Tom Coates has posted the slides from Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software – the presentation given by him, Matt Webb, Paul Hammond and Matt Biddulph at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference
Renting DVDs by post is all the rage these days. I’ve been enjoying a free trial from Lovefilm.com, but as it draws to a close was debating whether to continue as a paying customer. Via Going Underground my attention was drawn to the similar service offered by Sainsbury’s. (Not linking because I don’t want to give either of them Google-juice.) I got part way through signing up for the free trial but was bounced as an existing member – you’ve guessed it, the Sainsbury’s service is operated for them by Lovefilm.
Shawn Callahan points to his own white paper Using Content To Create Connections Among People [PDF] that advocates (in a style accessible to the non-techie) the use of blogs, feeds and aggregators as a more flexible solution (compared with a grand “knowledge repository”) to sharing knowledge within a company and between a company and its customers.
Here’s an update on my experiences with setting up the Getting Things Done method: Weekly review still takes 2+ hours (that includes doing a few small tasks, and last week a complete clear up of all the paper piles on my desk); Still keeping the email box empty, still feeling the psychological benefits; Increased tendency to write up meeting notes within 24 hours (good for me and for colleagues); General sense of feeling more organised; Next challenge – incorporating blogging and other outside-work projects into the plan.
2005 is looking like an interesting year, but for the last week or two it’s been looking as though that might be interesting as in the allegedly Chinese way. I’ve been starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed by details, had caught myself forgetting a couple of fairly important things and decided that Something Had To Be Done! Few people can have escaped hearing about David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. As well as Allen’s own site describing the process, there’s a rash of other sites describing variants and implementations.
Time Lines Where’s your future? Where’s your past? Puzzled? Let me re-phrase that. Think of something mundane that is going to happen tomorrow – perhaps brushing your teeth in the morning. Notice where you represent that idea, in the space around or inside you. Think now of something a little further into the future – next week perhaps – and notice where that is. Repeat for a couple of other things, perhaps your next birthday or Christmas.
Upgraded the site to WordPress 1.5 without too many headaches. Please let me know of any bugs.
New on the blogroll is The “Does it Work?” Diary from my friend Clare Walker. She’s taken on the challenge of documenting “Which personal development techniques actually work”, and amongst other things is documenting a self-experiment on the positive affect on mood obtained by abstaining from watching television news. She says: I’m not certain why this may work, but suspect that: 1) The bias of most news is depressing (eg an emphasis on crime, disaster, problems, etc)….
That’s how long since I posted here. Some of that has been down to winter solstice ennui. Some of it down to spending time with loved ones over the Christmas and New Year period. Some of it because of work stuff (which I don’t write about here) Some of it because of some painful transitions in a close relationship, and the transformative change that has followed. And some of it because I am busy on a new project which you can expect to see mentioned here in the next couple of months.
A fascinating series of posts by Leslie Michael Orchard at 0xDECAFBAD applying the principles of small pieces loosely joined to computing hardware and appliances: Security and the State of The Computer, The Meta Lathe, On Exploding PCs and Appliance Relationships and Miscellaneous Thoughts about Exploded PCs