05.08.08
Posted in interweb at 10:24 pm by coldclimate
watching sopranos, no time to write, or read, so dumping links.
Wuffle - the thing that drives companies with mojo
Four words that drive Web2.0 companies (and I would argue, every great company)
Four more words that drive great companies
7 keys to graphic design on the cheap, because if you’ve getting started, you shouldn’t be giving other people money.
Which comes first, success or happyness? Much like so many things, you have to start one, and grow the other. They are not serial things.
And to finish off with a quote “you got friends, you got options. dont let nobody say you dont got options” - Tony Soprano.
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04.13.08
Posted in interweb at 3:32 pm by coldclimate
Yes, I’m excited by the idea of a new Bond film (the last one being a great film), but the title, well, it leaves me cold. Luckily there’s a wee man called Martin, normally accompanied by an accordion, who has recorded a rather good theme tune. Especially the bit about teaming up with Reg Hollis. Thats genius.
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03.03.08
Posted in business, interweb at 12:29 am by coldclimate
I love trustedplaces.com, and because I love it, its the only site I spend time being active in really. I’m a passive user of hundreds of sites and numerous emialing lists, but there are a couple of sites I actually contribute content to, and trustedplaces.com is one of them. The big question is why.
Well, it’s a bloody good service is one answer, and I’ve used it to find places to eat, but I must have uploaded more articles than I’ve used, possibly even more than I’ve read really.
The answer is simple. I have a vague and distant connection to it, and this makes it seem just a little bit more “mine”. I’ll happily tell people about it, recommend it, and when I go somewhere that I’ve found through it I try to make sure they know thats why I’m there.
How do I have this connection? Nothing really. I once went out to dinner with Randomcat Chris whom I’ve know a very long time. He in invited Gareth, who know in passing and have a huge amount of respect for. Gareth brought with him Ian Forester, who at the time I didn’t know, but I was amazed by backstage.bbc.co.uk, and it turned out Ian headed it up. I started reading Ian’s blog, which is excellently written and well thought out unlike many of my rambles, and he mentioned trustedplace.com. I wandered across it, thought it looked interesting, quite liked the idea of writing for a different audience (learn by doing I guess) and so I signed up. I’d been there all of about 2 minutes before I recognised a name, and found that Tom Reynolds who writes the brilliant Random Acts of Reality was also a member, and I was hooked.
Now this is all pretty patchy. I’ve never me Tom Reynolds. I’ve only met Ian once. I suspect it’s at least a year since I’ve seen Garath. Really, these are all pretty tenuous links, but they got me started.
What’s held my interest is the love and time that the sites founders clearly have. I emailed them when I found a minor bug, and they got back to me in hours to say thanks. They’ve asked me to go along to some of their social events, all of which I’ve managed to miss, but their asking increased my connection to the site. I’ve even “friended” them on facebook (bah! spit! more on this another time) but the key thing is I’ve built a relationship to the trustedplaces brand, and I have customer loyalty. There are lots of ratings sites out there, and I won’t touch them.
Thats the kind of marketing that can’t be bought. I takes time, dedication and the sort of investment that big companies just won’t make, and I suspect it’s the real power of scial networks, be they digital or physical.
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01.26.08
Posted in interweb at 9:52 pm by coldclimate
otherwise I’ll never make a great geek?
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12.01.07
Posted in interweb, shiny at 9:10 pm by coldclimate
I really love indexed, teeny tiny bits of genius on index cards.
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11.27.07
Posted in interweb at 1:44 pm by coldclimate
Jesus H. Christ Almighty, please please tell me I’m being an idiot and it’s not actually as fugly and difficult to use as 2 hours of experimentation makes me thing. Surely it is not possible.
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11.23.07
Posted in interweb, shiny at 11:05 am by coldclimate
I’ve been using and writing for trustedplaces.com for about a year now, and I love it. Its really cool to be able to post up your own stuff and have people feedback to you how they found it, and it can be dead handy for finding places to eat in cities you’re not well versed in (especially London) rather than wandering out and into places on the off chance (not that this isn’t good at times too).
Anyway, they’ve just been rated number 1 travel website on the Times Online, which is super cool. I have to admit, I don’t thingg of them as a travel website so much as a food site, but them again they did get behind me going to New York and get people to add places they’ve been to there so I had a blooming clue. Trip Advisor made number 2, thich is an excellent site too, I always use their reviews to find hotels.
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10.02.07
Posted in interweb, randomosity at 4:21 pm by coldclimate
As cool as the items on Die Electric as I can’t help thinking that a)super ugly side scrolling site and b) surely making the prongs out of plastic would be a good idea as metal is far from dielectric.
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09.30.07
Posted in interweb at 8:09 pm by coldclimate
editted: It would appear the situation is somewhat unclear, so I pulled my original post. I have re-opened it because people seem to have found it and been 404′d into confusion. I offer no judgement, make no calls, I just hope it all works out ok.
original post:
My many and various vanilla friends, don’t click on these links, they will only scare you.
A love modblog.bmezine.com, I’m a bme memeber, and a devotee to zentastic, Shannon Larratt’s personal blog. Shannon and I are polar oposites in the world, we really are, but his love and devotion to his daughter really shine through in his posts and photos, and he is somebody who really really does inspire me virtually every day.
There have been some rumblings on the interweb about whats going on over in Canada, and this post from Warren Ellis scared me a bit, especially as the original post on modblog has since been deleted (if indeed it was there - I assum it was - but I didn’t see it). Anyway, I went to log into iam.bmezine.com today for the first time in ages (IAM is the personal networky bit of BME) and got the following message ”
IAM is currently offline.
Recently, many ugly rumors and innuendos have been spreading across the Internet regarding the fate of BMEzine, BMEvideo, IAM and Modblog, as well as the state of our personal relationship. Allow me to address the two issues separately.First, I wish to assure you that BMEzine, BMEvideo, and Modblog are fine and will continue to be so. While we have experienced some technical difficulties with IAM as of late, we expect those to be resolved in short order. Your personal content is perfectly safe, and will not be lost. Some user accounts appear to have been deleted but please don’t worry as we have a complete back up of the site from Wednesday September 19th, 2007 on a machine that is not affected by this outage. Those of you experiencing difficulty accessing the site will be fully credited for your down time. I wish to assure you that Shannon and Myself will continue in our respective roles at BMEzine as long as we both desire and I will strive to ensure its healthy future.
BMEshop is entirely unrelated to this matter and is accepting and shipping orders just as they normally do.
Shannon is currently updating BodyTwo during this unscheduled outage. Shannon’s desired contact email address is snowrail@gmail.com.
Regarding personal matters, I feel sad that any issues regarding my relationship with my husband have been made public. I know you understand that there is a fine line between public and personal personas, a line that often blurs, especially in the “he said, she said” world of the Internet. Please respect our wishes to keep our personal lives just that…personal, while we work through this trying time.
Our mutual wish is that you continue to enjoy BMEzine and its family of sites. Please know that we value your contributions and the community at large.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Best regards,
Rachel Larratt
BMEzine.com”
Shannon has a post about the situation here over at bodyTwo, where he seems to be maintaining a blog thats a bit like modblog. I hope all goes well, it’s a rubbish way to spend a birthday.
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09.28.07
Posted in interweb, shiny at 12:21 pm by coldclimate
I love the work being done by the crew at Guerrilla Gardening. In a world of red tape, beurocracy (spelling?), and health and safety, surely planting up waste ground and “social spaces” is a great thing? The planting that goes on in social spaces is generally terrible. If I see another greying bank of scrubby bushes, untended and unloved. Get out there are replace them with something interesting!
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09.26.07
Posted in interweb, music at 10:36 am by coldclimate
With their existing customer base, who are used to using their payment system and front end, I can’t imagine Amazon can go wring with serving up DRM free mp3s which you can then use on any device (and backup etc etc).
I wonder who’s tunes they are serving up, and what the payback for artists and labels is like?
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09.13.07
Posted in interweb, shiny, technology at 2:55 pm by coldclimate
Lost from the net for a little big of timne, CatCam is back! Follow Mr Lee’s adventures.
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Posted in interweb at 12:54 pm by coldclimate
Wow - trustedplaces.com has had an overhaul, and it’s looking pretty bloody brilliant. The front end is faster and slicker, the reviewing process is much nicer (the last one seemed to suffer a little for session slip), and they now have some nice new features (recommendations based on your profile, etc).
One thing I love is that they nominate (automatically or otherwise, I don’t know) local expert e.g. people who review stuff and know an area quite well. I am, allegedly, a local expert on The Toon. Brillaint. I’m really quite chuffed.
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09.11.07
Posted in interweb, technology at 7:36 am by coldclimate
Google calendar is great. I use it huge amounts, like theway it syncs with iCal on my iBook (and thus with my phone), and it’s neat and clean lines.
Upcoming also seems like a great idea. I like it’s community feel, and I like it’s presentation.
So, the only big question is, how do I get items I’m attending on Upcoming to appear in gCalendar? I’ve take the rss feed from my events, and tried importing it into gCalendar, but it’s not being served up in iCal format (which gCalendar relies on), I think it’s a plain text feed. There must be a way to do it, but I’ve not got a clue how.
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09.06.07
Posted in blog, interweb at 1:07 pm by coldclimate
I loved this article called “Ten pieces of advice for old media” which interestingly enough was on badscience.net. I agree with every one of them, even the total ban on Flash on sites. It also makes a very good point about miniblogs and repeating content. Numerous times I’ve basically just re-written somebodies article to make the point that I’ve read it and enojyed it (etc etc). maybe it’s time for a miniblog on the site of here and ditch some other things?
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09.04.07
Posted in interweb, music, technology at 3:44 pm by coldclimate
I’m waiting for some scripts to finish running, and they were taking their time, which has given me the time to read the whole of this brilliant article about Rick Rubin. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the founder of Def jam records, and it turns out, the producer (and guru like muse) of some of my other favorite albums. he seems to have a very holistic approach to music, and the music industry.
There are some interesting rumination about future business models for the music industry, though I’m not positive on his subscription style model would work, but if I could pay $5/6 per cd amount of music (be that for a whole cd, or broken down per track), download it in some DRM free format (or with some form of DRM which actually works rather than limits me to certain hardware/operating systems), then I would. I spend enough on physical cds at the moment to prove I am committed to music.
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08.30.07
Posted in food, interweb at 1:17 pm by coldclimate
I love the writing style of Allegra McEvedy. As it’s not obvious, click on the permalink to read each full article.
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08.29.07
Posted in interweb, rant at 10:09 am by coldclimate
Buffalo Technology’s UK help desk is appalling. Rude, snappy and frankly appauling.
A few weeks ago I bought a Buffalo LinkStation Live (320Gb version) and very nice it was too, for the first 2 days. After 2 days, it simply made a beeping noise, and did not do anything more.
After 2 phone calls to Buffalo, I finally got them to admit I had a faulty drive and they would send me an email about how to replace it. After 2 days I had not received an email, so I rang back and a pleasant enough bloke apologized and resent (or possibly sent) the email again. I filled in all the blanks, and sent it back.
A week later, and I’ve not heard anything, so I’ve rung up, and after 10 minutes on hold, was barked at by an irate Irishman, who told me I hadn’t replied to the email, and when I said I had he said that it would take
“a few days to come through”. I pointed out that it was a week ago, to which he replied that they were “having problems with their email, which is provided by a third party, and they couldn’t do anything about it”. I asked what I should do, and suggested ringing back every few days, to which I was told I should definitely chase it.
Worse customer service I’ve encountered in ages. I will not be spending money with them again.
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08.24.07
Posted in food, interweb, randomosity at 2:11 pm by coldclimate
I lovelove love the last cartoon strip in todays BasicInstructions. I might possibly have done xtream roast chicken in the past. I brought it though. Definately.
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