Mac and PC

I really couldn’t think of a better pair than Mitchell and Webb to do the Mac and PC thing for the Apple adverts.

Still, they’re a bit annoying. The ads, I mean, not Mitchell and Webb. All this stuff about how Macs can do video and podcasts and other fun stuff, while PCs are only capable of spreadsheets, and that kind of guff. Now, I’m no Windows fan – I spend 80% of my computing time in Ubuntu – but this just isn’t true.

The only difference is that Apple provides the software within the box as standard, the form of ILife. PCs come with all sorts of stuff, depending on the manufacturer, not all of it good. You have to hunt out the decent stuff yourself, which I suppose is the problem for many people.

It reminds me of the early 90s, when the Atari ST was promoted as this amazing music computer, simply becuase it had MIDI built in from the off. The Amiga was a far better system as far as everything, including music, was concerned, but because you had to spend ten quid on a MIDI adaptor, no one bothered. Pah.

[tags]apple, mac and pc, mitchell and webb[/tags]

Zoho Notebook

Zoho Notebook looks like yet another very cool web app – they don’t seem to be putting a step wrong at the moment. It’s in private alpha at the moment – Hopefully I will soon get in for a play and will post my thoughts over on hyprtext.

[tags]Zoho notebook[/tags]

Why I love WordPress 2.1

Visitors to my blog site, rather than just RSS readers, will have noticed a slight change on the right hand side of the site this evening – the archives and categories have just got a lot bigger! This is because I have managed to use the new import/export feature of WP 2.1 to pull together all the posts I have made since I started blogging. Yowza!

Basically, I have had 4 blogs. The first one was a terrible effort on Blogger. Then I got serious and installed WordPress and blogged at davebriggs.net. At some point I imported all my Blogger posts into that blog. Then I switched to this domain and started a new blog – but in a new set of database tables, so the old blog’s content still existed. Then, when this site went kaboom at the start of this month, I installed WordPress on a third set of tables.

All I had to do to get the blogs all in one place was to install another WordPress setup elsewhere on the server, make sure the wp-config file pointed to one of the old databases, run the upgrade script, run the export and then import it into this blog. I used the same install for the exporting, just changing the database table prefix each time.

It worked like a dream! Only…I know remember how bad some of my early blogging was. Please don’t go there!

[tags]wordpress 2.1, blogger[/tags]

2,000 odd bloggers

I have had an amazing amount of incoming links since being part of Tino Buntic’s 2,000 bloggers project. I thought I ought to do the decent thing and return some of the link love. How I got caught up in this I do not know – I didn’t leave a comment on Tino’s blog, which is the usual way in…

2000 Bloggers[tags]Tino Buntic, 2000 bloggers[/tags]

Comment deletion

Steve Rubel asks why it is that not many blogging and other social media platforms allow commenters to edit or delete the comments they make on community based sites.

Everyone sticks their foot in it from time to time. If you do this
on your own blog, you can edit the post and take it back. You could
delete the post too, but it’s not looked on very positively. Still, if
you leave a comment on some other site, you very often need to live
with it. So you better think twice before lambasting your friend for
slamming Jethro Tull on his blog.

There’s really no reason why community sites shouldn’t offer this
option. It’s good for everyone involved. Three sites, at least that I
know of, allow you to edit or even delete your comments. They’re the
social saints.

These ’social saints’ are Flickr, Blogger and Facebook.

WordPress doesn’t feature the ability for commenters to edit what they write. There might be a plugin out there that does something like that, I don’t know. But for me, it should be up to the blogger – the site owner – whether a comment is changed or deleted. A commenter can always send an email to the site owner, or add another comment clarifying things.

To my mind, the person that makes the decision on the site is the person that is responsible for it. There have been countless examples of bloggers getting grief for deleting comments from their sites – allowing others to do so just clouds matters and complicates things, especially when the deleted or edited comment has already become a part of a conversation.

[tags]steve rubel, blogging, comments[/tags]

Also posted at Performancing

Google and Attention

Great post by Sam Sethi at Vecosys on Google and attention:

For the last two years I have been tracking a terminology called attention metadata. About 12 months ago some friends and I became really excited about the possibilities of creating a new discovery engine based on sharing our attention. We created an demo application and screencast video in Feb 2006.

There were other companies also looking to develop similar businesses around capturing and sharing attention metadata. e.g TouchStone, Attensa, Gesture Bank and Root Vault but the whole idea of attention metadata stalled because it promised much yet delivered very little. Recently though it has once again become interesting with the launch of new attention services from Google e.g Google Reader Trends and Google Bookmark and Search History.

Well worth reading in full.

[tags]google, attention, sam sethi, vecosys[/tags]

Amazon launches Amapedia

Amazon have launched a new site, Amapedia, which is a wiki for products. Nice idea.

Effectively, it gives people a chance to write about the stuff they like which can be bought from Amazon. I guess that means writing about stuff you hate is possible too. What makes the whole site extra cool is the use of tags to help you find related stuff

The guys at Read/WriteWeb have it summed up pretty well:

The site looks pretty raw currently and has little info in it – it is after all brand new. But a wikipedia for products makes perfect sense for Amazon. Who better to spotlight products and gather product information from the community, than Amazon? Another way to look at this: Amapedia could become the next generation of user reviews. User reviews on websites today are relatively rigid and old fashioned, so Amazon may be thinking that Amapedia will be a new platform for user reviews – it may help remove redundancy in reviews, while offering more completeness.

Technorati Tags: amazon, wiki, amapedia

If British politics is bad…

…then imagine how bad things are in the states. From The Guardian:

The Democratic senator, Barack Obama, has launched an aggressive
counter-attack against rumours that he is a Muslim and was educated at
a madrasa in Indonesia…Mr Obama’s spokesman said the senator had never been a Muslim and was a
church-going Christian. “We won’t take allegations that are patently
untrue lying down,” Robert Gibbs said in a statement…

But rumours that would ordinarily have remained in the blogosphere
gained some credibility this month when an online magazine said Hillary
Clinton’s campaign was investigating Mr Obama’s Muslim heritage. Ms
Clinton’s campaign has condemned the story as an attack on both
Democratic leaders.

How thoroughly depressing.

Need a Web 2.0 Name?

The Web 2.0 Company Name Generator is a cool and amusing little site. As the site says:

Need a name for your Web 2.0 company? Try this handy name generator.

Here’s some that I got:

Zoomworks
Buzzfish
Flashdog
Thoughttune
Quambee
Flashcat
Npath
Skamba
Chatterpulse
Quimia

That last one is just filthy.
Anyhow, once you have your name, don’t forget to head over to ImageTool.NET to sort out your Web 2.0 logo…

[tags]web 2.0, names, logo[/tags]

Link posts

Since the death of the previous blog, I cancelled the regular posting of my daily del.icio.us links.

When I set it up I thought it would be an interesting reminder for me of the stuff I thought was worth reading, and some bits might be useful for those that read this site. I was conscious, though, that a lot of the time those posts came up one after the other as original content is a little hard to come by sometimes.

So, what do we think? Should I bring them back? Or would a discreet link to my del.icio.us page on the sidebar be sufficient?

[tags]del.icio.us[/tags]