It’s easy to get carried away with all this Web 2.0 nonsense. So while you are trawling the blogosphere, desperately looking for invites to CoComment and seeing whether 30 Boxes does indeed live up to all the hype, pause for a moment and look at two of my favourite blogs that offer a slightly different perspective on Web 2.0. Go Flock Yourself - Witty, incisive, opinioniated comment. Always worth reading. The blog title alone still brings a smile. ...

Had a drink in The Plough in Hemel Hempstead last night. Conveniently located for the Buncefield Oil Refinery, The Plough offers fine ales and traditional English fare. Bad news: Guinness was off. Good news. Bitter and lager looked and tasted just like Guinness Food: Sausages and mash with black pudding. Gravy was greasy, a little oily in fact.

Thanks to AtariBoy, we now know what it takes to feature on ‘Top WordPress.com blogs today’. 11,706 hits (at least). Hmm. Way to go. As our American friends say.

The BBC reports that 1 in 8 people have been ‘harassed by email’. But what is amusing about this story is the screenshot that shows an Inbox displaying emails originating from ‘support@microsoft.com’. Careful. Microsoft is a large, powerful American company. I wouldn’t be surprised if their lawyers are not initiating legal action as we speak. The story itself reminds me about of the old joke about sexual harassment in the workplace where the employee goes to complain to Human Resources about not getting any. ...

Yesterday, I stumbled across Newsvine which is a very impressive news aggregator. Until now, I didn’t 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. ...

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 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. ...

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. ...

A few years ago, I worked for a small internet company and was a successful dot com millionaire. Then the confounded Italians went and devalued the Lira. We spent (wasted) lots of time interviewing Oracle developers. Interviewing was time consuming and we had a fairly rapid turnover of people with varying technical abilities and personality disorders. After a while, we decided to set a short technical test in an effort to save time and improve the quality of the technical people we hired. ...

I once sat on an interview panel. Each interviewer would briefly summarise the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate and a decision would be made by consensus. However, for one candidate, the first interviewer simply said ‘No’. ‘OK David. Thank you. John, anything to add to that ?’ John: ‘Absolutely no.’ And that was the end of that.