The Apollo Plus 40 Twitter Feed reminds me of the Orwell Diaries project. Each pulls a piece of history forward to the present day, where you can experience it in real-time. (via Kottke).
My inner autistic feels slightly uneasy about the the disparity between dates and day. For example, The Eagle Lunar Module landed on the moon at just after 8pm EDT, on 20th July 1969, which was a Sunday evening (see Mark’s Livingston’s date-to-day converter). However, I’ll presumably be reading a tweet announcing “the Eagle has landed” late on the evening of Monday 20th July 2009. Sunday nights and Monday nights feel very different.
The BBC screened couple of TV programmes a few years ago, Dateline Jerusalem and Bethlehem Year Zero, that operated on a similar timeshift concept for the Easter and Christmas stories. Not quite real-time, though. It strikes me as a new way to consume other types of art too: perhaps reading the entire oeuvre of a given writer by purchasing their books exactly 40, or 50, or a 100 years after the initial publication. Hansard, the Houses of Parliament archive, would be the perfect resource for an extended “on this day” type feed.
What’s freaky about the Internet, or specifically, the Internet where everyone uses permalinks, is that everything is already pre-archived, ready for this kind of treatment at a moment’s notice. Many is the time when I have accidentally thought that an archived news story is happening at that moment. With TV, film and radio, there are certain giveaways like picture and sound quality, colour balance, or even accents and pronounciation, which date the archived item. In print, the age of the page is easy to discern, by the graphic design style if not by the yellowing of the parchment. Meanwhile, the division of design and content on the Internet means that old text is constantly inserted into modern designs.
I’m not sure which I like best – going back in time to experience the sights and sounds of a forgotten era; or having the old narratives brought forward into a twenty-first century setting. There’s room for both, of course, but different approaches conjour different feelings, and teach us different lessons.
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If a blogger goes on holiday, and no-one reads his posts, does anyone notice?
Straight after the Oslo conference, a week in the sun. There was no temptation to blog any thoughts while I was away, and only one or two brief tweets. Its funny that, because blogging is an asynchronous medium, I’m only announcing I was away, now I’m back.
I really only mention this to contextualise further photo-blogs, with a Greek flavour, arriving later in the week.
Its been a bit quiet on the blog this week. That’s because I’ve been at the Global Forum on Freedom of Expression in Oslo. I’ve been using Twitter to log noteworthy nuggets from the seminars and speeches, and may add some more substantial thoughts later.
In the meantime, here’s a compelling cartoon from the artist Magnus Bard. It features in the International Cartoon Exhibition, currently on show until 26th July at the Oscarsborg fortress in Oslo fjord.

I didn’t know that Salman Rushdie and Aung San Suu Kyi shared a birthday:
On this day, my birthday and yours, I always remember your long ordeal and silently applaud your endurance. This year, silence is impossible. It is not any action of yours, but your house arrest, which symbolizes the suppression of Burmese democracy, that is criminal. It is your trial, not your struggle, that is unjust. On this day, on every day, I am with you.
Rushdie’s message launches the Sixty-Four Words for Aung San Suu Kyi project. Citizens of the world are invited to leave a 64 word message for Aung San, in honour of her 64th birthday on 19th June. Alternatively, you can leave a 64 character twitter instead, using the hashtag #assk64.
http://64forsuu.com/
The project is led by the Burma Campaign UK and was created in only six days, which is a remarkable feat. In addition to Salman Rushdie, the site carries messages from Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and George Clooney. Why not add your message, and then let others know that you’ve done so?

Photographed at a press conference in her home, September 1996, after a government crackdown on her party. By flickr user taptaptap
I was at the House of Lords on Monday, listening to peers debate the Coroners & Justice Bill. As previously mentioned, this Bill offers the chance to repeal the laws of criminal defamation and seditious libel.
I have summarized this aspect of the debate over at the Index on Censorship Free Speech blog – another outlet for my furious typing…
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