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holiday highlights

The annual Brightside family vacation in Norway is now over and the nominations for ‘Highlight of the Holiday’ have just been received:

Norma - ‘The fantastic scenery, the awesome mountains and unspolit beauty of the fjords coupled with the feeling of absolute peace, solitude and tranquility.’

Norman - ‘The 3 hour hike on the Jostedalsbreen glacier with spiked boots, roped together in a group, taking in stunning views back down the mountain, sticking an ice-axe into ice that is thousands of years old.’

where's your blogroll ?

No-one ever asks me: ‘Hey Norman, why don’t you have a blogroll with 457 interesting, thought provoking sites for me to look at ?’.

Firstly, while I find the reading lists of others interesting and a useful means of discovering new sources, I don’t particularly want an lengthy blogroll adding yet more clutter to my (sort of) minimalist blog.

Secondly, my RSS reading lists are stored on a Netvibes server. I have separate tabs for ‘Oracle’, ‘WordPress’, ‘Sport’, ‘News’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Tech’, ‘Software’ and a small one called ‘UK’. I would love to be able to publish these tabs and share the contents with everyone.

least popular blogging platforms

A trawl across the blogosphere revealed that hardly anyone, with any sense, hosts a blog at Yahoo 360' or Bloglines which is very surprising indeed.

Or maybe not.

Metro on UK blogging

The ‘Metro’ is a free, lightweight, disposable newspaper, aimed at commuters, which is solely funded by advertising revenues. So lightweight, you can finish it by the time you reach Waterloo but at least it saves you the embarrassment of staring at your neighbour for 27 minutes.

Last month, The Metro reported the exciting news that a quarter of all UK internet users maintain a blog. Hurrah !

However, the veracity of this claim is immediately subverted by the statement that ‘59% of bloggers choose to make it public.’ So, this implies that 41% of UK bloggers are blogging in private, by invitation only, to friends and family or in complete isolation. I know the British are reserved but that is simply ridiculous.

the state of the UK blogosphere

It really is in a right old state. I have a Netvibes tab called ‘UK’. It has a solitary, uninspiring, dry news feed from the BBC.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a lot of blogs from UK authors. Some are (Scottish) technical types in the Oracle blogging community with a sense of humour while others are Brits who have moved to foreign shores or very talented and dedicated WordPress techies.

Clearly, this is highly unsatisfactory and slightly underwhelming. I am certain there must be a wealth of witty, interesting, fascinating blogs out there written by British people but I just can’t find them.

AOL search data released

Norman Brightside, a little known UK blogger from the London (near England), was reeling yesterday from a cataclysmic, violent (yet unwanted) backlash of media inspired attention from Web 2.0 types in response to the impromptu and inadvertent release of 1367 GB of search data (including IP addresses, referrer data, explicit search terms and agent identifiers) from the Web server farm that hosts his incredibly popular blog.

Brightside is an IT genius who had developed his Web server tracking technology using advanced AI techniques to include the screen name of the AOL user, the room they were actually surfing from, what they were actually thinking, the strength of each individual key press together with the facial expression used when typing in search terms.

WordPress theme competition

After two months and two days, the music has stopped, the theme rotation carousel has travelled full circle and finally come to a halt.

WordPress.com offers a total of 40 themes (37 when I started) and I have experimented and laboriously captured screenshots of every single one.

I have tried out all the WP themes as they became available but it was interesting to live with each theme for a day or so.

Hotel Inspector

The scheduling goddess has granted me a second successive week in Birmingham; West Bromwich to be precise. I was shocked to discover that, following my unfavourable review last December, the Days Inn Hotel has subsequently been taken over by the budget chain, Premier Travel Inn.

My greeting at reception wasn’t too promising: ‘Ah - Good evening Mr. Brightside. A double smoking room, I believe’. ‘Err no. I booked a single, non-smoking room if you have one please.’

minimalism begins in Nepal

The Sandbox theme recently added to WordPress is pleasant enough but the original themes developed by Scott Wallick from plaintxt.org are absolutely superb.

Clean, white, minimalist, striking, understated and refreshingly different from the thousands of themes out there.

am I a technology Luddite ?

I am interested in IT, technology and gadgets. Not obsessed but interested and curious.

Recently, I find colleagues making increasing use of technology in the workplace to try to help distributed teams to communicate more effectively. Or maybe they’re just geeks who are afraid to pick up a telephone.

People use Web conferencing to share desktops.

This is an excellent use of technology. For example, I recently tried to help a customer in Copenhagen by remotely accessing the servers over the network from my kitchen fully equipped home office. The speed was slightly sluggish and the experience was a little frustrating at times but certainly much better than laboriously dictating (’l’ ’s’ ‘space’ ‘slash’ ’t’ ’m’ ‘p’) over the phone or getting on a plane.