Only 5 years ago, RSS was seen as the most effective way to allow web viewers to receive federated content.

Two things changed this.

First: Firefox 2 and IE 7, launched within days of each other in October 2006, both chose to only render RSS (along with other XML) as XML. This meant you could no longer present RSS as formatted HTML so content providers were stuck with having to write and verify two types of page even if the content were the same.  For automated generation, this was no issue, but for smaller news channels such as school journals this meant changing how you were reporting the news.

Second: people, groups and organisations started to tweet either through twitter, launched June 2006, or via Facebook, 2004.

Twitter is an easier way to reach an audience in that you can make all of the content public whereas only fellow Facebookers can view a Facebook tweet (I appreciate that many, like me use Twitter to update their FB accounts).

This public portal allows your audience to pull of the information they are interested in either by searching in Twitter or in Google.

That short tweet can be made in a variety of ways from separate apps on a smart phone to text messages and Facebook trackers.

Short links allow you to feature longer pieces of information in a properly branded way but the short tweet is the real hook.

After all, who has time to read a 150 word hook via a newsreader?

Yet, by the nature of the mathematicians work, this stereotype must lack merit.  The letters between Isaac Netwon’s and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz are possibly the best known recorded discussion on how integral calculus should work and two minds working together on the problem, steering each other to very similar conclusions.

Pythagoras was almost certainly a group of philosophers discussing how geometry should work which almost certainly makes the formulation of mathematical language one of the earliest recorded theories reached by a group and not an individual.

The language of maths itself proves that it must be uniquely defined as a purely team activity or else why would a language have been formulated to express its ideas so eloquently?

I’d like to know who first established the idea of the solitary mathematician?  How did this stereotype come to be so readily accepted?

Work slave?

I hung on though and treated myself to a Siemens SX1: I never did get my mail to work reliably but we had browser email access, so in a real emergency, that was always an option.

Jon then got his first N80, and I was smitten. Wifi access to your work email. No clumsy phone to deal with either it seemed a good option. But then Jon managed to kill it and the second one never did do wifi properly.

So, I kept with the SX1 and waited. The iPhone arrived just after I got into internet tablets: my N770 seemed to cover the gaps. So, who needed a smart phone?

Last Feb, I bought my Nokia 5800 Music Express. Compared to my friends and family I am no audiophile but I love it’s prowess in music reproduction. Having a removable memory card means I can switch the play list easily too - no reliance on bits of cable and 8G cards mean I can carry a presentation around with me and keep it separate to my Dvorak and Guns and Roses. The video is pretty good too, especially when driving the TV, though to be honest we have other solutions round the house.

It’s the mail I really love though. My “mail for exchange” client runs between work hours and switches off automatically; I can still get mail, but I am not bothered if I don’t want to be. The client I have for my personal mail works at the same time. Fring handles my tweets which automatically handle my FB status updates. I can skype for free where-ever I can hook up to the wifi

I have plenty of fun apps too. The one I have paid for allowed me to catalogue my books without having to buy and own a mac.

Heaven. And it’s all mine, so if I need to leave my company, it not an issue. Quality of life and ease of contact while working. It all sounds really good to me.

I produce two blogs, run four wikis and have produced various user generated content sites from scratch.

In five years of doing this I am coming to the conclusion that there is no single correct answer for achieving a goal.

Platforms are evolving all the time: I love word-press but I wouldn’t dream of using anything by 2.7.  I love TWiki - a powerful incarnation of the wiki with many powerful tools and my ultimate preference for creating web sites with many contributors (I even formed a company offering consultancy on this) but for small, quick collaborative tool mediaWiki is perfect.

So, there are a lot of great, evolving web tools out there.  Go on, try one a as solution for your problem.

courstesy of wikipedia

Trust is vital in any open source community, although it is through absolute strangers.

This is an interesting concept though: can you trust someone you’ve never met and can you trust someone you know well if they’ve let you down?

It is often a lot easier to trust someone you’ve never met.  This is how friendships are established after all - you trust until someone lets you down.

Yet, you do trust yourself even though you, well should, know yourself really well.  You know when you’ve let yourself down.  But you should have trust in yourself.  You will screw up, everyone makes mistakes, but without that ability to forgive, you can’t move on.

sounds good doesn’t it: write it, get it authorised and publish it.

toothpastefordinner.com

This is the whole basis of blogs - they do this job superbly.  Yet most businesses are still outsourcing this job through expensive packages and complicated processes.

But life really doesn’t have to be that hard.  Or does it?

Along with my interests in getting computers to do the boring bits for us, I am interested in how information is managed.  Information that sits on one person’s hard drive could be talking about the most exciting thoughts in world peace and solve world hunger but it’s doing nothing sitting on that machine.

This is where publishing comes in: you don’t have to run a major business or have a degree in journalism to put fingers to keyboards and say your piece, spout how good your product or service is or what you’re doing to change the scene if not.

So come on; the world is waiting with baited breadth!

1. accessibility of information
2. ease on the mind
3. ease on the mouse

anything else is a bonus.  Image my surprise then when Cuil was launched.  Black is the new white it seems…

I mean, Google won users by being empty - no garish logos, no loud adverts, no distrations.  White was stark in comparison to most sites at the time, but suitable and easy to live with.  The mind could easily wander over the page.

Cuil by comparison contains large amounts of black space.  Empty, infathomable black space. Not surprisingly, I love this.  The colours are very 1980’s (Commodore C64) and it works.  Not in a trying to be clever kind of way, but just because it isn’t.

The beeb have responded in kind, with their front page now sporting the black top bar.  Where will it end?  Watch this space…

It’s as long as a credit card, about ²/₃ the height and the thickness of a wallet full. It plugs in via a USB cord and just works. Top-up with a voucher and away you surf. I have to say the weirdest thing is how 3’s user interface is completely geared up for phones, while most of its customers are like me - surf hoppers.

And I have to say, that’s exactly how I feel - after bashing my head against fixed line reinstatement, this is a breeze.

Bye, bye lines. Except, I am now watching my bytes - it’s a return to making every bit count, turning off images and styling in an effort to keep down to the minimum and that makes it all really quick. Really, amazingly quick. So I’m thinking of rebuilding my laptop with a linux building to work once the cable is live again and wander free around the planet!

I want this tool to allow me to put up gut reactions and views and allow me to work on them based on comments I receive. So please make comments!

This entry is going to be about facebook…

I have been a member since 2006 and have really liked the clean interface and easy way to update all my friends on where I am and what I’m doing. The chat is a nice feature - but mostly, that isn’t what facebook is used for! The chats via email really work for me, as I am updated while I am at my desk without having my inbox full of non-work stuff.

So, it was with trepedition that I entered the new look facebook. It seems ok, though there are a few bugs (hopefully they will be sorted out). I don’t really like the photo updates - having my home page full of other people’s holiday snaps isn’t necessarily a great start to my day! I am happy to be wrong about this.

So I am hanging out to see how it goes - take the plunge, try the new facebook!