Wednesday, 9 January, 2008

Help! WordPress tag clouds

My tag cloud (on the right of the screen on my blog’s homepage) is a complete mess. I need to edit the font sizes used, and maybe limit the cloud to tags which are used more than once, say. I…

Open source is best

Simon Dickson muses on the advantages of using open source platforms, as opposed to proprietary ones, in the light of the Interesource debacle. It’s funny. Not so long ago, the question was ‘why should I be using open source?’ Increasingly,…

Newsgator RSS apps now free!

The Newsgator family of desktop RSS applications are now available for download free of charge! This is great news, and I would heartily recommend that anyone who hasn’t tried it before gives the Windows application, FeedDemon, a try. I have…

The ‘Lazysphere’?

Steve Rubel has posted about "The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging". Somewhere circa 2006 the tech blogger mindset shifted – at least among the majority. People who used to work hard creating and spreading big ideas resorted to…

barcampUKGovWeb hotting up

Jeremy Gould has been hard at work getting the barcamp for UK Government web types sorted out. We’ve got a venue – the Google offices in London. Cool. All the details are on the wiki and Jeremy’s blog. The Google…

links for 2008-01-09

Big Think – We Are What You Think The thinking man (or woman)’s YouTube. (tags: video ideas politics academic) Search Wikia: Not Even A Remote Threat To Google SearchEngineLand’s take on Search Wikia (tags: search wikia searchengineland) ReadBurner | Public…

The Innocents

Just finished watching The Innocents, the 1961 film based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. Here‘s the IMDB link to find out more, or there’s always Wikipedia. It really is one of the scariest things I think I…

Tuesday, 8 January, 2008

links for 2008-01-08

Wikia Search Is A Complete Letdown. Michael Arrington trashes the alpha launch of Wikia Search, the ‘human powered search engine’. (tags: search wikia) Wikia Search – Miles Behind the Competition Mashable’s view on Wikia Search (tags: google mahalo search wikia)…

Monday, 7 January, 2008

Wikia Search Launches

There has been a flurry of largely negative postings about the newly launched alpha of Wikia Search – Jimmy Wales’ human powered search engine. I’ve bookmarked quite a few at del.icio.us, which will pop up on this blog around midnight…

A grand day out

Had a lovely day yesterday in the glorious sunshine. We visited the Suffolk coast, at Dunwich Heath and Southwold, and had a marvelous time. Here’s some photographic evidence. There’s more, should you want it, on my Flickrstream.

links for 2008-01-07

Why Facebook wants to corner the market in personal info John Naughton on the Scoble/Facebook kerfuffle. (tags: observer scoble socialnetworking socialnetworks facebook plaxo) How Techmeme Homepage Changes Over Time – Video This Techmeme video clip captures 50 hours of Techmeme…

Sunday, 6 January, 2008

Ning and Porn

Ning founder Marc Andreessen has posted a response to the discussions about the fact that quite a bit of Ning’s traffic is as a result of ‘adult’ communities. Ning, remember, is the service that allows you to create your own…

links for 2008-01-06

Lunch_with_Maxwell.pdf (application/pdf Object) Piece by John Naughton on attending a function thrown by Robert Maxwell. Fascinating reading. (tags: robert+maxwell john+naughton) BarCamp wiki / BarCampPOIR8 The event follows the decision to launch a web-based channel as recommended by the Power of…

Saturday, 5 January, 2008

Swinging

Swinging Originally uploaded by DavePress Ben didn’t want to go on the big slide thing at Fermyn Woods today, so I felt the need to uphold the Briggs family honour. I think I did so well.

links for 2008-01-05

Asylum Great book review blog. (tags: books reviews blog) These Glory Days Excellent, thoughtful film review blog (tags: film movie review blog) Flipping the Linux switch: 5 tips every new Linux user should know – Download Squad Cool tips and…

Friday, 4 January, 2008

Organising my feeds

I recently undertook the task of organising all my feeds into folders in FeedDemon – before this I had just the one (very) long list of sites I checked, not broken up in any way. This had become unmanageable. So,…

Building Online Communities with Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management system which is fully extensible through a huge range of community developed modules. It’s the system which powers the demo site I put together for The Information Authority last year, and it is…

links for 2008-01-04

Free Music Zilla: Free Music Downloader Freemusiczilla is desktop based software that basically lets you download any song you can stream on the Internet. (tags: music download mp3 free tools freeware software radio) Global Neighbourhoods: SAP Global Survey: Australia’s Lee…

Thursday, 3 January, 2008

Seariki

Seariki (a conflation of search and wiki) is a new China based search engine which provides a way of finding information in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia search itself can be slightly frustrating, in that if it can find an exact match…

Wikis – which is best?

Well, it’s a question. Wikis are funny things, and building communities around them can be quite tricky (although advice like this helps). More than any other types of website, wikis demand community interaction, indeed, they are nothing without it. There…