Category Archives: My Tools

You Can Find Me Here: About.me

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I’ve wanted for some time a place where I can link people to everything that I contribute to.

LismoreOne of the ways of doing this is to link everything to everything and to post updates in multiple places. This kind of works but is a bit clunky with current capabilities. When I post updates to this blog they are also posted onto Twitter and Facebook, but there are other things that I do that I don’t post either here, or on Twitter or Facebook. But how would anyone know what I do and don’t contribute to?

I’m currently using About.me for the purpose of linking people to the things that I am currently contributing to. At the top level it’s a really simple concept, I like to think of it as an online business card. What I mean by this is that it’s a single page that says something about who I am and gives information on how to get in contact. It doesn’t get a lot of visitors, but it gets enough for me to regard it as important, fortunately it barely takes any housekeeping.

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My Tools: CrashPlan

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Like many families the Chastney’s are producing data at a formidable rate. I have a son who edits music and a daughter who is into photography, add to that a reasonably sized music collection, my photographs and a bucket load of other documents and there’s over 150GB of important stuff. (Did I tell you about the days when we used to argue about people wanting 20MB hard disks (yes I did mean Mega Bytes)).

RydalThat’s where CrashPlan comes in by creating a safe remote continuous backup.

Getting all of this data copied to a location away from the house has always been an aim for a number of reasons. The main reason being that there are so many situations where a backup solution in the house wouldn’t be sufficient to protect it – fire, flood, etc.. There’s also the added advantage of being able to access data that you haven’t taken with you if you need to. CrashPlan Central provides a remote backup location that is always there to write to and to read from.

Another great thing about CrashPlan is that it doesn’t matter where the devices are. My son is at university and living away from home during term time. Because he has internet access all of his work is still backed-up and protected whether he’s at home or at university.

The CrashPlan agent runs all of the time on all of the devices and is continuously backing up the data. This means that we don’t really think about it making a backup it just happens.

We’ve had need to recover some files too and that works a treat also.

There are a number of other features of CrashPlan that are really good, but I don’t really use them.

The pricing is pretty good to. I use the CrashPlan+ Unlimited Family which covers the household for a few pounds a month.

My Tools: Evernote

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The simplest way to describe Evernote is to call it a note taking and organisation tool, but that’s selling it a bit short.

Brockholes SunsetNote taking and collecting is incredibly important to the job that I do, and if that was all it did it would still  be very important.

I used to carry around all sorts of piles of paper. These comprised things I was reading, things I should be reading, thoughts, scribbles, diagrams, etc.. I still carry around a moleskin notepad which I use for taking notes in meetings, but for all of the other notes there’s Evernote.

My job involves me working with all sorts of pieces of information. Sometimes I need to read it, at other times I just need to know where it is for future reference. All of it goes into Evernote where it’s classified and organised.

One of the great things about Evernote is that it has been built from the ground as an internet application. It has client applications for all sorts of platforms, but these all replicate information with the central service.

I’ve also introduced it to my son who is studying at University and it works well for him too, quite frankly I’m a bit surprised that it isn’t promoted more by educational establishments

I’m not going to say much more because I really need to write a post about the ways that I process information and the way in which I use a number of different tools to collect, filter and organise. Evernote is a big part of that, but it’s only part of the journey.

You Can Find Me Here: Flickr

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I’ve decided to start another mini-series. It’s a bit like the My Tools series from a while ago, but this time I’m going to focus on the various locations where I project some of my social persona.

The first one is Flickr where I project the photographer Graham.

Jimmy and Granddad visit ButtermereI’ve used Flickr for a long while now, my first picture was posted on 9th December 2009, and it’s still one of my favourite pictures.

In my view it’s still the best photo social site.

Other social sites, like Facebook, do photos but they aren’t really focussed around the pictures, they are focussed on providing a photographic record of an event alongside other records of the event.

Flickr is focussed on the photo itself – where it was taken, when it was taken, what it’s showing, what it was taken with, how it was taken. With that in mind I tend to use Flickr for certain types of pictures.

I don’t, for instance, put pictures of the family on Flickr. Most pictures are of scenes or objects, Jimmy and Granddad are a particular favourite for many. I suppose that you might call them the arty photos.

I make most pictures quite open with Creative Commons licenses. Flickr is, in my view, there for sharing.

The Flickr Organiser is a work of genius which allow you to do all sorts of things with the pictures – adding them to groups, adding tags, adding maps, creating and manipulating sets; all in a rich graphical interface.

One of the elements I think needs a good deal of improvement are the maps and satellite images that are available for geotagging the photos. Many photogenic places aren’t near roads so a map isn’t much good, and the satellite images don’t allow you to zoom in close enough. Perhaps Yahoo should leverage it’s recent relationship with Bing to get their images.

That aside, I am a real fan of Flickr. It’s nicely social and I get some good feedback on pictures. People have contacted me to use pictures in professional material in line with the Creative Commons licensing, and I’ve granted it.

Buttermere SwimmingI like to interact with other people’s pictures, there are some inspirational photographers out there. There are also a set of photograph archives which I really enjoy too. The Preston Digital Archive is a great insight into the place where I live.

The Flickr statistics tell me some interesting things too, although I’d still regard myself as being in the long tail my pictures have been seen 165,000 times which is a reasonable number.

So that’s my photographic persona ready for social interaction.

The Conversation Prism V3

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An update to the Conversation Prism Infograph.

Chatworth with the FamilyThe prism shows 28 different categories of technologies that support the current complex set of conversations that we all have, everything from Wiki to Streams and Social Commerce to sCRM.

As someone who works within the corporate IT world there are a number of very prominent organisations we barely feature , or don’t feature at all: Microsoft, Oracle, HP, SAP. The high levels of choice also shows that we are a long way from many of these capabilities becoming universal, and for some even mainstream.

I’m also sure that we’ll see some of these capabilities collapse into other capabilities. There’s also a massive difference between wide adoption and deep adoption. Anyone who assumes that just because they are using Facebook for 2 hours a day means that everyone else is – is mistaken.