Blog Writer - WYSIWYG blogging editor

Now this sounds like an interesting product. Blog Writer mixes word processor and desktop publishing functions, making text formatting and image integration a snap. I've downloaded the latest version and will give it a spin in the next day or so. It's compatible with Blogger, and it's free.

Are you absolutely certain the Mac OS X is not susceptible?

I picked up a post on Aunty Spam's blog earlier in the week which is about a company (DVForge) that was offering a $25,000 prize to the first person to write an Mac OS X virus. I parked the post in my "Blog This" folder whilst I ruminated on whether to write something about the story or not.

The company involved cancelled the contest when they realised that there was a chance they were violating US federal law. Note they didn't cancel the contest because of the stupidity of sponsoring a contest in an area of computing life that has caused hundreds of thousands of computer users untold problems, heartache and loss. I don't much care if the logic is that the Mac OS X is not considered susceptible to virus attack and that's it's therefore really just a publicity stunt. That kind of logic is always flawed. As sure as eggs is eggs, there's always someone smarter than the people who unwisely declare with absolute certainty that they are right.

Only in America... Part 1

A mother of five from Tennessee has sold her name on eBay to Internet site Golden Palace Casino. She will officially be named goldenpalace-dot-com once the legal work is complete.

This could only happen in America.

An end to tyranny

I've been a big fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done approach since I read the book last year. Over recent weeks I was conscious that I'd fallen off the GTD wagon, but over the course of this week I've made a concerted effort to get back on track. Last night before I left the office I achieved an empty Inbox for the first time in several weeks and this morning I took the following steps to take even more control of my Inbox:

A. Open Outlook
B. Tools->Options
C. Click E-mail Options…
D. Click Advanced E-mail Options…
E. Uncheck:

(1) Play a Sound
(2) Briefly change the mouse cursor
(3) Show an envelope in the notification area
(4) Display a New Mail Desktop Alert (default Inbox only)

Scary stuff!

No more e-mails interrupting my chain of thought or the task on which I am currently focused.

I picked this advice up from the "What's the next action" blog, which is a weblog totally devoted to Getting Things Done, but it originally came from Microsoft blogger Omar Shahine. Omar recommended reading an article called "The Tyranny of Email" which I intend to do when I get some time later this week. For now, having created my list of next actions, it's time to get focused on them.

How very sad...

Wil Wheaton writes an excellent blog at WIL WHEATON dot NET. He's posted a very moving tribute to "The Bear", a family pet who is about to be put to sleep.

A difference of opinion about desktop searching

Yesterday, Marc Orchant pointed at an article in The Washington Post about the state of desktop searching. When I read the article I must admit to being pleased that I'd chosen Google as my desktop search tool as the article pretty much validated Google as, currently, the best of the options.

Today, Chris Pirillo, has entered the fray in defence of Copernic. Chris made some thoughful points about Copernic and I might have another look at their product as a result, at some point in the future. Chris goes on to argue that the line between local and network data should not be blurred.

I'm not so sure. I like that a Google web search reminds me that I have data locally about the topic I'm interested in. I have over 175,000 files on my laptop. If an issue comes up at work I'd like to be reminded that I have several documents on the subject I've used before and filed away, ready to be brought out and used again, whilst I'm searching the internet for topical information on the subject at hand. I'm not sure if he meant it or not, but Chris makes a veiled suggestion that in using Google as your Desktop tool you may end up with your chat logs (or some other locally held personal information) on the internet by mistake. Or perhaps Chris was only suggesting that less geek like users just might not get that some results are being returned from local sources.

I think that users will view the issue in terms of the criteria they might have for selecting the tool in the first place: Does the tool make searching ALL sources of data easier? Are the searches accurate? Are the searches fast? The criteria will not include: "does this blur the line between local and network data?" I guess this is fine whilst you trust that the providers of desktop searching will not trespass onto your local data and load it onto their servers. I trust that Google, Yahoo and MSN won't do that today. But will it always be that way?

And they said it couldn't be done....

Yesterday, Linda and I celebrated eight years of marriage. I just wanted to take a moment to recognise that none of what I do would be possible without the love and support given so generously by Linda.

We celebrated with dinner and a movie - Miss Congeniality 2 - which was not as good as the original but nevertheless an entertaining diversion.

Blogger's solo bid to climb Everest starts this week

Gavin Bate begins his solo attempt at Everest this week (he leaves the UK for Nepal on Easter Monday) and he's blogging it.

I've subscribed!

The website is here and the feed (which isn't obvious) is here.

Would you trust the hospital that buys your pacemaker off eBay?

The Tuscon Citizen is running a story about the purchase of a pacemaker on eBay. And I quote:

"A stolen pacemaker bought off eBay and implanted in the chest of an Arizona heart patient is raising questions about the burgeoning online market for medical devices and the regulations designed to keep patients safe."

This is raising questions? I should hope so. I thought of a question of my own: would you trust your hospital if it bought your pacemaker off eBay?

Lawyers acting for the medical group hospital who bought the device are quoted as saying: "There was nothing unethical about this purchase". I tell you what guys. From now on all the bloodsucking lawyers get the used pacemakers off eBay and the rest of us will have new ones, if that's all right with you.

Mindjet Blog

Marc Orchant at The Office Weblog has picked up on the launch of a Mindjet Blog. Mindjet are the people who make MindManager, one of my favourite desktop tools. It's a shame that only Mindjet personnel appear able to comment. And if anyone at Mindjet picks this comment up, it would be great if you could make the full posts available in your XML feed rather than just the headlines so that I can read the blog in my aggregator.

Type A personality

I stumbled over a blog this morning written by a mother who self-deprecatingly describes herself as someone "who used to have an exciting job". Her most recent post contained the phrase "getting things done" which is my Technorati watchlist for all things David Allen related.

The post also referred to "type A personality". Ok, so I'm [mostly] a type A personality too.

Answers.Com defines type A personality as: "A temperament marked by excessive competitiveness and ambition, an obsession with accomplishing tasks quickly, little time for self-reflection, and a strong need to control situations."

Type A behaviour is: "A behavior pattern characterized by tenseness, impatience, and aggressiveness, often resulting in stress-related symptoms such as insomnia and indigestion and possibly increasing the risk of heart disease."

Now what do I do?

Embarrasing facts about me, number one

I hope I don't have to write too many post in the series entitled "Embarrasing facts about me..."

So I'm a fan of American Idol. There I said it. Actually my wife, Linda, is the really big fan but I can't help getting wrapped up in the shows as well. At least I'm not one of those sad muppets who get caught up in Big Brother!

We both really enjoyed The X-Factor as well. I got caught up so much I was very aggrieved that G4 didn't win the first series. We bought the album the other week when it was released and we are going to see them in concert at The Royal Albert Hall in June.

Anyway, my Technorati feeds this morning found me a really well done blog called "American Idol Rantz". Given that in the UK we don't get the shows [on ITV 2] until the end of the week, sites like this one are a good way of keeping up with what's going on without all the PR fluff from the "official" site.

StatCounter

I just keep finding things I can do with my blog that:

(a) sort of make me look like a liar or a fool
(b) are incredibly cool in the nerdy sense of the word.

Was it only the day before yesterday that I wrote:

Interestingly, being semi-Scobleized does not appear to have brought any traffic to my blog, based on the only measure I have on Blogger which is whether anyone leaves comments.

So this moring I find StatCounter. Check out the sidebar on my blog. I have stats!

The process of setting up an account, configuring options and modifying my blog template was all very straighforward. I think the whole process took less than 20 minutes. The stats provided are comprehensive and easy to interpret. And it's free, up to a point.

The only "catch" is if you start to get over 9,000 pageloads each day you are outside what they can sustain as a free business model and they we will then ask you to either remove the code or upgrade.

Of course there's not a lot of point in getting hung up on stats on a blog with an rss feed. If anyone did decide to subscribe to my feed, then I will get the traffic count from the visit they make where they subscribe, but the website may never see them again.

So now I'm going to say that whilst my blog is hosted by Blogger there is no way to get statistics on my subscribers or readership. Let's see how long it is before I find out that isn't true either.

NASA is going back to the moon.

NASA has a new Vision for Space Exploration: in the decades ahead, humans will land on Mars and explore the red planet. Brief visits will lead to longer stays and, maybe one day, to colonies. First, though, we're returning to the Moon.

In my other life I'm a project manager. I'd love to be a project manager at NASA. Not because I don't like my current job. It's because I want to be a part of something that changes the world. And these are the people who put a man on the moon. Not only did they change the world but they changed the profession of project management, and they still do so today. There are few project endeavours of the size and complexity of launching people into space strapped to rockets. Well, not if you want to bring them back, that is.

I think that thinking like this is my mid-life crisis. It's the nagging thought about the legacy I might leave. I'd like it to be more than I made it through. I want to matter. Is that heroic aspiration or a selfish thought?

News at Ten. Semi-Scobleization to end!

So I get semi-scobleized (see my post where I think I invent the term for appearing in Robert Scoble's link blog) and within hours Robert announces the link blog is to be no more. It is ceasing to be. It is an ex-blog.

Whilst I will miss it as a resource we should not overly mourn it's passing. Personally I pay more attention to the Scobleizer than the link blog and as Robert himself points out there are many more ways to find things of interest to you in the blogosphere than when he started up the link blog. I've written about two of them myself in the last week: PubSub and Technorati. Learning about Technorati Watch Lists and PubSub Subscriptions is one way that we can all fill the void for ourselves.

And to be fair what I really like about Robert Scoble isn't his link blog. It's what he writes. And the way that he writes it. It's the passion and the humour with which he writes. And the basic humanity of the man. Long may the Scobleizer continue.

Robert could always export his list of newsgator subscriptions to an OPML file and make the file available to any masochist who wants to take up the challenge of reading 1000 blogs a day.

Tecnorati Rocks, Doh!

When I wrote earlier in the week about Technorati I said:

The only aggravating thing I found about Technorati was that if I set up a watchlist for 'Steve Newson' it finds posts containing 'Steve' and 'Newson' rather than 'Steve Newson'.

Doh!

If you use double quotes, as in "Steve Newson" it works as I wanted it to in the first place. I think what threw me is the graphic on the members page where you "Add a Watchlist". If you look carefully at the examples they appear to use single quote marks.

I'm glad I cleared that one up... it was bugging me.

FeedMap

I played this morning with an interesting blog application from Chandu Thota called FeedMap that uses MapPoint to display blog locations. I created my own BlogMap and it's now integrated into my Steve Newson DOT NET blog as a sidebar item.

There are nine bloggers on my BlogMap considered nearby. There is a local hotbed of blogging not far from Nuneaton which I have worked out is probably an educational establishment as four of the nine bloggers are co-located at the same spot and they mostly profile as students. They have a common geo-code of 52.5271531704437 but I can't find a way to do a reverse lookup of geo-code to get an address.

There are a total of 134 bloggers mapped in the UK, but surprisingly given the reported number of bloggers in the USA only 1517 have created a FeedMap. The UK is second to the USA, Canada comes in third with 127 bloggers, with the Netherlands fourth with 104 bloggers.

Da Vinci Code Sequel

Interesting article about Dan Brown in the New York Times. Fame, apparently, is not all it's cracked up to be.

It looks like being quite a wait for the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, current speculation suggests publication no earlier than mid-2006.

I wonder how the film is coming along. I heard on the grapevine that Tom Hanks is going to play the Robert Langdon role. I hope that means it will be as least as good as Apollo 13 - one of my top ten films of all time.

Trying to understand PubSub - Update

The two posts I wrote on Tuesday containing the term "Scoble" (Google Juice and Trying to understand PubSub) appeared in my "PubSub:Scoble" feed late onTuesday night although I didn't notice that fact until this morning (Wednesday). I'm guessing they both appeared in Robert Scoble's "PubSub:Scoble" feed as well. I know at least one of them did because Robert picked up on my Trying to understand PubSub post and re-posted it to his link blog.

So I was semi-Scobleized! I have invented (at least I think I have invented) the term "semi-Scobleized" to refer to being re-posted in the link blog rather than getting a full post in the Scobleizer (his main blog).

So what is the impact of being semi-Scobleized? Well the first noticeable impact was that I appear to have joined the top 75% of link ranked blogs as far as PubSub is concerned because the PubSub feed for my own name started to work - with the first post it sent me being the entry in Robert's link blog. It's not possible to know that for sure as PubSub's linkranks are offline at present.

What I do know for sure is that my Technorati ranking has gone from 1,099,837 to 654,693 in just 24 hours. For that, and before I forget to say it, thank you Robert Scoble. I appreciate it.

Interestingly, being semi-Scobleized does not appear to have brought any traffic to my blog, based on the only measure I have on Blogger which is whether anyone leaves comments. Having breifly tried MSN Spaces before settling for now on Blogger, one feature I really did like on Spaces was the statistics feature. There's just no way to get a handle on my readership on Blogger.

I must admit I'm enjoying the learning process. I feel like a geek again.

Team Smarts

Kathy Sierra writes one of my very favourite blogs, called Creating Passionate Users. It's one of my favourites because she writes about topics in a way that always makes me think. It's like having your own devils advocate writing to you every day or so.

I was particularly struck by her recent post "One of us is smarter than all". I happen to think that teams often snatch at consensus because it makes the majority feel good rather than listening to the lone voice with a different point of view who makes everyone feel uncomfortable.

Slightly re-writing a quote that Kathy used (which I think comes from the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki)... the power of a team comes NOT from consensus decision making, but from the aggregation of the ideas and thoughts of each member of the team.

That just makes a huge amount of sense to me.