make it an easy decision to close a tab, so the thing I find myself struggling with the most is performance. I would so desperately love to use native browser technologies to produce some of this stuff, but after years of comprimising my vision to fit into the browser I decided to become a bit more technology agnostic and author projects in whatever...

I wouldn't call myself an Apple fanboy, but I like to think that I've mellowed a little bit in my old(ish) age. The face melting vitriol which I normally reserved for shiny Web 2.0 sites in beta invitation mode has been funnelled into more productive pursuits, and I feel like I'm ready to approach Apple product launches in an appropriately objective state of mind.

I wasn't excited about the launch of an Apple tablet; the fervor with which the media and wannabe tech pundits prognosticated about the exact form of the second (third, fourth?) coming of Jobs always had me puzzled. If you could predict so much about it, why was it going to be so revolutionary? It's no wonder that the product itself was a letdown -- no physically producible product could ever have met your expectations.

But now that it's out, I can actually say that I'm excited.

I didn't think about it too much before, but seeing the iPad immediately made me realise it: we're at one of -- possibly the most -- exciting points in time since the...

Download 17 Years Of Soulful Drum & Bass (100MB MP3)

Drum & bass is often associated with an aggressive, intensely electronic sound; but its draw for me has always been the promise of drum & bass as the new jazz, the new soul.

Lush melodies, warm synthesizers, intricate beats, double bass and soulful vocals -- these are all the things which I want to hear from my drum & bass. To commemorate a new decade, I decided to look back over my listening history, pick out my favourite soulful drum & bass tracks and put them into a DJ mix.

If you've never listened to (or liked) drum & bass before, give the mix a listen. It's slightly less frenetic than my 139 Mix Tape, but you might be pleasantly surprised. For existing fans of drum & bass, all you have to do is sit back and enjoy 24 tracks spanning 1993 to 2010.

Tracklisting

1. LTJ Bukem - Horizons [1996]
2. Atlantic Connection - The Real Thing [2008]
3. Adam F - Circles...
   
   
4. Web Directions & Australian Web Week
   

   October's a big month for the 4,399,722 residents of Sydney. They're going to be hosting the fourth Web Directions South conference as well as the inaugural Australian Web Week. Web Directions is gradually turning into the antipodean SXSW.

   This year I'm extremely honoured to be playing my biggest (most daunting, nerve wracking, spine chilling, palate drying, brow sweating) part in Web Directions to date -- closing keynote on day 1. I'll be telling the tale of my involvement in Google Wave and what it's like to be a part of one of the most exciting web applications of recent years. I'm so excited! (And I just wet my pants with nervousness)

   Alongside Web Directions, you also shouldn't forget that you've only got five short days until nominations close for the McFarlane Prize for excellence in Australian web design. So, if you have a top class Australian website that you worked on between September 1st 2008 and August 31st 2009, then let them know about it!

   If your boss is too cheap to shell out for admission to Web Directions...
   
   

5. The 139 tracklisting
   

   The 139 Mix Tape has had a great response -- particularly from the people in my car -- which is making me reconsider my ten year estimate for volume 2.

   Just in case you're not into MP3s, I've also uploaded it to SoundCloud where you can stream it from within your browser.

   And ... (drumroll) here's the tracklisting for those of you who were playing at home. Seems like "Rhythm is a Dancer" was the most controversial track on there :P

   1. Chemical Brothers - Block Rockin' Beats
   2. Beastie Boys - Ch-check It Out
   3. Prodigy - Smack My Bitch Up
   4. Major Lazer - Pon De Floor
   5. Adam Freeland - We Want Your Soul
   6. Mason - Exceeder
   7. Stanton Warriors - Pop Ya Cork
   8. Eric B & Rakim - I Know You Got Soul
   9. Timo Maas - Shifter
   10. Beastie Boys - Hey Ladies
   11. The Wiseguys - Ooh La La
   12. Prince - Kiss
   13. NY Connection - Bless The Funk
   ...
   
   
   14. The 139 Mix Tape
       

       Download The 139 Mix Tape (64MB MP3)

       Ever since installing my very first music production program (which, for posterity, I believe was Impulse Tracker) I've wanted to create the ultimate mix; a kind of audio anthology that uniquely represents my musical DNA.

       Two years ago I started that mix and yesterday I finished it. (With about a 19 month sabbatical)

       Obviously, I have more favourite tunes than I could fit onto fifty CDs, so it was no easy task whittling them down to the perfect balance of 80s cheese and bass rattling beats. In the end 139 tracks made it into a 46 minute mix. A mashup of everything from The Chemical Brothers to The Cure, Stone Roses to Snoop Dogg, and Fake Blood to Pharrell.

       Download it. Listen. Get to know me. Maybe dance a bit.

       If you like it I might try it again in ten years time.

       First person to correctly list all 139 songs gets my 12" LP of Rick Astley's seminal album "Whenever You Need Somebody". (Unfortunately he didn't make...