When, oh when, will Steve McClaren, or whoever else is managing England, learn?

Square pegs, round holes. Square pegs, round holes. Square pegs, ro… you get the picture.

Picking Ben Foster and Jonathan Woodgate was good.

Picking Phil Neville at left back was very bad – we know he can’t cut it in that position (or, probably, any position) at this level. Was there no U21 left back who could have been brought in for some experience? Why bother picking older players to play out of position in internatial friendlies? What’s the point?

The midfield of Wright-Phillips, Gerrard, Carrick and Lampard was absurd. Pundits bag on about having Lampard and Gerrard in the same team, and whether or not it is possible. Of course it is, and McClaren has proved it himself – you play Lampard in the middle and Gerrard on the right. Stick a holding midfielder next to Lampard and then choose a left sided player to, guess what? Play on the left hand side.

What on earth was the point in asking Lampard to play on the left? We knew he couldn’t do it before the game, and we were proved right. Barry should have started from the off, because that’s his position – it’s what he does!

The problem for the England midfield is lack of consistency. The players should know what their role is in the team. The first choice midfield is fairly obvious: Gerrard on the right, Lampard and Hargreaves in the centre, Joe Cole on the left.

Now, if any of these players are unavailable, then replacements, who can play in that position, should be brought in. The others should stay in their regular role. If Gerrard can’t play, then Lennon should, or Wright-Phillips. If Cole doesn’t play, then Downing or Barry should step up. Hargreaves can be replaced by Carrick or Parker. Lampard is the only problem here – if he can’t play, and I don’t think Jenas, Barton or Dyer are good enough, then Gerrard should probably come across and then Lennon or whoever brought in on the right.

But this insistence of selecting players out of position – especially in matches designed for giving experience to younger players – can’t continue if England are to be anything other than a dull, distinctively average side.

The theme I am using on this site at the moment, Fjords01!, is beatiful. But for some reason the CSS makes italics (through the em tag) appear like this.

Until I get round to changing the stylesheet, I am having to edit the tags to be a simple ‘i’. It’s annoying.

[tags] fjords01! theme[/tags]

Despite being an avid reader of RSS feeds – not just from blogs, but other sites like newspapers, and other new organisations – I still get a newspaper every day. I guess this runs somewhat contrary to the idea that the use of web technology to deliver news will eventually mean the death of the printed press.

So why do I still buy newspapers, when all the content I am interested in is available free online?

Well, there is the obvious thing about how nice it is to have a newspaper in your hands, sticky ink and all. But for me, the main thing is that having the paper in front of me makes me read stuff that I’m not necessarily interested in.

One of the main things on here is the business news. It’s actually quite interesting, who is buying who and what’s going on in the stock markets and stuff. I don’t really understand it, but it’s still good reading. Now, if I am reading a newspaper online, I wouldn’t go near the business section, because it isn’t one of my main interests.

Charlie Brooker, TV reviewing god, has a pop at the ‘I’m a Mac’ ad campaign with his usual savagery:

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign – the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show – probably the best sitcom of the past five years – in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, “PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers.” In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

Genius.

Penguin, the publishers, have unleashed a cool idea: a novel written on a wiki. There’s a blog just for the project, too. Great that they are using open source tools: WordPress and MediaWiki.

The main Penguin blog (Typepad, boo) notes that:

Over the next six weeks we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel. We honestly don’t know how this is going to turn out – it’s an experiment. Some disciplines rely completely on collaboration, while others – the writing of a novel, for example – have traditionally been the work of an individual working in isolation. But with collaboration, crowdsourcing and the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ being buzz words du jour, we thought we might as well see if these new trends can be applied to a less obvious sphere than, say, software development.

Fair play to them.

[tags]penguin, a million penguins, wiki[/tags]

Robert Scoble has enraged many in the blogosphere by accepting an invitation to speak to a conference organised and sponsored by PayPerPost – everyone’s most hated blog-related company.

I know this conference will be controversial — one way to get discussions among bloggers broiling is to bring up PayPerPost. Certainly more controversial than speaking at Gnomedex, LIFT, or Northern Voice or something like that.

Why do it then? Cause I’m a capitalist and because I think that blog advertising is something that we should talk about. Disclosure is something those of us who accept payments are figuring out how to do. I didn’t do it well last weekend. Microsoft didn’t do it well when they handed out laptops. And I’m still not that satisfied by PayPerPost’s disclosure policy either. I’m sure we’re far from seeing the last controversy here

Unsuprisingly, he is getting a kicking in the comments. His co-author and friend Shel Israel doesn’t hold back himself:

I am personally dosappointed that you have chosen to do this. To me Pay for Post represents everything that the book you and I wrote opposes. I wish you would change your mind. This will not help your reputation.

One more thought, Robert. You taught me the standards for blogging that I adhere to. It is what you taught me that makes me so passionately oppose Pay per Post, who have shown themselves to be the sidewalk hookers of the blogosphere. Robert, I really hope you cancel. In the long run, you will be doing PodTech a service.

It seems like Scoble is on a mission to destroy the goodwill he has built up for himself, what with this and last week’s hissy fit. Very strange behaviour.

[tags]scoble, payperpost, shel israel[/tags]

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 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]

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]

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

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 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

…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.

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]

Google’s Coop cusomised search engine now provides usage statistics. This is undoubtably a Good Thing.

My customised search engine is LGSearch, one which searches local government websites. Sounds dull, but when you work for in local government, it’s useful. Obviously others think so too.

As well as the basic numbers, it also lets you know what the top searches have been:

Interesting stuff, and a great feature.

[tags]google coop, lgsearch[/tags]

Google’s Coop cusomised search engine now provides usage statistics. This is undoubtably a Good Thing.

My customised search engine is LGSearch, one which searches local government websites. Sounds dull, but when you work for in local government, it’s useful. Obviously others think so too.

As well as the basic numbers, it also lets you know what the top searches have been:

Interesting stuff, and a great feature.

[tags]google coop, lgsearch[/tags]

Via the 901am blog, I came across a post on Kineda outlining the tools every blogger should have:

You’ve started your blog and you’re up and running, but do you have the
essential tools necessary to be a blogging pro? Here’s a list of tools
I personally use that will improve your blogging experience and
productivity. Being well equipped will make you a better blogger, and
being a better blogger means gaining the respect and affection among
your weird and fuzzy blogging peers and readers.

Let’s have a look at some of the stuff recommended. Photoshop CS2. Dreamweaver. Mint. MacBook Pro. Hmmm – beyond the ability of this blogger to afford that kind of stuff, and many others too. Fair enough, WordPress (obviously!), Thunderbird and Firefox are also mentioned, so it’s not all a proprietary free for all.

Still, this got me thinking, and here’s my list. It’s my view that the democratising nature of blogging and social media should be reflected in the tools that can be used. So, my list is comprised of software and services with no charge, and open source where possible.

WordPress – the best blogging platform there is. And it’s free.

The GIMP – incredibly powerful open source image editor. Will do everything (and more) that a blogger could want to do.

Audacity – want to have audio on your blog? Edit it with ease and feel good that the software you are using is free as in speech as well as beer.

Ubuntu – why shell out for a Mac when an easy to use , quick and ultra secure alternative is available for use for nothing? Breath new life into your PC.

gFTP – an FTP client for Ubuntu. No frills and a very quick way of getting files online. Windows users can use FileZilla.

Firefox – the only sensible browser option. Use IE only for checking how your blog is rendered.

Gmail – I’m yet to see a better interface for webmail. Masses of storage mean you can sign up to as many mailing lists and email RSS feeds as you like. Spam filtering top notch, so you can leave your email address on your blog at will. Why accept the limitations of a desktop client?

Google Reader – suddenly the best RSS aggregator  around. Takes your feeds wherever you go.

These are the tools I use on a regular basis, and they serve me well enough. I personally don’t think having wish lists of expensive gear helps anyone – if anything, the thought of having to shell out on stuff for blogging is going to put people off.

It’s better to keep things free.

[tags]blogger tools, kineda, 901am[/tags]

Just chucked up a slew of posts on Hyprtext:

• WordPress 2.1
• Zoho and Omnidrive
• Wikipedia Woes
• Performancing: Back from the Brink?

[tags]hyprtext[/tags]