Martin challenged me to contribute to www.geograph.co.uk so I have.
My profile can be seen here. I’m amazed at how many pictures there are out there and how many places there are still spare.
Martin is way ahead of me here.
A few years ago the web was a huge great reference book, with little or no input from the community that was using it. With blogs and sites like this we are moving towards a position where the web is becoming a community tool.
Sometimes it’s good to give a relationship a bit of a test. this time it’s me that has set myself one – how well do I know my wife? This is also a test in the maturity of blogs, or more specifically RSS. If Sue can get into it, then they are probably good for almost everyone. If she doesn’t see the point, then so will many others in the general population. I’ve used Sue as this type of benchmark before and she is great at keeping my feet firmly on the ground.
I have set her up with an aggregator built into Outlook (RSS Popper) so as not to confuse her with another application to learn, and she spends all her life sending emails about this that and the other (that took her a while, but once she caught it she was away).
But then what to point her towards to get her started. There is no point in putting this site in, because she isn’t interested in anything technical at all.
She likes Oak Grove Happenings because that’s about us.
Ummm.
Well what does she like, what interests her. Well she really loves stories about people so Sand in the Gears seems like a good place to go. And she likes pictures so it’s worth putting our Flickr set in there, and perhaps it’s worth putting the Lake District pool in too, because that’s where she grew up.
But then after that, umm, not sure, time for some research I think.
(Any ideas would be gratefully received, as usual).
I have upgraded to flickr pro because I got above the 200 photograph limit of the normal account.
I’m not altogether happy with paying for something that is still marked as BETA, especially as all of the pictures in my blog point there. But that’s the risk you take.
I love the way that flickr generates community, I get far more comments on my flickr photos that I do on my blog. perhaps there is something to be learnt from that. I also like the concept of favourites too, there is definitely as need for the Internet to have a layer placed upon it which adds a level of confidence to a particular article or site. del.icio.us partly gets there, but the idea of marking things as favourites is also nice especially favourites that are visible to all. I have found myself doing searches over-and-over again because I can’t remember where an article is.
There isn’t much there yet, but Stuart Downes has started a blog site.
Stuart is also a Flickr user.
Another virgin blogger – Martin Fryatt. Martin is a very talented Programme/Project Manager who manages to achieve things others can’t. All without (yes, without) a smile on his face. Amazing.
We’ll see how he gets on.
It’s great having a name like Graham Chastney, once you get noticed on the Internet you are search-able. In the last two months I have become discovered by all of the major Internet search engines and now you can go to any of them; type in Graham Chastney; and you get ME. It’s great. But not only am I there, I’m there at the top. Of course it would be easy to get big headed about that, but I didn’t choose my name I was given it. Still, it’s nice to exist.
Mary Jo Foley has been commenting on Microsoft’s OneCare (A1) initiative and stating:
What do you think? Will Windows users — consumer and/or corporate — flock to Windows OneCare? Or will Microsoft have to go back to the drawing board, as it did with Hailstorm, to find a more palatable way to sell subscription services to its users?
I’m not actually going to seek to answer that question here, but I am intrigued by our view on these things. Many people seem to be inferring that because Microsoft have created the problem perhaps they should fix it for free. While out walking this lunchtime the madness of this situation occurred to me.
Those of us who drive cars expect to have to service it, some of us can service a car on our own, but the number of us capable of doing that is reducing all of the time. Most of us take our car into a garage, in doing so we have a choice. We can go to the manufacturers dealer or we can go to an independent garage. In car servicing we expect two things, we expect the mechanic to look after our car and try to ensure that it isn’t going to break down in the near future; we also expect the mechanic to undertake any safety work on the vehicle. Just because Ford have made a car with tyres that wear-out doesn’t mean that we expect Ford to come and replace them for free every six months. If we don’t change the tyres you can be fairly sure that we will have a crash at some time in the future. For me security software on PC’s (anti-virus, firewall, ad-ware, etc.) are just another mechanism of delivering safety servicing. Some people will choose to do the safety servicing themselves, some will choose an independent garage, others will choose the manufacturers dealer.
Carrying this metaphor forward. We all know that an independent garage will give us a cheaper service than the manufacturers dealer. Yet, millions of cars are serviced at manufacturers dealers every year. Why? Well some of it has got to do with warranty. Some of it has got to do with bulk deals. Some of it has got to do with the ‘peace of mind’ that a manufacturers dealer can provide. In offering security servicing, perhaps Microsoft could learn a lesson or two here.
While I’m on a role, lets push it a bit further. In the UK you have to submit your car to an annual test (MOT) for safety. Other countries have a similar thing. Cars also get tested before they are allowed out onto the road. Don’t you think it’s about time we did a similar thing for the IT industry. “Your IT equipment can stay on the network for another 12 months as long as it has got to this standard of safety”
And then finally. There is a roundabout near me called Ladyewell Roundabout. There is something wrong with the way that the road is built there. I don’t know what it is because I’ve never been caught, but most days someone has. In travelling from the motor-way towards the local Asda something makes cars carry straight on straight into a bunch of trees rather than moving further around the roundabout and staying on the road. If the road is the network in our metaphor perhaps we should try and make sure that all of the roads/networks are safe for vehicles/PC’s that adhere to the safety tests.
My new strap line for this blog is “as well as I am able”. This line actually has a bit of history to it.
It’s actually the Chastney family official motto and included in our coat of arms; but that is something that was only discovered by my father’s generation. Before that it was always a motto for the way that the Chastney family lived their life and was even a common saying in the family. It obviously stuck and was passed down through the generations.
We have never been people to angst about perfection, but have been comfortable in doing the best that we can. It doesn’t mean we are sloppy or anything, it just means that we try to do the best we can. If our best is good enough then that’s great, if it isn’t then fine, that’s not our problem.
The Chastney problem is often that our best is often much better than other peoples good enough.
I’ve decided that it’s blog clear out day. I have been inspired by a number of posts by people talking about procrastination and information overload.
So I have decided to go through the list of blogs I subscribe to and weed them out. There are a load that I have in my list because they once wrote something I was interested in, but have now fallen into ones that I scan over. The primary reason for this is that they are new regurgitator, they don’t add anything to it. If I want ‘news’ I’ll go to the feeds from The Register or the BBC and look (because I like them), what I want is intelligent comment. But there are other reasons, some peoples comments aren’t worth looking at. There are also a number which haven’t been updated for a while.
Some examples for you:
The one I am leaving in there for now, but it’s under review is Scobles link blog. I still have a bit of the ‘what if I miss something’ in me.
There are also a number of blogs which have ended, can I please have a ‘clean up dead blogs’ option in NewsGator.
Welcome to my new home for Oak Grove.
This site will continue to focus on my work-type related stuff. I’m also planning something new for more general information and musings.
Graham
Graham Chastney 