Monthly Archives: October 2008

Word of the day: Maven

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Grandma in GrizedaleI like knew words and occasionally write something about them. This one is a new one to me, and quite new in word lifespan terms too.

The definitions seem to wander about a bit as is often the case with relatively knew terms.

Here’s one definition:

Maven

n.   A person who has special knowledge or experience; an expert.
[Yiddish meyvn, from Hebrew m?bîn, active participle of h?bîn, to understand, derived stem of bîn, to discern; see byn in Semitic roots.]

Although I think prefer this one:

A maven (also mavin) is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others.

It’s the “who seeks to pass knowledge on to others” that I like, especially as it’s a tipping-point idea. A maven/mavin isn’t just an expert, they are one who seeks to connect and to pass on.

I’m sure that many of us can think of many people are like that, I’m sure that we can think of just as many experts who are the opposite. I suppose I’m more likely to be maven than not. I’d rather people made use of the knowledge that I had, it’s normally not that much use to me otherwise.

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Is Flickr losing its Creative Commons roots?

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Grandma in GrizedaleI’m a big flickr user, I post all sorts of stuff and I post it all as Creative Commons licensed. I’m even generous and license at quite a low level of Creative Commons control – Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic. in simple terms, what this means is that someone can use my pictures as long as they use them for non-commercial work and they give me credit. I’ve even had people asking to use pictures for commercial work, which I have given without fee.

There was a time when I could search through flickr and be reasonably sure that what I was looking at was also licensed as Creative Commons. It was the place that I would go to to get hold of good quality photos for a project I might be working on, as long as I respected the Creative Commons license I could be confident in using the pictures.

I have no statistics to support this, but my perception is that more and more of the content on flickr is now locked down to “all rights reserved”. Flickr does a really good job of protecting these pictures – you can’t download them and you only see one size.

I fully understand a couple of reasons for locking down content in this way:

  • You wouldn’t want anyone messing about with your personal pictures.
  • You might not want anyone using all of your pictures when it’s your business.

But there are many, many pictures that are locked down which aren’t either of these, they are pictures of scenes, or of items and events which are not of any value to them, nor that much value to anyone else.

What value does locking them down have? It just takes value away. if it’s locked down you can only see a small representation of it; no-one gets to enjoy the real full fidelity picture, no-one gets to download it and use it as a background or in a screen-saver, no-one gets to use the picture in a project to create something new and exciting.

Perhaps I’m just being some kind of liberal creative commons open source hippie but it feels like flickr is loosing its roots, loosing its sole? (did I really just say that, oh dear)

I feel like turning my stuff to “all rights reserved” – why should I share my stuff if no-one else is willing to share their stuff? “I’m not sharing my ball if you won’t share yours”. Perhaps that would be a good feature – my stuff is licensed as Creative Commons to everyone who’s pictures are also Creative Commons, if your stuff is “all rights reserved” then, to you, so is mine.

Why do people have to be so protective of stuff? Do they really think it has a value that people are willing to pay? Do they not realise that sharing is good for them.

Gosh I’m grumpy for a Friday.

Thankfully flickr advanced search enables you to search by license type, but I’m not sure why I should need to.

(Jimmy and Grandad are Creative Commons too)

I need a new bag

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Jimmy and Grandma have a day outI need a new bag, the one I’ve got at the moment is falling apart. I made a massive mistake and went for a cheap option. This one is the third bag, the first two went back with broken zips in the first few days of owning them, this one has lasted a little longer but not much.

Now I’m a bit weary of investing my money in another dud, so I thought I would ask that great big world out there.

What am I looking for?

  • It needs to look good in the office.
  • Nothing too dull, but nothing too bright.
  • It needs to take a 15” laptop.
  • I move around quite a lot so need to be able to slot the laptop in and out quite quickly.
  • I always surprise myself with how much paper I carry around but I’m not looking for a mobile office.
  • I carry stuff too – iPod, pens, power packs, cables, USB sticks, etc.
  • I occasionally walk quite a way with the bag so it needs to be comfortable.
  • The bag itself shouldn’t be too heavy – if I’m going to carry weight I want it to be in the stuff that I need not in the bag (I picked up a Swiss-army bag at the weekend and it was so heavy I put it straight back down again).
  • It needs to be robust – I don’t want to buy another one in another few months.
  • It needs to be waterproof – I live in England.
  • I don’t really want lots of pockets – I’m not organised enough to put things in the same place every time so lots of pockets just become annoying.
  • I quite like to be unusual so would look favourably on something a bit quirky.
  • I’m not Roman Abromovich so it needs to be a sensible price.

I tend to prefer messenger style bags, although I would prefer a vertical style one over a horizontal style one. I’ve never seen a really stylish backpack bag, but could be persuaded.

A couple of sample things that look good to me.

Anyone tried any of these bags?
Does anyone out there have any other recommendations for me?

Help me, please, I’m in danger of becoming a bag fetishist..

How I read blogs: snacking, dining and scanning

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Grandma in GrizedaleI tend to read blogs in three ways.

It’s not something I have consciously built up, it just seems to be the way I have gone.

I’ve also noticed myself subconsciously rating a whole blog in a similar way:

  • Snacking: some blogs tend to be written as small chunks and I like to consume them that way.
  • Dining: some blogs write longer posts these can be really good dining and require time and attention to enjoy them.
  • Scanning: there are a set of blogs on which I neither snack nor dine, I just scan. It’s rare that I eat anything at all, I just look and see, the headline is enough.

I’ve also noticed that when blogs that I regard as a snack produce items that are longer than a snack they tend to get scanned. Blogs that get scanned are the ones that I’m likely to delete from my reader, because scanning is of limited value.

Some example of what I mean for different blogs:

Blog  

Snack Rating

Dining Rating

Scanning Rating

apophenia

2

*8*

0

BetaNews

*8*

0

2

Dilbert

*10*

0

0

Endgadget30*7*

Flickr Lake District Pool

1

0

*9*

Presentation Zen

2

*7*

1

ReadWriteWeb

1

0

*9*

SharePoint Magazine

2

*7*

1

Steve Clayton

*9*

1

0

A reader is, of course, essential to this type of working.

The question this leaves me is this:

How do people relate to my blog?

Am I a snack?

Am I a dinner?

Or am I a scan?

Lotus Notes Tabs – My Usability Problem

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Grandma in GrizedaleI have a bit of a usability problem with Lotus Notes tabs.

It’s a simple thing but it catches me out every day and has become an annoyance that I feel like I need to write about.

When I start Notes the first thing I do is to take a quick look in my inbox and then open my calendar. The two tabs that I have open look like this:

As I open items to read the tab bar starts to fill up and the size of the tabs starts to reduce.

The number of tabs that I need to open depends on the size of the screen that I am using. On my laptops it’s only four items before I get to this:

I’m now stuck, which is my calendar, which is my inbox. Opening more items just makes the situation worse. If I had a shorter name it would be less of an annoyance, but I don’t have a short name.

I’m not sure why Lotus couldn’t do something with the icons to show me which view of my mail file I am looking at, perhaps it’s configuration issue I can work my way around, or even the way that Notes has been deployed to me, but I haven’t done anything to create this situation.

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I don’t blog enough! Do you?

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Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallIf you want to be noticed as a blogger – you have to blog.

It would seem like a reasonably easy equation, but how much do you have to blog to be really noticed, if noticed is what you want to be.

Well it would appear that the answer according to Technorati is at least 2 to 4 times a day, and if you want to be really, really noticed you have to blog more than 10 times a day.

Well, there is little chance of me getting to 10 a day, perhaps I should just aim to be one of the 22% of top 5000 bloggers who write things that are so good that writing less than one post a day is good enough.

I still think that quality is better than quantity – but then I would, I don’t have a lot of quantity.

I quite like the idea from Micro Explosion Media of the meal verses snack ratio.

Personally, I try for three posts a week and employ my meal verses snack ratio with those three posts (one meal, two snacks).

I suppose that’s about what I do. Perhaps a few too many snacks recently though.

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My Tools: Word – CTRL+Shift+N

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Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallCTRL+Shift+N does something incredibly simple – it sets the style of the selected text to “Normal”. As simple as that.

It’s a key combination that I like to use every day, but seems to be one that other people don’t use much at all. How do I know other people don’t use it – templates.

Nearly every template I see has the “Normal” style configured as something different to the main style of the document. One of the first things I do is to make them the same.

I suspect that this suggests another thing – people don’t use keyboard shortcuts, which certainly means that they are working very inefficiently.

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The difference that 10 years makes

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Jimmy and Grandma have a day outI’m sure I’m not going to be the only one to be this over the next few days, but it’s fun all the same.

In celebration of 10 years Google has made a specific search available to show results from 2001.

Being the humble fellow that I am, I had to see what the difference in the results for “chastney” were. So from 2001:

I have to admit to doing this in the full knowledge of what the result shows today:

That’s right, in 2001 I didn’t feature at all, today I feature in the top spot – twice.

Back in 2001 there were only 328 entries – now in 2008 we mange 11,800, still a relatively small number.

One of these days I will manage to write something to surpass my now defunct post on Windows Live Writer Dictionary Hacks. The problem is – I keep linking to it.

It’s nice to see that Jimmy and Grandad get a mention under my Flickr stream, but that’s probably only because they were the last pictures that I posted.

It also shows that I need to work a bit harder on my “happenings” site so that it appears somewhere.