Kent Newsome pointed me this morning in the direction of a New York Times article on the demise of radio. Kent summarises that there are two underlying causes of the trend away from radio - alternative delivery models (online services, portable music players, mobile phones) and advertising. In passing I wonder if it's too late for a radio version of TiVo.
One thing that we have in the UK that makes for a different equation to the USA is the BBC. On the drive to work in the morning I tend not to like to listen to music and inane DJ's who sound like they've had a few too many happy injections just don't do it for me. Fortunately there is BBC Radio 4 and "The Today Programme", an intelligent news and current affairs programme for grown ups that examines the state of the nation (and the rest of the world) on a daily basis. As with all BBC programming, it's advertising free.
The Today Programme website now publishes an audio archive of the last seven days of transmissions and you can even get podcasts of key interviews.
Tags: Kent Newsome, radio, BBC, The Today Programme
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Videoblogging probably isn't for me...
Robert Scoble has picked up on the whole videoblogging debate via Techmeme, that I first ran into over at Mathew Ingram's blog.
Dave Winer, the blogfather, has some sage advice in a comment on Robert's post. If Dave doesn't mind me paraphrasing: there is much communication that lends itself to using the written word, in some circumstances audio might be better and sometimes there is just no substitute for video.
Personally, to extend one of Mathew's analogies, I have a "voice for print" which is why I never got into the podcasting thing. I come from a part of the world where inhabitants are called Geordie’s and we sound like this:
www.bobjude.co.uk/bobjude/geordie/geordie.htm
Things won’t improve much if I tried videoblogging :)
Tags: Robert Scoble, Mathew Ingram, Dave Winer, Geordie, videoblogging
Dave Winer, the blogfather, has some sage advice in a comment on Robert's post. If Dave doesn't mind me paraphrasing: there is much communication that lends itself to using the written word, in some circumstances audio might be better and sometimes there is just no substitute for video.
Personally, to extend one of Mathew's analogies, I have a "voice for print" which is why I never got into the podcasting thing. I come from a part of the world where inhabitants are called Geordie’s and we sound like this:
www.bobjude.co.uk/bobjude/geordie/geordie.htm
Things won’t improve much if I tried videoblogging :)
Tags: Robert Scoble, Mathew Ingram, Dave Winer, Geordie, videoblogging
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Out with an old meme, in with the new
TDavid over at things that... make you go hmm shares a stunning video of an acoustic performance of the Bon Jovi classic Livin' on a Prayer by Finnish guitarist Tomi Paldanius.
Pity the same can't be said of the video which marks the return of Gary Brolsma (the Numa Numa guy)
Tags: TDavid, Bon Jovi, Gary Brolsma
Pity the same can't be said of the video which marks the return of Gary Brolsma (the Numa Numa guy)
Tags: TDavid, Bon Jovi, Gary Brolsma
All change for the A list
I wrote the other day that for as long as I could remember the top gun as far as blogs were concerned was Boing Boing. For some reason the Technorati popular blogs page appeared on Techmeme today so, whilst my plan this weekend includes culling some of the blogs I read because I feel obliged to read them rather than because I'm truly interested, I thought I'd check out the current Top 100 list to see what was going on in the world of the A list.
I got one major surprise from looking at the current list - Boing Boing has lost it's mojo. It's no longer the most linked to blog. Engadget has stolen the top slot!
I noted that TechCrunch has basically come out of nowhere and joined the Top 10 in a little over a year. Congratulations to Mike Arrington, even though I have to confess that TechCrunch is top of my hit list for the weekend cull of my subscriptions.
I further noted that leaving Microsoft hasn't harmed the Scobleizer's mojo, at least so far.
I'm curious why gapingvoid isn't higher up the list. I'm a great fan of Hugh MacLeod's work.
Dave Winer looks like he's about to fall from the A list, he's currently hanging on in there at number 100, but I fear that he'll have to hand over his key to the gate before too long.
I counted up that I read 5 of the top 10 blogs and 19 of the Top 100. Looking over the current list the only blog that stood out as one I should consider subscribing to is ze frank. We could all do with more laughter in our lives, no?
Tags: Technorati, Top+100, blogs, blogging
I got one major surprise from looking at the current list - Boing Boing has lost it's mojo. It's no longer the most linked to blog. Engadget has stolen the top slot!
I noted that TechCrunch has basically come out of nowhere and joined the Top 10 in a little over a year. Congratulations to Mike Arrington, even though I have to confess that TechCrunch is top of my hit list for the weekend cull of my subscriptions.
I further noted that leaving Microsoft hasn't harmed the Scobleizer's mojo, at least so far.
I'm curious why gapingvoid isn't higher up the list. I'm a great fan of Hugh MacLeod's work.
Dave Winer looks like he's about to fall from the A list, he's currently hanging on in there at number 100, but I fear that he'll have to hand over his key to the gate before too long.
I counted up that I read 5 of the top 10 blogs and 19 of the Top 100. Looking over the current list the only blog that stood out as one I should consider subscribing to is ze frank. We could all do with more laughter in our lives, no?
Tags: Technorati, Top+100, blogs, blogging
Fallen, a long way
Fallen, the debut album by Evanescence, was one of my musical highlights of 2003. So I had very high expectations for the follow up album, The Open Door , which I got to hear for the first time today.
Sad to say, I was very disappointed.
Tags: Evanescence, Fallen, The Open Door
Sad to say, I was very disappointed.
Tags: Evanescence, Fallen, The Open Door
Thursday, September 07, 2006
What does the ultimate blog post teach us?
The ultimate blog post is a pretty funny (and a somewhat cynical) view of some of the more popular blogs out there. One of the things it teaches us though is that blogs often write for specific niches, in a specific style, and have a specific slant; and if what that blog writes about isn't really your niche, style or slant - it may be that you have a peripheral interest but it's not where your heart is - then pretty soon that blog is going to get boring to you.
Kent Newsome has reached the end of the road with the blogs that are boring him. I think I'm reaching a similar point with some of the blogs in my subscriptions list, although possibly not for the same reasons in all cases.
I know that some of the blogs I subscribe to, I subscribe to because I feel like I ought to.
Boing Boing is a classic example. I subscribe because it's generally thought to be the number one blog out there, and it's held the top spot on Technorati for as long as I can remember. If I'm brutally honest though I'm interested in less than 10% of the posts which actually makes for quite a lot of wasted attention.
TechCrunch is another example. I think I subscribe to give myself the comfort that I'm not missing out on the latest and greatest Web 2.0 news, whereas I actually get the best of that news filtered by other writers (Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Kent Newsome and Mathew Ingram amongst others) and from Techmeme.
I think this weekend might be a good time for a clear out. I'll add a task to my Zoho Project.
Getting back to Kent, and the points he makes today, I think there are a few comments I'd like to make at this point:
(1) There's certainly the age old question of why we blog in the first place at play here. I still like the answer I came up with the other day.
(2) It would make for a better blogosphere if some of the influential players within it exhibited better linking behaviour.
(3) Linking and commenting is how we connect to each other in the blogosphere. If we're all honest about it, we could all be a bit better at that.
(4) Climbing the blogging hill is hard, and getting harder. I can see, daily, Kent making efforts to converse with bloggers up at the top of the hill and I can also see the silence with which those efforts are generally rewarded. That must just get tiring after a while. I'd be very surprised if the people that Kent is reaching out to don't have a vanity watchlist on Technorati (or some equivalent), so he has (in my book) every right to ask, periodically, the rhetorical question "why am I being ignored?"
So where does all this take us? The bottom line for Kent is a question: How do I find people I'd converse with in the real world in the blogosphere? Part of the answer to that (as already identified) is to go find the blogs that talk about what you talk about in the real world. If I've read your blog correctly in the past Kent, you don't talk about technology and blogging in the real world so culling the tech blogs and the meta blogs is a good place to start.
Let me hypothesise that part of the rest of the answer is that for all the web 2.0 hype about sociable media there isn't an online community that you'd actually feel comfortable hanging out in at the moment. MySpace and FaceBook certainly don't fit your profile. YouTube - nope. Flickr - you're interested but not that deadly serious about photography.
So where's your web 2.0 community? And (with tongue firmly in cheek) - is that a business opportunity????
Tags: blogs, blogging, web+2.0, Kent Newsome
Kent Newsome has reached the end of the road with the blogs that are boring him. I think I'm reaching a similar point with some of the blogs in my subscriptions list, although possibly not for the same reasons in all cases.
I know that some of the blogs I subscribe to, I subscribe to because I feel like I ought to.
Boing Boing is a classic example. I subscribe because it's generally thought to be the number one blog out there, and it's held the top spot on Technorati for as long as I can remember. If I'm brutally honest though I'm interested in less than 10% of the posts which actually makes for quite a lot of wasted attention.
TechCrunch is another example. I think I subscribe to give myself the comfort that I'm not missing out on the latest and greatest Web 2.0 news, whereas I actually get the best of that news filtered by other writers (Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Kent Newsome and Mathew Ingram amongst others) and from Techmeme.
I think this weekend might be a good time for a clear out. I'll add a task to my Zoho Project.
Getting back to Kent, and the points he makes today, I think there are a few comments I'd like to make at this point:
(1) There's certainly the age old question of why we blog in the first place at play here. I still like the answer I came up with the other day.
(2) It would make for a better blogosphere if some of the influential players within it exhibited better linking behaviour.
(3) Linking and commenting is how we connect to each other in the blogosphere. If we're all honest about it, we could all be a bit better at that.
(4) Climbing the blogging hill is hard, and getting harder. I can see, daily, Kent making efforts to converse with bloggers up at the top of the hill and I can also see the silence with which those efforts are generally rewarded. That must just get tiring after a while. I'd be very surprised if the people that Kent is reaching out to don't have a vanity watchlist on Technorati (or some equivalent), so he has (in my book) every right to ask, periodically, the rhetorical question "why am I being ignored?"
So where does all this take us? The bottom line for Kent is a question: How do I find people I'd converse with in the real world in the blogosphere? Part of the answer to that (as already identified) is to go find the blogs that talk about what you talk about in the real world. If I've read your blog correctly in the past Kent, you don't talk about technology and blogging in the real world so culling the tech blogs and the meta blogs is a good place to start.
Let me hypothesise that part of the rest of the answer is that for all the web 2.0 hype about sociable media there isn't an online community that you'd actually feel comfortable hanging out in at the moment. MySpace and FaceBook certainly don't fit your profile. YouTube - nope. Flickr - you're interested but not that deadly serious about photography.
So where's your web 2.0 community? And (with tongue firmly in cheek) - is that a business opportunity????
Tags: blogs, blogging, web+2.0, Kent Newsome
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
A different approach to creating a resume / CV
A quick definition: what Americans / Canadians call a resume is generally referred to in the UK as a CV (short for Curriculum Vitae).
I originally found the resume of Chris Heuer via the MindJet Blog. It inspired me to try something similar. I could see that the mind map was put together using MindManager but I couldn't figure out the tool used to compile the rest of the document. My first thought was he'd done the document entirely in Mind Manager using floating topics to do the text boxes. Then I thought for a while that it might be a word document, but I could not come close to the kind of layout and formatting that was achieved in the text boxes containing his bio and strengths.
I wrote to Chris to find out the secret. What I discovered was that he created the mind map in MindManager and then output it to a PDF file. He then opened it up in Photoshop, copied it and pasted it into a new document where he did the layout design. I didn't have Photoshop at the time so I decided to try and see what I could do entirely within a native MindManager mind map.
I'm quite pleased with the results:
You can a larger scale version of the image here:
http://steve.newson.googlepages.com/SteveNewsonCV2006.pdf
or here:
http://static.flickr.com/80/236054089_403e98ebd8_o.png
I'm always on the lookout for interesting uses of MindManager. I don't think that this style of CV is going to replace more traditional approaches anytime soon and I generally send a word version of my CV alongside this visual style, but I do think the approach says something about me in the sense that I do absolutely believe in the power of information visualisation and mind mapping.
I've placed a copy of the native MindManager (mmap) file here, if you can't get it from there then drop me a line via steve.newson@gmail.com and I'll send you a copy. All I ask is that if you extend the idea further then I'd love to see the results.
Tags: MindManager, Mindjet, CV, resume
I originally found the resume of Chris Heuer via the MindJet Blog. It inspired me to try something similar. I could see that the mind map was put together using MindManager but I couldn't figure out the tool used to compile the rest of the document. My first thought was he'd done the document entirely in Mind Manager using floating topics to do the text boxes. Then I thought for a while that it might be a word document, but I could not come close to the kind of layout and formatting that was achieved in the text boxes containing his bio and strengths.
I wrote to Chris to find out the secret. What I discovered was that he created the mind map in MindManager and then output it to a PDF file. He then opened it up in Photoshop, copied it and pasted it into a new document where he did the layout design. I didn't have Photoshop at the time so I decided to try and see what I could do entirely within a native MindManager mind map.
I'm quite pleased with the results:
You can a larger scale version of the image here:
http://steve.newson.googlepages.com/SteveNewsonCV2006.pdf
or here:
http://static.flickr.com/80/236054089_403e98ebd8_o.png
I'm always on the lookout for interesting uses of MindManager. I don't think that this style of CV is going to replace more traditional approaches anytime soon and I generally send a word version of my CV alongside this visual style, but I do think the approach says something about me in the sense that I do absolutely believe in the power of information visualisation and mind mapping.
I've placed a copy of the native MindManager (mmap) file here, if you can't get it from there then drop me a line via steve.newson@gmail.com and I'll send you a copy. All I ask is that if you extend the idea further then I'd love to see the results.
Tags: MindManager, Mindjet, CV, resume
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