Month: May 2006

The 'Info-glut'

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Jiimy tries to scale the mount called Revisionpaperwork

Greg at EOD joins the rant about the glut of information and it’s definitely one of the more entertaining ones.

 

The conclusion:

 

 

“As of now, my fancy-pants, community-generated, emergent-behaviour data-sorting heuristic is: a calendar. If I haven’t gotten to something in a week, it dies. Stick that in your attention economy and smoke it. I’m re-booting. Feed list: empty. In-box: empty. TiVo: OK, OK, I still need to watch “24.” But other than that: empty.”

 

There is a lot to be said for the time based approach.

 

My dad always used to follow a three draw approach. When his in-tray became full he would put everything out of it into the top draw in his desk. If someone asked him about something he would go and find it, if it was in his top draw it would get put back into his in-tray. Every time his top draw became full he would take everything out of it and place it in the bin without even looking at it. If it had become that old he clearly wasn’t going to get to it and it probably wasn’t relevant anyway. GTD encourages people to do something similar and Greg’s approach sounds equally sensible.

 

It’s definitely time for people to realise that they need to take control no-one else is going to do it for them.

Samsung Q1

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Jimmy and Grandad warm themselves by the mysterious warm black thing

While I was off sick yesterday then went and officially launched the Samsung Q1 – the sleek Origami UMPC.

People are clearly still struggling with whether they like this form factor or not.

James Kendrick point to a mixed set of reviews.

Microsoft Monitor definitely sees it as a status device.

At $1,100 in the US and £800 in the UK you are going to really have to want one to be spending.

I still think that this form factor has so many home uses that I can’t wait to be in the market for one, but I don’t need it so much that I am willing to pay £800.

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Cringley makes me laugh

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Jimmy and Grandad try to hide from the surveillance cameras

I like reading i, cringley because it makes me laugh. Does someone really get paid to put together supposition, rumour and hear-say with some really paranoid conspiracy theories. He’s obviously a much smarter man than I am.

The last post on Apple and it’s domination strategy and the fact that he thinks buying Adobe would bring it to fruition was great.

You’ll have to read the article to understand some of the things I am rabbiting on about here.

He says that he is talking about an application strategy – which he equates to an ‘Office’ strategy. Wow, what a mistake.

‘Office’ capabilities are a huge set of the capabilities that people use day-to-day, but having been involved in desktop transformations since there have been desktop transformation I can tell you that the volume of applications other than ‘Office’ are the issue. In order for Apple to overcome this ‘inertia’ they need to be able to guarantee, and I mean guarantee, that all of the applications are going to work with whatever compatibility technology they are going to make available. That is a massive risk for most businesses and not one that they will be willing to take on.

The other point he makes is that ‘Windows is far more vulnerable today than it was then from a security standpoint.’ That’s an interesting view, most other people seem to be tackling this from a different perspective – Windows XP SP2 is good enough. And just because Windows is vulnerable it doesn’t make Office vulnerable. OpenOffice has been around for a good few years now, but it still hasn’t built anything like a dominant position even though it’s free.

Anyway it made me laugh.

International Writer's Blog

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Where is that noise coming from?

Is there some kind of international writers block going on? There was a time when I would start my aggregator and the set of articles that met me would make me want to write a couple of posts straight away. Over the last few weeks I have noticed a distinct lack of things that made me feel that way.

Having looked through I have noticed that the writers who used to stimulate this reaction have been a lot quieter themselves.

There are a number of possible reasons for this, but I wonder whether we are witnessing an international phenomena or whether it’s a cyclical thing that should be expected. We all know that many blogs starts, run and then fizzle out because the person has said much of what they wanted to say. We also know that it’s really hard work producing original content all the time, it’s much easier to echo someone else’s content. So are people just getting to that phase in their writing, or are we actually in a phase where there is very little to say.

Having written this I’m struck by the fact that I haven’t said anything either .