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 ...

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. ...

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. ...

I was seriously considering selling all my stock options and purchasing a 1GB USB memory stick for an amazing 30 GBP. Then I thought I would get an account at box.net and upload all the precious files, that my wife sadly lost when my hard disk died a couple of years ago, there instead. This has the advantages that if I ever need to take my memory stick to Seattle to show Auntie Rita, this will be possible, I won’t be able to leave the memory stick in a client’s PC in Eastern Europe and, finally, it will cost me 30 GBP less. ...

I have started a book club. I am the only member. I realise that this is a little unusual but I prefer to choose the books myself rather than someone else (or even worse, the Daily Mail). I held my first meeting last night which was very well attended by all members. Norman gave a fascinating review of ‘Into Thin Air’ by Jon Krakauer. This book was written by a journalist and experienced climber who took part in a commercial, guided expedition to climb Mount Everest in May 1996. After reaching the summit, bad weather struck resulting in the death of eight climbers from three different expeditions. ...

I am lazy. I buy my gas from British Gas and my electricity from Seeboard. It takes a lot for me to overcome my inertia and change provider to save money. However, I am interested in Carphone Warehouse’s offer of 8M/bit broadband, unlimited UK landline and international (28 countries including Australia) calls, all for 21 GBP per month. This is much less than I am currently paying Telewest for an inferior package of telephone and broadband services. ...

Absolutely no-one has ever asked me: ‘Norman - why don’t you start a photo blog of all these interesting places you visit ?’ So here we go. No. 1 in a very occasional series. The Sage Gateshead in Newcastle (from the Tyne Bridge)

You start to feel small and insignificant. [ Via Populicious ]

I enjoyed these quotes from airline staff with a sense of humour (via Tom Kyte). A couple of years ago, I was on a British Airways flight that was making its final approach to some anonymous airport in Scandinavia. Quite suddenly and without any warning, the landing was aborted. The plane stopped descending, quickly started to climb, levelled out and then resumed a familiar, circular holding pattern. I was a little perturbed but no-one else seemed bothered as though this was perfectly normal so I stopped screaming, apologised to my immediate neighbours, dabbed the sweat from my brow with a napkin and picked up my copy of ‘High Life’. ...

I go away to spend a few days sitting on the UK’s gridlocked motorway network and I discover those chaps at WordPress have been making yet more changes. The Regulus theme has been upgraded to 2.1.1 and now includes bug fixes, support for sidebar widgets, personalised header graphic and lots more besides. In addition, every single post is now prefixed by ‘Posted by Andy C’. This is completely superfluous in my case and I would dearly like to turn it off. This is my personal blog. Who else is going to be posting to it ? ...