BigShinyThing

As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve had a bit of a redesign here at BigShinyThing. Gone is the calendar (but not forgotten, see below), and we welcome in its place a BST lifestream, which aggregates all the other stuff we do online. We hope you find this enhanced view of our world interesting: we’ve been banging on for years about the value of continual peripheral awareness in social media, and now we’re putting that belief into practice.

Why? Coz we think you might be interested in our other things and themes, many of which don’t make it onto this site as fully worked-up posts.

Why now? We’ve been using social bookmarking sites such as Delicious.com for years, store all our photos on Flickr, and bore even ourselves with our plethora of RSS feeds. But useful though they are, all those bookmarks and sites have seemed, well, solitary: experientially more collaborative than actively social.

Way back in 1994, we bemoaned the “isolating hyperlibraries of the ‘Net”. A hundred million people out there, where are they hiding?, we cried. It’s taken the addition of Twitter — the CB radio of the Internet — to interframe with personal narrative all that posting, tagging and bookmarking goodness.

So hello, world.

We might make a few other changes soon, but for now, our main RSS feed will still feature only BST articles, as before. If you want to sub’ the ‘stream (dude!), then grab it on FriendFeed.

To make space for our new stream, we’ve removed the calendar from the site. The diary data is being migrated from our system to Yahoo’s Upcoming service. If you’ve been subscribed to the old calendar system via iCal, redirect your software here.

That’s about it. Feedback and bug reports welcomed. Happy streaming.