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. ...

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. ...

Don’t bother with my slow, tortuous methods, Just be Stephen Fry.

Dear Prudence That’s 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. ...

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: ...