Posts from February 03, 2006

Yesterday, I stumbled across Newsvine which is a very impressive news aggregator. Until now, I didnt much care for these type of sites. Digg left me a little cold with too many irrelevant, repeated articles (not to mention flame wars) and Slashdot hurt my eyes.

I currently use My Yahoo! with various news feeds configured and was starting to experiment with a similar, personalized Google portal with feeds from Google News as an alternative.

Newsvine is more focussed on news with feeds from Associated Press, tagging, watchlists, personalisation, discussions and your own news column (articles, links). The interface is well thought out, fast, easy to use and I quickly found myself exploring many different topics of interest.

Newsvine is yet another of those Web 2.0 applications currently in beta and needs an invitation to sign up. I anticipate Newsvine supplementing rather than replacing GreatNews as my RSS reader (for personal and technical blogs) but it is certainly a very impressive and interesting application.

I stumbled across Newsvine on this blog and the author was kind enough to issue me with an invite. If he has none left, I also have some Newsvine invites available if you are interested in trying it out.

I have been thinking (yes I do a lot of that) recently about managing my personal calendar more effectively. Ideally, I would like a simple Web based calendar that could also sync to my Palm.

I don't really like the Yahoo! Calendar that much even though it can sync with Outlook and the Palm. I simply don't enjoy looking at the Yahoo! calendar. I just think the interface is ugly and there are distracting ads liberally scattered at the top of the screen.

I am following the development of Sunbird with interest but this project is still in development and I think Sunbird only runs locally.

I have an outstanding, low priority ToDo to evaluate Remember The Milk but keep forgetting.

So, I was interested to read Matt Mullenweg speaking in glowing terms about the calendar functionality from 30 Boxes rapidly followed by similar sentiments from Scobleizer.

Mental note. Forego 'Songs of Praise' for just one week and remember to sign up at 30 Boxes on Sunday 5 February when it enters public beta.

In fact, add it to your calendar with an SMS alert so you don't forget.

I wanted to find UK related blogs written by people in the UK as most blog indexes and search engines naturally tend to be heavily weighted towards the US.

Initially, I searched on Technorati for 'UK' tags. However, this included lots of photo blogs from tourists visiting London on whale watching holidays and UK 'political' news (yawn).

Then I came across britblog.com which is an growing index of UK based blogs which includes blogs listed by region and category in addition to recently added and popular blogs.

Britblog also has an interesting map displaying the distribution of blogs across the UK.

Good news. A kind, thoughtful, considerate colleague noticed my unattended Palm and placed it in a locked drawer for safe keeping. Unusually, for such a kind, thoughtful and considerate person, he omitted to send me a note telling me.

Bad news. I will be writing my own Christmas cards this year.

The planned filming of the reconstruction next Wednesday, to be broadcast on this month's edition of BBC Crimewatch, has now been cancelled.

Many thanks to all for your messages of support during this testing time.

PS. Sincere apologies to any recipients of those awful poison pen letters.