sports bars of Europe

People often ask me “Norman - when will you be updating your award-winning ‘Sport bars of Europe ‘meme’ ?” No. 2 - The Irish Rover Stroget, Copenhagen Satellite feed - RTE. Thankfully, we were spared Tyler’s orgasmic ‘ON REEE !’ Food feed - Irish Rover Burger (inevitably). Just like a standard burger in a English pub. Smoke feed - Intense. Peaked around the time of the missed penalty. Beer feed - Carls Special and Tuborg substituted at half-time for Leffe. ...

April 25, 2006

ZohoWriter

Just wrote a quick letter using ZohoWriter. An interesting product. Think of Microsoft Word on the Web. ZohoWriter supports the standard WYSIWG editor, document versioning, collaboration, blog publishing and export to Word/PDF formats. My document is saved safely on a server in the event of any media based disaster striking my PC. The only comments I have was that it wasn’t obvious how to suppress the header and footer when printing the final hard copy, I couldn’t see a speel checker and WordPress.com wasn’t listed in the list of supported blogging platforms. But don’t quote me as I never took the time to RTFM so all of this may be possible. ...

April 22, 2006

state of the blogosphere

Web 2.0 aficionados, across the globe, held their collective breath today as Mr. Norman Brightside, a little known and largely unsung blogger, from Newcastle (near Norway) delivered his much awaited, quarterly update to his renowned ‘State of the Blogosphere’ address. Fresh from the successful launch of a book club, Brightside told an adoring and expectant audience: The blogosphere is in a right old state. There are a few more blogs appearing and the rate of growth is directly proportional to a fascinating new factor. Blogging growth = Technorati apology growth ...

April 21, 2006

lies, damned lies and statistics

In the first 13 minutes of 20 April 2006, there was a single hit on this blog (no names, no pack-drill). Curiously, the recently added WordPress feed statistics reported a surprising and rather unlikely number of 53 ’estimated number of people who used certain tools to read your feed’ in the same period. Now this is simply not true. Most of these 53 ‘people’ were RSS spiders and automatons dumbly and repeatedly polling for any activity. The associated human being is probably down the pub or asleep. ...

April 20, 2006

HTML > blog

Michael Brundage writes an popular article about what it is really like to work at Microsoft. Flexible working environment, minimal paperwork, hard work, gripes about managers, free drinks. So nothing too earth shattering or surprising there. But what struck me about this blog is that it isn’t a blog. It is simply a good old fashioned Web page. No categories. No comments. No statistics. No trackbacks. No fancy themes. No calendar. No widgets. No plugins. ...

April 20, 2006