Graham Chastney

Here’s another way to see what’s popular. aideRSS is a new service which generates a rank for each of your posts – PostRank. It then uses this information to provide filtered RSS feeds for good, great, best and top posts. These filtered feeds then allow you to filter out the drivel from someone’s site.

My posts all rank exactly the same at the moment which isn’t very helpful. I suspect that is because I’ve not written anything interesting recently; it only shows my last 10 posts. If you want to have a look it’s all here: http://www.aiderss.com/all/oak-grove.typepad.com

I’m a bit puzzled by the whole concept really, because it feels a bit like a self fulfilling prophecy. The PostRank seems to be using things like the number of comments on a particular post. If lots of people only subscribe to the “best” posts then those posts are going to stay the “best” posts because they are the only ones being commented on and the other non-”best” posts aren’t going to get a look in. They must be reckoning on enough people subscribing to the full feed that the numbers aren’t completely skewed.

The other interesting thing is that they are running it on Amazon’s EC2. So you could says that it’s a virtual start-up because they don’t even have their own infrastructure to look after.

Josh Bernoff writes:

The more I write and read about social media, the more frustrated I get with the term “users.”

When I started in the business twenty-mumble years ago, writing software manuals, people who used software were unusual (and had to be masochists). We spent a lot of time talking about users. The word user was helpful — it helped us to keep in mind that there was a poor slob on the other end of what we were building.

Those times are long gone. We know users are important now. Disappoint them and you lose. So why do we still have to call them “users,” which puts the emphasis on the technology they are using?

Josh’s point is that it makes us see the customers of the things that we do differently. If someone is a “user” they are somehow out of the ordinary. Ordinary people aren’t users, they are just people. Describing them as “users” dehumanizes them.

I’ve tried for a long time not to describe people as “users” not because of the reasons Josh is outlining (to change the way we see these people) but because I think it’s a demeaning term. The only other business with “users” is the illegal drugs industry and I don’t want to see any of my customers in that way.

Having said that, I find that it’s great shorthand that people understand. Not using it can make the documents that I write sound a bit politically correct. There is a real danger that using a different word just shifts the problem on to that word we already have this problem with words that describe people who are older or people with some form of disability/special need/etc. (you see my problem).

It’s becoming a popular trend of reporting “BlackBerrys and PDAs bad for work/life balance“.

Is that really true?

Is the device itself actually bad for work/life balance?

Does the very presence of a Blackberry or a PDA have a negative effect on your ability to balance your time?

It’s another case of us humans abdicating our responsibility over to the machines and letting them take the blame.

It’s not the machine that is the problem – it’s our attitude to the machine!

Do I have the ability to turn my Blackberry off? Of course I do!

Do I have the ability to leave my BlackBerry at home when I go out for the day? Of course I do!

It’s a tool that I use, it’s not my master and I’m not a slave to it.

If my boss sends me an email at midnight, that’s his problem! I don’t see why I should carry my BlackBerry around just in case he does.

If I choose to go through my emails on the night before returning from holiday so that I can have an easier run in on Monday morning that’s my choice. It’s not the machine making me do it. If I blame the machine then I’m just ducking the real issue.

When I was a child I kicked a ball through a window. When I was caught I blamed the ball, but I was still the one that was punished. N-one would expect otherwise.

I know that, for many people, the need to respond to something is very strong, but we need to learn to ignore it, or to turn it off. I would be a very rich man if I had a £1 for every time someone interrupted a face-to-face meeting we were having so that they could answer the phone. But it’s still not the phones fault for ringing, it’s our fault for answering it.

This weeks is a timely reminder that stuff happens.

For the second time this year whole areas of the UK are deep in water. Thousands of homes are without running water. Thousands have been without power,  thousands more would have been if it hadn’t been for some remarkable work by the Emergency Services.

Yesterday a power problem in San Francisco affected a number of popular web sites.

People in IT talk a lot about contingency and resilience but sometimes you just have to acknowledge that you can’t allow for every eventuality.

One of the interesting things about working from home is having to provide your own power and connectivity.

It’s gone very dark outside because of a thunderstorm. The power has already dipped a number of times and I’m using CTRL+S (Save) rather more than normal just in case.

Thankfully the domestic supply in the UK is quite reliable, but it’s not guaranteed. As more people work from home, I wonder whether we’ll start to see the utility companies offering a premium service for home workers.