Doc Searles on blogs

What is a blog? The oft-cited Doc Searles shares his thoughts in a PowerPoint from the “Les Blogs” conference in Paris. Or, if you’d like the html version …

Try slide 17 for the nub of things:

• Blogs are journals
• They are not “sites”
• They are not “content”
• They are not “media”
• They are not here to “deliver an experience”
• They are not an “emergent synchronization mode”
• There’s no argument about “who’s a journalist.” We all are.

Searles’ basic argument is that blogs are individual writings — speech — that turn into conversations through the linking ability of the Web. Treat them like content, he says, and we run the risk of censorship.

This is why news media and blogs struggle to find compatibility. We in this business see such things as content. That’s fine. Call them online columns, which is what most really are when we produce them.

From Scoble:

Google moves its blog to Blogger, adds blogroll

Yeah, TDavid, it is an honor to be blogrolled on Google’s blog. Google recently moved its blog over to Blogger.

So that’s why my previous attempts to subscribe to this have failed recently. Note to self: check this out in the morning.

History of the Graphical User Interface

Ars Technica has a great history of the GUI that just came online. I was one of those “Xerox invented it, Apple stole it, Microsoft stole that” kinds of people. It’s great to realize that, really, everyone stole everything from someone else and none of this is unique.

From Ensight, a blog by a chap named Jeremy Wright. Looks like an article well worth looking up. I’m reading feeds in bed through FeedDemon, so can’t look them up just now. Oh, for a wireless internet connection!

Well, I am leaving Scrutiny after nearly a year and have a new job as a Business Analyst at another authority. Just a week to go – my first day is 16 May.

What’s it all about? Well, project management basically. A real growth area in local authorities in the UK, and one I am keen to learn about. And guess what? To help keep a handle on all the information that will be coming my way, I am going to be blogging about it. Not here, though. One of the joys of WordPress is that I can have multiple blogs running from the same MySQL database. So, I have just started Project: Blog and will be updating it starting from about now.

I guess you can expect maybe a couple of posts a week over there. It should be pretty interesting (if you are interested in project management…) Still, to help differentiate it from this one I really do need to apply a new theme to it…

Does anyone know how I can insert trackbacks to posts I am quoting or writing about whilst within BlogJet?

At the moment I am having to edit posts while online to add them in, which kind of defeats the object of the exercise…

8 Secrets of the New Super Blogs from Vaspers the Grate

8 Secrets of the New Super Blogs:
Blog Revelations from Otherwhere

(1.) Blogs will be interesting…or die.

(2.) Blogs will be unusual, abnormal, unique…or die.

(3.) Blogs will be practical, helpful, valuable…or die.

(4.) Blogs will be creative, innovative, artistic in both literary and graphic stylings…or die.

(5.) Blogs will be authoritative, reputable, credible, reliable…or die.

(6.) Blogs will be imaginative, original, personalized, customized…or die.

(7.) Blogs will be strong, loud, brilliant, brave…or die.

(8.) Blogs will be ethical, moral, legal and legitimate, altruistic…or die.

An article by Dan Gillmor: Operating Systems and Recent History

Early last week, Bill Gates demonstrated Microsoft’s next Windows desktop computer operating system at a conference for manufacturers of computer hardware. Later in the week Apple started selling its latest version of the Macintosh operating system, known as Mac OS X Tiger.

Interesting article on Michael Howard’s signal of his intention to resign as leader of the Tories on the BBC.

The last thing the Tories want is another instant resignation similar to William Hague’s the day after the 2001 election defeat.

And there is no clamour for Mr Howard’s head after what most believe was an effective election campaign.

Mr Hague clearly believed he was also doing the best by the Tories, but that is not how it turned out.

Thanks to the recently introduced election procedures, it tipped the party into a prolonged battle which ended with outside candidate, “quiet man” Iain Duncan Smith winning as a result of the grassroots vote and then suffering an unhappy spell in the leadership.

The Tories are determined not to go down that route again and Mr Howard has given them time to sort out a new leadership election procedure – which will inevitably mean giving MPs the greatest say.

And he has also ensured that should be a swift process to allow his eventual successor time to bed in before the next election in 2009 or 2010.

There will be some in the Tory party who will grumble that he has not given them time to recover from the election defeat before being thrown into another, internal campaign.

And there is no doubt that the contenders will start positioning themselves immediately for the contest which most will hope comes within the next six to 12 months.

But most Conservatives probably believed the best they could hope for from this general election was an honourable second place, and Mr Howard has delivered that.

When I first heard that he was quitting I was under the impression that he was doing it straight away, Major and Hague style. But leaving a break of 6–12 months does make sense.

Blunkett returns in new Cabinet, according to the BBC:

David Blunkett has returned to the Cabinet as work and pensions secretary as Tony Blair reshuffles his top team.

Patricia Hewitt has been appointed health secretary – with John Reid moving to defence and Geoff Hoon becoming Commons leader.

In other changes, Alan Johnson takes the new post of secretary for productivity, energy and industry.

Chancellor Gordon Brown, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Home Secretary Charles Clarke remain in their posts.

David Miliband enters the Cabinet as community and local government secretary.

The shake-up came after Mr Blair won an historic third election – but with a majority cut from 167 in 2001 to 66.

Mr Blair said he had “listened and learned” after the election result.

The prime minister acknowledged the Iraq war had been “deeply divisive”.

But he said he believed people wanted to move on.

Am working on a large list of links of pages I regularly visit. At the moment it is very incomplete, so have temporarily password protected it.

Backpack lets you create and share lists, photos, documents and more in a wiki-like editable Web site you can share – like this one. I am trying it out to share blog links with my client and I love it so far, though I wish it enabled RSS feeds for each page. I see lots of applications here for the PR community including instant press rooms that can be set up in the event of a crisis. Kudos to 37 Signals. It’s also generating a ton of buzz. I bet they’re going to give Jot and Socialtext a run for their money at least in the small biz market.

And here is my del.icio.us page. Both this and the Furl one have RSS feeds to subscribe to.

del.icio.us/theclosedcircle

Furl is a bookmark manager, rather like del.icio.us, I think. I am going to give both of them a try and see which is most useful, if either. Here’s the link for my Furl page which as yet has only this blog’s index page in it – how sad!

LookSmart’s Furl – The theclosedcircle Archive

So, another Labour government, albeit with a much reduced majority. Probably the best result all round.

Here are some interesting snippets from The Guardian‘s coverage this morning.

• Tony Blair alone bears the blame – Polly Toynbee
• The Tories’ Michael Foot – Max Hastings
• Who won? What next? – Lewis Baston
• BNP doubles its vote as it builds on support in inner cities

The BBC also provides a rather funky Flash-based map with details of all the results, here.

This from John Naughton is priceless!

DIY declassification

Ho, ho! The Pentagon released a heavily-censored PDF version of its report into the shooting, by US troops, of the Italian secret agent who was escorting a freed hostage to safety. But it turns out that you could make the blacked-out paragraphs in the classified document, containing top-secret details (such as the name of the soldier who fired the deadly rounds of ammunition) reappear by cutting and pasting them from the site into a Word document! More exquisite details from Corriere della Sera here.

Interesting post on Microsoft Monitor about the future of Windows: 

What Microsoft really needs to do is transcend the traditional user interface and fundamentally transform how people interact with the operating system. But not in some newfangled way that would require effort akin to learning a new foreign language. Apple is off to a good start, assuming the company really understands what it’s got.

I’m talking search as the user interface. Back in February I suggested that maybe the best future of operating system interfaces is a step back to the command line. Search as the user interface makes lots of sense, and it is familiar because of how people use the Web.

Over the weekend, I stopped into an Apple Store to ask questions about QuickTime 7 High-Definition support. An Apple employee said that he had a 1080i short of BBC clips on one of the Macs. Rather than go to the file folder where the clip was stored, he clicked on the Spotlight search icon in the upper right-hand corner, typed BBC, found the file in about one second and started playback in HD. I’ve spoken to a few Mac users that are going through a kind of transforming behavior, where Spotlight quickly is becoming the main way through which they interact with the operating system.

Right now, Windows is stuck in the past.

I see desktop applications like desktop publishing and spreadsheets as driving the first wave of PC purchases. The Internet spurred the second wave of sales. Digital content could drive a third wave of sales, if vendor focus shifted from processing power and other tired feature and performance metrics to real user benefits. Search is a potentially strong user benefit, because it can remove an obstacle–the tired file folder structure–to making more out of digital content. I wonder in a teacher’s survey of a third-grade classroom how many kids aspire to be a file clerk when they grow up? Probably none. So how many people really aspire to filing stuff on their computers and then actually trudging through the file folders looking for it?

Since installing Google Desktop Search and Picasa I now never use the traditional My Documents file browsing. I just bung in what I am after into Desktop Search and move from there. Likewise on the web, with Google as my homepage I simply don’t bother with bookmarks any more – does anyone? It’s far easier to just type what you want into the search engine.

Thought it might be of some interest to share details of what software and services I use on a regular basis on my PC. Then again, it might well be incredibly boring. Here goes anyway.

I use FireFox most of the time. Tabbed browsing and the speed are the two plus points. I have three tabs set up as home pages: this blog, Gmail and Palimpsest. I sometimes use IE for things like online banking, and when I need to visit Microsoft webpages for things. For email, I use Gmail almost exclusively for my day to day emailing. I’ve never used a webmail client so useable. I have the Notifier tool running, which alerts me when new mail comes in, so I don’t need to be refreshing my inbox evey two minutes. I also regularly use Thunderbird for other email accounts for domain names I own, such as this one. I don’t touch Outlook Express with a bargepole. On the blogging side of things, I use WordPress to run this blog and would recommend this to anyone who has their own domain and database available. Otherwise, I would eschew Blogger, despite its nice integration with tools like Picasa, Hello and the Google Toolbar, because I find it slow and unreliable. Instead, I would recommend using MSN Spaces which is quick, fully featured, pretty customisable and easy to use. I use Filezilla as an FTP client and the new version 7 of the MSN Messenger IM client.

I read blogs offline with FeedDemon which is remarkable for being a piece of software I have actually paid for. It also integrates seamlessly with BlogJet, an offline blog post writing tool, which I have also shelled out the readies for. I don’t always use it though and sometimes good old Notepad comes in handy for quickly writing a post or note. I really wish, though, that ~ctrl-backspace~ would delete a word, rather than inserting a fairly useless character. There are no doubt plenty of free alternatives out there, but all the ones I have ever tried complicate things too much.

Occasionally I read blogs online with BlogLines which is a super service. PubSub and Technorati are useful blog search engines. For web search, it’s Google UK for me, though I do give MSN Search a go now and again. Google News and the BBC News sites are regular visits. WikiPedia likewise. The Guardian provides the best online content of any British newspaper, in my opinion, in terms of accessibility and depth.

I use Picasa to track my digital images on my PC, and wish it could integrate with blogging tools other than Google’s Blogger. These closed practises Google is developing pee me off sometimes. I usually host my pictures using a free account at Flickr and have downloaded their uploading tool, which works well. For other graphics work I use the Gimp – mainly because it is free. If I need to do any editing of websites, then I use 1st Page 2000 which is pretty comprehensive and (more importantly) free.

My choice of office suite is (perhaps obviously) OpenOffice.org, which does everything I need it to. I am not convinced that it is anywhere near as good as MS Office, but for my needs it is perfect value. For security, I run the ZoneAlarm firewall, AVG anti-virus, Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy. Am considering downloading the MS Anti-Spyware package at some point too.

I listen to music with ITunes as I have an Ipod, and watch DVDs with InterVideo WinDVD which came installed and seems to work quite well. For online media content I have Windows Media Players, RealPlayer and Quicktime all installed.

I think that is everything. Will update/correct links as necessary. Let me know if there is anything I should try out.

Really thoughtful article here from the BBCs Stephen Sackur on his return to the UK after 15 years of foreign jaunts.

Until I was 18 years old, I had never met a black man or woman. Nor, knowingly at least, a Jew nor a Muslim.

I was a farm boy born and brought up in Lincolnshire – among the whitest of white English counties.

I remember the stir in my primary school when a family of Vietnamese refugees was housed in Toynton All Saints.

We stared and we prodded and we mimicked because these were people with whom we could make no meaningful connection. They might as well have come from Mars.

They were not threatening, they were not aggressive, but to us they were overwhelmingly weird.

For the past 15 years I have been living far away from my homeland – in Cairo, Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels. And while I have been gone I know that things have changed.

Watched Shaun of the Dead last night, an Amazon Rental DVD. The only one of the three that arrived on Friday without a crack in it.

Still, it was an excellent, funny film and I recommend it.

I emailed Amazon on Friday night about the bust DVDs, and got an email back saying replacements were sent out on Saturday, which means I should get them Monday, which shouldn’t be too bad I guess.

Am reading Chaucer by Peter Ackroyd now. It’s interesting stuff and really well written, and delightfully short, so I will hopefully get it finished today.

A friend mentioned today that she had visited The Bowes Museum in County Durham. Quickly googled it, and what an impressive building it is:

The reason this cropped up? The Raphael painting The Madonna of the Pinks is currently on a national tour and is resident at the Bowes until June 26.