Posts from 2008

Just quickly reviewed the number of posts in each full year since I started this blog.

• 2008 - 94
• 2007 - 219
• 2006 - 395

What does it all mean ? Not sure. Does it matter ? Probably not.

Amazon (UK) recently announced an online music store and a £3 discount on all music downloads on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

To download an album, you need the Amazon Download utility and the music is MP3 format encoded at 256kbps. Best of all, the music is DRM free so you can transfer, copy and play on any device. Normally, I like to buy an actual CD so I can rip into whatever format I need and also as a backup so 'The Seldom Seen Kid' by 'Elbow' was my first ever purchase of online music.

Downloaded music is automatically added to iTunes or Media Player and the only glitch was that the Downloader didn't appear to work under Google Chrome.

As this album (and quite a few others) only costs £3, this album was free. As in beer.

Just been down to Asda. Not because I am a Nineties man but mainly because the element on the kettle just blew.

I went fully equipped with what I believe is known as a 'shopping list'. I managed to decipher all of the entries (some were written by Norma) and successfully secured everything. I was debating whether to pay at a till or risk self-service where you swipe your own goods.

As I reviewed and cross-checked the list for a final time, I found to my horror one solitary item unaccounted for.

Worse, it wasn't Norma's handwriting. Worse still, the final, indeterminate item was written by me.

I could have left it but when you suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder that is easier said than done. In any case, what if the item was important ? What if the item was needed for tea tonight ?

I paused for thought, pushing my trolley to the side by 'Chocolates and Confectionery' and studied the shopping list intently. I still couldn't decipher the writing. I turned my head through 90'. Still no joy.

A friendly, helpful shop assistant approached. 'Can I help you, Sir ?'

'No really. It's OK. I'm fine. Thanks. Just looking at Liquorice Allsorts for my Dad for Christmas. He loves them, you see'.

'You're not having problems reading the shopping list, your wife gave you, are you ?'

'God no. Of course not. In any case, I wrote some of it.'

'Here - let me have a look'. I reluctantly passed the assistant the shopping list.

She scrutinised the scrap of paper. 'Well it can't be that. We don't sell it. Nor do Sainsbury's.' She then turned her head through 90'. 'Hmm - it sounds stupid but, honestly, that's my best guess - 'Goat's Head'.

'Yeah. Thanks. That's what I thought it was. It was probably my son messing around. He's a Goth, you see.

'Listen - do you want me to ask Eric ? He's really good at these handwriting puzzles.'

'No. Listen, it's OK. Honestly, Thanks a lot for all your help. I'll just leave it for now.

I hurriedly made my way to a manned till as I simply dare not risk any more potential embarrassment at the self-service tills with items that fail to scan, causing interminable delays.

Phew - the ordeal is finally over. I put the shopping list back in my pocket and start to pack the shopping.

As I hang a bumper pack of 24 toilet rolls onto the handy hook on back of the trolley and prepare to pay, I hear a demented shriek: 'WAIT - DON'T LET HIM LEAVE THE STORE !'

The plain clothed store detective perks up and security men start to move menacingly towards me.

I spot the previously helpful shop assistant sprinting towards me from aisle 11 (Ice Cream and Frozen Vegetables), carrying something.

People from adjacent tills are now staring at me and I feel myself starting to redden. The security guard is now brandishing a pair of silver handcuffs with a worrying gleam in his eye.

The shop assistant finally reaches the till and triumphantly throws down two 'Go Ahead' bars (Strawberry and Fruits of the Forest).

'I asked Eric. He took one look and said: 'Come on - this one's obvious. It's not 'Goat's Head' - but 'Go Ahead'.

Pownce (a microblogging service) has been sold to SixApart and decided to close the service on December 15 which is a nice early Christmas present for all their users - both freeloaders (like me) and 'Pro' users who pay $20 per year.

Although I have a dormant Pownce account, I don't actively use the service. However, I find it odd that Pownce have decided to close the service and provide all their users with just two weeks notice to extract all their data and find another home.

The Pownce blog claims that:

'we believe we'll come back with something much better in 2009'

However, that 'belief' must be pretty weak and the date in 2009 must be a long way away. Otherwise, why on earth would Pownce and SixApart force all the existing Pownce users to evaluate and migrate to alternative services if a viable, better alternative was being planned.

Will those users really come running back to SixApart after being kicked out ? When they're already been forced to move once ? After the way they've been treated ?

Surely, it would have been better to do what Google did with Jaiku. Absolutely nothing. Leave the service exactly as it is with no fixes, no improvements, no additional services or functionality. That way, the hardcore, diehard users will remain on Pownce and, at least, you have a hope of getting those users converted onto the new SixApart product (whenever it is available). There are a few obvious choices for Pownce users:

• Twitter - more stability and increased uptime recently but limited to 140 characters (unlike Pownce) and inferior support for file sharing.
• Tumblr - probably the closest match in terms of functionality (no 140 character limit, support for media posts (images, links, audio, videos)
• FriendFeed - includes most of Pownce functionality.
• identi.ca - micro-blogging service but OpenSource so the opportunity exists to run a separate Laconica instance for Pownce users and potentially support the Pownce API (and hence all existing desktop Pownce clients).
• Posterous - supports MP3, photos, audio files and posting by email.

In fact, identi.ca have already responded to the imminent demise of Pownce and started work on the ability to import Pownce feeds into identi.ca and are actively looking for developers to assist with providing a Pownce compatible API.

However, I suspect the main issues here for disillusioned Pownce users aren't purely technical and won't necessarily depend on the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative services. The key factor will probably be the 'community' which has now been suddenly and forcibly broken up.

I suspect most Pownce users are on Pownce for a reason - they like the Pownce service and they like the community they have forged on Pownce. Consequently, I suspect a significant number will simply migrate wherever the majority of their friends go to or maintain multiple presences.

I also suspect that most Pownce users may well have already considered (and rejected) alternatives that were around (Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed) when they originally chose to sign up with Pownce which may be another positive factor in identi.ca's favour.

Yesterday was 1 December and an innocuous post on identi.ca about an Advent calendar immediately reminded me of an amusing (and completely true) blog post I wrote two years ago.

This, in turn, prompted me to write this short note on identi.ca and the post on identi.ca subsequently appeared on my FriendFeed stream.

Normally, when I post a new blog entry, the post gets visited by a handful of people - presumably a subset of those subscribed to this blog. In this case, this wasn't a new post so regular RSS readers wouldn't see this content so any visitors had to come from identi.ca or FriendFeed.

Despite having over 150 subscribers on identi.ca and 21 'friends' on FriendFeed, only a couple of people clicked through to the 'eat your own dog food' post when it appeared on identi.ca and FriendFeed. This isn't unusual (for me, at least) - the same pattern happens with any new blog content.

My very good friend and Oracle colleague, the right honourable Emperor of Ontario (possible pseudonym alert) had recently signed up to reddit.com and was curious about the viral effect of reddit and how it might be used to help generate traffic to a blog.

Ontario Emperor kindly submitted my humble blog post to Reddit under the category 'Funny'. When I became aware of this, I monitored the Web server logs and immediately saw a lot of traffic generated from reddit. At one point, the post reached No. 15 on Reddit's 'Funny' page and 6 people 'liked' the entry.

The traffic spike was short lived (similar pattern to getting a post on StumbleUpon). However, although the increase in traffic is interesting and briefly satisfying, it is really not that useful for a blogger because:

• Reddit generated visitors are almost always 'one-hit wonders'. They visit one page and immediately leave.
• Reddit generated visitors are unlikely to linger on the site and explore other content.
• Reddit generated visitors are unlikely to comment and resurrect conversation over a two year old post.
• Reddit generated visitors are unlikely to subscribe to your blog.
• Reddit generated visitors are all new visitors to your blog. Consequently, they don't understand the context, the author, the history, the sense of humour or the writing style.

As a brilliant example of the last point, a solitary comment was left on the blog post by a Reddit visitor. The comment was so superlative, so funny, so brilliant, I have chosen to reproduce it here in all its glory to save you all the trouble of a time-consuming, pesky mouse click.

why r u so cruel to your own children?

can u not be a little more sympathetic?

You shouldn't need to explain yourself. You shouldn't have to put sign posts up everywhere. You shouldn't feel obliged to use the tag 'Humour'. You shouldn't need to insert a plethora of emoticons just for passing ~~visitors~~ idiots.

And that is why Reddit is completely useless to bloggers.

Dont bother with my slow, tortuous methods,

Just be Stephen Fry.

Dear Prudence

Thats excellent news. I am glad to hear you have managed to get PDO installed and now have Habari up and running on your site.

As for how I happened to stumble across your site, well....

There's an army of committed, passionate Habari enthusiasts who routinely conduct Twitter, Web and blog searches for every single mention of the word 'Habari'.

In addition, one of the primary responsibilities of the mysterious organisation - the Cabal - is to infiltrate Government intelligence agencies worldwide (GCHQ, NSA, Mossad, KGB) and access transcripts of all mobile phone conversations and SMS text messages. Sophisticated AI algorithms (grep with regular expressions) are then used to mine that data, searching for Habari related terms.

Then whenever we identify anyone using Habari, we leave a 'Welcome to Habari. Enjoy the ride' comment on the blog.

If people are having problems, we desperately marshall all available technical resources try to assist and claw them back from the abyss.

And if we discover individuals who have tried, failed, given up in disgust and gone back to Drupal, Joomla or WordPress, well we pay them a personal visit and shoot them :-)

Peace, love, empathy

The Habari Evangelist.

Last week, I travelled to Hamburg, near Germany, on business. As Mark Burgess (lead singer of The Chameleons) now lives there, I took the opportunity to send an email to one of my all-time heroes (even though he is a City fan).

Unfortunately, I guess Mark must be busy with his musical commitments as I haven't had the courtesy of a reply (yet).

Hi Mark

Excuse the intrusion but I am coming to Hamburg tomorrow on business. I'm staying at the SIDE hotel and need to know:

1. Location of Sports Bar that serves Boddies or strong German lager and will be showing MUFC versus QPR (Carling Cup).
2. Music venue with decent indie live music. My favourite bands are The Smiths, The Fall, The Chameleons, Pixies, Nirvana, Joy Division, Interpol, Editors, R.E.M though not necessarily in that order. Bands doing cover versions of any of the above are automatically excluded.
3. Decent bar where I can get a pint without being ripped off or beaten up.

PS. Enjoyed your book (which you kindly signed) a lot apart from the last chapter that left me a bit cold.

Peace, love, empathy - Andy

My support for the Disqus commenting system used on this blog is well documented. I have also had great support whenever I have had minor issues with a service I paid precisely nothing for.

Disqus are a small company with less than 10 employees. However, Disqus are not a cottage industry operating out of Daniel Ha's garage. Disqus are funded by venture capital (Union Square and angel investors) and raised $500,000 in the last round of funding (March 2008).

So it's not surprising that Disqus are growing and hiring people. However, what fascinates me is that in addition to hiring talented developers to develop, improve, enhance and fix the product, Disqus have recently appointed Giannii as a 'Community Manager'.

Ignoring the lack of a surname and some of the Web 2.0 terms sprinkled in this introductory post; for example, 'Chief Happiness Engineer' is frankly cringe worthy, it is worth noting that Disqus have many channels available for people to contact them:

• Twitter
• Disqus forums
• Email
• GetSatisfaction

More importantly, Disqus don't just sit by the computer waiting for people to call in - they proactively monitor all these channels and participate. Moan about a Disqus problem on Twitter and count the seconds until you get a response.

What is interesting about Disqus hiring a 'Community Manager' is not necessarily that a small startup can afford one but Disqus (and presumably the people controlling the purse strings) actually view this role as one of the first ten, and most important, positions to be filled in the company.

So what ? Every company has a 'Community Manager' - they are just called different things 'Sales', 'Marketing', 'Partners', 'Customer Care', 'Public Relations' - every company does this stuff but they don't a) shout about it and b) dress it up in Web 2.0 tinsel.

To pick just one example, Apple are a big, successful company who make clever videos and sell expensive, stylish computers, iPods and iPhones to this type of demographic so surely they must have a 'Community Manager' ?

Surprisingly, they don't. In September, Apple released the 2.1 firmware for the iTouch and this update broke WPA2 wireless connectivity. Having recently acquired an iTouch and been hugely impressed with the device, I was surprised Apple could have introduced such a fundamental bug but I ignored it and waited patiently for a patch.

Unsurprisingly, lots of Apple customers experienced the same issue and multiple threads arose to discuss the issue on Apple's official support forums. The most popular thread now has 36,208 views and 436 replies.

• How many of the 436 replies came from Apple ? None.
• Did Apple respond to any of these threads ? No.
• Did Apple even acknowledge the problem ? No.
• Do Apple care about their customers ? Not sure.
• Am I encouraged to give more money to Apple by spending in the iTunes Store ? No.
• What impression does this give to a recent Apple convert ? Arrogant.
• When is 2.2 scheduled for release ? Not known.
• Will 2.2 include a fix for this issue ? Not known.
• Is a fix even on the horizon ? Originally, I would have bet money on it but, given Apple's lack of response to date, I am now starting to have doubts.

It's obvious that Apple don't have a 'Community Manager'. Does your company ?

This is the first in a series of open letters when I send emails to people who I admire or have had a major influence on my life.

I will post my open letter and subsequently will post the individuals response (with their permission).

To kick things off, an open letter sent in February 2008 to Tony Hawks (UK author, comedian and occasional 'talking head' on those interminable BBC series that look back to the 1980's).

Obviously, Tony has been very busy this year which must explain why I haven't had the common courtesy of a reply (yet).

Hi Tony

You don't know me (I bet a lot of your emails and fan letters start like this) but many years ago I saw you in the reception at the Chine Hotel in Bournemouth.

I recognised you, you saw me staring at you and gave me a weak, knowing smile, probably dreading the awkward exchange that you feared was about to happen.

I was considering coming up and introducing myself. However, I didn't for the following reasons:

1. I had this awful mental image of stuttering 'Hi Tony. I've see you on TV and I think you are quite funny' while you were trying to query a mysterious charge on your hotel bill.
2. My wife has never heard of you and would wonder why I was accosting a complete stranger at the reception desk.
3. I had to go to check on my two little children who were at loose in the soft-play area.

Anyway, I never did make it over and many years later, I still think you are quite funny and I have just finished 'Piano in the Pyrenees' which I thoroughly enjoyed. So much so I am immediately going to buy your other books ('Fridge Round Ireland', 'Playing Moldovans at Tennis' and possibly 'One Hit Wonder').

All the best, Andy

PS. Tell those techies who designed your Web site, it doesn't appear to work on Firefox thus alienating a large part of your target audience.