Serendipity Book

Create your own tag cloud with Wordle

Wordle creates beautiful tag clouds from any text. This is what it did with my delicious tags. If only it was hyperlinked too.

Via: Thomas Hawk who points to a hack for creating a Flickr tag cloud in the same way.

Big Brother at Alton Towers

So, it seems that I'm only 2 years late to the news that the British theme park Alton Towers has introduced RFID technology in wrist bands to physically track and video their customers using CCTV as they move around the park.

The technology is primarily intended to offer a service which creates a custom video of "Your Day at Alton Towers". Guests wear bracelets fitted with RFID tags that trigger surveillance cameras throughout the park. The video footage is then spliced together automatically with stock "B roll" footage from the park to produce a custom DVD for each customer with a run time of up to 30 minutes.

The surveillance cameras are also used for "safety and crime prevention".

Guests opt-in to wear the tags but the privacy implications for other guests who will feature as "extras" in other people's DVDs are worth reflecting upon. The Alton Towers privacy policy states the following:

Please note that personal data in the form of images of visitors to the Park is collected via the operation of closed circuit television ('CCTV'), ride photography and video cameras all of which are located throughout the Park. Your image will be recorded and processed for the purpose of producing photographic images and video recordings.

Data from video cameras is collected by the wearing by visitors to the Park of a radio frequency identification (RFID) wristband. Please note your image may be captured passively through other visitors to the Park who may be wearing an RFID wristband.

I'm torn. Is this an relevant, exciting and clever use of a new technology which offers a genuine benefit to guests or a gross invasion of privacy?

P.S. Did you realise that it now costs nearly £100 a head to get in to Alton Towers?

Via RD's Delicious links.

The Smiths 'Still Ill' Live Video Bootlegs

I bumped into a friend whilst out and about this morning. We got to talking about the internet. He told me authoritatively that "99.9% of the stuff on the internet is rubbish". I told him that I had heard my dad say something similar.

With no further introduction required, this little musical interlude is dedicated to him. This is The Smiths performing 'Still Ill' live on The Tube in 1984.

Other live versions of this gloriously life-affirming piece of miserabilism can be found here, here, here and here. I could play these all day.