Renting office space using Twitter
How Web2.0 is this?
Rodrigo Sepúlveda, the man behind video publishing on-demand service vpod.tv, is looking for people to share his company's office space in Paris... and he's looking on Twitter!
How Web2.0 is this?
Rodrigo Sepúlveda, the man behind video publishing on-demand service vpod.tv, is looking for people to share his company's office space in Paris... and he's looking on Twitter!
A friend mentioned to me today that he was sorry I'd given up blogging.
"I haven't given up blogging," I spluttered, insofar as it's possible to splutter on IM. "I've just been busy."
He seemed even less impressed when I went on to add that, anyway, his assertion that Blogging and I had parted ways wasn't even true - my tumblelog, horreo.org, is anything but inactive.
"But that's just links..."
*
This chat got me thinking about what had prompted me to start a blog in the first place, back when I hand-coded my very first post at this domain in September 2001.
I'd been a blog reader myself for a few months. Choice wasn't so wide in those days, but I did enjoy my regular visits to Sylloge, to kottke.org and to notsosoft (which is no longer online but whose writer now blogs at meish dot org). This seemed like a party I wanted to gatecrash, even I wasn't sure exactly why.
There was the writing, of course. The discipline involved in putting my thoughts into written words on a regular basis certainly appealed to me, as did the idea that I could write more creatively than I was able to do at work at the time.
There was also the community. In the dark ages, many sites didn't have a mechanism for leaving comments on individual posts, but that didn't stop us all from frantically linking to each other from a list of "Sites I like" in our sidebars, and we gradually built up our little communities that way. Many posts I (and others) wrote were often little more than, "I've found this new blog, it's really great: <INSERT LINK HERE>". When the person I linked to discovered my blog through her log files, she would undoubtedly come and see who was linking to her -- and often return the favour if she found we had something in common that she could share with her readers in turn.
And this leads me on to my final point, to what I have come to believe was and still is my main motivation for blogging: a desire to share. The web is home to many wondrous things, and having a blog seemed to be a way for me to point my friends towards some of those things that I considered worthy of their attention.
That's still the case today, really, both here - where I can be more wordy if I choose - and at horreo.org - where I simply point and say, "Go!"
At the end of the day, as my friend observed, it's just links.
My Movable Type installation seems to have gone all "screwy" (if you'll forgive me for using such a technical term) and hasn't been displaying dates properly for quite some time now.
I don't have the time - or much inclination, really - to look at what's causing the problem, so I've just removed the dates from each post as a quick fix.
Of course, that means there's now no way of knowing when any particular post was written (although the month still appears in the URL, if you're someone who looks at that sort of thing).
Does that matter?
In any case, it's a pretty theoretical question when you consider that I do most of my blogging on my tumblelog (horreo.org) now anyway.
VON Europe Spring 2007, "The Global IP Communications Industry Event!", is taking place in Stockholm on 11-14 June 2007.
The theme of the event is "disruptive applications", and they have speakers from a whole range of interesting companies.
If you register now using the promotional code BLETH to identify yourself as a Blethers.com reader, you'll get free access to the VON Expo (worth 92 dollars).
*
In the interests of transparency, I must point out that the organisers offered me a free pass for the event to blog about this, but unfortunately I won't be able to attend. I'm just mentioning it because I think some of you might find it interesting - I hope you do.
I'm experimenting with the quick-and-dirty posting style of a tumblelog over at horreo.org.
I'll continue posting longer entries here if I ever have to anything to say that can't be summed up in a pithy sentence or two.
OK, so Jack Schofield may be hoping that Twitter might go away, but I know a bandwagon when I see one so I'm giving it a try.
There's now a Twitter badge in my sidebar, and you can also follow me at www.twitter.com/smudie
It's been a while since I've linked to a Carnival of the Mobilists, but Rudy De Waele's done a great job this week hosting Carnival #64 at m-trends.org. I mean, he even manages to mention Jean Baudrillard for goodness sake!
(In a related post at Click Opera, Momus also has an interesting comparison of the difference between the French obituaries of Baudrillard and the Anglo-Saxon ones.)
Our book, The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista, has received its first review on Amazon - and it got four stars out of five!
When reading this guide I was struck by a remarkable difference from other books about operating systems and the more complicated computer software. The authors not only give you the technical information, but also include background information on how changes and the current state of the feature set came about. This really shows that the authors have been a part of the community surrounding this software.
Thank you very much, David Lawlor. Your kind words are much appreciated.
Our publisher Wiley has given us permission to make a couple of chapters from our book The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista available for download.
You can find them here: excerpts from the Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista.
Franck Perrier, CEO of photo and video sharing platform Eyeka, interviewed me recently to find out more about this thing called Windows Vista.
Read what I had to say on Franck's blog, together with his own thoughts on why, despite the fact that "Windows Vista is most likely a great product, built by smart guys, bringing significant UI (Aero) and 'inside the box' improvements", Vista is web 1.0!
[Disclosure: Franck and I have a professional relationship.]
Will you be in Barcelona for the 3GSM World Congress next week?
Sadly, I won't be attending this year, but that shouldn't stop you having fun. Here's where you should be if you want to be "where it's at".
If you do go along to any of these events, make sure you write plenty of blog posts about what you get up to.
Steve Jobs tells record labels to get rid of DRM.
Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
Some research tangentially related to a project I'm currently working on for a client led me today to a blog on BioHacking...
You may say there is Genetic engineering and Biotechnology. Yes, they are there but they are just the beginning. I am talking about grander things such as bacteria playing chess, farms of algae providing energy for inter-planetary journey, microbial intelligence replacing AI, E. coli on seek-and-destroy cancer missions in our body, merger of biotechnology, information technology and nanotechnology, and many other futuristic bio-things.
All these things are grand yet achievable. And the art/science (it doesn't make a difference yet) of achieving them is BioHacking.
In a similar vein, there's also Biohackery, a blog about "do-it-yourself biology".
If you thought the fight between free and closed software was bruising, wait till the gloves come off between free and closed wetware...
I could spend hours reading this stuff!
Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the annual conference of the French chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. (Feel free to download the slides from my talk, "Beyond Technical Communications: Moving from Technical Communicator to Author", to learn a little more about how I got into this computer book writing lark.)
This was only my second public speaking engagement, and I'm sure it showed - not that I was nervous exactly, but I still need to learn to project myself better (and not forget some of the points I wanted to make). I only hope at least some people in the audience got more out of it than the gentleman who came up to me at the end and told me, in French, that he'd found my Scottish accent hard to follow and had missed about one word out of every five!
Sign up now for MobileSunday Barcelona 2.0!
When I attended the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona last February, I thought it might be fun to get together with a few mobile bloggers beforehand and "have a chat about all things mobile". I put up a wiki page for the occasion (which I decided to call MobileSunday), invited along two or three friends, and sent out a couple of emails to set the word-of-blog wheels in motion.
Frankly, my only real goal for the evening was to have a beer or two with Rudy De Waele, who helped me find a suitable bar for our gathering since I'd moved away from Barcelona in 2001 - which meant that his knowledge of the nightlife in the Catalan capital was much more contemporary than mine. As it turned out, more than fifty of us ended up squeezing into Café Schilling on Carrer Ferran, where the fun lasted until well into the wee small hours.
And that was just the beginning of a great, great week.
*
So, 3GSM is almost upon us again. While work commitments mean I won't be able to make it to Barcelona this time round, Rudy has convinced me that our little event was fun enough to be worth repeating.
If you want to kick off your week at 3GSM by attending "an unofficial, informal and generally cool and funky gathering of mobile bloggers and their chums", simply add your name to the MobileSunday Barcelona wiki and turn up on the night. Don't tell anyone, but I hear there may even be some free beer this time round - courtesy of MyStrands.
*
As I said, I won't be in Barcelona this year, but I still hope to participate on the night in a non-presential, 21st-century mobile kind of way. Stay tuned for more details.
As Derek announces on our Unofficial Vista blog, "we're a top 5 Windows Vista resource", according to PC Magazine.
Nice!
I'm still not sure whether work commitments will allow me to attend the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona next February, but if I can make it, this is one event I definitely won't want to miss - The Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards.
That, and the launch party for the 2007 edition of the Netsize Guide, of course. And the inevitable Mobilist's meetup. And perhaps even a MobileSunday get-together like the one I organized last year.
Oh, what the hell! I'm off to book my plane ticket right now.
Rudy De Waele of m-trends has written an article at Read/WriteWeb that provides a comprehensive overview of current thinking on Mobile 2.0.
It is very useful to see all this information gathered together in one place, with lots of great links, and I'm sure this article will become a valued point-of-reference over the months ahead.
Just listen to the customer, and give them the product that meets their needs for a reasonable price. Or am I asking too much?
Today our little tour is visiting Relaciones Públicas, the blog of Madrid-based PR blogger Octavio Rojas, where I've written a short post on how feedback received from the blogging community may or may not have helped shape the final version of Vista.
I wrote my post in Spanish - with a couple of corrections from Octavio - but I've provided an English translation as well in case any anglosajones happen to drop by.
Today's stopping-off point on the Unofficial Vista blog tour is Naked Translations, where I discuss how IE7 uses Punycode to help protect users against domain spoofing. There's even a version française.
My guest post at Petite Anglaise, written as part of the virtual blog tour I am currently undertaking with Derek Torres to promote our book The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista, has provoked some pretty strong reactions from her readers.
As I understand it, their main objection seems to be that I have taken advantage of Petite's audience to try to sell a product (did they notice the Sponsors section in her sidebar before accusing her of selling out by publishing my post?). Some commenters also seem to confuse Derek and me, two humble technical writers, with Microsoft, the company everyone loves to hate - a fact which clearly doesn't help matters, not least because it makes them think I'm promoting Vista itself rather than our book.
Surely it is up to Petite what she decides to publish on her blog, be it paid advertising, giving a helping hand to a friend or whatever else she chooses to write about.
Also, let me be clear about one thing. I am visiting five blogs on our tour, and I know each of the bloggers who are hosting me personally. Every single one of them, including Petite. That's what I'm taking advantage of - some of the many online and real world friendships that having a blog for over five years now has allowed me to form.
Finally, rather than clashing with the content that the readers of these blogs are used to finding (in the case of Petite, "a slice of life and a serving of self-indulgent navel gazing"), it was my intention to write posts that would link the topic of Windows Vista with whatever each host blogger normally writes about. Fortunately, at least some of Petite's readers seemed to find what I wrote worthwhile. One commenter even said she was going to forward the post to a friend, which, I hope you'll agree, more than makes up for being called "a cheap slime".
Today I'm visiting Neville Hobson's blog and trying to defend the indefensible in Does IE7 suck?
I'm flogging The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista over at Petite Anglaise today, where I've written a guest post to tell a fellow parent how we can use Parental Controls in Windows Vista to stop our kids doing naughty things with our PCs.
The schedule has been been announced for our Virtual Blog Tour to promote The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista.
Last year, I put together a list of nearly all the RSS feeds from the blogs belonging to everyone who attended Les Blogs 2.0.
This year, for Le Web 3, they're doing it themselves at Planet LeWeb3.
It had to happen.
Blyk is a new mobile operator that will be launching in the UK in mid-2007, with other markets to follow.
So far, so what?
The key difference is that Blyk is free to the end user, and funded by advertising. While not everyone will want to be subjected to ads in return for free calls, Blyk is targetting the 16-24 age group, and they just might.
The trick, of course (as both Azeem Azhar and Jyri Engeström point out), is to get the advertising right, so that users perceive its value rather than just seeing it as a nuisance. An interesting challenge!
Still, if nothing else, Blyk certainly looks set to shake up the mobile operators' pricing model, and from a consumer perspective, that can only be a good thing.
Update: While we're on the subject of free mobile operators, let's not forget Neuf Mobile Liberté, a new offering available only to French operator Neuf Telecom's ADSL subscribers that gives users ten minutes a month for zero euros.
I was tickled to see Blethers is at number 95 in Alianzo's list of what they consider to the Top 100 blogs in France, just four places behind Guillaume du Gardier's PR Thoughts and, surprisingly, one place above Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz.
Apparently this ranking is based on Technorati, Google and Yahoo! links, the blog's position in Alexa and the number of RSS subscribers it has in Bloglines. Like all such rankings, it should of course be taken with a pinch of salt. The true measure of a blog's quality is what its readers get out of reading it - nothing more, nothing less.
But still, I'm sure my mother will be very proud.
My co-author and I are planning a virtual roadshow as part of the promotion of our upcoming book The Unofficial Guide To Windows Vista.
I pinched the idea from Octavio Rojas, who squatted several blogs (including Blethers) around the launch of his book Relaciones Públicas: La Eficacia de la Influencia. Basically, the plan is for Derek and me to write a series of blog posts that in some way combine the subject of Windows Vista with whatever our host bloggers usually write about. For some of the blogs we intend to visit, that may be quite a challenge - but we like a challenge.
Before we start contacting people directly, I thought I might ask whether any of you would like to have us drop by your blog on our tour. Don't worry if your blog is not tech-oriented; if anything, we'd prefer if it isn't, since our book isn't really aimed at hardcore geeks.
We promise to be respectful guests. You'll have the final say over what - if anything - gets published, and we can also write in French or Spanish if your readers aren't used to seeing English-language posts on your blog.
If you're interested in hosting the Unofficial Vista Roadshow, send me an email at smudie@gmail.com.
Update (1 December): Here's the final schedule of our tour, with links to each post.
I'm just back from presenting "The Impact of Windows Vista on Technical Communications" to the Society for Technical Communications' Region 2 Conference in London on Friday.
My co-speaker and I may have mentioned that we have a book on Windows Vista coming out shortly; I can't quite remember.
It was a fun experience, turnout at the event was much higher than I'd expected, and it was particularly gratifying to have someone come up to us afterwards and say that she had found our presentation "very funny". If the book had already been published, I would have given her a free copy there and then!
I just had an article published on Microsoft's Windows Vista Community site, in which I explain how to determine if your current computer is capable of running one of the many editions of Windows Vista and then go on to describe how to transfer files and settings over to Vista when you do decide to make the move.
- Are you ready for Windows Vista?
(Those of you who know me well - and have good eyesight - may spot that I managed to sneak my father-in-law's name into one of the screenshots.)
In the Cory Doctorow novel Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom, the author introduces a concept he calls "whuffie", which Wikipedia describes as an "ephemeral, reputation-based currency".
How it works is simple. Do good things to other people, or help someone out, and your whuffie goes up. Let someone down (or worse) and your whuffie goes down. The higher your whuffie, the more likely strangers are to want to interact with you in a positive fashion, based on the assumption that the community considers you to be a good individual. It's a step up from "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" to "you scratch my back, someone else will scratch yours".
The areas of application for such a system are limited only by our imagination.
Needless to say, it was just a matter of time before someone got round to implementing the idea in real life. Visit The Bitchun Society to find out more.
As Mr Torres announces on our book blog, we have now completed our work on the Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista.
Phew!
And for my next trick...?
My co-author of the Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista and I will be speaking at the Society of Technical Communicators Region 2 Conference in London on 13 October 2006, on the subject of "The impact of Windows Vista on Technical Communication".
I only mention this because I just read about an interesting Vista feature that allows you to block Windows Live Messenger notifications during presentations. In other words, no more risqué chat messages popping up at inopportune moments in front of a packed room of strangers!
Spotted on the metro this morning - a guy wearing a t-shirt that read, "Go away or I will replace you with a very short shell script".
I'm cleaning out my bookmarks.
For the last couple of months, my Nokia 6630 mobile phone has been greeting me with the following message whenever I switch it on: "Memory low delete some data".
We're talking about internal phone memory here, not the memory card - a quick check revealed that I was left with only a few hundred kilobytes of free memory from the 10 MB I should have had available. This is strange, since I never install software on the phone itself if I can avoid it (although a couple of times I wasn’t given any choice). I can only conclude that something on my phone was leaking memory pretty seriously. But what? And what could I do about it?
Fortunately, help was at hand, in the shape of the Nokia Phone Software Update tool that I downloaded from the Nokia UK website. This tool updates the firmware on your phone, which is always a good idea, and what I was particularly interested in is the fact that it also reinstalls everything, wiping your phone clean in the process.
Five minutes later, and my phone was back to normal! Now I just have to reinstall a few apps...
[ UPDATE: I had to reinstall PC Suite as well, as my fresh new phone didn't seem to fancy syncing with my PC at first. ]
I've spent a good part of the last few months co-authoring a book entitled The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista, which is due to be published by Wiley early next year. Amazon are currently announcing a publication date of 12 February 2007 for our work.
As I write this post, I'm downloading the RC1 build of Windows Vista (it weighs in at more than 2.5 GB, has taken over 12 hours so far, and still has just under 1 GB to go). For those of you not familiar with software release schedules, the "RC" stands for Release Candidate, which means this is a version of the software that Microsoft hopes will be good enough to sell. The "1" means it's the first such version for this particular product.
The RC1 build was made available to beta testers last week, and I've been reading some good things about it online. No software is ever perfect, certainly not in its 1.0 state, but everything seems to indicate that this particular build could be the one we've been waiting for.
I certainly hope so - my co-author and I are looking forward to be able to wrap up our book!
If you're a traditionalist who still visits blogs directly instead of bloglining the RSS feeds (or just curious), you'll have noticed that Blethers.com has a new design.
You may also notice a few bugs. I could blame your browser (and I will if it's any version of Internet Explorer other than IE7), but it may just as equally be due to me trying to cobble together the styles of at least three different sites and getting something horribly wrong in the process.
So, let me know if anything doesn't look quite right for you.
Currently
I twitter and I have a flighty tumblelog. Try to keep up!
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Blethers.com is the personal weblog of Stuart Mudie, a freelance writer and editor based in Paris, France.
Stuart is co-author of The Unofficial Guide to Windows Vista and is currently working on the snappily-titled BusinessObjects XI Release 2 For Dummies.
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