Scaredy cats

I'm an I/Oer apparently. Can see the application, can see what it does, don't care how it does it, but wonder what I could use it for, as I work by myself, and nobody I know uses Radio -- though I tell 'em. (Stupid, stupid, scaredy cats.)

40,124 hits yesterday. BTW: I'm still here. Only working in another part of the factory. Still putting in 14 hour days, for little pay, just like my Granddad -- he died of miner's lung too. Now, I've got a hacking cough, and had it for nearly 5 weeks -- time to visit the quack. Feel sure he'll tell me I've programmers' tickle and give me three months to live.

More buttons, more to come!

Create a Manila warBlog

Or a Manila sexBlog

Or a Manila villaBlog

Or a Manila spursBlog

Some more buttons. If you want to add them to your site, go ahead.

Dixons sues Time over ComputerWorld name. Trademark spat [The Register] "There are 108 PC World stores: the smallest have 10,000 sq ft of trading space and carry 5,000 product lines. More typically, stores are between 18,000sq ft to 20,000 sq ft and are sited out of town. Time shops, and the Tiny branches it took over when Tiny went into receivership, are 1,000 sq ft and are mostly town-centre based."
What about 'puter world?

Fast blogging

Power Blogging and SMS-to-blog are the latest technical gizmos in the Service shop window. Take a look - it's the future, only now. [BlogFootball]
So I'm a few minutes behind Mark, or is he a few minutes behind me?

system.verbs.builtins.radio.cloud.getInitialResources changed on Thu, 21 Mar 2002 00:53:46 GMT: Only apply the default theme if this is a fresh install -- if user.radio.prefs.usernum is defined. [Radio.root Updates]
Ah! This caught me a few days back in testing, glad people were listening to the bug reports.

Microcontent News: "covers what we call the "microcontent" sector: weblogs, Webzines, email digests, and the entire personal publishing sector."
I think I'll be reading this a fair bit. But truth be told, I'm already converted, if only some people who I talk to would read this.

Sexblogs are open for new "Radio" business. It's going to be a new way of forming relationships -- meeting people.

Post Modern Sleaze (Reprazent Mix)

Currently listening to Post Modern Sleaze (Reprazent Mix). Drum and bass to you!

15580 » March 17 6:34 AM. Farewell Arthur Andersen - I guess having one corporate basket case is a misfortune but two starts to look like carelessness. With tens of thousands of employees and pensions holders across the world, it's a disaster, for staff, pension holders and clients. Is this tough treatment "a gross abuse of government power" or a fitting reward for crooked practice? [MetaFilter]
"The firm allegedly spent a month shredding documents. Andersenâs auditing clients are heading for the door, the firm's reputation is in tatters, and even a takeover now looks unlikely"
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Wicked people, need locking up. This white collar crime should be punished ruthlessly. IMO

'Dot.Con': One Is Born Every Minute. John Cassidy, a financial writer for The New Yorker, looks at the Internet stock craze and the fortunes it made and lost. [New York Times: Technology]

Useit.Com: Protecting the User's Mailbox. Email is a powerful way to reach customers, but overdoing it is risky. Let users know up front that you'll respect their mailboxes. Otherwise, they won't give their email addresses, and you'll lose a unique channel for marketing and customer service. [Tomalak's Realm] Stating the bleedin obvious isn't it?

All good clean fun. I just thought I'd show the types of envelopes I'm sending out... Like to add some more templates to this feature. It looks good printed, believe me, it's just the cheap jpeging I've used...

Advert results: "Total click throughs = 15
Total views = 8672 "
A new macro, anybody can add it to their site, so long as it's a blog football site. {suites.bannerAds.adResults ()} I'm hoping to try and sell some advertising on blogfootball, and this macro is an early beta of the results a customer could expect.
{suites.bannerAds.adResults ()}

A Good Riddle: "Sr. managers determine a strategic objective for the company. A physically distributed management team develops a tactical plan/chronologic to do task list in the form of an OPML outline. Each task is an outline head which can be subscribed to with a desktop aggregator (Radio) by the people who need to know. The task owner/doer updates their progress under the OPML task outline head and publishes it to a cloud. The aggregators subscribed notice the change and push the new information to the subscriber weblog and/or optionally notifies the subscriber by IM or email. Authorized people (other than the task owner/doer) may write comments etc. under the task outline head which are also published by the task owner/doer.
This creates a communication system that doesn't rely on email and is self organizing. Very handy on multiple levels and the rewards are immediately apparent."
This needs some careful reading. But I don't see why Manila private sites and open sites joined discussion groups and so on cannot do this right now. I know that Userland have been using Radio and RCS internally, but many Sr. managers right now don't/aren't techie and this solution just smells of tech. Though, I'm sure it can look neat and tidy once installed and set up, but the IT geezer won't want to be involved in all the nonsense that maintaining the CEO's machine entails.

This stuff is coming, and it will eventually be piss easy, but it isn't right now, while Manila is, and a joy to use. If we could get some companies to adopt a blogging colony with Manila now, later they could grow into more powerful features... Inch by inch.

rss.xml file in every blogFootball site!

Click for bigger view of how I blog from the villa blogs these days, well as of in a minute. Now, I can keep up with the people who use the servers. They spot errors PDQ ";->"

PalmInfocenter: Sony Introduces Two Models with Keyboards, MP3 Players

Sony Japan has just introduced two new cutting-edge handhelds. The PEG-NR70 and PEG-NR70V both have built-in keyboards and 320 by 480 color screens. They also have built-in MP3 and ATRAC3 audio players. In addition, the PEG-NR70V has a built-in camera.

Palm OS 4.1, 16mb RAM has a 10Mb ROM, April 13 release for the top of the range $456 only in Japan... Why aren't laptops moving closer to this space? I need a phone inside my PowerBook, and a camera. I know I can get a phone card, I already use the infra red port and a Nokia 6210 at 9k, and a kritter. But it isn't something I take to the park with the kids, my Nokia is small enough but the damn key pad and predictive text, no copy/paste...

More to the point, imagine mobile blogging and surfing on the commute home, or intranet knowledge blogging, listening to the hum of the organisation as you're whizzed down the M6 in your chauffeur driven Merc. Maybe 5 years off in technical terms, but, many, many years before it's common place.

Of Weblogs, Websites and RCS

"(And no, Mom isn't stupid).
If I say to her, "just go write in the browser and here is a way of seeing the places where it has gone after you posted it" and "here is the place in the same browser where you go to assist the people who are coming to you" - RCS on her desktop-and-in-the-browser for the flower club work - she is quite likely to go, "ah, that makes sense."
Interesting article. I like it when people (techies) get down to this bottom level (mummies). This is the problem I have with "Radio" right now. There's too much interest in the high flying new and wonderful coding and development. Nothing about my Mum. And nothing, repeat nothing in the K-logging space is going to happen till developers come out of their own arses. (Me included.)
It mustn't matter where news items get posted, what's public, what's private. Until there are users, not coders, nor early adopters, there is no community.
I've a load of football meatheads currently forming communities of interest based around Manila. None of them care it's Manila. All they're interested in is the content, and a little of how it looks. I don't think many of them use the search facilities to look back into the archives, it's more a what's happening now type of gossip, who's updated their blog, who's getting most hits. There is little research, just commentary. I hate it, I've no, read none, zip, zilch interest in looking at fucking football drivel -- though I have to sometimes.
They are in fact mostly oar pullers rather than sail inventors . There are sail inventors there. Though of all their comments and suggestions re: the team, all get ignored, by the club, but not by their blogging peers.
Sail inventor EllisOut: Ambition For Villa - Manifesto: "I am standing for Parliament because I passionately believe urgent action is needed to make sport - not only football but other sports as well - more responsive to the needs and views of the supporters and spectators who are its lifeblood."
Oar Puller claretpimpernel : Round Holes, Square One: "Which brings us on to the midfield. Working from left to right, Barry had a sublime 5 minutes where his natural quality shined through."
Manila has my vote at the moment, it's mature and brings web writing to the bottom users -- football meat heads -- gawd bless 'em.

Netimperative.com looks for buyer. Receivers called in.
Last year netimperative asked its readers to pledge money for subscriptions in a bid to generate revenue. Most of the news there is deeply IPO type material, and mostly PR releases, usually without comment. I'm not surprised they're facing the wall.

The Register: "Mac performance: up to snuff or up the duff?"
Some replies to yesterday's suggestion via the eg, that Apple was slow and PC's were fast.
You have just been deleted. Any website that would post such crap is crap.
Seems like some people just don't believe it.

blogML

Acts of Volition: The Weblog Markup Language: "1:37 PM - Joe makes a post on his blog about his golf vacation on Prince Edward Island

3:24 PM - Joe makes a post on his blog about hang gliding in Newfoundland

Two weeks pass.

Sam searches Google for hang gliding in Prince Edward Island. Joe's blog is the first result.

The trouble with this picture is that Joe never wrote anything about hang gliding on Prince Edward Island. The thought never even crossed his mind. "
This is certainly a good idea for later, when there are so many blogs as to drown relevant searches.

Some new adverts, about time I did some advertising.

Welcome to Weston Park: "Welcome to weston-park.com. You will require the Flash 5 plug-in to view this site. "
Oh nice one! I thought I was up to date with flash... Never mind. When you're more welcoming I'll maybe come back... Not. Dickheads.
I wanted more info on the Festival of Transport: "Great family day out with over 1,500 vintage & classic cars, bikes, trucks, buses and tractors on display, alongside arena entertainment." On the 31st of March.

Virtual Shropshire. A short history of Dawley: "The parish of Dawley lay within the forest of Mount Gilbert, now known as the Wrekin, until 1301 when it was disaforrested. "
Not that I'm from Dawley, but still interesting. Though, the photo seems a little flattering.

Shropshire news

BBC - Shropshire: "Police are questioning a man as part of a murder inquiry in Ironbridge. Darren Corrigan, aged 24, from Majestic Way in Aqueduct (pretty close to me, a mile or so) was found seriously injured in the car park of the Crown Inn at Hodgebower on Saturday evening."
Some local news... I only live 4 miles from Ironbridge, and this is the first I heard of it... Power of the internet eh?
More here: Shropshirestar: "The injured man was bleeding from his mouth and his eye."

Lots of people said they'd come and visit and try out making their own site. Someone said they'd visit the Villa blogs... He's a season ticket holder too. BTW they're going to add Spurs, and... and... oh, another four or five teams, they tell me, but it goes in one ear -- can't stand footie. "Oh really," I say, "how interesting."
Oh, and the IoD presentation is here.
Oh (2), I'm mostly over at the dot co dot uk, at the moment. But also at my personal site. Not so much at war, and very little at sex these days.
I wonder if I should blog more Shropshire stuff, as I'm selling to the immediate locality? I wonder what's out there?

John Robb's Radio Weblog: "One of the most powerful aspects of K-Logging (weblogs for knowledge management and collaboration) is the ability to create knowledge networks. These networks make it easy for individual K-Loggers and readers to simply "find the good stuff." While centralized public networks are great for unaffiliated individuals, most companies and organizations need the privacy, focus, and control a self-managed network can provide."
John Robb's at it again. Pushing Radio... Well it's nice and the stuff they're building on top of it (Jabber, particularly) but 90% of what punters want, IMHO, can be had through a Manila server. It's got all the rankings and referers, and best of all is that it is centralised. For an admin geezer, that would be a big plus. For the end users, doing it through a browser without installing new software is also a massive plus. The only problems I've had with running a Manila server over the past two and a half years is the massive amount of traffic a site like the Aston Villa fans' site can attract at lunch time, that's a big spike. But an intranet for a medium sized organisation (large ones would want to spend lots more money) would be just fine, just perfect.

Benchmarks demolish Apple speed boasts: "Bested in the floating point tests by an eighteen month old Pentium III-based machine. In the integer tests, which give a better indication of performance for the kind of general-purpose desktop computing most of use every day, the G4 held its own against the ancient Pentium running at 1Ghz."
In my real world tests at the weekend my 800mhz PC seemed faster loading web pages, but that could have been the browser... Hmmmm. But I do feel at home with my PowerBook laptop -- G3 500mhz... And I don't really need a super fast machine. Most of what I do is slow writing or coding. The graphics I do these days are usually for the web so they're not so big.
But when it comes to serving pages, well, that's another story. The next machine I get will be a dual 1 ghz G4, running OS X.

A Busy Writers Guide to Radio Renderers: "...a quick introduction to writing stories using HTML renderers in Radio 8.0. Renderers provide a simple mechanism for formatting text within specific HTML constructs (e.g. a table) without specifying the actual HTML tags."
They are much easier than his description. Basically using an outliner you can format your web page into all sorts of weird tables. Its what I base my calendar on.

via another blog listing http://blo.gs/ from if.

Good morning world. Kids got me up early this morning, lucky I went to bed earlier than the usual 3 am.
Much to do this week, visiting clients and looking for new ones. Moving blogfootball to another server and starting new clubs. And seeing if we can move to Australia... Amanda wants to go, worried about the political situation here -- damn that Bush plan to bomb the world.

Been up my back end for the last few days, cleaning up my mailing system, that's snail mail mixed with web pages.
There's so much that can be done with it. Next will be tighter integration with a file maker contact list and a news letter format. What would be nice is a category that once a week collated into a newsletter and automatically spooled to the printer, mail merged with names and addresses. I wonder if I could print postcards too.
I've already the calendar, a month of blogging on an A0 sized sheet -- a notice board, perhaps. I wonder if I could open an account with a digital printer and every month automatically email a poster sized calendar, and just have it snail mailed to a list of addresses by the printer. Sounds reasonable. Or maybe I'd offer it as a service myself, point me to your weblog, I suck it down and format it, print and snail mail back.

Blackberry 5810. Phone and email. This looks better for me than the Palm. I really need good email when I'm on the move... Oooo... what am I saying! I'm not on the move, I'm always at my laptop. When I'm not, I'm glad to get away!

The face of the Net is a-changin'. "Long the playground of the young, affluent and geeky, the Internet is now attracting a more diverse crowd, Jupiter Media Metrix says, including people over 50." [CNET News.com]
They're saying that the digital divide between have and have-nots isn't going to happen as more less well off come on to the 'net. Maybe in the US but I'm still unsure about that here. And no matter what we're still 2 years behind the US (blame BT and it's holding back of broadband for so long).

LA Times: Mac software better than XP "...the Mac is less frustrating, less commercially intrusive and more elegant. Quite simply, it's a better computer." " [MacNN]
Well, I gotta listen to the right sort of information, haven't I.

BMWs hit the road with Microsoft. "The automaker's 7 Series, just released in the United States, boasts Windows CE software that allows BMW drivers to navigate, make calls and control other features of the sedan." [CNET News.com]
This is the one place that computers haven't really made in roads. But if you could get satellite internet as well as GPS, now, that would be interesting? Where's the nearest petrol station? And the one after that? Really, there's a car boot sale just over there? I've got £25 where can I get a blow job for that price near here?

New Palm a Tough Sell for Biz. "Analysts say Palm's low-end PDA should do well with first-timers; but its other new release, which is designed for business, doesn't impress." [Wired News] And Palm intros new color handhelds [MacNN].

$280 for the low end and rechargable battery and colour screen.

 

My old Palm Pro's fucked. But it would still do 99% of what I need. An IR port would be good too... Hmmm. Am I really away from my laptop that much? Nah, not really. So I won't be tempted by the pretty pictures ";->"

Google Time Bomb : Will Weblogs blow up the world's favorite search engine? Bomb for Humor, Ego, Money or Justice. How to defuse a Google bomb, and how to build more powerful ones.

 

This is group power in action.

 

"Bloggers are fighting blogrolling bombs with linkblogging bombs."

 

"It's clear that Google Bombs are incredibly effective at building traffic."

O'Reilly Network: Jon Udell: Radio UserLand 8.0 Is a Lab for Group-Forming - "When Radio's currently-centralized community engine itself becomes distributable (as is planned), I expect to see an explosion of group-forming activity. The spaces thus constituted will express different sets of values, but they'll federate in the way that Reed's Law predicts."

 

Which says: "Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, i.e. much more rapidly than Metcalfe's square law. I will call such networks Group-Forming Networks, or GFNs."

Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size, i.e. much more rapidly than Metcalfe's square law. I will call such networks Group-Forming Networks, or GFNs.

O'Reilly Network: Jon Udell: Radio UserLand 8.0 Is a Lab for Group-Forming - "The impulse to collaborate online, in ways richer than email allows, is finding other means of expression. Blogging is a major ingredient of the emerging story, but it is not the whole story. A lot of things are coming together all at once, creating a rush of excitement like I haven't felt in a few years."

 

I know what he means. It's been coming for so long though. Under the IPO wire.