Bike Bell by François Schnell (via Flickr).

One of the things I've been pondering since I've regularly been cycling to work over the last year is exactly when you should use your bell. In theory it's not too taxing: it's there to warn pedestrians you're coming and to prevent them being mown down or to stop something unpleasant happening to you or others.

However, and I don't know if this is something particularly to do with London, I've found using my bell a bit more problematic in practice. I've noticed the following types of behaviour exhibited by pedestrians in response to a gentle "ting" or two:

1. They see you, acknowledge you and move out of the way, very occasionally accompanied by a "sorry" or hasty intake of breath (depending on how close you are to them);
2. They freeze in the middle of the road (a natural response but probably the worst thing they can do);
3. They completely ignore you and just carry on (in which case they are either wearing headphones, unable to hear or just want to make a statement that you should be the one slowing down/getting out of the way);
4. Worst of all, they take it as a personal affront and unleash a torrent of abuse at you (this happened to me when using my bell on a stretch of shared walkway / cycle path on National Cycle Route 4).

In general I've found it so fraught with potential dangers that I only use my bell when I know the situation is outside my control. For instance, if I'm on a particularly busy stretch of road where I know pedestrians have a habit of stepping blindly in front of me I'll use the bell as a more or less constant warning (a particular problem say, in London Bridge for instance where people are fixated on catching their train home).

I don't use it if I'm on a quieter stretch of cycle path which is shared with pedestrians and I know I can cycle around them without causing either of us any major inconvenience, unless they happen to be walking very slowly five abreast or look like they're about to veer.

I had a conversation with someone this morning on a quiet stretch on route 4; a very pleasant and well-mannered conversation instead of the usual slanging matches that happen between cyclists and non-cyclists I should add. The other party asked as a favour whether I minded ringing my bell, as she was hard of hearing, to which I gave her a breakdown of my reasons for not using the bell to which she conceded my points (she was a cyclist herself but probably mainly just wanted to get away).

I suppose it's all to do with the wider etiquette of cycling in London. I personally find some of the behaviour of other cyclists offensive (i.e. whistling at you to tell you to get out of the way, not stopping at red lights, particularly where pedestrians are crossing, doling out expletive-laden missives to others who contravene the rules of the road), so I do understand others' frustration. Also, as I spend most of my life as a pedestrian I know sometimes you make mistakes and you don't step out in front of cyclists to annoy them (although I'm very aware of cyclists because I am one so this doesn't happen very often I should say).

On the other hand, cycling sometimes feels like you've entered some kind of 80s arcade game, a reverse Frogger in which you've got to avoid the speeding white van forcing you into the pot holes in the gutter, the taxis that suddenly pull in in front of you, pedestrians (or frogs) walking out in front of you so I know all about cyclists' frustrations. Mainly I don't want to cause an accident or be the focus of one so using a bell is part of cycling assertively (not aggressively).

I'm just back from two days at the Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School. One the sessions I found really impressive and inspirational was OUCS's Kate Lindsay on the "ABC of Crowd Sourcing a Community Collection". The talk highlighted the experiences of the Great War Archive in the UK and the Europeana Erster Weltkrieg project in Germany. These two projects built a digital archive of objects, documents, souvenirs and ephemera from the Great War, crowd sourced both virtually via the Web and "physically" via sessions to which members of the public were invited to bring their collections in order to have them scanned and catalogued.

This video from the Europeana Project shows the interesting connections and stories projects like these can highlight.

Waterbeach to Ely on 1 May 2011. Yes, it was very flat which had the added advantage / disadvantage of being able to see Ely Cathedral approaching very slowly about half-way through the walk. 

"With interactivity, one tries to give 'the illusion of authorship' to people who couldn't otherwise author. Thought: maybe he need to be told stories is like the need to have sex. If you want to hear a story--you want to be passive and sit back around the fire and listen. You don't want to write the story yourself."

[T]he longer we practice, the more intuitive our work becomes. And as it becomes more intuitive, it disconnects further and further from language and constructs.

This is why young practitioners often argue passionately about theory while older practitioners tell stories and draw pictures.

 Jeffrey Zeldman, Our Jobs In Cyberspace: Craft Vocabulary vs. Storytelling.

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Stephen Coles, Frank Chimero, Tiffany Wardle and Jason Santa Maria on web typography, from this year's South by South West.

Some great stuff in here about alternatives to common Web fonts, how to choose a font and how to promote the readability of your content.